In the aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo attacks in which we are seeing a tsunami of support for free speech in France - and indeed the whole of the western world, is everyone missing the elephant in the room here?
Holocaust denial is subject to legal restrictions in many European countries. This amounts to a thought crime, and is an outrageous affront to the principle of free speech. There's just no other way of spinning this. If this Charlie Hebdo business doesn't jolt Europe into reconsidering these egregious attacks on free speech, then the hypocrisy will be breathtaking.
The masses of French people who are spontaneously coming out onto the street to stand up for free speech might want to examine their own laws on holocaust denial:
Quote:In France, the Gayssot Act, voted for on July 13, 1990, makes it illegal to question the existence of crimes that fall in the category of crimes against humanity as defined in the London Charter of 1945, on the basis of which Nazi leaders were convicted by the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg in 1945-46. When the act was challenged by Robert Faurisson, the Human Rights Committee upheld it as a necessary means to counter possible antisemitism.[22] In 2012, the Constitutional Council of France ruled that to extend the Gayssot Act to the Armenian Genocide denial was unconstitutional because it violated the freedom of speech
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laws_against_Holocaust_denial#FranceThe last sentence in bold took my breath away when I first read it.