The Nazi apologist David Irving, who last night began a three-year jail term in Austria after admitting Holocaust denial, is not a figure who elicits great sympathy in many circles.
Calling the gas chambers of Auschwitz "a fantasy" is an unforgivably repellent statement.
Many might agree with the 80-year-old Holocaust survivor Noah Klieger, who flew from Israel to Vienna for yesterday's trial, and said that Irving's conviction "sends out a message ... the Pope of Holocaust deniers has finally been brought to justice".
But the discredited British historian's conviction over two speeches he made in Austria in 1989 has prompted the inevitable debate over freedom of speech.
Commentators as prominent as Noam Chomsky have said in the past that while they disagree with Irving and his ilk about the Holocaust, they are opposed to restrictions on freedom of speech.
Charles Richardson of the Australian website Crikey writes today:
'Free David Irving' doesn't have the same sort of cachet that, say, 'Free Nelson Mandela' had. But while he stays in jail, Europe's claim to be the home of free speech will ring hollow.
Richardson says that "a belief in free speech means defending the rights of people we disagree with ... free speech must protect bigoted, wrong-headed and offensive speech, or it protects nothing".
There is a difference of opinion in the left-leaning press about the rights and wrongs of imprisoning Irving. The New Statesman's position is pretty clear: a pre-trial article headlined "Send this man straight to jail" reproduced a poem written by Irving for his daughter and read out at his 2000 libel hearing. The poem, intended to be recited in earshot of "half-breed" children, runs as follows:
I am a Baby Aryan
Not Jewish or Sectarian
I have no plans to marry an
Ape or Rastafarian
The New Statesman compares Irving's case with that of the Muslim cleric Abu Hamza, who was recently jailed for seven years for race hate crimes. The magazine says: "Irving may not have a hook but there is not much else to distinguish him from other hate preachers who are being put behind bars."
But today's Independent says that while it sheds no tears for Irving, it does have "deep misgivings" about the classification of Holocaust-denial as a prosecutable offence. The paper worries that prosecuting Irving is the start of a "slippery slope" and that, however objectionable the historian's views, "he is entitled to hold the views he does, and to express them in public".
But how sincerely is Irving trying to use the defendable notion of free speech? His many opponents accuse him of deliberately misusing historical sources to try to paint a sympathetic picture of Adolf Hitler, who he has claimed was trying to "protect" the Jews of Europe.
Irving told yesterday's trial that he had changed his views ("history is like a changing tree", he told reporters) and now accepted millions of Jews died, although his brother John tells the Times that he doubts this was a genuine recantation. As Duncan Campbell writes in the Guardian, Irving's opponents "see him as a would-be martyr cynically using the arguments of free speech to peddle myths to appreciative extremist audiences".
The timing of his conviction comes as many in Europe are already thinking about freedom of speech following the outrage caused to Muslims over the publication of cartoons depicting the prophet Muhammad in Danish newspapers.
In Islamabad today, one visiting Turkish Islamic leader linked the two cases and, citing Irving's conviction, called for Muslims to be given the same "protection from European law". Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, secretary general of the 57-nation Organisation of the Islamic Conference, said: "This notion of freedom of expression ... should include our sensitive points ... if they [Europeans] really respect the Muslim world."
The So What! blog says: "Is it not hypocritical to support the right of a Danish cartoonist to make fun of Muhammad and deny the right of a British (self-proclaimed historian) to deny the Holocaust? What happened to the "I don't agree with what you say but I'll defend to death your right to say it?".
It is debatable how transferable these ideas of protection are between the two cases. Irving's conviction in Vienna might also invite comparisons with the recent failures to convict the BNP leader, Nick Griffin, on hate charges. He faces a retrial on one charge in October.
The BNP website unsurprisingly laments the conviction of Irving, who it describes as a "British pensioner". Many will find anything the far right party says risible, but in the interests of informed debate, it is worth setting out some of their reaction. In the piece about Irving, Steve Blake argues against the history of the Holocaust being sacrosanct. He writes:
No other episode of history has such protection; not the wholesale slaughter of Cambodians by the wicked Communist Pol Pot regime; not the massacre of Cossacks by the Red Army; not the millions of Ukrainians starved to death by the Russian Communists in the 1930s and to show we are not in any way biased, the suffering and death of the people of Ireland during the 1840's potato famine.
Critics of this view would argue that the Holocaust is rightly a special case. Reacting to Irving's conviction, Karen Pollock, chief executive of the Holocaust Educational Trust, said Holocaust denial was "anti-semitism dressed up as intellectual debate".
Austria has the toughest Holocaust denial laws in Europe, and Charles Richardson argues that the laws that convicted Irving are a "disturbing" anachronism. He reminds us that Austria's laws against Holocaust denial, like Germany's, were an emergency measure enacted shortly after the second world war. He goes on:
The threat of a Nazi revival could then be reasonably regarded as a "clear and present danger" that would override concerns about free speech. But to make the same argument today is just nonsense.
Richardson also notes the reaction last night of Deborah Lipstadt, whom Irving unsuccessfully sued for libel in 2000. She told the BBC: "I am not happy when censorship wins, and I don't believe in winning battles via censorship ... the way of fighting Holocaust deniers is with history and with truth."
She also told Channel 4 news that the biggest shame about Irving was that he should have become well known when his views deserved only "obscurity".
