Over in the States, a professor at Chicago's Northwestern University has publicly welcomed the assertions of Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's that the holocaust is a 'myth'.
Engineering professor Arthur Butz was quoted last week by the English-language Tehran Times and Iran's semi-official Mehr news agency in approving terms and is being promoted as a 'world scholar' who supports the ever-so-slightly controversial stance, quoting Butz as saying "I congratulate him [Ahmadinejad] on becoming the first head of state to speak out clearly on these issues and regret only that it was not a Western head of state,"
Butz's opinions have not been welcomed in the US.
"Butz's most recent invective demonstrates the power of hate to rally extremists, anti-Semites and Holocaust deniers out from under their rocks throughout the world," said Richard Hirschhaut, executive director of the Holocaust Foundation of Illinois, quoted in the Chicago Tribune.
The university has been aware of Butz's stance since 1976 when he published The Hoax of the Twentieth Century: The Case Against the Presumed Extermination of European Jewry. They seem to view him with exasperation, rather than anger - Northwestern University spokesman Al Cubbage told the Tribune that the university does not agree with Butz:
"As certainly has been made clear on many occasions, Northwestern University as an institution obviously does not endorse or agree with the personal opinions of professor Butz," Cubbage said. "At the same time, however, the university does believe that its faculty members are entitled to express their own personal opinions."
While that may well be the case, does this entitlement really need to stretch so far as to give the professor university webspace to put his opinions across? A question of free speech, or an abuse of the right?
