rome | Holocaust scholar Deborah Lipstadt was once sued by David Irving, but that doesn’t mean she supports the prison sentence given to the Holocaust denier this week.
“I’m in principle against laws that promote censorship. I’m in principle against laws on Holocaust denial. I’m in principle against laws that prevent the publishing of cartoons in Denmark,” said Lipstadt, a professor of Jewish and Holocaust studies at Emory University in Atlanta.
On Monday, Feb. 20, an Austrian court sentenced Irving to three years in prison for statements he made in 1989 that there were no gas chambers at Auschwitz.
Lipstadt said she understands the need for laws on Holocaust denial in countries such as Germany and Austria, given their records during World War II.
The sentence sent a potent message to both local extremists and the international community, but it also added fuel to freedom-of-speech debates.
Irving, 67, was arrested in November when he entered Austria to give a lecture at a far-right student fraternity.
Irving’s lawyer, Elmar Kresbach, lodged an immediate appeal after the sentenced was announced. He said the sentence had been meant as a political warning.
But Austrian prosecutors on the case want Irving to spend more time in prison. The prosecutors appealed the next day, saying that his sentence of three years is too lenient.
Irving, who faced up to 10 years in prison, had pleaded guilty to the charges. He also had said he changed some of his views and now believed that the gas chambers had existed and that “millions of Jews died.”
Judge Peter Liebetreu was not convinced. “The court did not consider the defendant to have genuinely changed his mind,” he said after pronouncing the sentence. “The regret he showed was considered to be mere lip service to the law.”
Lipstadt was not alone among Jewish observers in expressing concern over the latest chapter in Irving’s well-publicized effort to deny the Holocaust.
“The sentence against Irving confirms that he and his views are discredited, but as a general rule I don’t think that this is the way this should be dealt with,” said Antony Lerman, director of the London-based Institute for Jewish Policy Research. “It is better to combat denial by education and using good speech to drive out bad speech.”
Other Jewish groups, however, praised the verdict.
“The sentence confirms David Irving as a bigot and an anti-Semite and also serves a direct challenge to the Iranian regime’s embrace of Holocaust denial,” Rabbi Abraham Cooper of the Simon Wiesenthal Center said in a statement.
Austria, which was part of the Third Reich during World War II, is one of 11 countries that have laws making Holocaust denial a criminal offense. Britain and the United States have no laws on Holocaust denial.
“While Irving’s rants would not have led to legal action in the United States, it is important that we recognize and respect Austria’s commitment to fighting Holocaust denial, the most odious form of hatred, as part of its historic responsibility to its Nazi past,” Cooper of the Wiesenthal Center said.