All entries for Tuesday 21 February 2006

I like sugar, I like tea.

: 21 Feb 2006 07:52 |  Comments (1) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Another wonderful win for freedom of speech in Europe!

Writing about web page http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/4734648.stm

Right on the back of some Muslims being mightily miffed, famed Holocaust-denier David Irving was sentenced to a prison term in Austria.

Now David Irving's crime is, essentially, shitty scholarship. He deliberately misinterpreted and twisted the available data, tried to undermine existant scholarship on the most spurious of grounds and went some lengths to falsify information in order to polemicise the issue. Deborah Lipstadt (and others) have brought good rebuttals to his work (well ironically so in Lipstadt's case). But in essence his work and arguments were no different from a piece of work such as From Time Immemorial. There are plenty of works of dubious scholarly worth, claiming to be scholarship, that pass under the radar or are even praised for their claims (see again Joan Peters' From Time Immemorial).

It will be interesting to see how this sentence adds to the ongoing debate.

: 21 Feb 2006 06:53 |  Comments (2) |  Close comments |  Report a problem