Freedom of speech

Anne Applebaum writes of the encounter between Oliver Finegold of the Evening Standard and Ken Livingstone, the mayor of London, where the latter asked him if he was a German war criminal, then said, "All right, well you might be Jewish, but actually you are just like a concentration camp guard, you are just doing it because you are paid to, aren't you?" Livingstone refused to apologize.

Whereupon, incredibly, something called the Adjudication Panel for England suspended the mayor from his job for four weeks...

We...have evidence of something that, in the wake of the cartoon fracas across the Muslim world, should interest us all: the Western world's growing inability to deal with its own offensive, insulting and racially or ethnically controversial debates. We don't, for the most part, burn flags, storm embassies or hang foreign prime ministers in effigy when someone offends the general public's sensibilities, which is an extremely good thing. But neither does it seem right that an unelected committee should prevent the elected mayor of London from doing his job, just because that mayor is unpleasant and offensive (and I can personally testify that he is both). Surely it's the voters' job to weigh Livingstone's behavior against the fact, conceded by all, that he has improved the flow of London traffic.

It is not directly analogous, but the recent imprisonment of historian David Irving is troubling in some of the same ways.... Irving, an extremely knowledgeable historian and the author of more than two dozen books on Nazi Germany, is nevertheless willing to twist that knowledge when the mood takes him, largely to create outrage and direct attention to himself. He has claimed, at times, that the Holocaust never took place; that it did take place but Hitler knew nothing about it; that millions died, but not at Auschwitz, and so on. He enjoys lecturing to Austrian and German neo-Nazis. He once joked -- prepare to be really, really offended -- that more people had died in the back of Ted Kennedy's car than in Nazi gas chambers.

Still, I'm with Deborah Lipstadt, the historian whom Irving unsuccessfully sued for libel several years ago and who proved in the course of that trial, that he had altered facts and massaged documents to make his pro-Nazi case. "The way of fighting Holocaust deniers is with history and truth," she said -- not jail sentences.

I agree.