On Holidays...

I'll be in Morocco, Spain and Portugal for the next two weeks. See you when I get back.

More stupid laws about saying stupid things

Some time ago briefly mentioned the ridiculous jailing of David Irving for holocaust denial. At the time I wrote:

Isn't the Austrian nation just a little embarrassed by this. "Hey everyone! This guy suggested something preposterous in '89 - let's throw him in the slammer!" I wonder if denying the 1994 genocide in Rwanda draws a similar sentence.

Well, it looks like denying the 1994 Rwandan genocide will draw a similar sentence (in Germany):

Berlin's draft EU directive extends the idea of Holocaust denial to the "gross minimisation of genocide out of racist and xenophobic motives", to include crimes dealt with by the International Criminal Court...
The draft text states: "Each member state shall take the measures necessary to ensure that the following intentional conduct is punishable: 'publicly condoning, denying or grossly trivialising of crimes of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes as defined in'... the Statute of the ICC."

Again, I completely agree with Ed Brayton:

...this is not the sort of thing a court ought to decide. The government has no business deciding what is the official belief that can be expressed, that should be left to scholars, historians and others to debate. And ironically, one of the world's strongest opponents of the validity of holocaust denial, Deborah Lipstadt of Emory University, says that such laws actually undermine the position of scholars and historians combatting such myths.