1984 – Not An Instruction Manual

An alleged Holocaust denier was arrested as he flew into Britain today.

The Metropolitan Police's extradition unit detained Australian Gerald Toben, 64, at London's Heathrow Airport under an EU arrest warrant issued by the German authorities.

Now, I’ve no time for Holocaust-deniers, flat-earthers, Moon Landing-doubters, global-warming believers or any other kind of loon, in general.

And I think that Germany and Austria and any other country with such laws on their books would be far better off allowing them to say what they like so that normal, decent people can tear their ‘theories’ to shreds or just point and laugh at them in the street.

You only need to look at the example of David Irving’s plunge into obscurity and ridicule to see how effective that strategy can be. His brief imprisonment in Austria did him less damage than his famously-misjudged case for libel against Deborah Lipstadt, where his writing was examined, held up to scrutiny and then slowly torn to shreds by fellow academics.

Still, that’s their decision to make in their own countries. But I find it worrying that you can now be arrested in this country by another country for a ‘crime’ (actually a ‘thoughtcrime’) committed in cyberspace that is not a crime in your own country!

And this is what we are now signed up to, thanks to the creeping tentacles of the EU.

Now the odious Toben and is ilk can point to their ‘persecution’ with a certain amount of truth and whip up their knuckle-dragging followers to make them martyrs to their ‘cause’.

Not helping, EU, really not helping…