Haaretz
Shvat 24, 5766
LONDON - British historian David
Irving, jailed by an Austrian court for denying the Holocaust, refused to
apologize Wednesday for offending victims of the Nazi death camps and said
he would not be silenced.
Irving, 67, told Britain's Sky Television
he believed historians should be allowed to question official versions of
history and said freedom of speech was the "right to be wrong".
"I
come from a free country and I'm not going to let anybody silence me," he
said.
Irving was sentenced to three years in prison on Monday for
denying the murder of 6 million Jews. Austria's state prosecutor filed an
appeal on Tuesday to lengthen the sentence.
"I think they are
trying to silence me now," said Irving, who dismissed his trial as
"theater."
"They want to increase the sentence to silence me for
even longer. They are not going to succeed, I don't think."
Irving
pleaded guilty, hoping for a suspended sentence, but the Vienna criminal
court concluded he was only making a pretense of acknowledging Nazi
Germany's genocide against Jews in order to escape a jail
term.
Asked whether he regretted the offense he had caused to
Holocaust survivors and their families, Irving replied:
"Freedom of
speech means freedom to say things to other people that they don't want to
hear. And if that causes offense to them then that's partly their problem
and partially mine.
"Freedom of speech is the right to be wrong,
basically. Sometimes I'm wrong," he added.
Irving told Sky he did
not deny the Holocaust but acknowledged that his views had changed as he
had learned more.
"I don't like the phrase 'deny the Holocaust,'"
he said.
"Any sane historian is going to be entitled to open this
package that the media describe as the Holocaust and look at the
individual contents and say 'well, this part I believe and this part I
believe and most of that I believe but there is one thing here I don't
believe. And that is what I did.
"That is not denying the
Holocaust. It is saying 'listen, I'm not a mug, I want to be told the
truth and nothing but the truth,'" he added. "It is not so much of a
change of heart, it is just a refining of your position."
Assessing
his case on Monday, the presiding judge decided Irving had not genuinely
changed his position and had shown regret only to pay "lip service to the
law" in Austria.
Irving, a self-taught historian who has written
dozens of books on Nazi Germany and World War II, has appealed.
He
was arrested on a return visit to Austria last November, based on a
warrant over lectures and a press interview he gave in 1989 there, where
denying the Nazi genocide is a crime punishable by up to 10 years in
prison.
Austria is keen to show it is tough on Holocaust denial
since a significant number of Nazi leaders, including Adolf Hitler came
from Austria, and Jews and other critics accused the country of glossing
over its past for decades after the war.
A British High Court
ruling in 2000 rejected an Irving libel suit against an American professor
and her publishers, declaring Irving "an active Holocaust denier ...
anti-Semitic and racist."