German magazine defies Holocaust hate laws

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German magazine defies Holocaust hate laws
Posted: 06/01
From: Mathaba

The first cracks in the political and legal edifice to protect the 
Holocaust industry from criticism have started to appear and are 
likely to widen over time.

The German magazine Der Spiegel has landed a major coup in its latest 
edition - not for doing a rare exclusive interview with the Iranian 
president Mahmoud Ahmedinejad, but for allowing him to express views 
which would have resulted in a lengthy prison sentence, had they been 
stated by a German national. It is not clear whether this was the 
intention of Der Spiegel, which in an editorial distanced itself from 
the remarks by the Iranian president, but the publication will have 
been as decisive a step towards scrapping the thought crime laws 
dating from the period of allied occupation as the publication of 
"Crabwalk" by the famous German author Günther Grass a few years ago.

Grass' book was the first to break the taboo of talking about Germans 
and Germany in other terms than those of the evil perpetrators when 
dealing with the Second World War. He highlighted those "Other 
losses" and gave German readers the sense that they, too, had been 
victimised by those events.

Discussing the Holocaust and the shadow it cast over Germany and 
generations of Germans, however, remained taboo, and German citizens 
would not only be punished for "defaming the memory of the dead", but 
even for not balancing any remarks casting doubt on the official 
holocaust dogma with the usual mantra of the eternal victimisation of 
Jews who were thereby absolved from any culpability for whatever they 
have done or might do to anybody else.

In 1997, for example, a German court found Udo Walendy guilty not for 
knowingly publishing lies but for publishing a "one-sided" account of 
history and not giving sufficient attention to alternative 
interpretations. He was charged of having "on a very 
scholarly-historical basis" published quotations and facts that 
contradicted "in many specific points, the accepted version of German 
guilt for the Holocaust and other National Socialist crimes".

Freedom of speech? For Walendy, Deckert, Toben, Rudolf and Zündel it 
comes at the price of several years in prison.

So Der Spiegel filled several pages with a rebuttal of what 
Ahmedinejad had to say, but it allowed him to question the veracity 
of the official Holocaust version, let him get away with saying that 
if the Holocaust happened as claimed and Germans or Europeans were 
collectively guilty then Israelis should be repatriated to Europe, 
and if it didn't then there was even less justification for the 
Palestinians to suffer occupation and injustice at their hands.

The Iranian president was even allowed to challenge the anachronistic 
situation where scientific research into the Holocaust is punishable 
by prison under German law, should it result in findings unfavourable 
to or objectionable by the Jewish lobby - and he was given permission 
to say that the young generation of Germans should not be made to 
feel guilty for whatever their great grandparents might have done, 
and that Germans should stop allowing themselves to be humiliated by 
the Zionists after having paid reparations for decades.

So far there has been condemnation of Ahmedinejad - who performed 
infinitely better in this interview than in his lengthy letter to the 
[American] president - but no threat of legal action against Der 
Spiegel.

If this published interview remains unchallenged in the courts, then 
it should now be permissible in Germany to report the views of 
Holocaust revisionists, and as long as the revisionists themselves 
are not German, no charges would be brought. Germans, hitherto 
forbidden from discussing these issues, might now do so simply by 
quoting what others have said without adding their own opinion or 
judgment.

The first cracks in the political and legal edifice to protect the 
Holocaust industry from criticism have started to appear and are 
likely to widen over time.

=====

-- Dr Sahib Mustaqim Bleher is a German living in England, a Muslim 
and a pilot - in today's oppressive neo-fascist climate this means 
walking a tight rope. And it requires speaking out. He has done so 
through articles, pamphlets and books, many of which are available 
via his web site FlyingImam.com