Persecution Mania: Please, Mr Blair, Make Me A Martyr!

Persecution mania is one of the unfortunate side-effects from swallowing Denier bullshit whole, and over at the the Cesspit, some members of the great British Commonwealth have lately gotten a bad case of it.

A panicky 'Jordan' (we understand this person is a he, and not the paramour of Peter Andre, but you never know) asks:

'Has anyone heard anything recently on the possibility of a "Holocaust denial law" being passed in the UK? Didn't Blair say he was considering it?'

Alas, the best that his interlocutor Kiwichap could come up with was a statement made before Tony Blair was even elected Prime Minister in the UK, almost ten years ago. Any such plans were dropped over six years ago, in January 2000.

Not content with letting the matter rest there, Kiwichap dug up this statement from sociologist Anthony Giddens, former director of the London School of Economics and now a Labour peer in the House of Lords:

Europe is the home of freedom of speech, but I remind noble Lords that Europe is also the home of the Holocaust. In Germany, the Netherlands and Austria, you can be imprisoned for making public remarks about the Holocaust. You can be imprisoned for Holocaust denial - someone is on the point of being imprisoned for that - and for making various kinds of anti-Semitic remarks. These, in a sense, are our sensitivities. They are a part of our sacred values in a European context.

Woo, scary! The Thought Police are coming!

Actually, no. A swift search on the same website as Kiwichap quote-mined reveals just 19 mentions of the term 'Holocaust Denial' in both Houses of Parliament since December 2000, an average of one mention every three months, in almost all cases representing concerns with Arab anti-semitism or ritual denunciations of the far right. The few times the term comes up in a legislative context, the political consensus is clear: while Holocaust Denial is for the Lords, Ladies and Right Honourable Gentlemen of both houses something to be deplored, there is zero interest in legislating over the issue and 'banning' it. A typical statement involving the term looks like this:

Lord Stoddart of Swindon: What about someone who writes and publishes in Britain a book or article denying the Holocaust that is then circulated in Germany? Germany, of course, has strict laws about Holocaust denial; it is an offence punishable by a term of three years. They have that offence because they want to assuage their guilt about what happened under the Nazi regime, including the Holocaust and all the other awful things that were done. There is no reason, however, why we should suffer for that as well.

Indeed, and that's why 'revisionists' in Britain are denied (heh) their eagerly sought-after victim status. Because while we abhor your shitty speech, we uphold your right to say it.