The freedom of speech is regarded as one of the foundations of a free society. It distinguishes governmental systems from one another and provides a standard for evaluating the social advancement and is used by political scientists as a measure of the legitimacy of a nation state.

 

The methods utilized by governments in response to questionable content of speech is a significant indicator of the government’s relationship to its citizens and national identity.

 

There are two contrasting cases that have been testing the Western European stance on the freedom of speech in recent weeks. The first is the ongoing uproar over the cartoons portraying the Prophet Mohammad, the second is the conviction of David Irving, a British historian infamous for denying some of the most crucial aspects of the Holocaust.

 

Offending a religious group by falsely portraying it to the public can be freedom of expression, a landmark of a free society. Or it can be a crime punishable by imprisonment.

 

It all depends on which group is affronted.

 

The portrayal of Mohammad as a killer is as offensive to Muslim and Islamic

nations as the denial of Holocaust is to Jews and European countries.

 

But the European governments that claim impartiality and insist on the balance between rights and responsibilities are haunted by their dark past and let it shape their public policy, leading to a considerable prejudice in who receives protection.

 

And that is understandable. As a Polish citizen with concentration camp survivors as family members, I am repulsed and angered by Irving’s (and others) denial of the horrors of the Holocaust. But I also believe that passing laws that make claims as ridiculous as Irving’s illegal grant them more legitimacy and attention than they ever deserved.

 

Funding and governmental promotion of educational programs which transfer the facts to the next generations is what governments should be spending their resources on, not the persecution of uneducated nutcases like Irving.

 

Allowing people like Irving to have their say may prove quite beneficial in setting the record straight. The overwhelming evidence contrary to his position would then be brought into the public spotlight and the truth reaffirmed.

 

Criminalizing Holocaust denial appears to be borne out of guilt (the most stringent anti-Holocaust denial laws are in Austria and Germany).  As Jeffery Herf wrote in his famous book “Divided Memory: The Nazi Past in Two Germanys”, the lengths post- World War II West Germany went to accept the burdens of the Holocaust was perceived as an attempt to “purchase their country’s moral rehabilitation and integration into the Western alliance.”

 

To truly break with the history of abuses of governmental power, the European governments should avoid doing exactly what dictatorships are fond of: censoring unpopular ideas.

 

Maybe Europe can once give up its Old World pride and take a lesson from the United States Supreme Court, which dealt with the issue in Gertz v. Robert Welch, Inc. and Hustler Magazine v. Falwell.

 

The Court wrote that the “First Amendment recognizes no such thing as a false idea,” but at the same time held that false statements of fact do not deserve Constitutional protection as “they interfere with the truth-seeking function of the marketplace of ideas.”

 

Even when dealing with hate speech as odious as Holocaust denial, our government has demonstrated a commitment to the pursuit of equal treatment in the pursuit of truth and to the conviction that uninhibited discourse is a vital part of democracy.

 

Some of the most socially, economically and culturally advanced countries in the world should reassert their own devotion to democracy by allowing freedom of speech without a retrospective partiality.