German magazine defies Holocaust hate laws

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.