Free speech and other taboos

Interesting how news of the imprisonment for five years of the writer Ernst Zündel has caused not the slightest blip in the litblogosphere, certainly not in comparison to the failed prosecution of Orhan Pamuk and other Turkish writers.

We all know what the cheese-eating surrender monkey said about defending free speech. For announcing that he'd defend to the death the right to free speech, in Blair's PC Wunderland Voltaire would probably be thrown in gaol for glorifying terrorism.

Interesting too that Holocaust denial is now invariably associated with Islam. The Guardian claims in the same article that "as well as denying the Holocaust", the Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has "called for Israel to be wiped off the map". This is more dangerous than anything a neo-Nazi fantasist can write about the Holocaust. While Guardian journalists no doubt adhere to the injunction "Never again", they nevertheless blithely repeat such disinformation generated by those who have already triggered a war that has led to a number of deaths many in the mainstream media are keen to deny, and now seem to wish to spread their genocidal policies to Iran and beyond.