WHY ARE WE MAKING THIS POWER-MAD

EXTREMIST LOOK SO GOOD?

By Bradley R. Smith

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is a hard-line religious extremist, a dangerous demagogue who is an unapologetic enemy of human rights. He has effectively killed Iran 's budding reform movement, rolling back gains that have been made for women's rights, civil rights, freedom of speech, and freedom of the press. He has threatened Israel with annihilation, called the Holocaust a myth, and refused to honor agreements made with the United Nations regarding Iran 's nuclear program.

So why have the nations of the West chosen to hand him the one issue—the right to intellectual freedom, a free press and free speech—that makes him look like a courageous champion of a free society?

Ahmadinejad is the only world leader who is willing to vigorously criticize the increasingly common practice in the West of imprisoning those who express skepticism, or who want to revise or deny any aspect of the received history of the Holocaust. Over the past decade an increasing number of writers, historians, and politicians have been prosecuted in Europe , Canada and Australia for what they've written or said about Holocaust history.

In the U.S. , although the 1st Amendment prohibits the government itself from imprisoning Americans for what we say or write about history, the Bush Administration collaborates with the German State in extraditing immigrants living legally in America to Germany , where they are imprisoned for writing “illegal” history.

On the world stage, only Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has been a vocal critic regarding these events. That's a disgrace. The politicians and free speech activists in the West who have remained silent about the imprisonment of Holocaust revisionists have shoved—literally shoved—this issue into the laps of extremists like Ahmadinejad.

The persecution and imprisonment of Holocaust revisionists in the West, particularly in Europe and Canada , is virtually ignored by the U.S. press, but it is a huge story in the Muslim world. In Iran alone, over the past six months, this story has been the subject of dozens of lengthy reports in the Tehran Times, the official Iranian news agency (MEHR), and every single Iranian TV station. In October 2005 the Iranian Sahar TV network even produced a miniseries about the prosecution of Holocaust revisionists in the West.

Of course, the Muslim press goes to great lengths to use the imprisonment of Holocaust revisionists as a way to give credence to a litany of conspiracy theories against Jews. After all, if the Jews can have mere critics of Holocaust history thrown in prison, they must indeed wield decisive control over cultural and political life in the West.

However, it is not the Jews in the West who are imprisoning people who question the official history of the Holocaust. Many prominent Jews abhor the idea. The truth is, those responsible for the laws that make Holocaust revisionism a crime are those officials who hold office in Western Governments, a tiny minority of whom are Jews.

The anti-revisionist censorship laws themselves are often purposefully vague regarding exactly what constitutes illegal questions or statements regarding Holocaust history. It is a simple matter for European politicians to administer these laws in an arbitrary and self-serving fashion, sometimes using them to settle old scores, or rid themselves of pesky critics.

In 2005 alone, the laws against Holocaust denial in France were used by the government to prosecute political opponents on both the left and the right. In Austria you can be imprisoned for “minimizing” the Holocaust. The definition of what constitutes “minimizing” is not clear. These laws invite—plead--for misuse, and serve the State factotums who exploit them.

In Canada , if you express skepticism about some aspect of the Holocaust story, you will be investigated by the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, or CSIS, a massive domestic spying agency (imagine the FBI, combined with the powers of the CIA, and given the mandate of spying on private citizens).

If you are imprisoned in Canada for being a Holocaust “denier,” the CSIS does not have to present evidence to show why you are being held, and it does not have to bring your case to trial.

When Iranian President Ahmadinejad blames the Jews for laws against Holocaust skepticism, those government officials who actually wrote, enacted, and enforced those laws, not one of them, steps forward to say, “No, it was not the Jews. It was me and my colleagues.”

Moreover, President Ahmadinejad's outspoken advocacy of a free press on this matter compromises those in the West who sincerely desire to see democratic reforms in the Muslim world. We are made to look like the hypocrites we are. How can we ask Muslim dictators to allow dissent and free speech in their countries, when we in the West imprison people for what they write about history?

If the West has the right to imprison citizens for thought crimes, don't Muslim and other cultures have that same right? Isn't that where Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is going to be seen to be standing tall by people all around the world? And won't they be right?

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad may be a kind of Persian capo with a loose cannon, but it is obvious to people everywhere that he is on the right side of the question of whether or not a writer should be imprisoned for challenging the “official” history of—of anything.

No free society, and no decent society, makes criminals of those who choose not to believe what the State tells them they must believe.

Bradley Smith is the author of

“Break His Bones: The Private Life of a Holocaust Revisionist”