16 October 2007
The notorious Holocaust denier David Irving has been invited to speak to the Oxford Union, the renowned debating society of the British university. The invitation has angered student groups and activists. The leader of the extreme-right British National Party, Nick Griffin, and the authoritarian Belarusian president Alexander Lukashenka were also invited to speak. "It will be a disgrace if these discredited speakers are allowed a platform at a forum on free speech," Oxford Jewish Society co-presidents Daniel Bloch and Steven Altmann-Richer said in a statement. "They have an embarrassing history of disregard for legal restrictions. It will certainly go down as a black mark on the reputation of the Oxford Union."
"The Oxford Union is famous for its commitment to free speech, and although I do think these people have awful and abhorrent views, I do think Oxford students are intelligent enough to challenge and ridicule them," Oxford Union president Luke Tryl told the ‘Guardian’ newspaper. In 2005, David Irving was sentenced to three years in an Austrian jail for speeches in which he questioned the existence of Nazi death camps and called the Auschwitz gas chambers a “fairy tale.” He lost a libel suit in Britain in 1998 against author Deborah Lipstadt, who had called him a Holocaust denier.
