21 May 2007
The notorious Holocaust denier David Irving has been thrown out of an international book fair in the Polish capital Warsaw. "We asked him to leave", book fair organizer Grzegorz Guzowski told the Reuters news agency, adding, "Our employees helped him pack up his things, and our car drove him to the address he specified."
Irving, whose work as a historian has been widely discredited, was convicted of Holocaust denial in Austria two years ago and spent a year in jail there before gaining early release. In Poland, there is no law punishing the denial of the Holocaust. Irving was at the book fair to promote his writings, many of which question long-established facts about the Shoah such as the existence of the gas chambers at the Auschwitz death camp. Irving plans to visit Auschwitz and other former Nazi death camps, according to Reuters.
Meanwhile, the French Holocaust denier Robert Faurisson was prevented from holding a talk at the law faculty of Teramo University in Italy. Faurisson had been invited by Claudio Moffa, a professor of Asian and African history and director of a master’s program in Middle East studies. The university first ordered Moffa to withdraw the invitation because Faurisson’s credentials were academically illegitimate. Later, as protests mounted over the planned speech, the rector decided to close the building for the day because of rising tensions over Faurisson’s presence. Faurisson, himself a former university professor, had said two months ago in Paris that Hitler's gas chambers and the Holocaust had been "one and the same historic lie.''
