Of all the people whose misfortunes made news this past week, few inspire less sympathy than David Irving. The British historian who has fashioned a career out of questioning the Nazis' slaughter of millions of European Jews was sentenced to three years in prison on Monday for violating Austria's ban on Holocaustverleugnung, or Holocaust denial.
The man had it coming: He was aware of the country's anti-Nazi law and deliberately chose to flout it during a lecture tour there in 1989, admitting as much in court. Yet in a broader context -- how to respond most effectively to a Holocaust denier, be it Irving or any other -- the jailing of this belligerent individual is not so easy to agree on.
In fact, the Irving decision has caused nearly as much head-scratching as the Danish cartoons of Muhammad, over which debate still rages on the merits of a newspaper's right to publish contentious material vs. people's right to criticize its judgment. Last week's ruling in Vienna caused a similar clash of priorities, as Austria's right to outlaw Nazi activities on its own soil collided with the view -- expressed even by some Jewish observers -- that this particular sentence might have been ill-advised.