Whats Next — Jailing Flat Earth Fans?
Austria has just sentenced an eccentric, obsessed historian to jail for three years because he expressed his opinion that Auschwitz didn’t have gas chambers. David Irving violated Austria’s law which provides for up to ten years imprisonment for Holocaust deniers. It is ironic that many of the people cheering this suppression of free speech in Austria are the same people decrying Moslem attempts to do the same in Denmark. Even on this side of the Atlantic people are paying a heavy price for expressing their views. Harvard University’s president, Lawrence Summers, was just forced to resign, essentially for suggesting that it might be worth studying whether innate differences would explain why fewer women than men succeed in math and science. Professor Alan Dershowitz rightly called the affair an academic coup d’etat. In the Wall Street Journal, writer Dawn Eden describes how the New York Post fired her after several warnings concerning her beliefs as a Christian conservative. The paper
