Madam, - Alan Shatter says (March 1st) that there is no contradiction between the right of the Danish press to publish satirical cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad and opposing free speech for Holocaust deniers such as David Irving. In fact the contradictions are manifold.
I myself think Mr Irving's claims are madness but what is there to gain in imprisoning a 67-year-old man for practising bogus history? If Western Europe is the free and democratic political bloc it proclaims itself to be, surely a more appropriate solution would be to compel him to face his detractors - ie, academic and intellectual fire-power of the highest calibre - to clearly and concisely lay waste to his claims in a debating forum.
Learning the history of the Holocaust and death of six million Jews is a moral imperative but in the past 12 years, two events comparable to the Holocaust happened which makes Mr Irving's imprisonment look even more ridiculous. In 1994 Hutu militias butchered thousands of Tutsis in Rwanda, and a year later, Serbian death squads butchered hundreds of Bosnian Muslims in Srebrenica.
On both occasions, the West stood by and watched these mass murders happen, which poses a moral puzzle all of its own: who is worse? David Irving for denying the scale of the Holocaust, or those who allow such things to happen in the first place? - Yours, etc,
ROBERT BYRNE, Clonmel, Co Tipperary.