Peter Singer, the esteemed utilitarian expositor of  animal liberation and euthanistic infanticide, has proffered a qualified defense of bonafide thought criminal, David Irving, who continues to while away his hours in an Austrian jail cell. 

Singer’s essay is parsed with the requisite caveats,  but it comes down to this:

…even while the protests about the [Danish] cartoons were still underway, a new
problem about convincing Muslims of the genuineness of our respect for
freedom of expression has arisen because of Austria’s conviction and
imprisonment of David Irving for denying the existence of the
Holocaust. We cannot consistently hold that it should be a criminal
offense to deny the existence of the Holocaust and that cartoonists
have a right to mock religious figures. David Irving should be freed.

For more on the ongoing censorship and persecution of dissident Holocaust historians (a widespread phenomenon to which the Irving case is but a high-profile footnote), forget everything you know and check out the archive at Historians Behind Bars, especially this important and overlooked overview.   

It’s worse than you think.