Free Speech
Despite her acrimonious history with Holocaust denier David Irving, she has stated that she is personally opposed to the three-year prison sentence of Irving in Austria for two speeches he made in 1989, during which he allegedly claimed there had been no gas chambers at Auschwitz, as minimizing the atrocities of the Third Reich is a crime punishable with up to 10 years imprisonment in Austria. "I am uncomfortable with imprisoning people for speech. Let him go and let him fade from everyone's radar screens...Generally, I don't think Holocaust denial should be a crime. I am a free speech person, I am against censorship."
Read more about this topic: Deborah Lipstadt
Famous quotes containing the words free and/or speech:
“If you are ready to leave father and mother, and brother and sister, and wife and child and friends, and never see them again,—if you have paid your debts and made your will, and settled all your affairs, and are a free man, then you are ready for a walk.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“And hereby hangs a moral highly applicable to our own trustee-ridden universities, if to nothing else. If we really wanted liberty of speech and thought, we could probably get it—Spain fifty years ago certainly had a longer tradition of despotism than has the United States—but do we want it? In these years we will see.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)