My fault–I missed the word “suspended” in the “prison sentence.” I erred. HOwever, that cite is not to IHR; it’s to Liberacion. Is that a holocaust-denier website?
Not necessarily. It’s quite possible the petition was started by Holocaust-denying assholes, but Chomsky saw the statement in favor of free speech to be more important than that.
Cite?
Nonsense. Tht’s a total non sequitur. Chomsky made his reasons perfectly clear; all you’re doing is saying, “nuh uh!” without any support for it.
And it’s stupid. There’s nothing anywhere else in Chomsky’s writing to suggest that he agrees with minimizing or denying the Holocaust, yet he’s obviously not someone to shy from controversy. If he really agrees with Faurisson’s odious conclusions, why doesn’t that show up elsewhere? (And don’t even think of three-headed-monkeying your way into offering the Khmer Rouge controversy as evidence of this–that’d be another total non sequitur).
Er, I apologize for the tone in that post. It’s vexing to be told I’m ignorant about something because I’ve only read a wikipedia article on it, when I’ve followed this controversy for roughly 15 years and have read multiple sources on it from Chomsky’s POV and that of his detractors; but that doesn’t mean I should be similarly snippy in my response. I’ll try to be more respectful from here on.
If you say so, but I deliberately used “falsehood” instead of “lie” because “falsehood” simply means “untrue”, without impugning a motive to deceive on the part of the speaker, as “lie” does. Can I not say that something is untrue, or is there a different word that means “untrue statement” that I should use?
Edit: looking in online dictionaries, it seems my understanding of the definition of “falsehood” was incorrect, and it generally is used to connote intent to deceive. My apologies; I thought it implied no such intent.