David Cameron takes on “non-violent extremists”
In a long career filled with achievement, historian David Irving has a new feather in his cap — as a poster boy for the British government’s new campaign against extremism. It is an accolade he shares with internet executioner ‘Jihadi John’.
Prime Minister David Cameron bizarrely chose to single out the revisionist historian as an example of someone beyond the pale in his major speech on dealing with non-violent extremists who, he complains, manage to sneakily stay on “just the right side of the law”.
It was an outrageous slur: “When David Irving goes to a university to deny the Holocaust — university leaders rightly come out and condemn him. They don’t deny his right to speak but they do challenge what he says. But when an Islamist extremist goes there to promote their poisonous ideology, too often university leaders look the other way.”
So, quite apart from the ludicrousness of Irving ever being allowed to speak on campus, combating him and his books are part of “the struggle of our generation” as Cameron put it. The Irving reference, as with the Charlie Hebdo and internet Jewish conspiracies reference, was really a signal to the Jewish community, that their interests remain closest to his heart. Even the venue for his speech was a nominally Jewish school in Birmingham. Read more