Iran president denies holocaust

[Occhidiangela]

I'm pretty sure Aus has a similar rule making it illegal to deny the holocaust, since there was a fluster a while back querying why the NZ Govt. didn't have one also, when a prominent Canadian denier was trying to enter NZ.

I also seem to remember an academic losing his job last year after supporting a students research into the 'real' number of holocaust victims or something similar.

But then, freedom of speech is not a fundamental right over here.  (well, you can say what you want, as long as no-one can prove it  :P )
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Why is that singled out as deserving special protection, and why is research into detail forbidden? How bizarre!

I'd think academic rigor would welcome the standard detailed look into history, as revisionists and other historians do all the time on a hundred topics (why else yet another book/dissertation on the US Civil War, for example) rather than ban a particular avenue of research. That seems intellectually dishonest.

I mean, is it that important that 5.72 million versus 6.11 million died in the Holocaust? Probably not, but people on the PhD path have researched far more trivial detail than that without being arrested or sanctioned.

What happened to "the search for truth" and "contributing to the body of knowledge?" Are people also banned from researching Mao and China's holocaust during the period 1950 to 1970, or is that OK due to racial, political, or cultural classification?

I'd like to understand this, it makes little sense to me.

Occhi