BRUSSELS—Belgian Holocaust denier Siegfried Verbeke was sentenced to six months in prison after a criminal court in Mechelen found him guilty for proclaiming negationist theories.
The 74-year-old Verbele has been already sentenced several times for negationism in Begium and in sourrounding countries.
This time he sent a DVD to the Holocaust Museum in which he dismissed the historical facts about killing Jews in gas chambers in Auschwitz-Birkenau as ‘’unbelievable.’’
He was given the maxium sentence of six months in prison and a hefty fine of eight thousand euros. The judge did not at any point follow the defense of Verbeke’s counsel, who said that there was no question of any spread of Holocaust denial since the museum staff had not looked at the contents of the DVD.
In August 2005 Verbeke was arrested on arrival at Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport because an international arrest warrant from Germany ran against him because of Holocaust denial. He was arrested and disappeared behind the bars until May 2006,when he was released
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It is most regrettable that Mr Siegfried Verbeke’s counsel had no better defence than ‘ there was no question of any spread of Holocaust denial since the museum staff had not looked at the contents of the DVD.’ I suppose that this is the only defence availsble when it is illegal to ‘deny the holocaust’.
Well, shame on you, Belgium, for suppressing truth to the point that you imprison a man who has done nothing more that try to tell the truth.