More cartoon frolics

Arab News reports:

Dutch prosecutors said Wednesday they will charge an Arab cultural group under hate speech laws for publishing a cartoon that suggests the death of 6 million Jews during World War II is a fabrication.

The public prosecutor’s office in the city of Utrecht said the cartoon insults Jews as a group and is therefore an illegal form of discrimination.

Prosecutors plan to press charges for insulting a group and distributing an insulting image.

This seems to be the cartoon in question:



I'm publishing it for the same reasons I published the Danish cartoons. If there's a controversy over a drawing, we need to be able to see it to judge for ourselves. I'm a strong defender of free expression, and this isn't limited to the expression of ideas I agree with or like. Attempts to suppress a viewpoint should be met by the wider distribution of that viewpoint than would otherwise be the case.

The cartoon above is plainly a holocaust denial. This is as intellectually negligible and contemptible as the belief that the earth is flat. But neither viewpoint should be illegal. So I publish it not because I agree with it or like it, neither is the case. I publish it because the Arab European League has an absolute right to the expression of its ideas.