Blogs to right of them, blogs to left of them

I put a comment on Professor Deborah Lipstadt's weblog this morning that referred in turn to my post about her interview with the BBC and was pleased and surprised to receive a gracious acknowledgement from her by email. What an extraordinay medium the weblog is, the more I work with it the more conversational it seems to become.

When I posted about David Irving this morning I had no idea that Nick Grifffin of the BNP was due to go on trial today on race hate charges arising from a 2004 undercover documentary. (Nick Griffin and co-defendant Mark Collett - just like everyone in the world these days it seems are also putting their case via Blogger.)

I predict that this trial will turn out to be an even more egregious example than Irving's of Lipstadt's warning that "we should not allow them to become martyrs".

I bet that part of Griffin's defence will be that what he said has been proved by the London bombings of 7/7 to be true. Imagine how inflammatory that is going to be.

More and more I am convinced that all this hate crime legislation is counter productive. Consider the recent interview by the police of Sir Iqbal Sacranie with regard to homophobia.

Such proceedings encourage rather than alleviate tension.