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Holocaust Memorial Day

I would indeed agree, which is why we need to inculcate tolerance of others in our society. Let me touch briefly on holocaust denial. To anyone who has looked at the facts, it is of course absolutely ridiculous, but as the HET says, it is best defeated by education and knowledge. David Irving, who we have heard about already, went to prison in Austria for some of his ridiculous utterances. Although I have no time for the man, I wonder whether sending such an idiotic figure to prison is the best answer. We also heard earlier about Richard Williamson—a self-appointed bishop, I think, in a sect of the Roman Catholic Church, to which he has recently been readmitted. I watched him on YouTube shortly before I came here and found out that the gas chambers did not exist! He denies their existence. People like him are best defeated by education, knowledge, fact and ridicule. Frankly, I deprecate him completely. I believe that the holocaust denier who is currently in the highest position is President Ahmadinejad of Iran, and I find that much more worrying than the views of some silly man called Richard Williamson. Education is important. As survivors die off, there will be fewer people to tell others what happened to them and to move us all. That was brought home to me today by the obituary, in The Daily Telegraph, of a Pole called Alec Maisner, who became an air vice-marshal in the Royal Air Force. He was not Jewish, but he was at Warsaw university in 1939, when Stalin took over Warsaw, and many of his fellow students were Jewish. He spent two years in Stalin's labour camps in Siberia before coming to Britain and becoming an air vice-marshal. I mention that not because it represents part of the holocaust that we commemorate—of course, Stalin killed some 25 million people, probably his own people, for almost any reason, but not particularly for racist reasons—but because as people like the air vice-marshal move on, we need to keep the knowledge alive. That is why I say again that I praise the work of the HET and hope that we will indeed learn the lessons of history.