Friday, March 02, 2007

Illegal to Burn a Book?

Sounds like the Koran has rivals as a book requiring maxed-out respect:

"Seven far-right Germans in their 20s who flung a copy of Anne Frank's Diary into a bonfire amid cheers from beer-drinking neo-Nazis went on trial for sedition Monday. The Summer Solstice Party last year in the small town of Pretzien, 130 kilometres west of Berlin, caused uproar in Germany last year after it was revealed that the town mayor and police were also present and saw nothing wrong in the book and a US flag being burned.

Frank, a Jewish girl who died of typhus in 1945 at the age of 15 in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, is a figure of hatred to Holocaust deniers because of her compelling story of life in hiding in Amsterdam before her capture by the Nazis...

They have not been charged in connection with the burning of the US flag"

Source

Apparently the action is being categorized as "Holocaust denial". That seems a rather large assumption to me. It is a warning, however, about how broadly any "hate speech" laws could be applied. You could be guilty of "hate speech" without saying a word, by the look of it.