Samedi 15 janvier 2011 6 15 /01 /Jan /2011 12:45


Europe’s Newest Free Speech Martyr: Barcelona Librarian Pedro Varela



http://libertadpedrovarela.over-blog.co ... 31899.html


As one European free speech martyr, Ernst Zundel, is released from prison, another one takes his place in the EU gulag. A Spanish court has sentenced Barcelona bookshop owner Pedro Varela to two years and nine months in prison for “spreading racist propaganda.” The court ruled that Varela spread ideas “favorable to genocide.” In fact none of the books Varela sold were favorable in any way to genocide. Varela has always condemned all human rights violations against peoples. He was charged with “racism” for simply selling a book in his bookstore by a leading British scientist on racial differences. A book which advocated no repression or harm against anyone. He was also ordered to pay a fine of 2,880 euros (3,945 dollars). Prosecutors had asked for a four-year prison sentence.

The court rejected Varela’s defense that he belonged to no political party and that there were no banned books in Spain. During the trial, Varela said “I am not saying there was not persecution of the Jews, and I have always condemned forcefully any persecution that existed, but there should be traditional academic investigation, criticism and challenge on historical events.” Brief English summary from EarthTimes; Spanish-language media reports from El Pais and EFE. So, they seek to throw him in prison not for denying crimes against Jews in the Second World War but for simply selling books in his shop that historically argue numbers of which there is considerable dispute even among mainstream Jewish researchers.

This represents Pedro Varela’s third time through the Spanish justice system over free speech issues. In 2006, Varela was arrested on Holocaust denial and justification of genocide charges, convicted on the justification charge, and sentenced to seven months in prison after a 2008 trial, but avoided incarceration at the time because he lacked a prior criminal record. Previously, on November 16th, 1998, a Barcelona criminal court found Varela guilty of inciting racial hatred and of denying or justifying genocide, and sentenced him to five years imprisonment and a fine of 720,000 pesetas (about $5,000). The conviction was suspended by the Catalonia Provincial Court on April 30th, 1999 when the three judges of the Audencia court in Barcelona unanimously declared that the law under which he had been convicted may have violated Article 20 of the Spanish Constitution, which guarantees the rights of free speech and free expression of opinion.

Ultimately, a Constitutional Tribunal sided with the provincial court, deciding in 2007 to decriminalise a presumption that was included in the reform of the Penal Code of 1996. Article 607.2 anticipates punishments of up to two years in jail for whoever, “by any means” diffuses “ideas or doctrines that deny or justify” the Holocaust. The Tribunal found that this clause limited a fundamental right, the right to freedom of expression, since it punished the diffusion of ideas “without demanding any other element, such as affronts, or inciting to attack groups.”

In 2007, Pedro Varela published Dr. David Duke’s Spanish-language translation of his book, “Jewish Supremacism”. The two launched a joint book tour for Dr. Duke. The November 2007 Spanish news video embedded below shows one of the joint appearances of Dr. Duke and Pedro Varela — and also shows Spanish Marxists staging a riot in protest. Ironically, a nonviolent man who has harmed no one is facing almost three years in prison while communist terrorists who rioted, burned property, who physically harmed police and bystanders, who sought bodily harm against other humans simply because of their viewpoint — were let off with only a slap on the wrist!