University shut in Holocaust row

Story from BBC NEWS:
europe/6670745.stm

Published: 2007/05/18 17:33:14 GMT

An Italian university has closed down one of its campuses to prevent a
planned lecture by a controversial French professor and Holocaust denier.
Robert Faurisson has been convicted five times in France for denying crimes
against humanity.
He was due to speak at the University of Teramo in central Italy as part of a
Masters course in Middle East studies.
But the university decided to close part of the campus to prevent him
addressing students.

It said the "climate of tension" might endanger the safety of its students.
‘Embarrassment’
Faurisson says that Nazi gas chambers are a fiction and that most of the Jews
who were killed at the Auschwitz concentration camp died of natural causes.
Last year, he was one of several prominent Holocaust deniers who gathered to
take part in a conference in Iran.
The University of Teramo’s Professor Moffa, who organised the lecture, was
formally warned to cancel the invitation but insisted he had a right to
academic independence.
"Are you so convinced of your truths?" Mr Moffa was quoted as telling the
Italian daily newspaper La Stampa. "Then why don’t you come and pull him to
pieces?"
The Simon Wiesenthal Centre issued a statement saying that the invitation to
Faurisson was "an embarrassment to Italian academia".
"To welcome Faurisson […] encourages a perverse propaganda to incite a new
generation to anti-Semitism," it read, according to AP.
European interior ministers agreed last month to make it an offence to
condone or grossly trivialise crimes of genocide – but only if the effect is
incitement to violence or hatred.