Have we in Europe lost all sense of irony or the ridiculous?

We tell the world's Muslims free speech is one of our important values and thus we cannot stop or condemn the publishing and republishing of cartoons which are offensive to Muslims and which have caused 250 deaths and counting.

Yet within four weeks, an elderly historian has been imprisoned for three years for denying 19 years ago that Nazi gas chambers were used. And this in a country, Austria, which recently elected an extreme right-wing chancellor.

Then an unelected body suspended the Mayor of London for a month for privately calling a Jewish journalist who had been harassing him for some time "a concentration camp guard".

-Bob Cranmore, Lancing