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After Being Freed from Prison Irving Backs Mel Gibson

The British Holocaust Denier, David Irving, was released from the Austrian prison system after serving a 13 month sentence. Upon arrival at the UK Irving held a press conference in London, Friday, in which he reinitiated his attack on the Jewish people, this only a day after he was released from prison for denying the existence of the holocaust. Irving was released after the Supreme Court in Vienna ruled that two-thirds of his sentence be converted to probation.

During the press conference Irving was asked if he was anti-Semitic, Irving answered: "No, I like to think I am not." But then he said: "In many respects Mel Gibson was right," commenting on the actor and director`s drunken comments earlier this year that Jews were responsible for all modern wars. "They (Jews) should ask themselves the question, `Why have they been so hated for 3,000 years that there has been pogrom after pogrom in country after country?` and it`s the one question they seem to be very shy of," Irving said.

Irving, the 67-year-old historian was arrested in November 2005, for things he said in two lectors he gave 16 years ago, and has since been in custody of the Austrian correctional system. In February an Austrian court found Irving guilty and sentenced him to 3 years in prison. Irving appealed the verdict, while the prosecution demanded a tougher sentence, since Holocaust denial is a crime that carries a sentence of up to 10 years. Irving has written over 30 books in which he claims that the Holocaust was a much smaller `incident` than accepted. He also claimed that there was no evidence that the Nazi`s have acted upon the "final solution." In the first lector he gave in Austria, in front of a crowed of 300, he claimed that the events of the Kristallnacht were conducted by anonymous persons dressed as SA members, that Anna Frank couldn`t have written her diary since the pen she claimed to have written with was yet to invented and that Hitler never gave an order to exterminate the Jews.