Varieties of free speech

I recently came across this item from Spiked . While I don't agree with David Irving's holocaust denying think it's counter productive to threaten him with imprisonment for words he said years ago. He is variously described in the article as a "British historian" and a "racist crank", terms which you might think are incompatible with each other.

The case of Orhan Pamuk, the Turkish writer, is more interesting to me, not only because it is continuing at the moment but also because I'm reading Robert Fisk's The Great War for Civilisation, which includes a lengthy chapter "The First Holocaust" on the 1915 massacres in Armenia. Fisk is well aware of Turkish sensitivities on this matter and draws attention (see pp 418 - 429) to some recent airbrushings and equivocations by the US and British governments and media. He also mentions (at p 430) other recent instances where discussion of the massacres has been aired in Turkey, while acknowledging the red rag responses they elicited .

Spiked, asserts that both cases are the same:

"both [ Irving and Pamuk ]could be incarcerated, not for physically harming another person or for damaging property, but for the words they spoke; both could have their liberty removed because they expressed views that the authorities - in Turkey and Austria - decree to be distasteful. And both of their trials are an outrage against the principle of free speech. You may or may not agree with what Pamuk said, and you probably are disgusted by Irving's weasel words. But this isn't about what either author said; it is about whether they should have the right to say it, and we should have the right to hear it. Freedom of speech, as its name suggests, does not mean freedom for views that go down well in polite society but not for views that stink: it means freedom for all speech, the freedom to think, say and write what we please and the freedom of everyone else to challenge or ridicule our arguments."

In today's Hurriyet the Turkish Justice Minister is reported as saying of the Pamuk case "All we need is democratic patience", whatever that means, though he "declined to give details of steps to be taken on the issue".

"Democratic patience" has, like most doublespeak, a bland fuzziness about it. Does it really mean "undemocratic impatience"? This would seem to be more in tune with the current environment of fear and anti-terror legislation.