Jack Lopresti
Main Page: Jack Lopresti (Conservative - Filton and Bradley Stoke)Holocaust Memorial Day 2012
Jack Lopresti Excerpts(12 years, 4 months ago)
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Gavin Barwell
My hon. Friend makes his point very powerfully. Earlier, I tried to touch on the fact that the victims of Nazi atrocity were clearly many and varied.
Dr David Tibbs was serving with 13 Para, which was also involved in the liberation of Belsen. He had a slightly different reaction:
“At Belsen, I felt a curious elation. Looking at all these terrible things, I thought, ‘Here is the justification for this war, for all the lives we have lost, for everything we’ve been through’”.
A few people in our society today argue that war never achieves anything. I myself am an opponent of one of the conflicts we are engaged in at the moment. However, those words are a reminder that, sometimes, violence does achieve something. In this case, it stopped, far too late, a tremendous atrocity.
Jack Lopresti (Filton and Bradley Stoke) (Con)
I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing the debate. He spoke very movingly about the history and first-hand testimony. Does my hon. Friend share my dismay that the Iranian President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a repeated holocaust denier, was given a platform to address the UN anti-racism conference in Geneva in April 2009, and that he spoke from a UN platform again on this subject in 2011?
Gavin Barwell
I regret that fact. I am a great believer in free speech, and if people such as Mr Ahmadinejad wish to reveal just how foolish they are by denying things for which the historical evidence is overwhelming, I do not have a problem with that, but I do not believe the United Nations should have given him a platform to do so.