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Belgium: Holocaust denier’s punishment – visit concentration camps

A  Belgian Holocaust denier was ordered by a court to either visit Nazi death camps in Poland every year for the next five years or go to prison.

A former Belgian politician who has been convicted of Holocaust denial was ordered to either visit Nazi death camps in Poland every year for the next five years or go to prison.

Laurent Louis, a former member of the Belgian Chamber of Representatives who is notorious for his anti-Zionist and anti-Semitic positions as well as Holocaust denial, was given a six-month suspended prison sentence and a fine in 2015 after being convicted of minimizing the Holocaust and contesting crimes against humanity. He had downplayed the degree to which Jews were targeted for genocide and questioned the number of Jews murdered in gas chambers during the Holocaust in an article posted on his blog.

However, the sentence was recently converted to an order that has Louis embarking on an annual pilgrimage to Nazi concentration camps, including Auschwitz and Treblinka, for the next five years.

He was also ordered to share, in detail, the “eye-opening” experience on his blog.

The Belgian newspaper Derniere Heure reported that the creative sentence was Louis’ idea. On Wednesday, after it was given, Louis celebrated on Facebook and apologized “to anyone who may have been hurt by my remarks.”

“All that is left for me to do is to go and report in the death camps,” he wrote in a statement. “No doubt, the Court has recognized my talents as a writer.”

“Laurent Louis is generally considered as a baffoon,” Dave Sinardet, a professor of political science at the Free University of Brussels, told the New York Times. “He unites Belgian politicians all across the board in the sense that none of them take him seriously.”

Professor Deborah Lipstadt, who won the famous trial against Holocaust denier David Irving,  said even fringe figures should be taken seriously. She called his sentence “unusual.”

By: World Israel News Staff