Should the German NDP be banned?

I don't know about you, but I'm definitely conflicted over this issue. The far right and the far left are equally abhorrent to me. I have far more in common with my (small or large "c") Conservative opponents - after all, we generally play to the same rules, would usually prefer a victory by the other to one by our own extremists - than I do with my extremist "allies".

That said, is this a step too far? Is the right way to combat the extremists to ban them? I felt at the time, for example, that the Austrians did no-one except the far-right a favour when they imprisoned David Irvine after the had lost his libel case against Deborah Lipstadt and penguin Books. They gave him back credibility among his far-right acolytes. Far better, I thought, to have heaved him back over the border and told him to go away. 

So, are the German-Jewish community and their friends and allies right to want to ban the National Democratic Party or not? If they can be directly linked to acts of violence and to be promoting law-breaking by violent means, there might be a case for that.

After all, albeit from a different background and history, the tendency in the UK is to use the available democratic means to combat the far right and left. But then, we haven't had 13 years of Nazism in our relatively recent past. See what you think, here: 

By: Brian Goldfarb