Right-wing British historian David Irving declared Thursday that his critics want to silence him, arguing that his three-year sentence on a charge of denying the Holocaust was an attack on his right to freedom of speech.

Irving told The Associated Press during a jailhouse interview that he erred 17 years ago in contending there were no gas chambers at the Auschwitz concentration camp. But he said that the error was a mistake in "methodology" and that he accepted that millions of Jews died during World War II.

However, Irving refused to use the word Holocaust, describing it as a concept that "became cleverly marketed, like Tylenol." Tylenol is a U.S. painkiller.

"I'm not going to use snap-happy trademark words," he said.