Tweet
National Assembly of Armenia
Oct 27 2006
Silencers at work in the marketplace of ideas
BY: JEFF JACOBY, Special to the CJN
Did the Ottoman Turks commit genocide against the Armenians in 1915?
Careful - in some places you can be arrested if you give the wrong
answer to that question.
Under Article 305 of the Turkish Penal Code, for example, those who
promote recognition of `the genocide of the Armenians' are subject to
prosecution, while Article 301 makes the denigration of `Turkishness'
a crime punishable by up to three years in prison.
Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk, winner of the 2006 Nobel Prize for
Literature, is among those who have been charged under Article 301.
His offense was to tell a Swiss interviewer that ��,000
Kurds and a million Armenians were killed in these lands, and nobody
but me dares to talk about it.' (The charges against Pamuk were
eventually dropped, but other prosecutions are ongoing.)
Yet if acknowledging the Armenian genocide is a crime in Turkey,
gainsaying it could soon be a crime in France. Two weeks ago, the
French National Assembly voted to approve a bill under which anyone
denying the 1915 genocide could be sentenced to a year's imprisonment
and a 45,000-euro ($56,000) fine. That matches the penalty under
French law for denying the Nazi Holocaust.
The French legislation is meant to uphold the truth - the Armenian
genocide, like the Holocaust, is a fact of history - while the point
of the Turkish law is to debase it. Both, however, are intolerable
assaults on liberty. Beliefs should not be criminalized, no matter
how repugnant or absurd. As I wrote when David Irving was convicted
of Holocaust denial in Austria earlier this year, free societies do
not throw people in prison for giving offensive speeches or spouting
historical lies.
We Americans should know this better than anyone. The right to speak
one's mind is supposed to be a core article of our civic faith. Yet
the would-be censors are busy here, too.
[parts omitted]
http://www.clevelandjewishnews.com/articl es/2006/10/27/community/letters_opinion/ajacoby102 7.txt
Oct 27 2006
Silencers at work in the marketplace of ideas
BY: JEFF JACOBY, Special to the CJN
Did the Ottoman Turks commit genocide against the Armenians in 1915?
Careful - in some places you can be arrested if you give the wrong
answer to that question.
Under Article 305 of the Turkish Penal Code, for example, those who
promote recognition of `the genocide of the Armenians' are subject to
prosecution, while Article 301 makes the denigration of `Turkishness'
a crime punishable by up to three years in prison.
Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk, winner of the 2006 Nobel Prize for
Literature, is among those who have been charged under Article 301.
His offense was to tell a Swiss interviewer that ��,000
Kurds and a million Armenians were killed in these lands, and nobody
but me dares to talk about it.' (The charges against Pamuk were
eventually dropped, but other prosecutions are ongoing.)
Yet if acknowledging the Armenian genocide is a crime in Turkey,
gainsaying it could soon be a crime in France. Two weeks ago, the
French National Assembly voted to approve a bill under which anyone
denying the 1915 genocide could be sentenced to a year's imprisonment
and a 45,000-euro ($56,000) fine. That matches the penalty under
French law for denying the Nazi Holocaust.
The French legislation is meant to uphold the truth - the Armenian
genocide, like the Holocaust, is a fact of history - while the point
of the Turkish law is to debase it. Both, however, are intolerable
assaults on liberty. Beliefs should not be criminalized, no matter
how repugnant or absurd. As I wrote when David Irving was convicted
of Holocaust denial in Austria earlier this year, free societies do
not throw people in prison for giving offensive speeches or spouting
historical lies.
We Americans should know this better than anyone. The right to speak
one's mind is supposed to be a core article of our civic faith. Yet
the would-be censors are busy here, too.
[parts omitted]
http://www.clevelandjewishnews.com/articl es/2006/10/27/community/letters_opinion/ajacoby102 7.txt