Getting at the Truth
December 13th, 2006 by
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the egregious president of Iran, is hosting a conference this week on whether the Holocaust really happened. There are serious questions that someone with Ahmadinejad’s hostile attitude toward the state of Israel might ask about the Holocaust — did it justify the settlement of its survivors in Palestine in the first place and has Israel misused the Holocaust to justify the Israeli settlements in the occupied territories — but whether the Holocaust ever happened is not one of them. To even somewhat sensible, mildly educated people, Ahmadinejad’s conference is like having a conference about whether the world might be flat after all.
Although Iran surely intends this as an affront to Israel and Jewish people everywhere — my family and I fled Czechoslovakia in 1939, leaving my grandparents and many relatives behind to die in Theresienstad and Auschwitz — the real victims of this minor latter-day outrage are the Iranian people and rational discourse everywhere. [Read more]
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December 15th, 2006 at 9:45 pm
Charles Fried’s recent piece in the Boston Globe makes a powerful argument in the defense of truth and freedom of speech. I am in agreement with the basic principle that those who stand for freedom of speech must do so even when it is exercised by those who they disagree with.
However, one must ask at what cost will they allow free speech to trample on other equally important values such as dignity, justice, and respect for the victims of horrible atrocities?
During World War I, Armenians experienced the worst crime known to man. Their family trees were torn to shreds, their wealth and belongings were looted and they were plucked from their historic homeland, forced to wander in foreign countries seeking refuge. Today, Armenians everywhere have to live with this massive injustice which befell their people. What’s more, they have to live with the fact that the perpetrator of this crime sits back unpunished and unrepentant.
Armenians have had to deal with denial on a scale much larger than one mere conference in a marginalized state such as Iran. They have faced uphill battles against denial in the United Nations, academia, media, and the halls of major legislatures throughout the world. Indeed, for a large part of the 20th century, nobody would even lend an ear to the plight of Armenians.
Thus, while Fried looks at the French law punishing the denial of the Armenian Genocide in the same vein as those who “degrade the currency of truth,” I see it as part of the continuing struggle of the Armenian people to put in an end to the genocidal campaign of the Turkish government and its powerful allies across the world. For in every effort to deny the Armenian Genocide, there lies an attempt to complete the process of elimination which began in 1915; there lies an attempt to spit on the graves of those who were butchered and flaunt immunity in the face of those who survived. In this sense, I see the French law as another clog in the gears of the vicious Turkish denial machine.
Freedom of speech is obviously an important principle that deserves our protection. The only question is, are we supposed to support it even when it is employed as the final stage of a genocidal campaign?