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French Author Explains Rationale Behind Genocide Bill

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  • French Author Explains Rationale Behind Genocide Bill

    FRENCH AUTHOR EXPLAINS RATIONALE BEHIND GENOCIDE BILL

    PanARMENIAN.Net
    January 10, 2012 - 10:19 AMT

    PanARMENIAN.Net - French writer and academic Bernard-Henri Levy
    explained the rationale behind the recent bill passed in the French
    Parliament criminalizing the denial of the Armenian Genocide in a
    January 4 article in Huffington Post.

    "The law whose purpose is to penalize negationist revisionism, voted
    before Christmas by the French parliament, does not propose to write
    history in the place of historians. And this for the simple reason
    that this history has been told and written, well written, for a long
    time," Levy writes in the Huffington Post. "This we have always known:
    that, beginning in 1915, the Armenians were the victims of a methodic
    attempt at annihilation."

    "It's time to stop mixing everything up and drowning the Armenian
    tragedy in the ritualized blahblahblah assailing the 'memorial laws.'
    For this law is not a memorial law. It is not one of those dangerous
    power plays capable of laying the path for dozens if not hundreds
    of absurd or blackguardly rules, codifying what one has the right
    to say about the Saint Bartholomew's Day massacre, the meaning of
    colonization, slavery, the Civil War, the misdemeanor of blasphemy
    and heaven knows what else. It is a law concerning a genocide - which
    is not the same. It is a law sanctioning those who, in denying it,
    intensify and perpetuate the genocidal act - which is something
    else entirely. There are not, thank God, hundreds of genocides,
    or even dozens. There are three. Four, if we add the Cambodians to
    the Armenians, the Jews, and the Rwandans. And to place these three
    or four genocides on the same level as all the rest, to make their
    penalization the antechamber of a political correctness that authorizes
    a stream of useless or perverse laws on the disputed aspects of our
    national memory, to say, "Watch it! You're opening a Pandora's box from
    which everything and anything can pop out !" is another imbecility,
    exacerbated by another infamy and sealed with a dishonesty that is,
    really, grotesque," the author writes.

    "Let us confront this specious line of argument with the wisdom of
    national representation. And may the senators complete the process
    by refusing to be intimidated by this little band of historians,"
    he concludes.


    From: Baghdasarian
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