France Sparks Uproar with Genocide Bill
Turkey and others infuriated by law criminalizing denial of First World War expulsion, execution of Armenians

By Susan Sachs
October 12th, 2006

PARIS — French politicians are galloping into diplomatic quicksand with a proposal to imprison anyone who publicly denies that the Turkish massacre of Armenians a century ago constituted genocide.

The draft law, to be debated by the National Assembly today, was submitted by the opposition Socialist Party and has strong support among those on the political right who hope to derail Turkey’s candidacy for European Union membership.

Members of France’s 400,000-strong Armenian diaspora, whose votes are important to all sides in next spring’s presidential election, have lobbied for years to criminalize negating their genocide, just as it is a crime in France to deny the Holocaust.

But the proposed law, which would also require the French Senate’s approval, has caused an uproar outside France and discomfort in some unexpected quarters.

Turkey has warned that French companies will be barred from bidding on billions of dollars worth of government contracts if the law is approved. The Armenian government has kept silent on the proposal, saying its goal is to secure recognition of the genocide by Turkey. The European Union’s enlargement commissioner has pleaded with the French to abandon the bill, saying it would only undermine those Turks and Armenians promoting a dialogue over their conflicting versions of history.

More surprising has been the reaction of Armenian community leaders inside Turkey who have been fighting for greater freedom of speech at home.

They said France would do more harm than good by outlawing the expression of unpopular views. (….Full Article Here)

 
Hear Dr. Duke’s Heartfelt Comments Concerning Free Speech (MP3)

The Non-Lobby Not at Work

By Kabobfest
October 11, 2006

The non-existent Israel Lobby is yet again not behind a complete coincidence where two events critical of Israel are shut down. This self-intimidation and censorship is the result of our imagination. There is no lobby.

The French embassy’s office in New York canceled a book launch because of the author’s Israel views. Author Carmen Callil wrote a book on the deportation of thousands of French Jews to Nazi death camps. Normally, an author would be celebrated by Jewish and other organizations for covering this. However, Callil’s crime was in the postscript:

A party in honour of Bad Faith, Callil’s account of Louis Darquier, the Vichy official who arranged the deportation of thousands of Jews, was to have taken place at the French embassy in New York last night but was cancelled after the embassy became aware of a paragraph in the postscript of the book. In the postscript Callil says she grew anxious while researching the “helpless terror of the Jews of France” to see “what the Jews of Israel were passing on to the Palestinian people. Like the rest of humanity, the Jews of Israel ‘forget’ the Palestinians. Everyone forgets.”

In the second non-incident, the Polish Consul General in New York canceled a speech by NYU Professor Tony Judt, after threats made by the crime-family Anti-Defamation League, which is a non-member in the fictional lobby boogeyman. Judt was scheduled to speak Oct. 4th to a nonprofit organization that rents space from the consulate. The subject was in fact a self-fulfilling prophecy:

Judt’s subject was the Israel lobby in the United States, and he planned to argue that this lobby has often stifled honest debate.

Wow. Anybody else sees the irony here? (more…)

Co-Author of Medical Study Estimating 650,000 Iraqi Deaths Defends Research in the Face of White House Dismissal

DemocracyNow!
October 12th, 2006

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More than 650,000 people have died in Iraq since the U.S. led invasion of the country began in March of 2003. This is according to a new study published in the scientific journal, The Lancet. The study was conducted by researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and Al Mustansiriya University in Baghdad. Researchers based their findings on interviews with a random sampling of households taken in clusters across Iraq. The study is an update to a prior one compiled by many of the same researchers. That study estimated that around 100,000 Iraqis died in the first 18 months after the invasion.

Les Roberts joins us now from Syracuse, New York — He is one of the main researchers of the study. He was with Johns Hopkins when he co-authored the study but has just taken a post at Columbia University. (….Full Interview Here)