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Respecting the Holocaust
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The UN General
Assembly recently adopted by consensus a
resolution condemning the denial of
the Holocaust. This US sponsored resolution "urges all member states
'unreservedly to reject any denial of the Holocaust as a historical event,
either in full or in part, or any activities to this end' ... 'ignoring
the historical fact of these terrible events increases the risk they will
be repeated.'"
It can be argued
that this UN resolution has a laudable symbolic value, especially in light
of the recent Iranian
conference that questioned the
Holocaust. But this comes at the back of
news from France, where a "French
court handed a leading far-right French politician a three-month suspended
jail sentence and fined him 5,000 euros... for questioning the Holocaust",
also ordering him to pay 55,000 euros in
damages to the plaintiffs. It also appears that "Germany is using its six-month European
Union presidency to push for EU-wide criminalization of Holocaust denial." |
Sounds like a denial
of free speech, no?
Not that free speech
is an absolute
right; curbs on
it have long
existed. But if the
denial of historical
fact can be
criminalized, why
not the denial of a
scientific fact like
evolution? After
fair laws and
institutions, the
best way to counter
ignorance and
prejudice is through
education and
evidence. Tolerating
a loony fringe is
the inevitable price
of free speech.
Besides, is it not
far better to take a
stand against hate
speech than against
denials of
historical facts ?
The latter doesn't automatically imply the former, even in
the case of the
Holocaust.
These developments,
surely led by some
dubious politicking
and European
national guilt, made
me go back and
reread the brilliant
essay by the Jewish
historian and
activist Howard Zinn
on the more
honorable ways of respecting the
Holocaust. |
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.. the memory of
the Jewish Holocaust should not be circled by barbed wire, morally
ghettoized, kept isolated from other atrocities in history.
To remember what happened to the six million Jews, I said, served no
important purpose unless it aroused indignation, anger, action against all
atrocities, anywhere in the world.
. If the Holocaust is to have any meaning, we must transfer our anger to
today's brutalities. We must respect the memory of the Jewish Holocaust by
refusing to allow atrocities to take place now . When
Jews turn inward to concentrate on their own history and look away from
the ordeal of others, they are, with terrible irony, doing exactly what
the rest of the world did in allowing the genocide to happen. |
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