Friday, December 22, 2006
Tuesday, December 12, 2006
Mahmoud Ahm-a-in-denial
If you couldn't make it to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's Holocaust-hoax party in Tehran this week, fear not, the Web is flooded with a veritable fast-breaking feast of reports on that stellar gathering of fools. A BBC reporter I recently heard on WNYC acutely observed that the same Iranian demagogue who claimed to be merely providing a platform for free speech and independent thinking will not offer the same privilege to his own people, particularly when it comes to the policies of Mahmoud and his mullah masters. It was ironic, though, that the Yank-baiting nation rolled out the red carpet for an American white supremacist Ku Klux Klanner, even if he was a jolly participant in the anti-Jew spewfest. The irony is not that he's American, but that the same good ol' boy would be happy to stand at the loose end of a noose, ready to lynch any Mahmoud lookalike who had the nerve to think he could be a part of the American dream—he is a white supremacist, after all.
But American psychos and German crackpots (and other assorted foreign nincompoops, not to mention homegrown ones, like the virulently anti-Zionist ultra-Orthodox Jews of Iran) aside, the event threw up all kinds of crazy ideas, and not all of them were revisionist theories. As it turns out—or maybe I'm just late in the game to discover this—Holocaust denial is a crime punishable by imprisonment in some "progressive" European nations, such as Germany and Austria. Now I'm not saying that proclaiming that massacre as a fiction is any kind of reasonable argument—hell, it's not even a sane one. But jailing someone for expressing it is not that different from throwing someone in the slammer for asserting that it did take place. That's what Turkey wanted to do with the writer Orhan Pamuk for publicly discussing the Armenian genocide allegedly exacted by the state of Turkey. Free speech is a double-edged sword, sure, and there's a razor-fine line between "free" and "irresponsible." But there's also a danger in overcompensating for one's own guilt by overcurbing others' expressions, as crazy as those expressions can get.
But American psychos and German crackpots (and other assorted foreign nincompoops, not to mention homegrown ones, like the virulently anti-Zionist ultra-Orthodox Jews of Iran) aside, the event threw up all kinds of crazy ideas, and not all of them were revisionist theories. As it turns out—or maybe I'm just late in the game to discover this—Holocaust denial is a crime punishable by imprisonment in some "progressive" European nations, such as Germany and Austria. Now I'm not saying that proclaiming that massacre as a fiction is any kind of reasonable argument—hell, it's not even a sane one. But jailing someone for expressing it is not that different from throwing someone in the slammer for asserting that it did take place. That's what Turkey wanted to do with the writer Orhan Pamuk for publicly discussing the Armenian genocide allegedly exacted by the state of Turkey. Free speech is a double-edged sword, sure, and there's a razor-fine line between "free" and "irresponsible." But there's also a danger in overcompensating for one's own guilt by overcurbing others' expressions, as crazy as those expressions can get.
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