France considers Armenian genocide bill

The killing of more than a million Armenians by Ottoman Turks in 1915 was an act of genocide. The Holocaust was a fact. Yet Americans are free to deny the reality of either — or make outlandish assertions of all kinds — without facing punishment by the state. Residents of France will be denied that privilege if its parliament adopts a wrong-headed bill to criminalize denial of the Armenian genocide.

On Thursday the lower house of France’s parliament will debate a bill that would punish those who deny the genocide with a year in prison and a $58,000 fine. Turkey is livid, just as it is when legislation is proposed in the U.S. Congress to declare the killings a genocide. It has threatened “grave consequences” to the French-Turkish relationship if the bill is approved and warns that it will raise the issue of violent French colonialism in international forums.

Turkey’s sensitivity to the term “genocide” is nothing new, nor is the warning of a diplomatic rupture if another nation dares to use that word. That’s not the reason to oppose the bill. The reason the French bill deserves condemnation is that it would be a monstrous violation of free speech.

France is not the only European country to take a narrower view of freedom of expression than the United States does, but to make it a crime to state a view about history — even an incorrect view — is an especially egregious act of preemptive censorship. Political correctness is one thing when it holds sway in the culture, politics or academe and quite another when it dictates how the criminal law is conceived and enforced.

Some would say that it’s presumptuous for Americans to lecture the people of a fellow democracy about the rights they accord their citizens. But robust freedom of expression isn’t some American fetish. Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights says: “Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.”

That the killing of Armenians was not an example of genocide is an opinion. We disagree with it, but it deserves protection, not punishment.