Turkey says french vote is 'heavy blow' to ties, threatens measures

AFP via The Tocqueville Connection ^ | 10/12/2006

[Always Independent]

And Iran is a big friend of the French. Go figure.

[L.M.H.]

It's ironic that the French who've been hassling Turkey about increasing freedom of speech turn around and pass a law criminalizing free speech. Way to set a good example. The French hypocrisy knows no bounds.

And sure it's easy to be in favor of anti-free speech laws with prison terms when you're not the intended target. But what's to stop France from one day passing a law making it a crime to deny the so-called "genocide" of Native Americans in America? Or passing similar "thought police" laws regarding certain opinions on Hiroshima, Vietnam, Iraq war, etc, etc.

It's a slippery slope when you start handing out prison terms for unpopular opinions on historical events.

[Centurion2000]

bump

[LonePalm]

Comme va tu mon ami?

Garde la Foi, mes amis! Nous nous sommes les sauveurs de la République! Maintenant et Toujours!
(Keep the Faith, my friends! We are the saviors of the Republic! Now and Forever!)
LonePalm, le Républicain du verre cassé (The Broken Glass Republican)

[Turk2]

The problem is there are no facts to refute us.

[Turk2]

The Armenian Reality

The Armenian Question

[Turk2]

What is embarrassing about Cyprus? There is nothing to be ashamed of not waiting for the entire Turkish population on Cyprus to be obliterated by the Greeks in 1974.

[bert]

.....Why not just refute these people with facts? .....

Facts like Vichy collaboration that turned over Jews to be exterminated by the Nazis.

[Turk2]

The Byzantine pearl was stolen by the Venetians 150 years before the Turks had even considered invading Istanbul.

[Republicain]

Personaly, I think this law is useless. Anyhow, I think the Senat will not vote the law. Nor the "Assemblée national" which will have to confirm his vote. And after, even if the law is definitively accepted, the government has the possibility to delay the publishing of the law...

[Republicain]

The problem is there are no facts to refute us.

The problem is that Turkey is alone with his certitude against the historical evidences and the rest of the world. A form of national autism ?

[Republicain]

Facts like Vichy collaboration that turned over Jews to be exterminated by the Nazis

Facts that nobody refutes in France. We have assumed our dirty past. That's what EU asks to Turkey now.

[Republicain]

Je vais très bien, merci. Et vous ?

[theFIRMbss]

>But a criminal offense to say differently?

"Sorry, Miss Marceau, but what you just said's a crime. Now I must search you to be certain that you're not hiding any more naughty sentences!"

[a_Turk]

Let us, you and I compare notes on Cyprus, what do you say? I wonder how our facts compare.

[eleni121]

"What Turkey should do is take all their fellow throat-slitters out of France and all other civilized countries and go back home."

---

Vive Le Liberte!


What Leftism says pretty much says it all.

I have nothing else to say except that France did the right thing..and now needs to take it a step further and send the heathen muslims back to the desert and central asia.

Next step: the liberation of Asia Minor!

[Between the Lines]

Words matter.

Yes they do. And in this case we are using the word "genocide" the crime as defined by the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. After all this is an international dispute and the convention wrote the law on the international crime of genocide. Interestingly enough the word "systematic" is not ever used in this law.

Even if one were to randomly kill members of one of these protected groups, it is still considered genocide.

Genocide :
- The systematic killing of substantial numbers of people on the basis of ethnicity, religion, political opinion, social status, or other particularity.
- Acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group.

I am not sure where you found this definition but the groups "political opinion, social status, or other particularity" are not found in international law either. The first draft of the Convention included these groups but due to objections by the USSR they were later omitted.

If the French wish to clear themselves of the genocide charges it would be very simple for them to do. They only have to reopen all of the archive documents regarding the massacres and genocide which they have sealed from anyone's inspection. Keeping the archives closed only perpetuates the accusations.

It is interesting what the French themselves have said about the accusations of genocide:

"Writing history is the job of the historians, not of the laws." -- Jacques Chirac

" Writing history is the job of the historians, speaking about the past or writing history is not the job of the parliament." -- Prime Minister, Dominique de Villepin

I have to wonder why this would apply to France and not Turkey. But for now we just have two countries pointing their crooked fingers at each other.

[eleni121]

The internationally accepted definition of genocide (1948)encompasses everything that the Muslim Turks have committed to the Christian populations in Asia Minor - by this definition France is not guilty.

Excerpt from the Convention on the Prevention and
Punishment of Genocide

"Article II: In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

(a) Killing members of the group;

(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;

(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;

(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;

(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

Much more horrible things were done to the Armenians and (Assyrians, Greeks,) by the Turks

[Between the Lines]

... by this definition France is not guilty.

Prove it.

That is what France has told Turkey, to prove that they did not commit genocide. While France says of itself that history should judge them. This is very hypocritical.

Personally, I could not care less what happened in the distant past as it relates to todays world. Most all of these people are dead now. Why are the Europeans so obsessed with putting a Scarlet G on every nation that has committed genocide in the past, to be worn for eternity?

BTW by the definition of genocide, every colonizing nation could be considered guilty of genocide in the past. And genocide was not illegal before 1948 so in reality neither country is guilty of the crime of genocide for anything that happened before that date. But then again we could bring up the Kurdish issue.

[bruinbirdman]

"Do they want Turkey to be further to the West--or do they want it to venture further down the road into Islamic fundamentalism?"

The EU never wanted Turkey as a member. Turkey considers itself more european than asian. Look for Turkey to cut more deals with Israel and U.S.A.

yitbos