French law against Armenian genocide denial overturned by court

This quote is from a CNN news article which you can read in full here.

A new French law making it a crime to publicly deny the Ottoman Empire’s genocide of Armenians a century ago was ruled unconstitutional Tuesday by France’s Constitutional Council.

The measure, which triggered condemnation from modern Turkey, was given final passage by the French Senate and signed into law by President Nicolas Sarkozy last month.

Sarkozy’s office immediately issued a statement calling for a new version of the law “taking into account the decision of the Constitutional Council.”

“The president believes that genocide denial is intolerable and must be punished in this regard,” the statement said.

The country’s highest judicial body reviewed it at the request of National Assembly members and French senators.

“The Council deems the law unconstitutional,” a short statement from the court said Tuesday.

The French law against Armenian genocide denial, which was proposed by President Nicolas Sarkozy, was passed by the French parliament in December 2011. The new law made it a crime to deny that the 1.5 million Armenians allegedly killed by the Ottoman Turks in 1915 was a “genocide.”  Now the council has ruled that the law violated freedom of speech, which is protected by the French constitution. Sarkozy wants the law to be rewritten, so that it can be passed again.

Armenian civilians are marched to a nearby prison in Kharpert by armed Ottoman soldiers, April 1915. 

Jews are marched to a ghetto in Krakow in Word War II

So what is the difference between the Armenian genocide and the Holocaust?

According to Wikipedia, “the Great Crime (the Armenian genocide) was the systematic killing of the Armenian population of the Ottoman Empire during and just after World War I. It was implemented through wholesale massacres and deportations, with the deportations consisting of forced marches under conditions designed to lead to the death of the deportees.”

The Holocaust was a bit different in that the Jews were sent on trains to concentration camps, and when the camps had to be abandoned, the Jews were forced marched under conditions designed to lead to their deaths.  I didn’t make this up — the story of the Jews being marched in order to kill them is part of the official Holocaust story.

According to Wikipedia, “the Ottoman military uprooted Armenians from their homes and forced them to march for hundreds of miles, depriving them of food and water, to the desert of what is now Syria.”  Holocaust deniers say that the Jews were uprooted from their homes and “transported to the East” meaning that they were sent to the three Operation Reinhard camps (Treblinka, Belzec, and Sobibor) from where they were taken into Russia.

I learned from Wikipedia that “Massacres (in the Armenian genocide) were indiscriminate of age or gender, with rape and other sexual abuse commonplace.”  You don’t hear many stories of the Germans raping the Jews.  The penalty for rape for a German soldier was death, and there was a German law against Germans and Jews having intercourse, so this prevented rape and sexual abuse.  It was the German women who were raped by the Allies in World War II.

The Jews and the Armenians are similar in that both are considered to be a race AND a religion.  The Armenians have their own churches, which are a bit different from other Christian churches.  For those who don’t believe that such a thing as race exists, then you can say that the Armenians are an ethnic group.

So it seems to me that, if there is a law against Holocaust denial, then there should be a law against Armenian genocide denial.  Or both events should be covered by free speech laws, and anyone can deny anything they want to.