LE GRAND SHUSH

Cleveland Plain Dealer, OH
Oct 16 2006

Here’s a hint to French lawmakers, who just leaped into the realm
of stupidity and excess by voting 106-19 last week on a bill that
would make questioning a 90-year-old atrocity a crime: It’s exactly
the wrong message to send Turkey, which continues to deny its own
history in the 1915-1920 massacres of more than a million Armenians.

What should be encouraged is dialogue, openness and a reliance on
facts, not emotions. Those in France who hope to torpedo Turkey’s
application to the European Union with this nasty ploy should be
ashamed. Especially so, given the timing of the vote Thursday that
served to cheapen that day’s announcement that outspoken Turkish
novelist Orhan Pamuk had won the Nobel Prize in literature.

Pamuk is at the leading edge of a Turkish society struggling to break
free of old attitudes and prejudices through a real national dialogue
and give-and-take with Armenian scholars over the truth of those
long-ago atrocities amid the Ottoman Empire’s disintegration. That’s a
process worth supporting, not this suffocation of intellectual honesty.