IN APPEAL, LAWYER ASSERTS GENOCIDE TEACHING SKEWED
By Jonathan Saltzman
Boston Globe
ts/articles/2010/03/03/in_appeal_lawyer_asserts_ge nocide_teaching_skewed/
March 3 2010
MA
A well-known Boston civil rights lawyer argued yesterday that state
educators violated the constitutional rights of Massachusetts public
school students and teachers by censoring legitimate arguments
disputing that the mass slaying of Armenians in the First World War
era was genocide.
Appearing before the US Court of Appeals for the First Circuit in a
closely watched legal challenge, Harvey A. Silverglate contended that
the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education bowed to pressure
from politicians sympathetic to the state’s Armenian community and
deleted "contra-genocide" views from an advisory curriculum guide in
June 1999.
"They were deprived of two sides of the controversy," Silverglate
said of students. "It was very irregular."
Silverglate is among a team of lawyers representing students and
teachers and the Assembly of Turkish American Associations, a nonprofit
group that disputes that the Muslim Turkish Ottoman Empire committed
genocide against its Christian Armenian minority population during
and immediately after World War I.
But Assistant Attorney General William W. Porter, who represented
the state education department, countered that Chief District Court
Judge Mark L. Wolf rightly dismissed the suit last June based partly
on Wolf’s conclusion that the plaintiffs failed to show that anyone’s
free speech rights were violated.
The curriculum guide, Porter argued, was a series of recommendations
that school systems could adopt or reject. "It’s purely advisory,"
he said, and does not even require school districts to include human
rights or genocide in lesson plans.
The three justices on the panel, which included retired US Supreme
Court Justice David Souter, peppered both sides with questions that
tended toward the legalistic but gave little indication how they
will rule.
The case revolves around the slaying of up to 1.5 million Armenians,
a matter of continuing international debate.
Just Monday, Turkey warned the United States that relations between
the two countries would be damaged if a congressional panel votes to
label the massacre of Armenians by Turkish forces as genocide.
Turkish activists have long maintained that although Armenians were
killed, it was not the result of a deliberate policy but of other
factors, including an Armenian revolt in alliance with Russia against
the Ottoman Empire.
In 1998, the Massachusetts Legislature ordered the state Board
of Education to prepare and distribute to all school districts an
advisory curriculum guide for teaching about genocide and human rights,
according to Wolf’s ruling.
A draft of the guide originally included a section on the "Armenian
Genocide," but a Turkish advocacy group pressured the commissioner
of education, David P. Driscoll, to include references to sources
that dispute that the massacre reflected a Turkish policy of genocide.
After officials filed the guide with legislators in March 1999,
the state’s Armenian community objected to the "contra-genocide"
viewpoint and complained to then-governor Paul Cellucci and other
prominent politicians.
The education commissioner jettisoned the dissenting viewpoint. Six
years later, several students and teachers and the Assembly of Turkish
American Associations filed suit.
>From the beginning of Silverglate’s argument yesterday, Souter focused
on the issue that Wolf had bored in on: whether the guide violated
any students’ rights.
"I thought the teachers don’t have to use this guide," he said. "So
how are the students injured?"
Silverglate said that educational officials had allowed political
concerns to trump research by academics who question the genocide
designation, including Bernard Lewis of Princeton University and
Guenter Lewy of the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
In contrast, he said, the guide featured differing interpretations of
the Irish potato famine rather than treat the massive starvation in
Ireland as, say, a deliberate genocidal act of the British government.
Silverglate, who often takes up controversial causes, has angered
many supporters of the genocide label.
Van Z. Krikorian, a professor at Pace University Law School in New
York who helped file a brief supporting the designation on behalf
of the Armenian Assembly of America Inc., said after the arguments
that Silverglate claims to support free speech but really wants to
suppress it by banning the use of the term genocide.
"This case was only brought for public relations purposes on behalf
of Turkish denialists," he said.
Andrew M. Fischer, the president of the Jewish Alliance for Law and
Social Action, said those who oppose labeling the massive Armenian
slayings as genocide "have no more credibility than Holocaust deniers."
Silverglate said in an interview that evidence of the Holocaust was
overwhelming, but that there is bona fide dissent about whether the
slayings of Armenians was genocide.
"I took this case because I don’t think there are issues you can’t
discuss," he said.
Jonathan Saltzman can be reached at [email protected]