Wednesday, February 7, 2007

Interview in Spiked

Because some people have had trouble getting the Spiked interview on line [they have had some trouble with their server], here are some excerpts from the article:



Tuesday 6 February 2007
‘Genocide denial laws will shut down debate’
She's one of the best-known warriors against Holocaust denial. Yet Deborah Lipstadt thinks EU plans to ban 'genocide denial' are a disaster.
Brendan O’Neill

‘For European politicians, bringing in a ban on genocide denial is like apple pie. It’s what I call a freebie. They’re doing it to make themselves feel good. I mean, who could possibly be against standing up to nasty genocide deniers? Only when you get to the heart of it, this “freebie”, this populist move, could have a dire impact on academic debate. Even on truth itself.’

Deborah Lipstadt, Dorot Professor of Modern Jewish and Holocaust Studies at Emory University in Atlanta, may be one of the best-known warriors against Holocaust denial. But she has no time for the proposals currently doing the rounds of the European Union which suggest making it a crime to deny the Holocaust, other genocides and crimes against humanity in general.

Last week it was revealed that Germany, current holder of the EU’s rotating presidency, is proposing a Europe-wide ban on Holocaust denial and other forms of genocide denial. This would make a crime of ‘publicly condoning, denying or grossly trivialising…crimes of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes [as defined in the Statute of the International Criminal Court].’ (1) In some European countries – most notably Germany and Austria, which formed the heart of the Third Reich – it is already against the law to deny or minimise the Nazis’ exterminatory campaign against the Jews in the Second World War. This new legislation might also make it a crime, punishable by fines or imprisonment, to raise awkward questions about the official history of conflicts that took place over the past 20 years.

‘This is so over the top’, says Lipstadt, in between sips of decaf coffee in the plush surroundings of the Athenaeum Hotel in Piccadilly, London. Her earthy New York accent sounds almost out of place in a building where even the doorman comes across as posh. ‘The question of genocide, the history of genocide and what you can say about it, should not be decided by politicians and judges’, she insists.


Lipstadt certainly can’t be accused of being soft on deniers. Her book Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory, published in 1994, meticulously exposed the lies and the underlying racist agenda of those who deny the truth of the Nazi Holocaust. Famously (or infamously) she was subsequently sued by the British historian David Irving, whom she had named in the book as a Holocaust denier. In January 2000, the 32-day trial, a showdown between an American-Jewish historian and a far-right British historian, became a legal debate about the history of the Nazis, and the nature of truth itself. Irving lost rather spectacularly. The judge branded him an anti-Semite, a racist and a Holocaust denier who had ‘deliberately misrepresented and manipulated historical evidence’. Lipstadt recounts the experience in History on Trial: My Day in Court with David Irving.

Yet this ridiculer of deniers is no fan of the idea that Holocaust denial or genocide denial should be outlawed. The current EU proposal to criminalise denial of contemporary genocides and war crimes is an affront to serious historical debate, she says.

Consider Srebrenica, the massacre that took place at the end of the Bosnian civil war in 1995 in which it is estimated that 8,000 Bosnian Muslims were killed. ‘Some people argue that, given there are only so many tens of thousands of people in Srebrenica and the Serb soldiers went after an X number of a specific group, then it is genocide. But someone else might say it’s a massacre of the X population, not a genocide – because if you’re going to use that word then you have to go back to what the Nazis did to the Jews or what was done to the Armenians [by the Turks in the First World War]’, says Lipstadt. ‘That is an entirely legitimate debate to have about Srebrenica. Are we now saying that the person who says it’s not a genocide will be fined and punished?’

Lipstadt is also worried about the way in which debate about the Armenian experience might be closed down. During the First World War, as Ottoman Turkish forces fought against the Russians, some of the Armenian minority in Eastern Anatolia sided with Russia. Turkey responded by rounding up and killing hundreds of Armenian community leaders in April 1915, and then forcibly deporting the two million-strong Armenian community in marches towards Syria and Mesopotamia (now Iraq). Hundreds of thousands died as a result. At the end of last year, to the fury of Turkey, France made it a crime to deny that the Armenian tragedy was a genocide, and now Germany seems to hope that the rest of Europe will follow suit by accepting its proposals to outlaw denial of all genocides.

‘This is another body-blow to academic debate’, says Lipstdadt. ‘I know serious historians who do not deny for a minute what happened to the Armenians, who do not deny the severity or the barbarity of what happened to them. But they question, they ask intellectually, “Was this a genocide, or was it a horrendous massacre?” They don’t ask that question on ideological grounds; they don’t have a shred of allegiance to Turkey. They ask it intellectually, because they want to get to the truth.’

‘I happen to think they’re wrong’, she says. She believes the Armenians did suffer a genocide. ‘But you can, indeed you must, have a vigorous academic debate about historical events. And in the course of that vigorous academic debate you probably would illuminate weaknesses in both sides of the argument, and hopefully sharpen the arguments as a result. That is what academic debate is about. This kind of legislation could put a kabash on that.’

Last year, in its reporting of the French decision to outlaw denial of the Armenian genocide, the BBC was forced to explain why it put the word ‘genocide’ in inverted commas. ‘Whether or not the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Armenians during the First World War amounted to genocide is a matter for heated debate’, it said (2). Yet if the proposed legislation is passed in the EU, then such things will no longer be a matter for heated debate; they will become legally-defined truths that you deny or question at your peril. Maybe even the BBC will find itself in the dock for putting ‘Armenian genocide’ in inverted commas.

It strikes me that as well as stifling open academic debate the proposed legislation could criminalise political protest. Very often these days, Western powers justify wars of intervention abroad in the language of combating genocide. Bill Clinton and Tony Blair described their bombing crusade over Kosovo in 1999 as an effort to stop Slobodan Milosevic’s ‘genocide’ against the Kosovo Albanians. In truth, the final number of civilians killed in Kosovo – including both Kosovo Albanians by Milosevic’s cronies and Serbs in NATO air strikes – was fewer than 3,000. The Nazis were capable of killing 12,000 a day in Auschwitz alone. As Nazi camp survivor Elie Wiesel said, taking umbrage at the use of Holocaust-talk to justify the Kosovo campaign, ‘The Holocaust was conceived to annihilate the last Jew on the planet. Does anyone believe that Milosevic and his accomplices seriously planned to exterminate all the Bosnians, all the Albanians, all the Muslims in the world?’ (3) If EU officials, in their infinite wisdom, decide that a conflict such as Kosovo is genocide, and therefore the bombers must be sent in, will protesters who question that line be criminalised under the new legislation?

Lipstadt finds today’s over-use of the genocide and Holocaust tags, to describe conflicts or political repression, disturbing and distasteful. She seems still to be reeling from an article she read in The Times on Saturday, the day before we met. Under the headline ‘We are vilified like Jews by the Nazis, says Muslim leader’, the paper reported that Birmingham’s most senior Muslim leader had compared contemporary political Britain to Nazi Germany.

‘That is ludicrous. It is stupid and ridiculous’, she says. ‘Is there fear of Muslims today? No doubt. Do some politicians play on that? Of course. But to compare Muslims in Britain to Jews in Nazi Germany…that shows an utter lack of historical understanding, not to mention sensitivity. Here, the police go out of their way to explain to Muslims what is going on. In Nazi Germany if a Jew spoke to a policeman he got hit. It was a whole government dedicated to being against you, to eliminating you. So that is a disgusting kind of analogy. It is wicked, and cleverly wicked. Sometimes it is done in a calculating fashion to further your aims by playing that victim card.’

To the ‘befuddlement’ of some of her colleagues, Lipstadt is also opposed to laws outlawing actual Nazi Holocaust denial. Such laws already exist in Germany, Austria, Belgium, France, the Czech Republic, Lithuania, Poland, Romania and Slovakia, and under Germany’s proposals these will be extended to the rest of the EU and will also cover genocide and war crimes denial. She points out that there is a huge difference between those historians who legitimately debate something like the Armenian experience, and the charlatans who distort the truth in order to show that the Holocaust didn’t happen and ‘the Jews’ are all liars. Where ‘genocide denial’ laws might frustrate serious academic debate, Holocaust denial laws are only aimed at punishing weird and malicious pseudo-historians. Yet she is against the censorship of these charlatans, too.

‘I’m opposed to Holocaust denial laws for three reasons’, she says. ‘First because I believe in free speech. Governments should make no laws limiting free speech, because it is never good when that happens. Second, because these laws turn Holocaust deniers into martyrs. Look what happened to David Irving when he was released from jail in Austria – he became a media darling, given room to spout his misinformation. We should ignore them rather than chasing them down.

‘And thirdly, and most importantly, such laws suggest that we don’t have the history, the documentation, the evidence to make the case for the Holocaust having happened. They suggest we don’t trust the truth. But we do have the evidence, and we should keep on developing it and deepening it, and we should trust it.’

Ironically, given her outspoken opposition to laws against Holocaust and genocide denial, many point to Lipstadt’s legal victory over David Irving as evidence for why the courtroom is a good place to resolve historical issues and punish those who lie about or deny historic tragedies. ‘I wish they wouldn’t do that’, she says. She points out that her case was not about ruthlessly pursuing Irving in order to prove the truth about the Holocaust. ‘He came after me! He sued me! I didn’t want it. I tried to stop it. Our whole legal strategy was premised on trying to make this guy go away. Only when it was very close to the case, when I saw the wealth of evidence that showed how he had lied and distorted the facts, was I glad it had come to court. Aside from that, I can think of no other instance where history has benefited from courtroom adjudication.’

‘Politicians should not be doing history’, she says. ‘They have a hard enough time doing politics right and doing legislation right. Let them not muck up history, too.’

Brendan O’Neill is editor of spiked. Deborah Lipstadt’s book History on Trial: My Day in Court with David Irving is published by Harper Perennial. (Buy this book from Amazon(UK)). Visit her website here. The photographs of Professor Lipstadt were taken by Sasha Frieze who blogs at Sashinka.

(1) EU plans far-reaching ‘genocide denial’ law, Bruno Waterfield, Daily Telegraph, 4 February 2007

(2) Q&A: Armenian ‘genocide’, BBC News, 12 October 2006

(3) Quoted in ‘Exploiting genocide’, Brendan O’Neill, Spectator, 21 January 2006

reprinted from: http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/article/2824/

10 comments:

acadia said...

Dear Deborah,

You stated, quote:

"Consider Srebrenica, the massacre that took place at the end of the Bosnian civil war in 1995 in which it is estimated that 8,000 Bosnian Muslims were killed. ‘Some people argue that, given there are only so many tens of thousands of people in Srebrenica and the Serb soldiers went after an X number of a specific group, then it is genocide. But someone else might say it’s a massacre of the X population, not a genocide – because if you’re going to use that word then you have to go back to what the Nazis did to the Jews or what was done to the Armenians [by the Turks in the First World War]’, says Lipstadt. ‘That is an entirely legitimate debate to have about Srebrenica. Are we now saying that the person who says it’s not a genocide will be fined and punished?’"

Deborah, what someone else thinks, says or writes about Srebrenica genocide is irrelevant. Srebrenica genocide is not a matter of opinion; it's a judicial fact.

Srebrenica massacre has been ruled genocide by both the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia and subsequently by the International Court of Justice in the Hague.

While I applaud your fight against Holocaust denial, it would be really interesting to know your true leaning concerning Srebrenica genocide - the first legally recognized case of Genocide in Europe, first by the U.N. court and secondly by the World Court.

Deborah, do you recognize Srebrenica Genocide or not?

Hope you don't censor my response to your article, thanks.

Daniel
http://srebrenica-genocide.blogspot.com

acadia said...

Dear Deborah,

I still haven't received your response, but I do have a need to explain my latest comment.

I stated the fact that Srebrenica genocide is the first legally recognized case of Genocide in Europe, first by the U.N. court and secondly by the World Court.

Of course, this DOES NOT MEAN that Holocaust was not a Genocide. In fact, Holocaust was WORSE than Genocide. The word genocide did not even come into existence into Raphael Lemkin created it during WWII. The Nuremberg trials took place BEFORE genocide had a legal meaning. So, the Nazis were not even tried with genocide; and therefore, couldn't be convicted of it.

I would appreciate your comment on this. The article I posted my two latest comments can be found here:

http://lipstadt.blogspot.com/2007/02/interview-in-spiked.html

Would you please be so kind to answer? Thank you Deborah.

Daniel
http://srebrenica-genocide.blogspot.com

Deborah Lipstadt said...

I am sorry that it took me a bit of time to respond to your comments. I am, among other things, getting ready to leave for a meeting of the International Association of Scholars of Genocide in Sarajevo. I am sure this topic will be one of the many discussed.

Let me explain my original comments: One [and I am not saying I am one of these people] can believe that certain horrific events were terribly horrific but were not necessarily in the category of "genocide." I was troubled by the fact that someone who might not think Srebenica does qualify as a genocide -- but who does not necessarily deny the terrible events that happened there -- might be transgressing the law.

I am an academic and our work is to look at matters and ask questions, sometimes troubling questions.

I totally differentiate between those who ask troubling quesitons and people who are deniers, such as David Irving and his ilk, who base their arguments on lies, distortions, inventions, and obfuscations; in short a tissue of lies.

I do not think it is healthy when politics enters the realm of historical scholarship.

Hope this helps.

acadia said...

Deborah, thank you!

I am so proud of you and your work.

Since you are going to Sarajevo, please do not forget to visit and see in person ancient Sarajevo Haggadah (you might even take some photos and post them to the blog to surprise us). During World War II, the manuscript was hidden from the Nazis by the Bosniak director of the museum, who, at risk to his own life, smuggled the Haggadah out to a Muslim cleric in a mountain village — there it was hidden under the floorboards of either a mosque or a Muslim home. During the Bosnian War of 1992-1995, when Sarajevo was under constant siege by Bosnian Serb forces, the manuscript survived in an underground bank vault. To quell rumors that the government had sold the Haggadah in order to buy weapons, the war time president of Bosnia (Izetbegovic) showed off the manuscript at a community Seder in 1995 secured by the Bosnian troops. Recently, they have printed a limited edition of just 613 copies ($1000 per copy). But copy never feels like original. So please, while you are in Sarajevo, see this beautiful and priceless piece of history on display.

At the conferences, you will probably get in touch with esteemed Jewish professor, Paul B. Miller (Professor at the International University of Sarajevo). He has done a lot of research on Holocaust and Genocide. I enjoy reading his work (his articles are very often published in local B&H media).

Also, the Sephardi Jewish cemetery in Sarajevo (which was bombarded repeatedly by Serbs during siege) is one of the most important Jewish burial grounds in Europe because of the shape of the tombstones and the ancient Ladino inscriptions on them. The cemetery includes pre-burrial chappel complex. The Jewish Museum chronicles the history of Sarejevan Jewry. In the Sarajevo synagogue, there is a valuable collection of Ladino and other Jewish books (must see!), some printed over 300 years ago. The tomb of the Tzaddik Rabbi Moshe Danon in Stolac is venerated by Jews and non-Jews. On the anniversary of his death (the first Sunday in July), pilgrimages are made there.

Again, keep up the great work by exposing mentally ill anti-Semites and holocaust deniers, such as Iranian president Ahmadinejad.

Cheers!

Daniel
http://srebrenica-genocide.blogspot.com

Deborah Lipstadt said...

Thank you for the important reminders of what to see in Sarajevo. I am excited about being there and shall blog from the meeting [International Association of Scholars of Genocide].

So stay tuned!

acadia said...

Deborah,

Kathleen Young, Phd.
Video: Attending Genocide Conference in Sarajevo

You can watch the video at YouTube, here is the link:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-smD9Ysp9tE

Have a wonderful trip and enjoy your stay in Sarajevo. There is a lot to explore, see, and "feel". You are trully extraordinary individual and we are proud of you and your work.

Daniel
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-smD9Ysp9tE

acadia said...

Deborah,

Kathleen Young, Phd.
Video: Attending Genocide Conference in Sarajevo

You can watch the video at YouTube, here is the link:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-smD9Ysp9tE

Have a wonderful trip and enjoy your stay in Sarajevo. There is a lot to explore, see, and "feel". You are trully extraordinary individual and we are proud of you and your work.

Daniel
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-smD9Ysp9tE

acadia said...

Deborah, I forgot to say one more very important thing. You will be in Sarajevo on July 11th - which will be anniversary of Srebrenica. As you could see from Kathleen Young's presentation (in a video I gave you), it was phenomenal experience to be there - both for her and her students. If you have opportunity to visit Srebrenica while you are in Sarajevo, please do so. Thank you.

Daniel

acadia said...

Deborah, I forgot to say one more very important thing. You will be in Sarajevo on July 11th - which will be anniversary of Srebrenica. As you could see from Kathleen Young's presentation (in a video I gave you), it was phenomenal experience to be there - both for her and her students. If you have opportunity to visit Srebrenica while you are in Sarajevo, please do so. Thank you.

Daniel

Owen said...

Deborah, I was concerned because your comments appeared in an interview with Spiked-on-Line, which is the flagship of the group responsible for Living Marxism/LM which spun out a campaign of denial relating to Penny Marshall, Ian Traynor and Ed Vulliamy's reporting of the Bosnian concentration and death camps in the Prijedor area, the Trnopolje camp in particular.

It was a judge and jury at the Royal Courts of Justice in the Strand where you had your epic encounter with Irving who forced them to shut up and stop their wilful misrepresentation. I hope you're familiar with David Campbell's deconstruction "Atrocity, Memory, Photography" - at http://www.virtual-security.net/attrocity/atrocity1.htm
- he gives a careful and conscientious account of the episode and the issues.

It took the libel trial decision to put an end to LM's pronotion of Deichman's untruths and half-truths (they then went bankrupt to dodge the consequences, before they reformed as Spiked, Institute of Ideas, etc.)."

Thanks

Owen