Abstract

Minority Report

French conscience is so uneasy about atrocities and complicity that there is an actual law in France that governs what may be said on the subject and in what tone. This statute can be employed to prosecute those who speak out of turn about crimes against humanity. Bernard Lewis, professor at Princeton University, has been arraigned under the same statute. He is one of the few scholars of any reputation who maintains that there was no genocide of Armenians in Turkey during the First World War. A group of Armenian lawyers and intellectuals in Paris has, brought civil and criminal suit against Professor Lewis, arguing that the unpunished annihilation of the Armenians was the model upon which later attempts at extirpation were consciously based.