France’s Holocaust-denial statute has been extended to Armenian genocide denial

Evidence

In one particularly telling instance, Lewis’s habits of tendentious generalization do seem to have gotten him in legal trouble. According to Libération (March 1, 1994) and the Guardian (March 8, 1994), Lewis now faces both criminal and civil suits brought against him in France by Armenian and human rights organizations. He is being charged under the same statute that makes it a crime in France to deny that the Nazi Holocaust took place; the charge against him is denying (in French newspapers) that a genocide of Armenians took place under the Ottoman empire. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 1222

Categorization

Category: Factual Claims

• DEFINE: Shows how the French statute criminalizing Holocaust denial became the legal template for prosecuting Armenian genocide denial — a concrete extension of the same legal concept.
• XREF: Links to Lewis’s tendentiousness argued earlier in the book and to how official denial of the Other’s history operates in Western intellectual discourse.