Well, this is a fine mess. Per the Associated Press, “Berlin police have opened a preliminary investigation against Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas over his comments this week that Israel had committed ‘50 Holocausts’ against Palestinians.” Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority, was speaking in Germany onstage next to German Chancellor Olaf Scholz. He had been somewhat too hopefully expected to offer an apology for the 1972 Munich Olympics attacks, in which members of Black September, a group aligned with Abbas’s own political party, Fattah, took Israeli athletes hostage in an attempt to extract prisoner exchanges and to exact terror. Eleven athletes and a West German police officer were killed in the massacre, along with five of the Black September terrorists. Abbas, in reply, took part in what is now often called “whataboutism,” a word I am not overly fond of, saying, “If we want to go over the past, go ahead,” but there are 50 massacres Israel has committed. He used the term “holocaust,” a term from the Greek for “whole” and “burnt” that had a general historical usage meaning a large slaughter before 1945, but which, since then, many historians have generally reserved for the Nazi eliminationist project aimed at removing Jews and other “undesirables” from the face of the Earth.

This brings us to the Berlin police and to Germany’s foolish and misbegotten speech codes. In Germany, as the Washington Post phrases it, “Downplaying the Holocaust is a criminal offense.” You may think “downplaying” is a flabby concept, which means that this is a criminal law with unclear terms. You’d be right. It is no mystery why Germany, along with France and several other European neighbors, are so touchy about the Holocaust that they feel drastic measures must be taken to protect the historical record and to suppress neo-Nazis — Europe is, after all, the birthplace and the homeland of Nazism and fascism. But that doesn’t mean that any particular drastic measure is a wise one. Germany’s speech codes are more a relic of fascism than a bulwark against its resurgence.