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.
Post-war de-Nazification efforts, under which Germans were forced to watch films about Nazi crimes, took place in a context in which German citizens had limited civil rights under the terms of military surrender. Today, limiting free speech for Holocaust denial (and downplaying) serves counterintuitively to legitimate antisemitism. As Seth Mandel, then of Commentary and now the editor of this magazine, wrote in 2014: “When anti-Semites anywhere propagandize about malign Jewish influence on their beloved countries, the last thing that would discredit them would be for the Jewish minority to appear to prevail on the government to outlaw anti-Jewish remarks and take away the livelihood of its proponents.”
Worse, this kind of thing breeds bad legal and civil habits. Laws limiting free speech virtually always serve as the thin end of a wedge, opening the door to more expansive limitations. Germany is a bad offender on this. Germany’s 2017 Network Enforcement Act has been criticized by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Human Rights Watch, as “the regulation forces tech companies to behave as the internet police with power to decide what is free speech and what is hate speech.” The act served as a model for other countries, however. The EFF cites Justitia in finding that “at least thirteen countries — including Venezuela, Australia, Russia, India, Kenya, the Philippines, and Malaysia — have proposed or enacted laws based on the regulatory structure of [the Network Enforcement Act] since it entered into force, with the regulations in many cases taking a more privacy-invasive and censorial form.”
I hope it goes without saying that I think Abbas’s comments are condemnable, despicable, and idiotic. It is a slander against fact itself. But who needs a magazine writer to inform them of this? Do the math. Israel’s most vociferous and conspiracy-addled enemies cannot claim it has killed 300 million. It is beneath the dignity of a thinking person to engage. In fact, I am glad Abbas said it, because it’s useful for him to have revealed his cast of mind. What would it help me or global civility for him to think this nasty stuff, but keep it quiet in Germany and to preach it in Ramallah? Let fools expose themselves. And let truth-tellers refute them bearing words, but not warrants.
