Is ‘Denial’ a crime?

By: Ahmed ELNAHAS – Montopoli, October 19^th 2013.

In today’s daily Il Fatto Quotidiano, the well known constitutionalist Bruno Tinti discussed* the Italian Senate’s Justice Commission recent proposal for a bill by which the “Denial of the Shoah”** be considered a crime punishable by 1 to 7½ years imprisonment; Mr. Tinti confirmed that “high level parliamentary sources confirm that the bill will pass in both chambers”!!

Nonetheless, the fact that no one, yet, have raised the problem of this proposal’s unconstitutionality in view of its flagrant violation to the 21^st amendment of the Constitution: “Everyone have the right to express freely his/her proper thought(s) by any mean of diffusion…”; not only surprises, it frightens.

Popes and Emperors together have founded the Inquisition to serve as an effective institutional organ for punishing the supporters of whatever ideas opposite, or contrary, to the Catholicism’s orthodoxy; by which were tortured and burned heretics, pagans, suspects of being false believers, preachers of other doctrines other than the empire’s established Roman Catholic Faith.

The persecutors of the Inquisition, which by the way lasted till the 18^th century, were defending what they believed to be ‘Historical Falsities’; and this present proposal resurrects the same concept only that those who proposed and wrote it are convinced of defending a ‘Historical Certainty’.. Consequently every individual will be forced to yield to other people’s ideological, moral and religious conditionings. The problem remain in the fact that we know how certain things begin, but how will they end and to which direction they may lead cannot be known for sure.

Now, after reading carefully Mr. Tinti’s argumentation, which I disagree in part with him, and the original text of the senate’s proposal, I’d like to pose an interrogative that seem opportune in such circumstances:

“Will the same concept be valid as well for other ‘Genocides’ and ‘War Crimes’ like those committed, and documented, in the Balkans; the Turkish against Armenian; the many African genocides; the European Colonial authorities vs. the Native American tribes; and the Israeli vs. Palestinian? Or it will concern only and specifically the cases of Denying the specific Nazi crimes committed exclusively against the Jewish citizens, thus discarding the dignity of all the countless victims of the Nazi and those of all War Crimes, Crimes Against Humanity and Genocides?”.

Pass On The Word.

*The article entitled “Denial, idiocy is not a crime”.

**Persecution and Extermination of Jews by Nazi forces during WWII.