French Parliament passed a bill making it a crime for anyone to deny that the tragic events of 1915 (which resulted in the death of many Ottoman Citizen and Armenians in Eastern Anatolia) as a genocide against the Armenian people.
The Turkish people (descendants of the Ottoman Empire) adamantly deny such false conclusions and refer maters of unfounded allegations with differing views to historians and call for open debate and discussions. Turkey, is a strategic ally of France and valued trading partner, this law will diminish France and Turkey's relationship. We believe this law is racist and discriminatory against Turkish people
This bill would impose a one-year prison term and 45,000 euros (59,040 U.S. dollars) of fine to anyone (including American or Turkish citizens) whom would deny such a genocide claim or offer proofs to the contrary.
We, the Council of Turkic American Associations strongly condemn France for promoting Turkophobia and passing such a bias, racist, discriminatory and anti-Turkish bill which is clearly based on political motives and not on historical facts. This bill undermines not just our core American values of fairness and equality, but universal human rights and values. This ill-conceived bill sends a clear message to the peoples of the world that the French government holds political gains above and before human rights and values and would jeopardizes world peace and order (with Turkey and France being NATO members).
Influential French philosophers and statesman valued freedom of speech and expression as natural human rights during the Enlightenment in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and stressed the importance of the "individual" with each person having the right to think and speak freely leading to France's declaration of the Rights of Man in 1789. France has now taken a step back to the dark ages and violated its own declaration that "the free communication of ideas and opinions is one of the most precious of the rights of man....[and that every man] may, accordingly, speak, write, and print with freedom...."
We the Council of Turkic American Associations strongly condemn France for passing the "Armenian genocide bill" and invite France to retract this unfounded, unjustified, biased, and bigoted bill and return to the Enlightened era.
