French senators are about to vote a bill to make it illegal to deny the tragic events of 1915 was genocide. If the French bill passes, those found guilty of denying the "Armenian genocide" would be sentenced to one year in jail and fined 45,000 euros.
But is the vote really important?
After all, many people in France accept that this is an electioneering attempt by Nicolas Sarkozy and the law is doomed to be revoked by the Constitutional Court. Robert Badinter, a former judge in the French Constitutional Court, as well as Thierry Fragnoli, an influential judge, and respected historians like Pierre Nora and scores of MPs and experts are all against this bill.
In democratic countries, parliaments don't write history and then restrict freedom of speech according to this precise version of history. If Sarkozy opts to do it for a few thousand Armenian votes, it means that he is ready to turn France into anything but a democracy. Fortunately, France still has an independent judiciary, unlike Turkey, and it won't surrender to Sarkozy in the end. If it does, then the French state would be committing a crime against democracy.
So, I really believe that the vote is not important in the big picture. What really important is the institutionalization of anti-Turkism, not only in Sarkozy's France, but on a larger scale.
Take the insistent efforts of the mass media to present a one-sided portrait of the 1915 events, which is painted by the nationalist Armenian diaspora.
As Fatih Çekirge, the editor-in-chief of Hürriyet's online edition, has pointed out today, a massive protest march in Paris is almost completely ignored by international news agencies. Almost 40,000 Turks from all over Europe had flocked in front of the French Senate on Saturday, but only AP posted a full story, although it was accompanied by dull photos.
Luckily, the world is not depended to the old gatekeepers now. The Turkish march was a trending topic on Twitter for the whole Saturday, for instance.
This is why I am optimistic, whatever the French Senate does.
In contrary to what the Armenian diaspora wants, we will have a more democratic debate, hearing the arguments of both sides.
It is not the 1920s anymore, when British "historians" were producing fake propaganda material against the Ottoman enemy to use the Ottoman Armenians as a leverage, preceding many more attempts of forgeries by Armenians.
Nor it is the 1970s, when Armenian terrorists were killing Turkish diplomats all over the world under French protection and nobody was aware, thanks to the hypocrisy of the Western European mass media.
Their lobby can't buy out freedom of speech anymore.
Neither now, nor in 2015.
