EU ENVOY DISCUSSES KARABAKH SETTLEMENT WITH REGION’S PRESIDENT
by: Tigran Liloyan
ITAR-TASS News Agency
April 8, 2006 Saturday 06:03 PM EST
A possible intensification of the EU role in a search for peace
settlement in Azerbaijan’s mostly Armenian-populated enclave of
Karabakh came into spotlight of talks between the EU’s envoy to South
Caucasus, Peter Semneby, and the President of the self-proclaimed
Karabakh Republic, Arkady Gukassian.
Spokespeople for Karabakh’s permanent mission in Armenia told Itar-Tass
Gukassian stressed the importance of maintaining ceasefire between
Karabakh and Azerbaijan.
He also spoke in favor of the breakaway region’s direct participation
in the talks on settling the conflict, the origins of which date back
to late 1980’s.
Foreign Ministry of the Karabakh Republic said in a statement
circulated Saturday encroachments on ceasefire on the line of
disengagement of Azerbaijani and Karabakh armed units became more
frequent recently.
“The incidents leading to a greater number of victims on the
disengagement line can only breed mutual mistrust and trigger an
escalation of violence in the zone of Azerbaijani-Karabakh conflict,”
the statement said.

EDUCATION CLASH HOLDS UP EU TALKS
by Anthony Browne in Brussels and Suna Erdem in Istanbul
The Times (London)
April 8, 2006, Saturday
TURKISH hopes of joining the European Union have been thrown into
jeopardy by a stand-off between Britain and France over human rights.
Entry negotiations have been temporarily suspended after Britain
blocked an early phase of the talks on education.
The dispute puts Britain, which has been the main champion of Turkish
entry into the EU, in the awkward position of blocking the membership
talks and playing down concerns over human rights.
As opposition to further enlargement of the EU mounts, the European
Commission has said that the talks -which started last November and
are meant to result in Turkey becoming the first Muslim member of
the EU in about a decade’s time could be heading for a “train crash”.
The dispute flared on Thursday night when Britain accused France of
trying to “move the goalposts” by insisting that the country’s human
rights record be considered at all stages of the membership talks.
During the negotiations on education policy, France, supported by most
other EU member states, said that it wanted issues of sex and race
to be addressed. There is concern over the difficulties that many
Turkish girls face in getting educated, alleged racism in Turkish
textbooks and the treatment of minorities in schools.
A recent study of Turkish textbooks found widespread nationalism
and racism.
Academics highlighted 4,000 instances of “human rights abuses”,
notably negative portrayals of Kurds, Greeks, Jews and Armenians. In
the religiously conservative east of the country, far fewer girls
than boys have access to education.
Despite the concerns, a senior British official made clear that its
negotiators had made a stand to stop countries that are uneasy about
Turkish membership from repeatedly introducing new hurdles.
A French government spokesman denied that Paris was changing the terms
of the talks, but said that they had to reflect public opposition
to Turkey joining. The mood in Brussels is becoming increasingly
pessimistic. Olli Rehn, the Enlargement Commissioner, said: “We
may face a period of political tension in EU-Turkey relations. The
commission is working hard to avoid a train crash.”

TURKEY ACCUSES ARMED GROUPS OF DRUG TRAFFICKING
Agence France Presse — English
April 9, 2006 Sunday 11:29 AM GMT
Kurdish rebels from the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) and
smaller armed leftist groups in Turkey are deeply involved in drug
trafficking according to a Turkish police report, the Anatolia news
agency said Sunday.
Since 1984, the report contends, the PKK, the Armenian Secret Army
for the Liberation of Armenia, and two extremist communist groups
have been involved in 333 separate drug trafficking incidents.
The two extreme-left groups are the Turkish Communist Party, and the
Revolutionary People’s Liberation Party Front.
A total of 3.7 tons of heroin, four tons of morphine-base, 710 kilos
of cocaine and various quantities of other drugs have been seized
by police, who also shut down two illegal drug-making laboratories,
Anatolia said.
Anatolia did not provide any statistical breakdown of trafficking
by group.
The police report noted that the PKK — classified as a terrorist
organization by Turkey, the European Union and the United States —
is also routinely identified by international experts on narcotics
as being involved in drug trafficking.
The conflict between the PKK, which seeks an independent state in
Turkey’s predominately Kurdish southeast, and Turkish security forces
has claimed an estimated 37,000 lives since 1984.

THE IRAQ MESS: KURDISH SEPARATISTS ARE ADDING TO THE WITCH’S BREW
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (Pennsylvania)
April 9, 2006 Sunday
Region Edition
Last week another Iraq war-related problem turned up. In southeast
Turkey, near its border with Iraq, ethnic Kurd separatists encouraged
by the growing independence of Kurdistan in northern Iraq battled
with Turkish security forces, leaving 15 dead.
The United States has leaned on Iraq’s Kurds for support since the
beginning of the Iraq war. In the beginning it was because the Kurds
were opposed to Saddam Hussein’s Arab regime. Later, it was because
the Kurds were the only important Iraqi group that appeared to like
the United States.
The Sunnis, who with Saddam Hussein had ruled Iraq for decades, hated
the United States for its invasion and overthrow of their rule. The
Sunnis now form the core of insurgent resistance to U.S. rule. The
Shiites always were lukewarm on the Americans, even though they
advocated the democracy and majority rule that would put them in
power during the occupation.
That left the Kurds. Kurdish leader Jalal Talabani became president.
As Iraq has failed to put together a central government, three years
after the U.S. invasion, nearly four months after the elections,
the Kurdish north of the country has become increasingly autonomous.
Ethnic Kurds in neighboring Turkey, Iran, Syria and Armenia have
remarked on the growing strength and independence of Iraqi Kurdistan,
and have become heartened in their desire for their own country by
developments there.
In U.S. NATO ally Turkey, where an estimated 25 percent of the
population are ethnic Kurds, and where an estimated 30,000 were killed
in previous conflict in the 1980s, the issue blew up recently.
The United States told Turkey in early 2005 that it wouldn’t do
anything about Kurdish separatists acting against Turkey from Iraq.
Given other U.S. preoccupations in Iraq at this time and continued
U.S. reliance on the Kurds, it is unlikely to change that position now.
In the meantime, Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has made
it clear that he will put up with no nonsense from Kurdish separatists
in Turkey.
This is another very old problem that the Bush administration should
have taken into account before crashing into Iraq, and particularly
before signing up the Kurds as America’s principal ally there.
In the meantime, the snarl in naming an Iraqi government four months
after the elections remains. The Kurds and the Sunnis won’t agree to
the Shiites’ choice of Ibrahim al-Jaafari for prime minister, selected
by the Shiite majority in February. U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza
Rice and her travelling partner, British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw,
visited Baghdad last week and sought to advance the candidacy of Vice
President Adel Abdul Mahdi for the prime minister slot in place of
Mr. al-Jaafari. It doesn’t appear to have worked.
Meanwhile, reconstruction is stalled in Iraq, proceeding in only
four of 18 provinces. Religious conflict between Sunnis and Shiites
proceeds. Another bomb in a Shiite mosque killed 71 on Friday. If the
strife cannot be called civil war — a term the Bush administration
resists despite the growing ethnic cleansing — it is quacking like
that duck.
U.S. deaths in Iraq continue to rise above 2,300. The cost of the war
to the United States is estimated at about $300 billion. President
Bush continues to assure Americans that we are winning.
If we are winning it is hard to imagine how bad it would be if we
were losing. The regional expansion of the trouble in Iraq into Turkey
through the Kurds is one of the worst developments to occur yet.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress

MORE THAN 1 MILLION ITALIANS ABROAD CAST BALLOTS IN PARLIAMENTARY ELECTION
By Marta Falconi, Associated Press Writer
Associated Press Worldstream
April 9, 2006 Sunday 12:05 AM GMT
More than 1 million Italians living abroad voted in the country’s
parliamentary election, according to a final tally, and their ballots
could be decisive in a close race.
This election marked the first time expatriates were allowed to vote
in a general election without having to travel back to Italy.
Around 1.1 million Italians abroad, or 42 percent of those eligible,
sent in their ballots by mail in early voting, the Foreign Ministry
said on Saturday.
Official results won’t be released until after the Sunday-Monday
domestic voting to choose between blocs led by Premier Silvio
Berlusconi and his center-left challenger, former European Commission
President Romano Prodi.
About 2.6 million citizens abroad were eligible to vote to elect 18
lawmakers who, for the first time, will be responsible for representing
their interests in the national legislature. Those lawmakers will fill
12 new seats in the Chamber of Deputies, the lower house of parliament,
and six in the Senate.
Around 47 million citizens who live in Italy will vote this weekend.
Latin American consulates reported the highest average ballot return
rate, with about 52 percent of Italians voting, the ministry said.
The highest return was in Uruguay, where 63 percent of Italians
voted. Campaigning politicians paid special attention to Latin America
Argentina in particular because it is home to hundreds of thousands
of expatriates. Fifty-six percent of Italians living there voted.
Europe had an average return rate of about 38 percent, with Armenia
topping the list with 95 percent, the ministry reported. About 37
percent of Italians living in North America voted, with the highest
returns in Barbados at 81 percent. Africa, Asia and Oceania reported
an average of 44 percent, with 100 percent or 32 people voting in
Kuwait, the ministry said.
Until now, Italians wishing to vote in their country’s general
elections had to fly back to Italy. A 2001 law, one of the first pieces
of legislation from Berlusconi’s five-year conservative government,
gave citizens who live abroad the right to vote by mail.
The expatriate representatives will have full voting rights in
Italy’s parliament, giving Italians abroad the chance to influence
decisions not just on issues concerning them directly, but also on
those affecting domestic policies in Italy.
In addition to giving overseas voters the right to cast ballots,
the law also created four huge electoral districts to represent
Italians who live overseas in Parliament, which is composed of a
315-seat Senate and 630-seat Chamber of Deputies.
In recent weeks, politicians of all stripes have been crisscrossing
the globe trying to woo voters.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress

IMMIGRANTS TODAY LESS LIKELY TO SEVER ROOTS
By Mark Bixler
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
April 4, 2006 Tuesday
Main Edition
Leaving the United States to serve in a foreign government is
nothing new.
In the 1990s, U.S. citizens returned to their native countries
to take such jobs as Yugoslav prime minister, chief of Estonia’s
armed forces, foreign minister of Armenia and foreign minister of
Bosnia-Herzegovina. A retired administrator for the Environmental
Protection Agency left Chicago to become president of his native
Lithuania. A U.S. citizen joined the Cabinet of Mexican President
Vicente Fox.
The trend is growing, along with the number of U.S. citizens who
also hold citizenship in another country. Dual citizenship used to be
illegal in most cases, but the U.S. Supreme Court changed that in 1967.
Immigrants sometimes leave the United States to take government
jobs at home — at least two Afghans joined a new bureaucracy in
Afghanistan after the Taliban fell.
The United States is now home to more foreign-born residents —
34.2 million — than at any time in history. Thanks to the Internet
and telephones, they follow politics in their native countries much
more closely than immigrants who came in the late 1800s and early
1900s, said David Pottie, the Carter Center’s assistant director of
democracy programs.
“Once they left home,” he said of earlier immigrants, “they left.”
Kathleen Newland, director of the Migration Policy Institute in
Washington, said critics liken dual citizenship to bigamy, but she
likens it to a man who loves both his wife and his mother.
“Having multiple allegiances is increasingly common in a globalized
world,” she said.
More than 40 countries, including the United States, allow citizens
who live abroad to vote, typically by mail or in person at an embassy
or consulate. Yet last year, only 10 percent of eligible Iraqi
expatriates voted in Iraqi elections, said Richard W. Soudriette,
president of the International Foundation for Election Systems,
a Washington nonprofit agency.
In a few months, Mexican citizens in the United States will for the
first time help choose Mexico’s president, but only 75,000 met a
deadline to register even though at least 7 million live here, he said.
“The fact is that most people really do not participate,” he said.

ILLIBERAL EUROPE: THE LONG AND GROWING LIST OF THINGS YOU CAN’T LEGALLY SAY
by Gerard Alexander, The Weekly Standard
The Weekly Standard
April 10, 2006 Monday
ON FEBRUARY 20, AN Austrian court sentenced the notorious British
writer David Irving to three years in prison for denying in a 1989
speech that Auschwitz contained gas chambers. Many American observers
had mixed reactions. They saw Irving as a loathsome anti-Semite but
were uncomfortable with the thought of a person serving time behind
bars for something he wrote or said, no matter how noxious.
Journalist Michael Barone probably spoke for more than a few when
he said that he “shuddered” at the news of Irving’s imprisonment,
“yet I can understand why Austria, like Germany, has laws that
criminalize Holocaust denial and glorification of Nazism. History
has its claims–heavy ones, in the cases of Germany and Austria.” In
other words, criminalizing speech might not be the American way of
doing business, but it’s understandably Austria and Germany’s way of
dealing with their unique Nazi past.
The trouble is that Austria’s anti-Nazi legislation is the tip
of an iceberg of political speech laws across Europe. Of course,
all governments restrict some speech. But free expression is so
foundational to democracy that there is usually a strong bias against
restricting speech unless it poses a compelling and even imminent
danger to others. The most pervasive and durable restrictions meet
that test, applying to things like child pornography, false statements
that result in demonstrable harm (defamation), the exposure of national
security information, commercial fraud, and the proverbial shouting of
“Fire!” in a crowded theater.
In addition, European countries have never had America’s strong
free-speech tradition. Nevertheless, three disturbing trends now
underway in Europe together represent the greatest erosion of
democratic practice in the world’s advanced democracies since 1945.
First, anti-Nazi laws are being adopted in places where neo-Nazism
poses no serious threat. Second, speech laws have been dramatically
expanded to sanction speech that “incites hatred” against
groups based on their religion, race, ethnicity, or several other
characteristics. Third, these incitement laws are being interpreted
so loosely that they chill not just extremist views but mainstream
ones too. The result is a serious distortion and impoverishment of
political debate.
After 1945, Germany in particular passed strict anti-Nazi laws, making
it illegal not only to form a neo-Nazi party but also to champion
Nazi ideology, downplay Nazi crimes, print Mein Kampf, or even air
the Nazi musical anthem, the “Horst Wessel” song. At the time, many
believed that these restrictions met the test of averting immediate
danger. Given what had happened between 1933 and 1945, it seemed
airing pro-Nazi or anti-Semitic views was the equivalent of shouting
“Fire!” in the crowded theater of Austria and Germany’s troubled
cultures. As it turned out, neo-Nazis proved too marginal even to
come close to posing a serious danger to Germany or Austria’s new
democracies, with real neo-Nazis never winning even 5 percent of the
vote. So the necessity for these restrictions became less and less
clear with time.
But instead of being pared back, anti-Nazi legislation spread. Laws
criminalizing Holocaust denial or minimization were adopted well into
the 1990s in France, Switzerland, Belgium, Spain, and other European
countries (and several countries outside Europe). What these laws could
accomplish was unclear, since they were adopted when neo-Nazism’s
prospects seemed more remote than ever. In all these countries,
including Germany and Austria, governments don’t really have to ban
neo-Nazis; voters do it for them through indifference.
Nonetheless, anti-Nazi laws have proved uncontroversial, maybe because
their sanctions fall on unsavory figures from Europe’s anti-Semitic
fever swamps.
This is unfortunate, because anti-Nazi laws gradually expanded to cover
other historical events. In 1993, Bernard Lewis, the eminent Princeton
historian of the Middle East, was asked in an interview with Le Monde
about the mass murder of Armenians in Turkey during World War I. He
readily acknowledged that terrible massacres took place but questioned
whether the murders were the result of a predetermined–that is,
genocidal–plan. That conclusion brushed up against French laws that
now prohibit denial of more crimes against humanity than just the
Holocaust. Several activist groups in France filed complaints. Two
civil and one criminal suit were dismissed, but Lewis was found guilty
in another civil suit and condemned by the court for having not been
“objective” regarding events that the European Parliament and other
bodies had officially certified as a “genocide.”
The expansion of the speech laws beyond the Holocaust is revealing.
Especially once it became evident that neo-Nazis were politically
marginal, it was unclear exactly what risk Holocaust deniers posed.
An alternative interpretation is that bans on denial were never really
about averting the menace of Nazi revivalism. They were motivated
instead by the fact that good people were offended by Holocaust
denial. That this is really what’s at work is confirmed by laws
prohibiting denial of events like the Armenian murders–cases that
pose no risk of old genocidal agendas’ being revived.
So genocide-denial laws can now be used to sanction professional
historians whose research leads them to findings that these laws
classify as unacceptable. And the anti-Nazi slope has proven more
slippery than that. Denial laws have been supplemented by new laws
that are even more prone to sanctioning reasonable people.
ESPECIALLY SINCE THE 1970s, Western Europeans have been passing bans
on speech that “incites hatred” based on race, religion, ethnicity,
national origin, and other criteria. These were adopted or beefed up in
the 1980s in the face of rising violence against minorities and rising
far-right parties like the French National Front. Such laws are now in
place in Germany, Austria, Belgium, Sweden, Norway, France, Britain,
and elsewhere. France’s 1972 Holocaust denial law was expanded by the
1990 Gayssot law, which extended sanctions to denial of other crimes
against humanity and points of view deemed racist. France’s Conseil
Superieur de l’Audiovisuel monitors broadcasters for any statements
that might incite racial hatred.
Earlier British legislation against incitement of racial hatred was
expanded in 1986 and was extended again in February 2006, this time
to criminalize intentionally “stirring up hatred against persons on
religious grounds.” This is spreading to the European Union level,
where a stream of rules now prohibits the broadcast, including
online, of any program or ad that incites “hatred based on sex,
racial or ethnic origin, religion or belief, disability, age or
sexual orientation” or–crucially–is “offensive to religious or
political beliefs.”
The highest-profile prosecutions under these laws have been of people
and organizations very vulnerable to the charge of racism. Incitement
charges have repeatedly been brought against the French National
Front’s Jean-Marie Le Pen, who regularly trades in slurs against
blacks and Arabs. Similar charges were leveled against the Vlaams
Blok, a Flemish nationalist party advocating the breakup of the
bilingual Belgian state, which sometimes luridly stereotyped immigrants
from the developing world as predisposed to criminality and welfare
dependency. In November 2004, Belgium’s highest court found the party
guilty of racism, allowing the government to deny it state funding
and access to television, in effect forcing the Blok to dissolve and
re-form under a new name. At the time, the Blok was jockeying for
first place in polls among Belgium’s Flemish voters.
But the anti-incitement laws now regularly target people who are
well within the political mainstream. This is political correctness
backed up with prison time. Britain’s then-home secretary Jack Straw
remarked in 1999 on criminal activity by people many of whom posed
as gypsies or “travelers”–hardly a slur on all gypsies even without
that qualifier. But a Travelers’ group filed a complaint of inciting
racial hatred, prompting a formal investigation and extensive media
coverage asking whether Straw was racist. In 2002, the prominent
French novelist Michel Houellebecq was charged with inciting racial
hatred in a novel and interview in which he referred to Islam as
“the stupidest religion.” Veteran Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci
was motivated by 9/11 to criticize Islam as violent and subversive of
traditional European mores. As a result she faced a French attempt in
2002 to ban her book as racist, and she is scheduled to stand trial
in Italy in June for statements “offensive to Islam.” One of her
accusers, in turn, faces charges for calling the Catholic Church a
“criminal organization.”
In May 2005, Le Monde, France’s premier center-left newspaper, was
found guilty of defaming Jews in a 2002 editorial that criticized
Israeli policies while referring to Israel as “a nation of refugees.”
The appeals court found such juxtapositions made Israelis synonymous
with Jews, so criticism of the former constituted incitement of hatred
against the latter. After it published a series of controversial
cartoons of Muhammad, the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten was formally
investigated to determine whether the cartoons constituted prohibited
racist or blasphemous speech.
This swirl of speech-law charges, lawsuits, and investigations is
now sustained by an “antiracism” industry. Dozens of antiracism
groups and self-appointed representatives of religious and other
communities, like France’s Movement Against Racism and for Friendship
Between Peoples (MRAP) and the Muslim Union of Italy, readily file
complaints and suits and sometimes are the direct beneficiaries
when fines are imposed. Their complaints provoke investigations
by an alphabet soup of government agencies, like Belgium’s Center
for Equal Opportunities and Opposition to Racism and Britain’s
Commission for Racial Equality. These in turn feed into the court
system. If America had practices like these, the debate over, say,
the Dubai ports deal would almost certainly have sparked a shower of
civil suits and criminal investigations against elected officials
and columnists charged with “anti-Arab . . . anti-Muslim” bigotry
(to quote the Council on American-Islamic Relations).
Not all cases, of course, result in punishment. Le Pen has been fined
hundreds of thousands of dollars, neo-Nazi groups banned, Holocaust
deniers and anti-Semites jailed in several countries, and the Vlaams
Blok de facto dissolved. Le Monde was found guilty, but sanctioned
with only a symbolic fine; Bernard Lewis with somewhat larger costs.
The investigation of Straw was dropped; Houellebecq was acquitted;
and the Danish prosecutors decided not to press charges against the
Jyllands-Posten. But an increasing number of European intellectuals,
politicians, journalists, and even scholars have had uncomfortable and
expensive brushes with speech laws. In many cases, their reputation
is tarnished; afterward their Wikipedia entry, so to speak, is never
complete without mention of the official investigation for bigotry.
SO THE REAL DANGER posed by Europe’s speech laws is not so much
guilty verdicts as an insidious chilling of political debate, as
people censor themselves in order to avoid legal charges and the
stigma and expense they bring. And the most serious chill is not of
fringe racists but of mainstream moderates and conservatives.
First of all, it turns out that some denials and incitements are
more equal than others in Europe. For all the trials on charges of
Holocaust denial, it is not clear that anyone has been charged with
denial or minimization of crimes committed by Communist regimes. And
the laws banning incitement of hatred on grounds of race, religion,
ethnicity, or national origin do not ban incitement based on political
orientation or economic status. Moreover, these laws protect speech
that incites hatred against Americans and some others.
And while there have been some convictions of Islamist radicals for
inciting hatred against Jews and others, Europeans have been shy to
move against the incitement pervasive in Islamist circles.
In other words, Europe’s speech laws are written and applied in ways
that leave activists on the political left free to whitewash crimes
of leftist regimes, incite hatred against their domestic bogeymen of
the well-to-do, and luridly stereotype their international bogeymen,
often with history-distorting falsehoods such as fictitious claims
of genocide said to be committed by the United States and Israel. It
may be no coincidence that Socialist and extreme-left parties have
played central roles in the design of speech laws. The crafter of
France’s 1990 Gayssot law, for example, was Jean-Claude Gayssot, a
longtime Communist party officeholder. All this matters. It sends an
important signal to the broader culture when Hitler is the symbol of
evil while Stalin and Mao are given a pass, and when, in effect, Pat
Buchanan’s ideas risk indictment while Michael Moore’s are protected.
But the more serious bias comes out when anti-incitement laws are
allowed to degenerate into the sanctioning of speech that causes
“offense.” It’s not clear why avoiding offense should be a top priority
to begin with. But when it is, the most important consequence is
likely to be the chilling not of racist speech but of moderate
and conservative thinking about major social problems. After all,
two views tend to cause offense in our day and age. The first is the
speech of bigots who denigrate members of other groups, calling them,
say, inherently delinquent. The second is speech by modern moderates
and conservatives who believe that problems like poverty, delinquency,
and poor health can often–not always, but often–be traced to bad
choices and mores and dysfunctional subcultures.
Sometimes, problems are disproportionately concentrated within
groups–of whatever class, race, ethnicity, or religion. Identifying
these causes assumes they can be corrected; so identifying them is
a prerequisite to improvement. This is the furthest thing from racism.
It is the non-bigotry of high expectations.
But in our hypersensitive age, this sort of speech is prone to being
construed as prejudice–much more prone than the left’s traditional
language, which attributes people’s problems to discrimination and
other forces beyond their control. Moderate and conservative speech
is even more likely to be tagged as bigoted when that tag is wielded
cynically by political opponents. In the politically tilted world of
Europe’s media, intellectuals, and NGOs, this happens all the time.
We know this is often cynical, because European speech-law advocates
like Jean-Claude Gayssot are perfectly capable of criticizing Israel
while insisting this doesn’t mean they’re anti-Semitic.
Laws against any speech that causes “offense” are biased because they
have the insidious effect of conflating bigoted speech and constructive
criticism, two kinds of speech that should be sharply distinguished
from each other. The result is the stigmatization of certain kinds
of thinking about social problems and public policy that American
conservatives, moderates, and even many liberals recognize as a
legitimate part of serious debate. These speech laws won’t ultimately
silence extremists, whose careers won’t end if they’re called bigots
and who often seek out controversy. But they can silence reasonable
people who don’t want that label and don’t want a scandal.
BETWEEN EUROPE’S SPEECH LAWS, hypersensitivity, and cynical
demagoguery, constructive criticism can become virtually impossible,
and self-censorship the norm. The effects are plain to see. European
politicians, media outlets, and university discussions are routinely
uncomfortable airing information–say, about rates of crime–that
reflects unfavorably on the members of groups such as citizens
of African or Middle Eastern descent, for fear that it will fuel
negative stereotypes of these groups and open the broadcaster to
charges of inciting hatred. Last fall, many French politicians and
commentators carefully avoided characterizing the identities of the
“youths” rioting in dozens of French cities and towns, and did not
aggressively pursue that issue when peace was restored. This leaves
it unclear even now who did what and why in the rioting–knowledge
that is a prerequisite for a serious policy response to what happened.
Consider the case of Alain Finkielkraut, a distinguished French
philosopher. Last November, Israel’s Haaretz newspaper interviewed him
about the French riots. In blunt language, he said that poverty and
discrimination could not explain the rioters’ behavior since most poor
communities in France did not torch cars. He believed public debate
should acknowledge head-on that the rioters were heavily of Arab
and African descent and bore aggressively anti-Western attitudes. He
specifically insisted that neither all “blacks and Arabs” nor Islam
as a religion were implicated in that statement. And he proposed that
it was imperative to signal the rioters that calls for opportunity
within a society had to be matched with a sense of responsibility to
that society.
Given that most French commentators flinched from serious engagement
with the rioters’ thuggish assault on France’s public spaces,
Finkielkraut’s was a point of view that badly needed to be expressed.
But after Le Monde offered the public a biased sample of his words,
MRAP moved immediately to file legal charges against him, withdrawing
the threat only when Finkielkraut appeared to apologize. While
Finkielkraut has not renounced his original words, he and others like
him have since been less outspoken. Public debate on an urgent matter
was deprived of a viewpoint that identified where the real hatred
resided, sought ways to retrieve segments of French youth from its
grip, and exhorted France to expect more of its own people.
The same deprivation can be seen in the initial handling of the recent
kidnapping, 24-day torture, and then murder of Ilan Halimi, a young
French Jew. For days after Halimi’s body was found, authorities
tried to avoid discussing the possibility that the kidnappers
were Muslim and that anti-Semitism partly motivated them, despite
powerful signs pointing in that direction. Officials wanted to combat
anti-Semitism but not to paint Muslims in France as unattractively
anti-Semitic. Many German authorities are similarly unsure what to
do when young Germans of Turkish descent loudly cheer Valley of the
Wolves, the new anti-American and anti-Semitic Turkish hit film.
Criticism might offend Turks, but silence risks offending Jews. The
compromise is prevarication. The side effect is disrespect for
morally flabby authority figures. And the result is impoverishment
of public debate.
The good news is that Europeans are questioning their illiberal speech
laws as never before. For several years, scholars and intellectuals in
France especially have been circulating petitions and counter-petitions
regarding the wisdom particularly of the laws creating official
accounts of history. Such skepticism has received a huge boost from
the events surrounding the Danish cartoons. After their publication,
a concerted campaign to drum up outrage in the Muslim world triggered
demonstrations and riots in numerous places.
With that violence as a backdrop, many Muslims inside and outside
Europe have been insisting that European governments ban the
cartoons. As models for this, they cite not only censorship rules in
Middle Eastern countries but also Europe’s own speech laws. Many are
bewildered that speech offensive to Jews is banned but not speech
offensive to Muslims.
In response, many Europeans have found it difficult to justify these
inconsistencies. Several European governments take the expected and
untenable middle road: They refuse to ban the cartoons but plead with
their media not to publish them either. Other Europeans, though, seem
to be using their discomfort over the idea of banning the cartoons
to ask whether they shouldn’t get out of the business of banning
political speech altogether.
If they try, they won’t have the backing of international law. The
International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights–the code the
U.N. Human Rights Committee is charged with enforcing–insists on the
banning of “advocacy of national, racial or religious hatred.” They
also won’t command the support of the world’s best-known human
rights organization. Amnesty International accepts speech laws as
legitimate, so it generally excludes from its list of “prisoners of
conscience”–that is, people “imprisoned solely for the peaceful
expression of their beliefs”–anyone imprisoned for “advocacy of
hatred.”
But reform-minded Europeans would have the example of U.S. practice,
which tolerates even loathsome speech. They would also have the
example of a rival human rights organization. Taking a principled
stand in the face of a great deal of international practice, Human
Rights Watch insists that governments should ban speech only when it
“constitutes imminent incitement” to violence and other unlawful acts
and urges reform of these laws, including repeal of Holocaust denial
laws. Europeans of all political stripes should want to seize this
opportunity to reverse the most dangerously illiberal trend in the
world’s advanced democracies. That would cease to make Europe a role
model for censorship and restore it as a model of core democratic
rights instead, expanding and not contracting its moral authority in
the world.
Gerard Alexander is associate professor of political science at
the University of Virginia and a visiting scholar at the American
Enterprise Institute.

WHO SHOULD BE AMONG THIS YEAR’S PICKS FOR THE TIME 100?
Time
April 17, 2006
U.S. Edition
To help make the selection, TIME asked earlier honorees whom they would
select as the world’s most influential people. This week’s installment:
AISHWARYA RAI The ex–Miss World conquered Bollywood and became an
international film star: I would like to submit Oprah Winfrey as my
nomination. There are those who are born to be leaders, and she is
one of them. Oprah is a healer of lost souls. She continues to lead
millions of people to their path of personal happiness. She has a
powerful and generous spirit, with the heart of a goddess. She is
both admired and loved.
ANDREW WEIL An expert in the art of integrating Western medicine with
herbal healing Richard Davidson is a pioneer in exciting mind-body
medicine frontiers. His best-known work focuses on a capacity of
the brain to develop and change throughout life. Using Tibetan monks
as research subjects, he has shown how meditation can improve brain
function. His studies may lead to therapeutic approaches for anxiety
disorders and reveal ways to protect against memory loss and cognitive
decline.
STEPHEN LEWIS The U.N.’s special envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa is the
author of Race Against Time: I suggest Michelle Bachelet, Chile’s
first female President. She has set an astonishing precedent by
appointing a Cabinet of exact gender parity. Also Liberia’s new woman
President, Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, who broke the monolithic boys’ club
of Africa. She will bring economic and social justice to her country.
And Zackie Achmat, who leads the world’s most important AIDS activist
organization. He has brought hope to millions living with AIDS
in Africa.
SAMANTHA POWER A Harvard University professor, her book on genocide won
a Pulitzer Prize in 2003: I nominate Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk. He
has acknowledged his homeland’s genocide against the Armenians and
nearly got himself arrested before the Turks decided their commitment
to and pride in their greatest writer exceeded a commitment to killers
who died almost a century ago. It could bring a cultural change. Also
George Clooney, for the obvious reasons, and the students who led
the divestment movement on campuses for Darfur.

HOW U. ILLINOIS FUNDS GENOCIDE
By Brian Pierce, Daily Illini; SOURCE: U. Illinois
Daily Illini via U-Wire
University Wire
April 5, 2006 Wednesday
CHAMPAIGN, Ill.
On July 12, 2004, a fire raged in a small village in western Sudan
known as Donki Dereisa. It was not a unique fire by any means, for
there were blazes all around, a result of exploding ordnance and the
flaming torches of the men on horseback who were attacking the village.
Amid the chaos that struck Donki Dereisa that day, there was no reason
to notice this particular fire — it was merely one of many that was
consuming the food and shelter of the village’s inhabitants.
But this fire proved special, because by the end of the day, it
consumed more than food, more than shelter, and more than personal
belongings. Its flames consumed six young Sudanese children, thrown
in the fire like so many pieces of firewood by militants deaf to
their screams and blind to their terror.
Many, if not most, students on this campus have at least heard of
the ongoing genocide in the Darfur region of Sudan. Here in America,
it is a discussion that groans under the weight of statistics:
Four-hundred thousand dead, 2.5 million displaced, four million in
need of humanitarian aid. In Sudan, it is a conflict that cries out
under the weight of lives lost and lives ruined.
The horror of the events in Sudan is so unimaginable that the problem
seems insurmountable. How can we imagine ourselves in the position
of choosing between sending women out to get firewood and risking
rape or sending men out and risking castration or murder?
The answer is, we can’t. The pain is inconceivable. And so we turn
away. We silently accept the deaths of thousands.
The reason why is because we don’t know what else to do. It is
beyond our control, something to be dealt with by governments
and international organizations. According to a recent Zogby
International poll, 62 percent of Americans agree that the United
States “has a responsibility to help stop the killing in the Darfur
region.” Americans want to help, they just don’t know how.
But there are tangible things we can do.
About 100 public companies do business in Sudan with the cooperation of
the Khartoum regime. These companies, mostly Asian but some European,
serve to prop up the economy of a government that commits genocide —
a government that is, simply put, evil.
What students may not be aware of is that their tuition dollars are
going to some of these companies. Hundreds of thousands of dollars
are invested in them through the University endowment.
There is a growing trend across the nation to divest funds in these
kinds of companies, with successful campaigns at Harvard, Yale,
Stanford, and the University of California. While Illinois has
divestment laws that affect the pensions of state employees, our
University could become only the second public university to divest
its endowment, setting an example for other public universities across
the nation.
Pressure must be put on University administration to divest our funds,
or we will be more than inactive in the face of genocide. We will
be culpable.
To learn more about how you can help, you can contact the
president of the campus student organization Action Darfur, Brian
Schwartz, at [email protected]. There is also a nationwide
organization, the Sudan Divestment Task Force, which can be reached
at [email protected].
History is filled with tragedy: a million Armenians dead in Turkey
between 1915 and 1917, two million Cambodians dead under Pol Pot
between 1975 and 1979, almost a million Tutsis dead in Rwanda in
1994. We cannot afford to continue watching these events unfold,
and when it’s all over uttering the empty words “never again.”
Let us follow the example of apartheid in South Africa, when the world
joined together and forced the collapse of a racist and unjust regime,
partly through divestment campaigns at universities like this one.
Let us replace the words “never again” with “not now, not ever.” Let
us do what we can to stop this suffering, let us act here at home,
and let us begin today.

PRESS RELEASE
Source: Commerce Bank/Harrisburg, NA
Commerce Bank Opens Commerce Center at TecPort Business Center in
Harrisburg
Wednesday April 5,

New headquarters, operations and training center reflects Commerce’s
unique retail culture inside and out
HARRISBURG, Pa.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–April 5, 2006–Commerce
Bank/Harrisburg, NA, the sole banking subsidiary of Pennsylvania
Commerce Bancorp Inc. (NASDAQ:COBH
< &d=t> – News
<; ), has opened Commerce Center, the bank's new headquarters, operations and training center, to accommodate its fast-paced growth. The 56,000-square-foot, two-story facility is located at TecPort Business Center in Harrisburg, prominently visible from Interstate 83. Commerce Center houses the bank's executive offices, operations and support services departments, and customer service call center. The building also houses commercial, consumer and residential mortgage lending operations for the bank's East Shore and West Shore regions in Harrisburg. Additionally, it is home to Commerce University, the bank's in-house training, development and education department, which helps every Commerce team member develop his or her expertise and advance along a Commerce career path. "Commerce Center reflects our unique retail culture, inside and out," said Commerce Bank Chairman, President and CEO GARY L. NALBANDIAN. "The facility is immaculate in appearance, just like our convenient prototype stores. It creates the same welcoming experience for our team members as they create for our customers. Commerce Center is now the central point from where our organization will continue to grow and turn more customers into Commerce fans." About 275 Commerce team members work at Commerce Center, nearly one third of the company's workforce. The facility's total capacity is about 400. It combines Commerce's previous headquarters in Camp Hill and operations center in Mechanicsburg, PA. Commerce's well-known brand and "WOW! the Customer" service philosophy is celebrated throughout Commerce Center. Wall art consists of nearly 40 poster-size images featuring "slices of life" at Commerce such as grand openings and community involvement. Two four-panel wall collages each feature nearly 80 images from the bank's Annual WOW! Awards, an Academy Awards-style event to honor the "best of the best" in customer service. Wall displays also highlight real fan mail from real Commerce fans. "The features and amenities of Commerce Center are all about creating an extreme sense of camaraderie, pride and morale among our team," Nalbandian said. "Every detail conveys the spirit of our 'WOW! the Customer' service philosophy." The architectural centerpiece of the facility is a 2,062-square-foot, glass-enclosed atrium. Other distinct features include: large-format, flat-screen displays throughout the building to inform team members about news and upcoming events; nearly 600 square feet of red neon accents; a 60-seat cafe with full-service vending; a sound-masking system to increase privacy and reduce audible distractions; and water conservation via the sites own well to water the landscaping. Commerce Center's training facilities, under the direction of Commerce University, include a 75-seat-capacity seminar room; teller training room; customer service representative training room; call center representative training room and computer lab. With a visually stimulating appearance, the training area features actual Commerce retail store equipment -- including teller stations and even a miniature size walk-in bank vault -- to simulate a branch environment. The Call Center at Commerce Center houses more than 30 representatives in high-energy, motivating surroundings. The hub of the Call Center is a high-tech raised platform from which team leaders proactively manage resources to maximize service levels. The Call Center's technology also enables the bank to forecast staffing needs down to the half-hour based on historical data. Commerce Bank/Harrisburg, "America's Most Convenient Bank," opened its first office in 1985. In the years since, the bank has cultivated a unique retail model that has produced continuous strong growth. The bank has doubled its number of branches in Pennsylvania in recent years, growing a network of 28 stores in Berks, Cumberland, Dauphin, Lebanon and York counties. Commerce's hallmark products and services include seven-day banking, free personal checking, free instant-issue ATM/Visa check card, free interactive Penny Arcade coin-counting machines, free online banking and 24/7 bank-by-phone. In addition to retail banking, Commerce offers a diverse portfolio of commercial banking services including term loans, commercial mortgages, commercial leasing and lines of credit, and cash management services. Commerce Bank/Harrisburg currently has assets exceeding $1.6 billion. For more information about Commerce Bank/Harrisburg, visit the bank's web site at commercepc.com. Editor's Note: To arrange media tours of Commerce Center including photography, please contact Jason Kirsch at (717) 412-6200 or [email protected]. Contact: Commerce Bank/Harrisburg, NA Jason S. Kirsch, 717-412-6200 [email protected]