Tonight the city council of Watertown, Massachusetts, will debate whether a local diversity-education program called "No Place for Hate" should be kicked out of town. The problem with the program is that it is supported by the"No Place for Hate!" proclaims ADL!: (some exceptions may apply, inquire no further for details, says fine print) Anti-Defamation League. And the problem with that is that the ADL has promoted a hate-campaign against 20 percent of the population of Watertown. So you can understand why the townsfolk are perturbed.

I say "hate-campaign" because I assume that "hate" is how the ADL would normally characterize genocide denial, which is precisely what Abe Foxman's ADL has promoted at the expense of the Armenian community, which includes one in five Watertown residents. The Armenian Genocide, the murder of up to 1.5 million Armenians from 1915-1923, is a historical fact. As Holocaust scholar Deborah Lipstadt puts it, “It's not a matter of debate. There is an overwhelming consensus among historians that work in this area that there is no question that this is a genocide. You can't deny this history."

Yet as I’ve written before, Abraham Foxman, head of the ADL, has sought to please his Turkish friends by announcing that iPioneering Historiographer Abraham Foxman: Foxman (here demonstrating Claw manuever) applies his theories differently to Jews and Armenianst is not the place of the Jewish community, nor the place of the U.S. Congress, “to be the arbiter of other people’s history.” The Armenians and Turks need to work out their own history, he says.

This is a novel approach to the study of history. Normally, believe it or not, historians determine historical truth, and we expect the warring parties to accommodate themselves to it. Thus, we don’t expect Bosnian Muslims and Serbs to decide between themselves what took place at Srebrenica. But in this case, Foxman bypasses the historians and asks the Armenians to negotiate their history with those who both perpetrated the genocide and deny the genocide.

For Jews, of course, Foxman takes the more traditional approach to history. He has no time for those who reject the historical record of the Holocaust, and hasn’t yet asked Jews to negotiate a compromise with such people.

Along with Foxman’s new historiographical theories, he’s also showing a new modesty. Who are we to judge? asks Foxman, reprimanding those among us with the hubris to acknowledge genocide. The problem is that Abe won’tI'll Leave that Question To More Learned Men!: The modest Iranian leader extend the same courtesy to others. For example, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a man just as humble as Foxman, has shyly announced that he doesn’t “want to confirm or deny the Holocaust.” And yet strangely, Foxman condemns Ahmadinejad for “openly questioning the Holocaust.” What more could you ask for, Abe? If Ahmadinejad ever decides that the Holocaust probably did take place, I know you’ll offer him your wise counsel and suggest that he keep that opinion to himself. It would be inappropriate for Ahmadinejad to come to a judgment about the Holocaust, no? Why is it his business?

It’s become something of a truism that youngish Jews are sick of hearing about the Holocaust. I don’t think that’s exactly true. I think we’re just sick of hearing people like Abe Foxman talk about the Holocaust. When I look back at the Jewish day school and Hebrew school I attended--where teachers so poignantly explained the various timeless moral lessons of the Holocaust, and how through the tragedies of our history the Jewish people acquired a moral seriousness and sensitivity to suffering—I remember all this and wonder what the hell the community thought it was doing. Why did it spend such time time building up this high estimation of the moral character of the Jewish community, if only to allow men such as Abraham Foxman to make the most mortifying possible public mockery of that character? We are perplexed that young Jews show little interest in Jewish organizational life. Perhaps if the community showed more self-respect, it would earn more from its youth.

In any case, I hope that the Jewish community acquires the courage of its own solemn teachings, and demands that its representatives and organizations not do to others what we find hateful when done to us. But no one’s counting on that. So for now I’ll just wish the Armenian community of Watertown, Massachusetts the very best tonight. I hope that they can encourage their neighbors to honor the “zero tolerance for bigotry” slogan of the NPFH campaign, and do what the Jewish community hasn’t yet been able to: tell an unhealthy organization to shape up, or get lost.

NEXT: We Bloody Freakin Won!