By Tom Tugend, Contributing Editor, Jewish Journal
MAY 4, 2007
The Turkish ambassador to the United States, Nabi Sensoy, dropped in at The Jewish Journal a couple of weeks ago for an hourlong conversation with its editors. Last Friday evening, Archbishop Hovnan Derderian of the Armenian Church of North America stood on the bimah of Valley Beth Shalom, hugged its rabbi and called the occasion a turning point in Armenian-Jewish relations.
All the attention is flattering, but its underlying cause confronts the Jewish community with choices that -- perhaps oversimplified -- pits its moral values and sympathies against the realpolitik of American and Israeli policymakers.
At the root of the split is a wound that has been festering since 1915, when Muslim Turkey and its Ottoman Empire were fighting Russia, France and Britain during World War I. Charging that the Christian Armenian minority in eastern Turkey was collaborating with the invading Russians, Turkey deported, starved and brutalized much of its Armenian population.
According to the Armenians, backed by predominant historical analysis, between 1915 and 1923, Turkey killed 1.5 million Armenian civilians in a planned genocide. Turkey maintains that some 300,000 Armenians died, but that an equal number of Turks perished, and that both sides were victims of chaotic wartime conditions, disease and famine, not a predetermined extermination.
Turks refer to the wartime slaughter by the Arabic word mukapele, which Sensoy translated during a phone interview as "mutual massacre."
Year after year, Armenian Americans have commemorated the beginning of the slaughter by demanding that modern Turkey formally acknowledge the persecutions and deaths of their ancestors as the Armenian Genocide. Just as consistently, the Ankara government has refused.
This year, the inflammation of the old wound has intensified, marked by the introduction of a congressional resolution that the U.S. government officially recognize the killing of Armenians as a genocide. Both on Capitol Hill and on the grass-roots level, the strongest outside voices supporting the Armenian cause are those of Jews, Los Angeles Jews at that, and the reasons seem obvious.
"How can we, the people decimated by the Holocaust, stand on the sidelines?" asked Rabbi Harold Schulweis. "Perhaps if the world had stood up against the first genocide of the 20th century against the Armenians, the Holocaust might have been prevented.
"It is obscene for us, of all people, to quibble about definitions," said Schulweis, spiritual leader of Valley Beth Shalom in Encino and long in the forefront of social and interfaith initiatives.
In 2004, Schulweis channeled his demand for action against world genocides by founding Jewish World Watch, focusing first on the ongoing massacres in Darfur. This year, the nonprofit was organized well enough to expand its reach, sponsoring a joint commemoration of "the 92nd anniversary of the Armenian Genocide" at Shulweis' temple.
At a dinner preceding the Friday evening Shabbat service, Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, Derderian and Janice Kamenir-Reznik, president of Jewish World Watch, struck a common theme. Jews and Armenians, two ancient peoples who have preserved their faiths and cultures through long diasporas, must be as one in remembering both their genocides and preventing such catastrophes in the future.
At the overflow dinner for 500, the majority Armenians, Rabbi Edward M. Feinstein of the host synagogue noted other striking similarities between the two ethnic groups.
"We both like to talk, loudly, we both like to eat and we both have reverence for our churches and synagogues, even if we don't attend services," he said.
Derderian, a youthful-looking prelate at 49 and a striking figure in a black robe and hood, pointed to some demographic similarities, as well. There are some 450,000 Armenians in Los Angeles, compared to 550,000 Jews, he said, and as primate of his church's Western Diocese, encompassing 14 states, he leads a flock of 800,000.
During the Shabbat service attended by some 1,100 Jewish and Armenian worshippers, Schulweis summarized his position, saying, "Of genocides, we cannot say, 'Mine is mine and yours is yours,' because both are ours."
The combined choirs of Valley Beth Shalom and St. Peter Armenian Church movingly concluded the evening with the singing of the Armenian and Israeli national anthems, both expressing the longing for lost homelands, followed by "America the Beautiful."
The Jewish and Armenian communities will come together again on May 15, when Jewish World Watch, now supported by 54 synagogues, will honor two Armenian scholars and activists at Adat Ari El synagogue. The honorees of the I Witness Award will be filmmaker Michael Hagopian and UCLA professor Richard G. Hovannisian.
Jewish support for the Armenian grievances has not been unanimous. Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Burbank), who represents a large Armenian constituency and has introduced House Resolution 106 calling for U.S. recognition of the 1915 genocide, has sent letters to four Jewish organizations criticizing their positions.
The Jewish legislator admonished the American Jewish Committee (AJ Committee), B'nai B'rith International, the Anti-Defamation League and Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), which had jointly transmitted to House leaders a letter from the organized Jewish Community of Turkey.
In the letter, addressed to the AJCommittee, the Turkish Jewish leaders expressed their concern that the Schiff resolution "has the clear possibility of potentially endangering the interests of the United States" by straining Turkey's relations with Washington and Israel.
JINSA supported the letter's view, while the Jewish Telegraphic Agency quoted ADL National Director Abraham Foxman as stating that "I don't think congressional action will reconcile the issue. The resolution takes a position, it comes to a judgment."
Foxman added that "the Turks and Armenians need to revisit their past. The Jewish community shouldn't be the arbiter of that history nor should the U.S. Congress."
In his written response, Schiff took the action of the American Jewish organizations as "tantamount to an implicit and inappropriate endorsement of the position of the letter's authors."
He added, "I cannot see how major Jewish American organizations can in good conscience and in any way support efforts to deny the undeniable."
In a phone interview, Schiff reaffirmed his criticism of the Jewish organizations and surmised that their opposition was influenced by Israel, worried about harming its good relationship with Turkey.
"It would be a terrible mistake if the Israeli government became involved in this matter," he said.
Schiff noted that his resolution, now under consideration by the House Foreign Affairs Committee chaired by Rep. Tom Lantos (D-San Mateo), is co-sponsored by 21 out of 30 Jewish representatives and by eight out of 13 Jewish senators in a companion resolution. He acknowledged that he is under considerable pressure by the Bush administration and by former fellow legislators now working for the Turkish lobby, which Schiff described as "one of the most powerful" in Washington.
The Turkish Embassy in Washington, D.C., has also joined directly in the struggle for the hearts and minds of the American people in general and American Jews in particular. It has cultivated close relationships with Jewish leaders and has retained a well-connected Jewish lobbyist to work with the Jewish media.
The embassy recently placed full-page ads in The New York Times and Los Angeles Times outlining a proposal to Armenia to appoint a joint commission of historians, with full access to national archives, "to study the events of 1915 and share the findings with the international public." In a phone call from his embassy, Sensoy confirmed Turkey's 2005 offer to Armenia for establishing a joint commission and urged that the United States and other countries participate in the investigation.
Citing the Turkish version of the 1915 events, Sensoy said that during the Russian-Turkish battles of World War I, a large number of Armenians supported the enemy, "and we had to relocate the Armenians in eastern Turkey to Syria and Lebanon." The result, he said, was "a kind of civil war," in which each side lost hundreds of thousands of lives.
"We are not saying we have all the truth, but we cannot accept guilt for the worst of crimes without knowing what the truth is," Sensoy said.
Asked why Turkey could not put the whole problem behind it by issuing an apology for deeds committed by a different regime at a different time, Sensoy replied, "The Ottoman past is part of our glorious history, and we cannot disassociate ourselves from the past."
On his special outreach to American Jews, Sensoy commented that "Jews are in the best position to understand the problem. We also have the best relations with Israel."
Drawing a parallel between Auschwitz and the disasters of 1915 "would be a disservice" to the memory of the Holocaust, said Sensoy. "After all, no Jews took up arms against the Germans and killed thousands of them."
Caught somewhat uneasily in the middle is the small, unorganized Turkish Jewish community of 100-200 residents of Los Angeles.
Dr. Moshe Arditi, vice chair of the pediatrics department at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, said he is pleased by "the recent movement toward an opening up in Turkey." He pointed to a massive rally by both Turks and Armenians in Istanbul to protest the murder of a local Armenian journalist.
Arditi endorsed a "historical fact-finding study" of the 1915 events that "could lead to dialogue between the parties."
But the joint commission proposal finds no resonance among critics of Turkey. Derderian, who described himself as "a grandson of survivors," rejected any dialogue before Turkish recognition of the Armenian Genocide.
Schiff commented that "there is no question among historians that what happened was genocide. It's like asking the Sudanese government to judge what's happening in Darfur."
Schulweis drew a different analogy, saying, "The proposal is similar to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad calling a conference to examine the truth of the Holocaust."
Genocide' reporting rankles newsroom at Times
While the pending congressional resolution to officially designate the 1915 mass killings of Armenians as the "Armenian Genocide" has affected the Jewish community, it has also triggered an acrimonious confrontation at the Los Angeles Times.
The tempest at the already storm-tossed Times, according to aggrieved reporters, goes to the highly sensitive question of whether a journalist can write an objective story on an emotional topic affecting his own ethnic group.
In other words, can a Jewish reporter write a balanced article on Holocaust denial, or a black reporter on racial discrimination?
As the current Times imbroglio shows, these are not abstract debating points, especially in as diverse and multicultural a city as Los Angeles.
Here is how the story developed, as mainly reported through internal Times' emails with some added commentary posted by former Times staffer Kevin Roderick in his blog www.laobserved.com, a daily must-read for journalists and media mavens.
In the middle of April, veteran Times reporter Mark Arax, of Armenian descent, wrote an article on the pending congressional resolution, focusing on how it had split the Jewish community into opposing sides.
In a highly unusual move, the story was killed by managing editor Doug Frantz because he felt that Arax "had expressed personal views about the topic in a public manner and therefore was not a disinterested party."
The "personal view" cited by Frantz was apparently a letter sent in 2005 reminding Times management that the paper's established policy was to refer to the 1915 killings in the old Ottoman Empire as the "Armenian Genocide."
The letter, which Frantz has described as a "petition," was signed by six journalists -- Arax and four other Armenian Americans and Henry Weinstein, the paper's respected legal correspondent, who is Jewish.
As anger about the article's fate inside the newsroom and outside in the Armenian community rose, top editor Jim O'Shea sent a memo to his staff. He declared that Arax's story had not been spiked but merely held for additional reporting, and that he said he would never take a reporter off a story on the basis of his ethnicity.
Also stoking the fire were charges that Frantz, who served as bureau chief in Turkey for both the New York and Los Angeles Times, was taking a pro-Turkish view on the Armenian question, a charge denied by Frantz and his superiors.
At press time, Arax was demanding a public apology from Frantz. Weinstein and Frantz declined to comment for this story.
Whatever the outcome of the Times conflict or the congressional resolution, we are again reminded that the ethnic wounds of 60, 90 or 1,000 years ago rarely heal completely.
Source: http://www.jewishworldwatch.org/news/press_articles/05_04_07-1.html
05/01/07: LA Times: 'Never again' for Armenians too
Several American Jewish groups abandon their anti-genocide zeal when it comes to Turkey's massacre of Armenians.
By Daniel Sokatch and David N. Myers
DANIEL SOKATCH is executive director of the Progressive Jewish Alliance. DAVID N. MYERS teaches Jewish history at UCLA.
May 1, 2007
THIS YEAR, Congress established April 15 as Holocaust Memorial Day, commemorating the Nazi genocide of European Jewry. Just nine days later, on April 24, Armenians throughout the world observed the commemoration of their great tragedy: the massacre of as many as 1.5 million Armenians at the hands of the Turks that began in 1915.
In many ways, it was the 20th century's first genocide that helped set the stage for its largest, including Rwanda and now Darfur. Adolf Hitler reportedly said, on the eve of his invasion of Poland in 1939, "Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?"
For the last 60 years, the Jewish community has labored to avoid granting Hitler, in the words of philosopher Emil Fackenheim, "a posthumous victory." Jews have taken as their motto "never again," and most tend to understand that this charge refers to all of humanity, not only to fellow Jews. One of the last surviving leaders of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, Simha "Kazik" Rotem, once said that the central lesson of the Holocaust to him was that the Jewish people should stand vigilant against genocidal acts directed at any people.
This is why it is troubling that some major Jewish organizations have lined up in support of Turkey's efforts to keep the U.S. Congress from recognizing the Armenian massacres as an act of genocide. The Anti-Defamation League (ADL), the American Jewish Committee (AJC), the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA) and B'nai B'rith International recently conveyed a letter from the Turkish Jewish community opposing a resolution recognizing the genocide.
The ADL and the JINSA also added their own statements of opposition, suggesting that the massacre of Armenians was a matter for historians, not legislators, to decide.
The American Jewish community has insisted, and rightly so, that the U.S. Congress, the United Nations and other governmental bodies formally commemorate the Holocaust. Why should Jews not insist on the same in this case, especially given the widespread scholarly consensus that what happened to the Armenians from 1915 to 1923 was genocide? After all, the man who coined the term "genocide" to refer to the Holocaust — the Polish-Jewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin — cited the Armenian massacres as a precedent.
The unfortunate and well-known answer to the question is that Turkey has fiercely opposed efforts to call the Armenian massacres "genocide." Moreover, it has asked its friends to help beat back the attempts at historical recognition.
Jewish opposition to recognizing the Armenian genocide comes mainly from a desire to safeguard the important strategic relationship between Turkey and Israel. Alone among the world's Muslim nations, Turkey has forged close military, political and economic ties with Israel. In addition, Jews remember with a deep sense of gratitude that Turkey served as an important haven for their forebears fleeing persecution, from the time of the Spanish Expulsion in 1492 to the dark days of Nazism and beyond. And it is not just that Turkey has been kind to Israel and the Jews. It is a critically important U.S. ally in a dangerous region racked by religious extremism.
Nobody is suggesting that Jews forget Turkey's historic friendship. But it is a mistake for Jews — or, for that matter, anyone — to surrender the moral imperative of condemning genocide in the hopes of avoiding a perceived, but by no means necessary, strategic loss. Similarly, it would be a mistake for Turkey to hinge its own strategic interests on the denial of past criminal acts. Coming to terms with the past, as democratic Germany has done in the aftermath of the Holocaust and South Africa in the wake of apartheid, is the best path to political legitimacy.
Turkey, a trusted ally and friend of the Jews and the United States, must come to terms with its past for its own sake. It is that battle that leading Turkish intellectuals, including Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk and martyred Armenian activist Hrant Dink, have been waging so nobly. We should do all in our power to strengthen the hands of these figures and avoid the abyss of historical revisionism.
Sixty years (and millions of historical documents) later, the world still has to contend with those who deny the Holocaust. We need only recall the shocking words and deeds of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on this score.
In response to such denials, all decent-minded people, and Jews in particular, must continue to declare loudly "never again" — not only to future genocides but also to the attempted denial of past genocides, regardless of who the perpetrators or victims are.
Source: http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-myers1may01,0,2074553.story?coll=la-news-comment-opinions
04/27/07: Jewish Journal: U.S. Jews enter debate on Armenian/Turkish history
By Ron Kampeas, Jewish Telegraphic Agency
United States Jewish groups are caught in the middle of a growing political struggle between two of their traditional friends, Turks and Armenians.
Top Turkish officials and Turkish Jewish leaders in recent weeks have sought help from U.S. Jewish leaders to stave off an effort in the U.S. Congress to define World War I-era massacres of Armenians by Ottoman Turks as genocide.
Rep. Adam Schiff, a Jewish congressman whose district includes Burbank and Glendale and stretches to Temple City, represents a substantial Armenian constituency. He has tried multiple times to pass such a resolution and this time has garnered nearly 200 co-sponsors for his non-binding resolution (HR106), and believes he has the backing of Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco), speaker of the House of Representatives. Pelosi has met with U.S. Armenian leaders.
"The fevered intensity of the lobbying shows they realize it has the strongest support in recent years," Schiff said.
Los Angeles-based Jewish World Watch (JWW) this year has also become involved in the issue; on Friday, April 27, the Jewish and Armenian communities will observe the 92nd anniversary of the Armenian genocide in a Shabbat dinner at Valley Beth Shalom in Encino, with His Eminence Archbishop Hovnan Derderian, Primate, Western Diocese, American Church of North America as the guest of honor. JWW is also actively urging Congress to support HR 106.
The Turkish lobbying has had some effect. B'nai B'rith International, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), the American Jewish Committee and the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA) are set to convey a letter from Turkish Jews who oppose the resolution to U.S. congressional leaders.
The ADL and JINSA have added their own statements opposing the bill.
"I don't think congressional action will help reconcile the issue," said ADL National Director Abraham Foxman. "The resolution takes a position; it comes to a judgment.
"The Turks and Armenians need to revisit their past. The Jewish community shouldn't be the arbiter of that history, nor should the U.S. Congress."
Schiff says the resolution reflects the historical reality. He notes that Raphael Lemkin, a Jew who coined the term "genocide" in 1943 to describe Nazi actions against Jews, cited the Armenian massacres as a precedent.
The historical parallels between the two events help explain the Jewish community's reluctance to back the Turkish effort to stop Schiff's resolution.
Off the record, Jewish officials say a community struggling to stem the tide of Holocaust revisionism is hardly in a position to endorse efforts to deny what Lemkin and other Holocaust chroniclers have described as the Holocaust's antecedent.
Estimates of the number of Armenians killed in the massacres vary from 300,000 -- the official Turkish number -- to more than 1 million.
Additionally, Jewish and Armenian community leaders have a history of friendly relations. Armenians, who are Christians, have in the past let Israeli leaders know that if the Old City of Jerusalem is partitioned in a peace agreement with the Palestinians, they would prefer that the Armenian Quarter remain under Israeli control.
"I'm pleased Jewish organizations have resisted efforts by Turkey," Schiff said. "I would encourage them to go beyond resisting pressure to affirmative support to recognize this genocide."
That's not likely. Turkey is the closest Muslim ally to the United States and Israel, and participates in joint military exercises with both nations. Jews also appreciate the relatively safe existence Turkey's Jewish community has enjoyed for centuries.
Significantly, a Jewish community delegation, led by community president Silvyo Ovadya, was one of three delegations Turkey sent to Washington in recent months. The other two were Turkish Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul's entourage in February, and a multiparty delegation of six senior lawmakers that arrived this week. All three met with U.S. Jewish leaders, as well as administration and congressional officials.
The Jewish delegation, whose visit coincided with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee's annual policy forum in March, warned U.S. Jewish leaders that passage of the resolution would harm Turkey's Western tilt and could make things uncomfortable for the country's Jews.
The parliamentary delegation predicted no such backlash against the Jews, appreciating the Jewish decision to hold back and Israel's own reluctance to characterize the 1915 massacres as genocide.
"Turkey and Israel have a vested interest in each other's welfare and safety," said Sukru Mustafa Elekdag of the opposition Republican People's Party.
Instead, they warned of broader consequences for the U.S.-Turkish alliance.
"It will hurt the feelings of Turks," said Yasar Yakis, a founding member of the ruling Justice and Development Party and the delegation's leader. The delegates cited the experience of France, where the National Assembly last year recognized the massacres as genocide. Turkey has since rolled back some commercial ties with France.
"If it passes, I cannot exclude very important negative consequences on all aspects of relations, including defense relations," Yakis said.
If so, it would typify Turkey's behavior toward Israel. Turkey frequently issues harsh denunciations of Israeli policy toward the Palestinians, yet bristles and threatens consequences over the merest hint of Israeli criticism of Turkey.
Elekdag said the genocide resolution could become an issue in elections later this year.
"Our public is extremely sensitive on these matters. Unwanted events could happen," he said.
Turks perceive the push as a show of Armenia's muscle, the lawmakers said. They believe the Armenian government wants to distract international attention from its treatment of its native Azerbaijanis. Turks feel close to Azerbaijanis, Muslims who speak a Turkic language.
The parliamentarians wondered why U.S. Jews were holding back from fully opposing the resolution, and speculated that it might have to do with the Turkish government's decision last year to meet with leaders of Hamas, the ruling party in the Palestinian Authority that rejects Israel's existence and embraces terrorism.
Onur Oymen, vice president of the opposition Republican People's Party, said Israel had moved on from the Hamas controversy, and so should U.S. Jews.
"The Jewish community should not change its position because of one moment," he said, noting that his party had vehemently opposed the meeting.
The Turkish Embassy in Washington ran a full-page ad in Monday's New York Times calling for a commission of historians from Armenia, Turkey and other nations to investigate the World War I-era events.
"Support efforts to examine history, not legislate it," the ad said.
Turkey would abide by whatever the commission concludes, the visiting delegations have said.
Schiff ridiculed the idea. He likened it to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's recent conference to provide an "objective" opinion on the Holocaust, essentially an exercise in Holocaust denial.
"It's somewhat akin to Ahmadinejad hosting a conference on the Holocaust to invite people to deny it," he said. "The idea of a conference I find an offensive stratagem."
Source: http://www.jewishjournal.com/home/print.php?id=17582
United States Jewish groups are caught in the middle of a growing political struggle between two of their traditional friends, Turks and Armenians.
Top Turkish officials and Turkish Jewish leaders in recent weeks have sought help from U.S. Jewish leaders to stave off an effort in the U.S. Congress to define World War I-era massacres of Armenians by Ottoman Turks as genocide.
Rep. Adam Schiff, a Jewish congressman whose district includes Burbank and Glendale and stretches to Temple City, represents a substantial Armenian constituency. He has tried multiple times to pass such a resolution and this time has garnered nearly 200 co-sponsors for his non-binding resolution (HR106), and believes he has the backing of Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco), speaker of the House of Representatives. Pelosi has met with U.S. Armenian leaders.
"The fevered intensity of the lobbying shows they realize it has the strongest support in recent years," Schiff said.
Los Angeles-based Jewish World Watch (JWW) this year has also become involved in the issue; on Friday, April 27, the Jewish and Armenian communities will observe the 92nd anniversary of the Armenian genocide in a Shabbat dinner at Valley Beth Shalom in Encino, with His Eminence Archbishop Hovnan Derderian, Primate, Western Diocese, American Church of North America as the guest of honor. JWW is also actively urging Congress to support HR 106.
The Turkish lobbying has had some effect. B'nai B'rith International, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), the American Jewish Committee and the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA) are set to convey a letter from Turkish Jews who oppose the resolution to U.S. congressional leaders.
The ADL and JINSA have added their own statements opposing the bill.
"I don't think congressional action will help reconcile the issue," said ADL National Director Abraham Foxman. "The resolution takes a position; it comes to a judgment.
"The Turks and Armenians need to revisit their past. The Jewish community shouldn't be the arbiter of that history, nor should the U.S. Congress."
Schiff says the resolution reflects the historical reality. He notes that Raphael Lemkin, a Jew who coined the term "genocide" in 1943 to describe Nazi actions against Jews, cited the Armenian massacres as a precedent.
The historical parallels between the two events help explain the Jewish community's reluctance to back the Turkish effort to stop Schiff's resolution.
Off the record, Jewish officials say a community struggling to stem the tide of Holocaust revisionism is hardly in a position to endorse efforts to deny what Lemkin and other Holocaust chroniclers have described as the Holocaust's antecedent.
Estimates of the number of Armenians killed in the massacres vary from 300,000 -- the official Turkish number -- to more than 1 million.
Additionally, Jewish and Armenian community leaders have a history of friendly relations. Armenians, who are Christians, have in the past let Israeli leaders know that if the Old City of Jerusalem is partitioned in a peace agreement with the Palestinians, they would prefer that the Armenian Quarter remain under Israeli control.
"I'm pleased Jewish organizations have resisted efforts by Turkey," Schiff said. "I would encourage them to go beyond resisting pressure to affirmative support to recognize this genocide."
That's not likely. Turkey is the closest Muslim ally to the United States and Israel, and participates in joint military exercises with both nations. Jews also appreciate the relatively safe existence Turkey's Jewish community has enjoyed for centuries.
Significantly, a Jewish community delegation, led by community president Silvyo Ovadya, was one of three delegations Turkey sent to Washington in recent months. The other two were Turkish Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul's entourage in February, and a multiparty delegation of six senior lawmakers that arrived this week. All three met with U.S. Jewish leaders, as well as administration and congressional officials.
The Jewish delegation, whose visit coincided with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee's annual policy forum in March, warned U.S. Jewish leaders that passage of the resolution would harm Turkey's Western tilt and could make things uncomfortable for the country's Jews.
The parliamentary delegation predicted no such backlash against the Jews, appreciating the Jewish decision to hold back and Israel's own reluctance to characterize the 1915 massacres as genocide.
"Turkey and Israel have a vested interest in each other's welfare and safety," said Sukru Mustafa Elekdag of the opposition Republican People's Party.
Instead, they warned of broader consequences for the U.S.-Turkish alliance.
"It will hurt the feelings of Turks," said Yasar Yakis, a founding member of the ruling Justice and Development Party and the delegation's leader. The delegates cited the experience of France, where the National Assembly last year recognized the massacres as genocide. Turkey has since rolled back some commercial ties with France.
"If it passes, I cannot exclude very important negative consequences on all aspects of relations, including defense relations," Yakis said.
If so, it would typify Turkey's behavior toward Israel. Turkey frequently issues harsh denunciations of Israeli policy toward the Palestinians, yet bristles and threatens consequences over the merest hint of Israeli criticism of Turkey.
Elekdag said the genocide resolution could become an issue in elections later this year.
"Our public is extremely sensitive on these matters. Unwanted events could happen," he said.
Turks perceive the push as a show of Armenia's muscle, the lawmakers said. They believe the Armenian government wants to distract international attention from its treatment of its native Azerbaijanis. Turks feel close to Azerbaijanis, Muslims who speak a Turkic language.
The parliamentarians wondered why U.S. Jews were holding back from fully opposing the resolution, and speculated that it might have to do with the Turkish government's decision last year to meet with leaders of Hamas, the ruling party in the Palestinian Authority that rejects Israel's existence and embraces terrorism.
Onur Oymen, vice president of the opposition Republican People's Party, said Israel had moved on from the Hamas controversy, and so should U.S. Jews.
"The Jewish community should not change its position because of one moment," he said, noting that his party had vehemently opposed the meeting.
The Turkish Embassy in Washington ran a full-page ad in Monday's New York Times calling for a commission of historians from Armenia, Turkey and other nations to investigate the World War I-era events.
"Support efforts to examine history, not legislate it," the ad said.
Turkey would abide by whatever the commission concludes, the visiting delegations have said.
Schiff ridiculed the idea. He likened it to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's recent conference to provide an "objective" opinion on the Holocaust, essentially an exercise in Holocaust denial.
"It's somewhat akin to Ahmadinejad hosting a conference on the Holocaust to invite people to deny it," he said. "The idea of a conference I find an offensive stratagem."
Source: http://www.jewishjournal.com/home/print.php?id=17582
04/26/07: Zaman: Jewish groups lobby against ‘Armenian genocide’ resolution in US Congress
In a letter addressing influential members of US Congress, including head of the House of Representatives' Foreign Relations Committee Tom Lantos, US-based Jewish groups demanded that voting on congressional resolutions urging the US administration to recognize an alleged genocide of Armenians be delayed.
The letter was jointly signed by B'nai B'rith International, the Anti-Defamation League, the American Jewish Committee and the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA). The letter included an annex -- a letter signed by the Turkish Jewish Community -- which said maintenance of good relations between Turkey and Israel and among Turkey, the US and Israel were crucial at a time when the US faces troubles in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Two separate resolutions are pending at the US Senate and the House of Representatives, urging the administration to recognize the World war I era killings of Anatolian Armenians as genocide. Turkey has warned that passage of the resolutions in the US Congress would seriously harm relations with Washington and impair cooperation in Iraq and Afghanistan. The US administration has said it was opposed to the resolution, yet the congressional process is an independent one. In his message for April 24, which Armenians claim marks the anniversary of the beginning of a systematic genocide campaign at the hands of the late Ottoman Empire, US President George W. Bush remained adhered to the administration policy of not referring to the incidents as genocide.
"Each year on this day, we pause to remember the victims of one of the greatest tragedies of the 20th century, when as many as 1.5 million Armenians lost their lives in the final years of the Ottoman Empire, many of them victims of mass killings and forced exile," Bush said. Turkey categorically rejects the claims of genocide and says as many Turks were killed when the Armenians took up arms against the Ottoman Empire in collaboration with the invading Russian army.
Bush, in his message, also called for the normalization of ties between Turkey and Armenia: "Today, we remember the past and also look forward to a brighter future. We commend the individuals in Armenia and Turkey who are working to normalize the relationship between their two countries. A sincere and open examination of the historic events of the late-Ottoman period is an essential part of this process. The United States supports and encourages those in both countries who are working to build a shared understanding of history as a basis for a more hopeful future," he said.
The Bush administration dismissed its former ambassador in Yerevan last year after he violated the US policy and called the events "genocide." Ambassador John Evans was insistent on his stance when he spoke at the National Press Club in Washington and said Turkey should accept "historical facts." He also claimed that Turkey's efforts had played a role in the abrupt termination of his duty as the US ambassador in Yerevan.
Source: http://www.todayszaman.com/tz-web/detaylar.do?load=detay&link=109482
The letter was jointly signed by B'nai B'rith International, the Anti-Defamation League, the American Jewish Committee and the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA). The letter included an annex -- a letter signed by the Turkish Jewish Community -- which said maintenance of good relations between Turkey and Israel and among Turkey, the US and Israel were crucial at a time when the US faces troubles in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Two separate resolutions are pending at the US Senate and the House of Representatives, urging the administration to recognize the World war I era killings of Anatolian Armenians as genocide. Turkey has warned that passage of the resolutions in the US Congress would seriously harm relations with Washington and impair cooperation in Iraq and Afghanistan. The US administration has said it was opposed to the resolution, yet the congressional process is an independent one. In his message for April 24, which Armenians claim marks the anniversary of the beginning of a systematic genocide campaign at the hands of the late Ottoman Empire, US President George W. Bush remained adhered to the administration policy of not referring to the incidents as genocide.
"Each year on this day, we pause to remember the victims of one of the greatest tragedies of the 20th century, when as many as 1.5 million Armenians lost their lives in the final years of the Ottoman Empire, many of them victims of mass killings and forced exile," Bush said. Turkey categorically rejects the claims of genocide and says as many Turks were killed when the Armenians took up arms against the Ottoman Empire in collaboration with the invading Russian army.
Bush, in his message, also called for the normalization of ties between Turkey and Armenia: "Today, we remember the past and also look forward to a brighter future. We commend the individuals in Armenia and Turkey who are working to normalize the relationship between their two countries. A sincere and open examination of the historic events of the late-Ottoman period is an essential part of this process. The United States supports and encourages those in both countries who are working to build a shared understanding of history as a basis for a more hopeful future," he said.
The Bush administration dismissed its former ambassador in Yerevan last year after he violated the US policy and called the events "genocide." Ambassador John Evans was insistent on his stance when he spoke at the National Press Club in Washington and said Turkey should accept "historical facts." He also claimed that Turkey's efforts had played a role in the abrupt termination of his duty as the US ambassador in Yerevan.
Source: http://www.todayszaman.com/tz-web/detaylar.do?load=detay&link=109482
04/26/07: Turkish Daily News: Four Jewish groups back Turkey on Armenian genocide
Bush declines to use g-word in annual Armenian remembrance day statement
Umit Enginsoy
Washington – Turkish Daily News
Four large U.S. Jewish groups have lent support to Turkey's position in opposing the passage of two resolutions pending in Congress that call for officialrecognition of World War I-era killings of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire as genocide.
B'nai B'rith International, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), the American Jewish Committee and the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA) have recently conveyed a letter from Turkish Jews who oppose the resolution to U.S. congressional leaders, officials from the groups told the Turkish Daily News.
In their letter, leading Turkish Jews have urged congressional leaders to postpone considering the genocide measures. In conveying the letter to Congressofficials, the four U.S. Jewish groups tacitly agreed to its contents.
Going further, the ADL and JINSA have also added their own statements opposing the bill.
"I don't think congressional action will help reconcile the issue. The resolution takes a position; it comes to a judgment," said ADL National Director Abraham Foxman.
"The Turks and Armenians need to revisit their past. The Jewish community shouldn't be the arbiter of that history, nor should the U.S. Congress," he told JTA, a Jewish press organization.
But the four groups' move does not mean that U.S. Jews are united in opposing the genocide measures.
A number of other large U.S. Jewish organizations have distanced themselves from the controversy, while some of the resolutions' top sponsors and backers are Jewish.
One genocide legislation was introduced in the House of Representatives in late January, and an identical resolution later followed in the Senate.
Turkey is fighting against the measures' passage in both chambers, and it is not clear if or when the bills could be brought to a vote.
No g-word from Bush:
In a related development, U.S. President George W. Bush on Tuesday issued a statement of remembrance for the Armenians killed at the end of the Ottoman Empire, but stopped short of using the word genocide.
The Bush administration also opposes the genocide resolutions' passage. In identical letters sent to congressional leaders, Secretary of State CondoleezzaRice and Defense Secretary Robert Gates have warned that the measures' endorsement would hurt U.S. national interests in Iraq and Afghanistan.
"Each year on this day, we pause to remember the victims of one of the greatest tragedies of the 20th century, when as many as 1.5 million Armenians losttheir lives in the final years of the Ottoman Empire, many of them victims of mass killings and forced exile," Bush said in the statement.
"I join my fellow Americans and Armenian people around the world in commemorating this tragedy and honoring the memory of the innocent lives that were taken," he said. "The world must never forget this painful chapter of its history."
Also on Tuesday, former U.S. Ambassador to Armenia John Evans, who reportedly had his tour of duty cut short because he had referred to the killings asgenocide in violation of the official U.S. position, said that Turks needed to confront the facts and to show contrition before there can be reconciliation.
He also said that he believed Turkey's efforts had a role in his firing.
Nearly 100 Armenians gathered in front of the Turkish embassy here on Tuesday to protest against Ankara, while a smaller group of Turks held a rival demonstration across the street.
Source: http://www.turkishdailynews.com.tr/article.php?enewsid=71599
Umit Enginsoy
Washington – Turkish Daily News
Four large U.S. Jewish groups have lent support to Turkey's position in opposing the passage of two resolutions pending in Congress that call for officialrecognition of World War I-era killings of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire as genocide.
B'nai B'rith International, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), the American Jewish Committee and the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA) have recently conveyed a letter from Turkish Jews who oppose the resolution to U.S. congressional leaders, officials from the groups told the Turkish Daily News.
In their letter, leading Turkish Jews have urged congressional leaders to postpone considering the genocide measures. In conveying the letter to Congressofficials, the four U.S. Jewish groups tacitly agreed to its contents.
Going further, the ADL and JINSA have also added their own statements opposing the bill.
"I don't think congressional action will help reconcile the issue. The resolution takes a position; it comes to a judgment," said ADL National Director Abraham Foxman.
"The Turks and Armenians need to revisit their past. The Jewish community shouldn't be the arbiter of that history, nor should the U.S. Congress," he told JTA, a Jewish press organization.
But the four groups' move does not mean that U.S. Jews are united in opposing the genocide measures.
A number of other large U.S. Jewish organizations have distanced themselves from the controversy, while some of the resolutions' top sponsors and backers are Jewish.
One genocide legislation was introduced in the House of Representatives in late January, and an identical resolution later followed in the Senate.
Turkey is fighting against the measures' passage in both chambers, and it is not clear if or when the bills could be brought to a vote.
No g-word from Bush:
In a related development, U.S. President George W. Bush on Tuesday issued a statement of remembrance for the Armenians killed at the end of the Ottoman Empire, but stopped short of using the word genocide.
The Bush administration also opposes the genocide resolutions' passage. In identical letters sent to congressional leaders, Secretary of State CondoleezzaRice and Defense Secretary Robert Gates have warned that the measures' endorsement would hurt U.S. national interests in Iraq and Afghanistan.
"Each year on this day, we pause to remember the victims of one of the greatest tragedies of the 20th century, when as many as 1.5 million Armenians losttheir lives in the final years of the Ottoman Empire, many of them victims of mass killings and forced exile," Bush said in the statement.
"I join my fellow Americans and Armenian people around the world in commemorating this tragedy and honoring the memory of the innocent lives that were taken," he said. "The world must never forget this painful chapter of its history."
Also on Tuesday, former U.S. Ambassador to Armenia John Evans, who reportedly had his tour of duty cut short because he had referred to the killings asgenocide in violation of the official U.S. position, said that Turks needed to confront the facts and to show contrition before there can be reconciliation.
He also said that he believed Turkey's efforts had a role in his firing.
Nearly 100 Armenians gathered in front of the Turkish embassy here on Tuesday to protest against Ankara, while a smaller group of Turks held a rival demonstration across the street.
Source: http://www.turkishdailynews.com.tr/article.php?enewsid=71599
04/21/07: LATimes: Genocide Resolution Still Far From Certain
Larger forces may quash a measure on Armenian deaths in Turkey
By Richard Simon
WASHINGTON — It was the year 2000, and Rep. George P. Radanovich was on his way to the Capitol, expecting the House to pass a long-debated resolution he was sponsoring to recognize the Armenian genocide almost a century ago.
But just as the Republican from Mariposa prepared to step onto the House floor, Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) called off the vote because President Clinton personally had warned him that the symbolic but emotion-charged resolution could damage national security. Turkey, an important U.S. ally, long has insisted that the deaths of about 1 million Armenians in the waning days of the Ottoman Empire were not acts of genocide.
Seven years later, however, with Congress in the hands of Democrats, the resolution's backers believe they stand their best chance yet of winning passage—even though the Bush administration, like previous Democratic and Republican administrations, is working hard to kill it.
Radanovich is predicting that the resolution's fate once again will come down to a phone call between the president and the House speaker. This time the speaker is Democrat Nancy Pelosi of San Francisco, who as a member of the Congressional Caucus on Armenian Issues has been a passionate supporter of the genocide resolution.
But there's a rub:
During almost 20 years representing the Bay Area, home to thousands of voters of Armenian descent, Pelosi has had a relatively free hand in deciding her position on the volatile issue. But today she comes at it as a leader of the Democratic Party and a high-profile player in the U.S. government. She has shown, by her maneuvering on Iraq war funding and her recent visit to Syria, that she is not reluctant to take on the White House. And she has learned that Republicans will be quick to seize any opportunity to brand her a lightweight in foreign affairs.
Soner Cagaptay, director of the Turkish research program at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said Pelosi must now weigh the resolution "through a perspective she never did before."
Also in a bind
And the speaker is not the only one in a bind on the issue. The Israeli government and many of its U.S. supporters face similar crosscurrents because opposing genocide is at the core of the Jewish state, but Turkey is the closest thing to an ally Israel has in the Muslim world.
As a result, although its prospects are bright, the resolution is far from assured of passage.
Radanovich predicted that if the leadership decided to bring it to the floor, President Bush would call Pelosi and ask her not to do so, in the interest of national security. Then, said Radanovich, usually a Bush ally, "Pelosi is going to have to make a choice: to agree with the president or respectfully disagree." Radanovich said that he hoped she "respectfully disagrees" and puts the measure to a vote.
"If it gets to the floor," he said, "it passes."
Pelosi hasn't signaled whether she will schedule a vote.
The resolution is supported by 191 House members, the most sponsors it has had in 20 years, according to the Armenian National Committee of America. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) backs it, as do more than a quarter of his colleagues. California's two Democratic senators, Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer, are among them.
Mark Parris, a U.S. ambassador to Turkey during the Clinton administration who now is at the Brookings Institution, said that when the Democrats won control of Congress in November, "the Turks knew there was going to be a problem."
Almost everyone, including the Turkish government, agrees that hundreds of thousands of Armenians died in eastern Turkey between 1915 and 1918 as World War I and the crumbling of the Ottoman Empire engulfed the region in turmoil. It's how they perished that continues to stir ferocious disagreement.
Armenians, along with most historians and many Western governments, say more than 1 million died at the hands of Turkish forces—victims of either murder or mass deportation that led hundreds of thousands to succumb to exposure and disease.
Turks say there was no government-sponsored program targeting Armenians. Rather, they insist, large numbers of Armenians—and Turks—died in the chaos of war and an uprising staged by Armenians seeking to capitalize on a government weakened by World War I. "There were numerous deaths on both sides, due to war, disease, hunger and civil strife," the Turkish American Heritage Political Action Committee said in a recent letter to lawmakers.
Not forgetting
Though the events lie far in the past, Armenians and Armenian Americans have worked hard to keep the memory alive. The Turkish government and the ultranationalists who are resurgent in that country have worked equally hard to keep the U.S. government from taking a position.
Caught in the middle of the debate are Israel and its supporters. "It's a terrible predicament," said David Twersky of the American Jewish Congress. "As Jews, we have a tremendous reverence for the moral imperatives of history. But then there is the aspect that no Muslim country is closer to Israel than Turkey. So we feel paralyzed by a set of conflicting emotions."
Turkish officials say the renewed push to recognize an Armenian genocide could not come at a worse time.
The issue is so incendiary that even a symbolic recognition by Congress could embolden ultranationalists there to unleash enough anti-American sentiment to shut down important U.S. military bases and affect Washington's position throughout the Middle East.
Civilian and military leaders of the Turkish government, including Foreign Minister Abdullah G, met at a Washington hotel in February with more than a dozen leaders of major Jewish organizations in an effort to prevent action on the resolution. Members of the Anti-Defamation League and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) took part in the gathering.
"I believe the right thing for the Jewish community is to recognize the Armenian genocide as a fact, because virtually every historian and scholar of note in this area calls it a genocide," said Morton Klein, president of the Zionist Organization of America. "As friends of Turkey, we need to encourage them to just recognize the truth, honor the victims and be done with it. This would only enhance Turkey's standing in the world."
Other Jewish leaders, believing the security needs of the U.S. and Israel trump distant history, are siding with Turkey.
"I don't think a bill in Congress will help reconcile this issue. The resolution takes a position. It comes to a judgment," said Abraham H. Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League. "The Turks and Armenians need to revisit their past. The Jewish community shouldn't be the arbiter of that history," he said. "And I don't think the U.S. Congress should be the arbiter either."
Events planned
Tuesday is Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day, and events are planned across the country to press for action on Capitol Hill. There are an estimated 1 million to 1.5 million Americans of Armenian descent.
The pending congressional resolution calls on the president to "accurately characterize the systematic and deliberate annihilation of 1.5 million Armenians as genocide." It also calls on the president to ensure that U.S. foreign policy reflects "appropriate understanding and sensitivity concerning issues related to human rights, ethnic cleansing, and genocide documented in the United State record relating to the Armenian genocide."
Similar resolutions were approved by the House in 1975 and 1984, but never made it through the Senate. A 1990 resolution was blocked by a Senate filibuster. The outlook this year in that chamber is uncertain.
Although the word "genocide" stirs passionate feelings, Los Angeles Times policy is to use it because a large body of historical evidence and authoritative recent research support the accuracy of the term to describe the events.
At least one Turkish historian, Taner Akm, has concluded that the Turkish government did commit genocide against the Armenians. In his book "A Shameful Act," Akm cites numerous Ottoman documents that he says prove beyond a doubt that the Turkish leaders, under the cover of World War I, planned and carried out the murder of more than half of the Armenian people.
"For Turks to discuss the genocide openly, we would have to begin by conceding that some of our national fathers were thieves and murderers," said Akm, who teaches at the University of Minnesota. "This is why the subject is so taboo."
Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Burbank), one of the resolution's chief sponsors, said: "One way you can tell that prospects for passage have improved this year is the intensity of the opposition." Schiff's district is home to more Armenian Americans than any other.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates are among those working to scuttle the measure, contending it could jeopardize Turkey's support for U.S. troops fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan.
And a steady stream of Turkish officials, government-hired Washington lobbyists and companies with business interests in Turkey have been moving through Capitol offices, warning of a diplomatic backlash if the resolution passes.
Some say Pelosi's past support for the measure does not assure she will push for a vote anytime soon. No vote has been scheduled in the House Foreign Affairs Committee or the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, usually the first stops for such legislation.
"I'm absolutely confident that, ultimately, Speaker Pelosi will do what is in the best interests of our nation," said Rep. Robert Wexler (D-Fla.), co-chairman of the Congressional Caucus on Turkey and an opponent of the resolution. He noted that supplies destined for U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan pass through Turkey.
Radanovich dismissed such concern, saying: "The Turkish government will throw a fit, and three months later, they'll be over it."
Copyright 2007
The Los Angeles Times
Source: http://www.genocidewatch.org/news/TurkeyGenocideResolutionStillFarFromCertain21April2007.htm
By Richard Simon
WASHINGTON — It was the year 2000, and Rep. George P. Radanovich was on his way to the Capitol, expecting the House to pass a long-debated resolution he was sponsoring to recognize the Armenian genocide almost a century ago.
But just as the Republican from Mariposa prepared to step onto the House floor, Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) called off the vote because President Clinton personally had warned him that the symbolic but emotion-charged resolution could damage national security. Turkey, an important U.S. ally, long has insisted that the deaths of about 1 million Armenians in the waning days of the Ottoman Empire were not acts of genocide.
Seven years later, however, with Congress in the hands of Democrats, the resolution's backers believe they stand their best chance yet of winning passage—even though the Bush administration, like previous Democratic and Republican administrations, is working hard to kill it.
Radanovich is predicting that the resolution's fate once again will come down to a phone call between the president and the House speaker. This time the speaker is Democrat Nancy Pelosi of San Francisco, who as a member of the Congressional Caucus on Armenian Issues has been a passionate supporter of the genocide resolution.
But there's a rub:
During almost 20 years representing the Bay Area, home to thousands of voters of Armenian descent, Pelosi has had a relatively free hand in deciding her position on the volatile issue. But today she comes at it as a leader of the Democratic Party and a high-profile player in the U.S. government. She has shown, by her maneuvering on Iraq war funding and her recent visit to Syria, that she is not reluctant to take on the White House. And she has learned that Republicans will be quick to seize any opportunity to brand her a lightweight in foreign affairs.
Soner Cagaptay, director of the Turkish research program at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said Pelosi must now weigh the resolution "through a perspective she never did before."
Also in a bind
And the speaker is not the only one in a bind on the issue. The Israeli government and many of its U.S. supporters face similar crosscurrents because opposing genocide is at the core of the Jewish state, but Turkey is the closest thing to an ally Israel has in the Muslim world.
As a result, although its prospects are bright, the resolution is far from assured of passage.
Radanovich predicted that if the leadership decided to bring it to the floor, President Bush would call Pelosi and ask her not to do so, in the interest of national security. Then, said Radanovich, usually a Bush ally, "Pelosi is going to have to make a choice: to agree with the president or respectfully disagree." Radanovich said that he hoped she "respectfully disagrees" and puts the measure to a vote.
"If it gets to the floor," he said, "it passes."
Pelosi hasn't signaled whether she will schedule a vote.
The resolution is supported by 191 House members, the most sponsors it has had in 20 years, according to the Armenian National Committee of America. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) backs it, as do more than a quarter of his colleagues. California's two Democratic senators, Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer, are among them.
Mark Parris, a U.S. ambassador to Turkey during the Clinton administration who now is at the Brookings Institution, said that when the Democrats won control of Congress in November, "the Turks knew there was going to be a problem."
Almost everyone, including the Turkish government, agrees that hundreds of thousands of Armenians died in eastern Turkey between 1915 and 1918 as World War I and the crumbling of the Ottoman Empire engulfed the region in turmoil. It's how they perished that continues to stir ferocious disagreement.
Armenians, along with most historians and many Western governments, say more than 1 million died at the hands of Turkish forces—victims of either murder or mass deportation that led hundreds of thousands to succumb to exposure and disease.
Turks say there was no government-sponsored program targeting Armenians. Rather, they insist, large numbers of Armenians—and Turks—died in the chaos of war and an uprising staged by Armenians seeking to capitalize on a government weakened by World War I. "There were numerous deaths on both sides, due to war, disease, hunger and civil strife," the Turkish American Heritage Political Action Committee said in a recent letter to lawmakers.
Not forgetting
Though the events lie far in the past, Armenians and Armenian Americans have worked hard to keep the memory alive. The Turkish government and the ultranationalists who are resurgent in that country have worked equally hard to keep the U.S. government from taking a position.
Caught in the middle of the debate are Israel and its supporters. "It's a terrible predicament," said David Twersky of the American Jewish Congress. "As Jews, we have a tremendous reverence for the moral imperatives of history. But then there is the aspect that no Muslim country is closer to Israel than Turkey. So we feel paralyzed by a set of conflicting emotions."
Turkish officials say the renewed push to recognize an Armenian genocide could not come at a worse time.
The issue is so incendiary that even a symbolic recognition by Congress could embolden ultranationalists there to unleash enough anti-American sentiment to shut down important U.S. military bases and affect Washington's position throughout the Middle East.
Civilian and military leaders of the Turkish government, including Foreign Minister Abdullah G, met at a Washington hotel in February with more than a dozen leaders of major Jewish organizations in an effort to prevent action on the resolution. Members of the Anti-Defamation League and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) took part in the gathering.
"I believe the right thing for the Jewish community is to recognize the Armenian genocide as a fact, because virtually every historian and scholar of note in this area calls it a genocide," said Morton Klein, president of the Zionist Organization of America. "As friends of Turkey, we need to encourage them to just recognize the truth, honor the victims and be done with it. This would only enhance Turkey's standing in the world."
Other Jewish leaders, believing the security needs of the U.S. and Israel trump distant history, are siding with Turkey.
"I don't think a bill in Congress will help reconcile this issue. The resolution takes a position. It comes to a judgment," said Abraham H. Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League. "The Turks and Armenians need to revisit their past. The Jewish community shouldn't be the arbiter of that history," he said. "And I don't think the U.S. Congress should be the arbiter either."
Events planned
Tuesday is Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day, and events are planned across the country to press for action on Capitol Hill. There are an estimated 1 million to 1.5 million Americans of Armenian descent.
The pending congressional resolution calls on the president to "accurately characterize the systematic and deliberate annihilation of 1.5 million Armenians as genocide." It also calls on the president to ensure that U.S. foreign policy reflects "appropriate understanding and sensitivity concerning issues related to human rights, ethnic cleansing, and genocide documented in the United State record relating to the Armenian genocide."
Similar resolutions were approved by the House in 1975 and 1984, but never made it through the Senate. A 1990 resolution was blocked by a Senate filibuster. The outlook this year in that chamber is uncertain.
Although the word "genocide" stirs passionate feelings, Los Angeles Times policy is to use it because a large body of historical evidence and authoritative recent research support the accuracy of the term to describe the events.
At least one Turkish historian, Taner Akm, has concluded that the Turkish government did commit genocide against the Armenians. In his book "A Shameful Act," Akm cites numerous Ottoman documents that he says prove beyond a doubt that the Turkish leaders, under the cover of World War I, planned and carried out the murder of more than half of the Armenian people.
"For Turks to discuss the genocide openly, we would have to begin by conceding that some of our national fathers were thieves and murderers," said Akm, who teaches at the University of Minnesota. "This is why the subject is so taboo."
Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Burbank), one of the resolution's chief sponsors, said: "One way you can tell that prospects for passage have improved this year is the intensity of the opposition." Schiff's district is home to more Armenian Americans than any other.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates are among those working to scuttle the measure, contending it could jeopardize Turkey's support for U.S. troops fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan.
And a steady stream of Turkish officials, government-hired Washington lobbyists and companies with business interests in Turkey have been moving through Capitol offices, warning of a diplomatic backlash if the resolution passes.
Some say Pelosi's past support for the measure does not assure she will push for a vote anytime soon. No vote has been scheduled in the House Foreign Affairs Committee or the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, usually the first stops for such legislation.
"I'm absolutely confident that, ultimately, Speaker Pelosi will do what is in the best interests of our nation," said Rep. Robert Wexler (D-Fla.), co-chairman of the Congressional Caucus on Turkey and an opponent of the resolution. He noted that supplies destined for U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan pass through Turkey.
Radanovich dismissed such concern, saying: "The Turkish government will throw a fit, and three months later, they'll be over it."
Copyright 2007
The Los Angeles Times
Source: http://www.genocidewatch.org/news/TurkeyGenocideResolutionStillFarFromCertain21April2007.htm
02/22/07: NYSun: Turkey Up in Arms Over House Resolution Against Armenian ‘Genocide'
By ELI LAKE
Staff Reporter of the Sun
February 22, 2007
WASHINGTON — Turkey was so alarmed by a proposed House resolution calling the mass slaughter of Armenians by Turks during World War I a "genocide" that it dispatched its foreign minister to persuade American Jewish leaders to lobby against it.
At a suite at the Willard Hotel in Washington on February 5, Abdullah Gül met with representatives of the Anti-Defamation League, American Jewish Committee, American Jewish Congress, American Israel Public Affairs Committee, Friends of Lubavitch, Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, and United Jewish Communities. According to one participant in the meeting, the Turkish foreign minister "made a hard sell," against House resolution 106, whose short title is "Affirmation of the United States Record on the Armenian Genocide Resolution."
This participant, who asked not to be named, said Mr. Gül appealed to the assembled Jewish representatives by noting the singularity of the German genocide against the Jews and warning that the House resolution, if passed, would rupture American-Turkish relations.
The Turks have reason to be worried. Although the resolution has faced opposition from the House leadership in previous congressional sessions, the current speaker of the House, Rep. Nancy Pelosi of California, is said to support it. Indeed, Ms. Pelosi has supported similar resolutions in the past. The resolution is now before the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, whose chairman, Rep. Tom Lantos of California, has supported the Armenian genocide resolution in recent sessions, though he opposed it in the past.
Source: http://www.nysun.com/article/49061
Staff Reporter of the Sun
February 22, 2007
WASHINGTON — Turkey was so alarmed by a proposed House resolution calling the mass slaughter of Armenians by Turks during World War I a "genocide" that it dispatched its foreign minister to persuade American Jewish leaders to lobby against it.
At a suite at the Willard Hotel in Washington on February 5, Abdullah Gül met with representatives of the Anti-Defamation League, American Jewish Committee, American Jewish Congress, American Israel Public Affairs Committee, Friends of Lubavitch, Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, and United Jewish Communities. According to one participant in the meeting, the Turkish foreign minister "made a hard sell," against House resolution 106, whose short title is "Affirmation of the United States Record on the Armenian Genocide Resolution."
This participant, who asked not to be named, said Mr. Gül appealed to the assembled Jewish representatives by noting the singularity of the German genocide against the Jews and warning that the House resolution, if passed, would rupture American-Turkish relations.
The Turks have reason to be worried. Although the resolution has faced opposition from the House leadership in previous congressional sessions, the current speaker of the House, Rep. Nancy Pelosi of California, is said to support it. Indeed, Ms. Pelosi has supported similar resolutions in the past. The resolution is now before the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, whose chairman, Rep. Tom Lantos of California, has supported the Armenian genocide resolution in recent sessions, though he opposed it in the past.
Source: http://www.nysun.com/article/49061
09/02/06: The Forward: Showdown Set in ‘Genocide’ Debate
Senators Back Armenians, Fight Bush Pick; Administration Fears Upsetting Turkey
A bipartisan group of lawmakers is threatening a confirmation fight in an effort to press the Bush administration to reverse America’s longstanding policy of avoiding the use of the word “genocide” to describe the mass killings of Armenians by the Ottoman Empire nearly a century ago.
The Senate Foreign Relations Committee is scheduled to vote September 7 on the nomination of Richard Hoagland as ambassador to Armenia, after committee members put a hold on his confirmation due to concerns that he had skirted acknowledging the scope of the killings, in keeping with the administration line and the wishes of Turkey. The current American ambassador to Armenia, John Evans, was fired last spring, generating widespread speculation that his dismissal came as the result of public comments in which he uttered the term “genocide.”
The question of what to call the killing and deportation of an estimated 1.5 million Armenians in Turkey in 1915 has long flummoxed the American government, whose lengthy alliance with Turkey has proved an invaluable asset in America’s dealings in the region. Turkey sharply objects to the use of the term “genocide” to describe what happened to the Armenian population during World War I, and has for decades lobbied its NATO allies to avoid adopting the moniker.
Maintaining good will between the United States and Turkey — even as relations between the two countries have frayed somewhat in recent years — remains a top priority for the Bush administration, experts say, particularly as Islamic movements take increasing hold in the Middle East. And equally important, experts say, is Israel’s friendship with Turkey, a rare nation with a Muslim majority that has supported the Jewish state since its inception.
The administration’s reluctance to allow its top Foreign Service officer in Armenia to use the word genocide “is a manifestation of the interest that the U.S. takes with Turkish relations,” said Morton Abramowitz, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation and a former American ambassador to Turkey. “The U.S. has always been in the position of trying to avoid the use of the term ‘genocide,’” he said. “It’s a continuing issue that has gone on for many years and, for a variety of reasons, the U.S. has hesitated to take a position to avoid alienating an ally.”
Abramowitz also stressed the significance of Turkey’s strategic value to Israel. “It’s important to have a secular state with a large Muslim population that recognizes Israel and has trade and military relationships with it,” he said.
At Hoagland’s initial June 28 confirmation hearing, a chorus of senators grilled the veteran Foreign Service officer, who currently serves as ambassador to Tajikistan, on a wide range of questions surrounding both his own views and the official American line on the Armenian genocide debate. Senate Foreign Relations Committee members who raised questions and have since held up the vote include Democrats John Kerry of Massachusetts, Barbara Boxer of California and Joe Biden of Delaware, and Republicans Norm Coleman of Minnesota and George Allen of Virginia. At that hearing, a vote was pushed back to midsummer, and was later put on hold again until this fall.
Coleman, one of the GOP’s two Jewish senators, has emerged as an outspoken advocate of changing American policy on the issue. He has said that he will continue to oppose Hoagland’s nomination in protest of the government’s unwillingness to recognize the Armenian genocide.
“I continue to be deeply troubled by the United States refusal to recognize the historically documented mass killings of Armenians in 1915 as ‘genocide,’” Coleman said in a statement released in early August. “As someone of the Jewish faith, I bring great sensitivity to the issue of recognizing the reality of genocide.”
Coleman’s view is reflective of a belief, held by many in the community, that Jews have an ethical obligation to recognize another ethnic group’s genocide. Others take a more pragmatic approach, placing Israel’s strategic interest over other moral considerations.
Despite vociferous support among some Jewish lawmakers for the Armenian community’s position that refusing to use the word “genocide” amounts to an injustice, American Jewish groups have traditionally sided with Turkey in the matter.
Every year on April 24, the day that Armenians commemorate the killings, a resolution calling for the use of the controversial term is proposed in Congress and then beaten back. Some Jewish groups claim credit for ensuring that such a resolution never passes.
Jewish advocacy groups, including the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, B’nai Brith and American Jewish Committee “have been working with the Turks on this issue” for more than 15 years, said Yola Habif Johnston, director for foundations and community outreach at Jinsa.
“The Jewish lobby has quite actively supported Turkey in their efforts to prevent the so-called Armenian genocide resolution from passing,” she said.
However, she added that Jinsa was the only Jewish group that last year backed off from supporting Turkey because of its recent criticism of Israel and its failure to cooperate with the United States in the Middle East.
Relations between the two countries have been strained during the last several years, since a political party with Islamist roots, the Party of Justice and Development, known as AKP, swept to power in Turkey in the 2002 elections. AKP, many analysts said, has shifted Turkey’s orientation away from the West and pushed the regional ally toward stronger ties with other Muslim nations, including Iran and Syria.
One of the first signs of Turkey’s changing priorities came just before the start of the Iraq war, when Turkey denied America’s request to stage an attack from Turkish soil. During America’s first war with Iraq in 1991, Turkey’s decision to let the United States use its air space was seen as an integral component of the war’s strategy.
An official at the Consulate General of Israel declined to comment on Hoagland’s nomination, saying that diplomats from his country do not comment on internal American affairs.
Some Armenian activists say that sinking Hoagland’s nomination is not their ultimate goal. “We’re trying to draw attention to the fact that the U.S. policy of avoiding saying the word ‘genocide’ is unacceptable, immoral and historically inaccurate,” said Harut Sassounian, publisher of the California Courier, an English-language Armenian newspaper. (California is home to the largest Armenian population outside of Armenia.) “It’s the policy that’s at issue, not Ambassador Hoagland,” he said.
Sassounian countered the argument that acknowledgement of the Armenian genocide would lead to a fissure in the American-Turkish alliance. The United States already passed resolutions in 1975 and 1984 recognizing the genocide and there was no fallout then, he said.
Prior to Hoagland’s nomination, 60 members of the House of Representatives sent a letter to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice asking for a full disclosure of why Evans, the current Armenian ambassador, was let go. They did not receive a response.
Many observers point to an incident in 2005 when Evans addressed an Armenian group in California, declaring, “I will today call it the Armenian Genocide,” as the precursor to his recall. Shortly after that, observers say, he was forced to retract his statement and was also stripped of the “Constructive Dissent Award” that he was scheduled to receive from the Foreign Service Association.
A State Department spokesperson declined to comment on both Evans’ firing and Hoagland’s nomination, saying that it was a matter for the White House. A spokesperson for the White House also declined to comment while the nomination was still pending.
05/06/05: Intermountain Jewish News: Shame on Israel and Turkey for desecrating Yad Vashem
Should Pol Pot have been invited to Israel to place a wreath at Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust memorial? If the murderer of millions of Cambodians were escorted by Israeli officials to a Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem, wouldn't blasphemy be the perfect word for the act?
Should Idi Amin have been allowed to appear at Yad Vashem?
What about the leaders of the Rwandan genocide, who took their machetes to 800,000 innocent human beings in 1994? Should Israel walk them down the aisle, wreaths in hand, to the Hall of Remembrance at Yad Vashem? Blasphemy, indeed.
Unlike Pol Pot and the other mass murderers, the prime minister of Turkey has no blood on his hands, but the moral stench was the same this week when Israel had Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan place a wreath at Yad Vashem. Israel might as well have brought along convicted Holocaust denier David Irving for the ceremony. Shame on Israel for engaging in its own form of Holocaust denial. Turkey is the perpetrator of the first genocide in modern times, the Armenian genocide. And Turkey is no Germany: Germany is repentant. Turkey is not. Germany paid reparations. Turkey did not. Modern-day Turkey never acknowledged the Armenian genocide, never said, we're sorry. There are Holocaust memorials all over Germany; don't go look for Armenian memorials all over Turkey.
The vilest form of realpolitik governs Israel-Turkey relations and, to their eternal shame, some in the American Jewish community join in the ugly charade of exonerating modern-day Turkey for the Armenian genocide. Precisely the kind of tendentious (not to mention outright false) "scholarship" that makes Jews livid when used by Holocaust deniers to diminish the Holocaust, Israel turns a blind eye to when Turkey uses it to diminish the Armenian genocide.
What moral credence should Jews attribute to a head of state and Nobel Peace Prize winner, if he were to state that "whether" there was a Holocaust is a "matter for historians to decide"? No moral credence whatsoever. Yet, this is just what Shimon Peres, the former prime minister of Israel and a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, said about the Armenian genocide.
We have here a prime case of politics trumping truth. Israel needs a positive relationship with Turkey. And to get it, Israel will engage in the same form of genocide denial that it acidly resents when others put it in the form of Holocaust denial. The national American Jewish Committee tags along, engaging in every from of sophistry to deny the undeniable: the Turkish attempt to wipe out the Armenian people during World War I.
If Jews don't want the world to forget the Holocaust, how can the Jewish state forget the Armenian genocide? As time goes on, the 25-year gap between the Armenian genocide and the Holocaust will shrink to the merest dots on the historical map. If one dot is deniable, the next one will also be very easy to deny.
The rationalizations for denial of the Armenian genocide are flimsy, indeed excruciating.
* Rationalization #1: It is said that the current Turkish government was not responsible for the Armenian genocide. This is 100% true -- and 100% irrelevant. Was the current German government responsible for the Holocaust? Of course not. But it is this German government that has openly acknowledged the truth, openly repented, and paid extensive reparations. Turkey does none of this.
This is highly dangerous. As time passes, no direct responsibility will be attributable to any government for any past genocide. Does this mean that Germany will gradually be exempt from honesty over its country's role in the Holocaust, or exempt from furthering Holocaust education? For Israel and the national American Jewish Committee to let the current Turkish government off the hook for the Armenian genocide 90 years ago -- which it is obviously not directly responsible for -- is to endanger all future education about all past genocides. Needless to say, the main point of genocide education is to prevent it. By the logic of exempting present-day Turkey from the Armenian genocide, genocide education will gradually halt. This is highly dangerous.
* Rationalization #2: It is said that the Armenian deaths weren't really a "genocide," just a "tragedy." Not so. Of the reams of evidence to the contrary -- thousands of independently gathered testimonies -- here is one from Hans Morgenthau, the (Jewish) US ambassador to Turkey during the first part of WW I, in a cable to the State Department:
"Deportations of and excesses against the peaceful Armenians is increasing, and from harrowing reports of eyewitnesses it appears that a campaign of race extermination is in progress under a pretext of reprisal against rebellion."
Note the key phrase: race extermination. That's genocide.
Morgenthau, as quoted in a recent report by Larry Derfner, also wrote: "Reports from widely scattered districts indicate a systematic attempt to uproot peaceful Armenian populations and . . . arbitrary efforts, terrible tortures, wholesale expulsions and deportations from one end of the empire to the other, accompanied by frequent instances of rape, pillage and murder, turning into massacre, to bring destruction and destitution on them."
Note the key adjective: systematic. That's genocide.
And yet, here we are: Turkey is allowed an honored place at Yad Vashem. And the national American Jewish Committee won't call the Armenian genocide by its name. This is a desecration.
Unlike the national American Jewish Committee, the US Memorial Holocaust Museum and especially the Museum of Tolerance, affiliated with the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, tell the truth. The Holocaust Museum in Washington mentions the Armenian genocide three times. The Museum of Tolerance does much more.
The truth, the whole truth, includes this: Turkey served as a haven for Jews after the expulsion from Spain in 1492, and for more than 500 years afterward. Turkey is a secular state in a Moslem region, an important trading partner with Israel and an important strategic partner with the US. All true, deserving of recognition and indeed gratitude -- but not deserving of lies. The Armenian genocide is a fact. If you argue otherwise, you have to argue against the evidence not only of Hans Morgenthau but of Elie Wiesel, Deborah Lipstadt, Daniel Goldhagen, Raul Hilberg, Yehuda Bauer and countless other authorities.
It should not be hard for present day Israel or Turkey to acknowledge the Armenian genocide, or for Turkey to commit to Armenian-genocide education. After all, if the present Turkish government was not responsible for this genocide, why the denial of the past?
Whatever the social-psychological answer might be, it is not Israel's role to aid and abet genocide denial. Right now, there is genocide in Darfur. Directly abetting the indifference over it are those who deny genocide in the past. If there is anything in community and state relations that must be above all political considerations, it is genocide. Our humanity -- and the existence of humanity -- depends on it.
Source: http://www.ijn.com/archive/2005%20arch/050605.htm#story12
04/22/05: The Jewish Week: ‘The Hidden Holocaust’
(04/22/2005)
‘The Hidden Holocaust’
On anniversary of 90-year-old genocide that paved the way for the Final Solution, campaign for recognition draws limited attention in the Jewish community.
Steve Lipman - Staff Writer
“Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?”
Adolf Hitler, to his generals,
before the invasion of Poland in 1939
In the coming days, a people nearly annihilated during the last century will pause to remember its losses.
In commemorations here, in Jerusalem and in other cities around the world, relatives of survivors will discuss painful memories, members of the clergy will offer prayers for the victims and leaders of the dispersed community will call for justice. Historians will reflect on a legacy of hatred that led to mass killings. Stories of brutality and statistics about the murder of a third of a people will be cited.
And hardly a Jew will be present.
The people who died in what has come to be called “The Hidden Holocaust” are the Armenians, Indo-Europeans with roots in the area between the Caspian and Mediterranean seas. They lived for two millennia, until their national tragedy, as citizens in the Ottoman Empire, which fell when Turkey was on the losing side in World War I.
The country of Armenia — the first Christian nation, formerly a republic in the Soviet Union, independent since 1990 — now occupies only 10 percent of the Armenians’ historic homeland, the rest of which is part of neighboring Turkey.
April 24, this year the first day of Passover, is alternately known as Martyrs’ Day or Genocide Commemoration Day. It marks the start of the planned destruction of the Armenian community in Turkey 90 years ago during WWI.
Of the 2 to 2.5 million Armenians there on the eve of the war, an estimated 1 million to 1.5 million were killed by Turkish soldiers and sympathetic Kurds in a campaign that peaked in 1915-16. The carnage lasted sporadically until 1923 and the ascension of Kamil Ataturk, who did not share an animus toward Armenians.
The Armenian losses in those years represented at least a third of their total population in the world — the same percentage as the Holocaust took from the Jewish people.
Front-page news in the 1920s, largely forgotten in the West within a decade, as Hitler’s documented 1939 statement testified — his words are inscribed on a wall of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, despite Turkish pressure — the Armenian experience was overshadowed by the Six Million victims of the Shoah. Holocaust survivors’ efforts to remember the Six Million and obtain reparations served as a model for the Armenians’ belated campaign for recognition.
Historians call the slaughter of Armenia “the forgotten genocide.” Israeli historian Israel Charny called it “a dress rehearsal for the Holocaust.” Raphael Lemkin, the Polish-born Jewish lawyer who coined the term genocide in the 1940s, did so in part on the basis of what happened to the Armenians.
Each year the Jewish and Armenian communities commemorate their 20th century tragedies within a few weeks of each other, but few members of one group attends the other’s events.
“We finally came to the conclusion that we were not going to get participation of the establishment Jewish organizations,” says Samuel Azadian, a longtime leader of the local Knights of Vartan fraternal group that has organized the April 24 Times Square memorial ceremony for 19 years.
This year that’s 11 days before Yom Ha-Shoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day.
The parallels between the Armenian Genocide and the Nazis’ Final Solution are chilling, but the issue of the Armenian Genocide and Armenian efforts for international acknowledgement of their tragedy has received little support from the organized Jewish community.
The Armenian Genocide issue presents the Jewish community with a classic conflict: realpolitik (Turkey is a strategic ally of the United States and Israel) vs. ethics (sympathy for an oppressed minority).
Realpolitik has triumphed, and Armenians recognize this.
“Jews and Armenians are linked forever by Hitler,” Armenian Foreign Minister Vartan Oskanian said during the UN’s recent special assembly marking the 60th anniversary of the Auschwitz liberation. “After Auschwitz, one would expect that no one any longer has a right to turn a blind eye or a deaf ear. As an Armenian, I know that a blind eye, a deaf ear, a muted tongue perpetuate the wounds.”
While Jews traditionally participated in disproportionate numbers in such causes as civil rights and South Africa’s anti-apartheid movement, “I have not seen any major involvement of the Jewish community in this issue,” says Haik Gugarats, assistant to the Armenian ambassador in Washington. “It’s surprising.”
Doug Geogerian, director of the Eastern Region of the Armenian National Committee, adds: “We don’t really understand; we’re a little surprised.”
Veteran Israeli politician Yossi Sarid, who as education minister declared at a Genocide commemoration ceremony in Jerusalem’s Old City in 2000 that “for many years, too many, you were alone on this, your memorial day,” will attend an international conference in Yerevan, Armenia’s capital, on April 24 as a private citizen.
“As opposed to many other nations, Israel has never recognized the murder of the Armenian people, and in effect lent a hand to the deniers of that Genocide,” Sarid wrote in a recent essay in Haaretz. “The Israeli Foreign Ministry, and not only it, is always afraid of its own shadow and thus it casts a dark shadow over us all as accomplices to the ‘silence of the world.’ ”
The Genocide — 20 years after an estimated 200,000 Armenians were killed during the reign of Turkey’s Sultan Abdul Hamid II — was carried out by the Ittihad government that took power in 1913. The Ittihad claimed it feared the “infidel” Armenians, the only remaining major Christian group in the Muslim Ottoman Empire, taking up arms for Russia, Turkey’s enemy in WWI.
Already the Armenians “were lobbying for basic guarantees, for civil rights,” says Peter Balakian, an English professor at Colgate University and author of two books with an Armenian theme.
Like the Jews in Nazi Europe, the often prosperous Armenians, pilloried as a Fifth Column, earned the enmity of the majority population, often former neighbors and co-workers. Like survivors after World War II, Armenians tried to put their recent past behind them.
Like the Jewish community today, the Armenians face a problem of keeping the memory of their tragedy alive after the last survivors die.
In 1915, under the cover of war, Armenian soldiers in the Turkish army were disarmed and conscripted into labor battalions. On April 24, 1915, Armenian political and intellectual leaders were arrested and killed. The remaining Armenians — mostly women, children and elderly men — were rounded up by army units composed of violent criminals released from prison.
The Armenians were marched to what they were told would be new homes in the desert hundreds of miles away; most of the captives were killed along the way, or they starved to death, or they were fatally beaten upon arrival. Some were herded into caves and burned alive, or placed on barges that were sunk on the Black Sea, or thrown into gorges.
Reports of rape and theft were common.
James Russell, professor of Armenian studies at Harvard University, calls the Turks’ treatment of the Armenians during WWI “the model that Hitler used.” Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s deputy, was among the German soldiers stationed in Turkey during the Genocide, Russell points out. “Germans assisted the Turks logistically,” he said.
Turkish denials of responsibility offer “a picture of what might have happened [after World War II] if Germany had not been held to account or if Germany had not been defeated,” Russell says.
Henry Morgenthau, the American ambassador in Constantinople during World War I, said in his memoirs that Turkish leaders made no attempt to deny reports of the violence against the Armenians.
“One day I was discussing these proceedings with a responsible Turkish official, who was describing the tortures inflicted,” Morgenthau wrote. “He made no secret of the fact that the government had instigated them, and like all Turks of the official classes, he enthusiastically approved this treatment of the detested race.”
“The great powers did little to prevent the mass murder of the Armenians,” Israeli historian Yair Auron writes in “The Banality of Indifference: Zionism and the Armenian Genocide.”
“Germany, an influential ally of Turkey, although able to do much to stop the murders, had no interest in doing so and was involved directly and indirectly in the Armenian Genocide,” Auron writes. “England and France remained on the sidelines. The United States, and Ambassador Morgenthau in particular, tried to help by diplomatic and monetary means, limited by the fact that the U.S. was neutral during most of the war.”
In Turkey, only Damad Ferit Pasha’s government immediately after the war was forthcoming about the massacres, holding war crimes trials that condemned to death the architects of the Genocide, who had fled the country.
While now-independent Armenia and activists in the Armenian community abroad seek Turkey’s recognition of the Genocide – Turkish governments since the 1920s have denied that genocide occurred, have claimed that the number of victims is exaggerated, have attributed the deaths to disease and famine, have claimed Turks were provoked by attacks by Armenians, have opposed artistic or political efforts to document the tragedy, and have refused to consider the type of reparation payments made by Germany after World War II to Israel and individual Holocaust survivors – the government of Israel and many prominent Jewish organizations in the United States have challenged Armenian claims about their early 20th-century history and have lobbied on behalf of Turkey.
“It’s a wrong-headed view,” says Dr. Robert Jay Lifton, visiting professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and author of “The Nazi Doctors.”
“Often in official Jewish groups there can be insensitivity to others’ suffering,” says Dr. Lifton, who has written his support of the Armenian cause.
The Turkish Embassy in Washington, the Israeli Consulate here, and major Jewish organizations contacted by The Jewish Week did not respond to requests for comment on this issue.
Few Jewish schools in Israel or abroad teach about the Genocide, few rabbis preach about it, few Holocaust institutions pay more than passing attention to the subject.
“Yad Vashem’s mandate is to keep the memory of the Holocaust alive,” a spokesman for the Holocaust memorial center in Jerusalem says. “As such we are dedicated to educating, researching, studying and memorializing the Shoah. However, in the course of our educational and research activities, other instances of genocide, ethnic cleansing and mass murder are raised, including the case of Armenia.”
“It is a Jewish issue and should be a Jewish issue,” says Yair Auron, the Israeli historian who has written two books about the Armenian Genocide. “The world committed genocide before the Holocaust.
“We have to be with the Armenians on their memorial day,” says Auron, who attends the annual commemoration in Jerusalem. “We have to be at the front of the struggle for recognition of the Genocide.” Otherwise, he says, “We’re doing exactly what the deniers of the Holocaust do.”
Israel’s small Armenian community, based in the Armenian Quarter of Jerusalem’s Old City, sponsors a commemoration ceremony there each year on April 24. Few Israelis attend.
In this country, while most major Jewish organizations have distanced themselves from the Armenian Genocide issue, a few groups, notably the Reform movement’s Religious Action Center, and individual Jewish politicians and intellectuals have lobbied for recognition of the Genocide, Armenian and Jewish spokesmen agree.
“You can’t be silent when you see injustice,” says Rabbi David Saperstein, director of the Religious Action Center.
“Armenian community leaders ask me about this,” says Rep. Adam Schiff, a three-term congressman from California who represents a district with a large Armenian population and serves each year as a sponsor of a non-binding resolution that urges Turkey to admit its past.
“There is a sense that the Jewish organizations lobby actively against the resolution,” Schiff says.
The apolitical Joint Distribution Committee, which assists Armenia’s small Jewish community, provided humanitarian aid when a devastating earthquake struck the country in 1988.
Besides Schiff, and Morgenthau, who alerted the American government to the Genocide, individual Jews associated with the Armenian cause include Franz Werfel, a Czech-Jewish novelist whose “The Forty Days of Musa Dagh,” about Armenian resistance to the Genocide, was passed from hand to hand as inspiration among Jewish resistance fighters in World War II ghettos; New York filmmaker Andrew Goldberg, who has produced three documentaries about aspects of Armenian life and is working on a major project about the Genocide that will appear on PBS within a year; and Harvey Weinstein, who, as president of Mirimax, agreed in 2002, despite reported threats from Turkey, to distribute “Ararat,” a film centered around the Genocide.
“Some of the strongest defenders of the Armenians are the Jews” – individual Jews, not heads of Jewish organizations, says Holocaust historian Michael Berenbuam, who has written and spoken extensively on the subject.
“This was a sense of tzedakah for me … a sense of justice,” Goldberg says.
Weinstein, who had not heard about the Genocide until he read the Ararat script, said he agreed to back the project because “the denial of the Armenian Holocaust reminds me of the denial of our own Jewish Holocaust.”
Weinstein “felt it was time to tell the story,” The Los Angeles Times reported. “Having lost eight relatives at Auschwitz, Weinstein related well to the subject.”
The Jewish community has been cautious about embracing the Armenian Genocide issue, observers say, for several reasons. The two primary ones are:
• Pressure by Turkey. Turkey, a political, economic and military ally of Israel, was the first majority-Muslim nation in the Middle East to establish diplomatic relations with Israel. A refuge for endangered Jews from the Inquisition to the Holocaust, the country is hospitable to the 27,000 Jews who still live there.
Turkey consistently challenges any Armenian assertions of Turkish responsibility for a genocide. As far back as the 1930s, it pressured the State Department to block an MGM movie version of “The Forty Days of Musa Dagh.” In 1982 Turkey, according to many media reports, pressured Israel – with threats against the safety of Turkish Jews and indications that it might close its borders to Jews fleeing Iran—to cancel an academic conference on genocide that was to include references to the Armenian experience; a scaled-down gathering was eventually moved from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv.
• The uniqueness of the Holocaust. Many protectors of the Holocaust’s legacy resist attempts to compare the scope of the Shoah to any other mass extermination of a people, feeling that references to such examples as Rwanda, Cambodia or Sudan would diminish the Jewish suffering’s unique status.
The Turkish Daily News in 2001 quoted Shimon Peres, then Israeli foreign minister, as saying, “We reject attempts to create a similarity between the Holocaust and the Armenian allegations. Nothing similar to the Holocaust occurred. It is a tragedy what the Armenians went through but not a genocide.”
“We are teaching the Holocaust in too particularistic a way,” Auron says.
What do the Armenians want?
“We want Turkey to acknowledge the genocide,” Haik Gugarats of the Armenian Embassy says. “All we want from Turkey is the establishment of normal diplomatic relations and the opening of borders.”
Armenia has no territorial or monetary demands, Gugarats says.
“The Turks feel they are unjustly accused,” says Taner Akcam, a Turkish historian and sociologist who is a visiting professor at the University of Minnesota. He is among a handful of Turkish scholars to challenge his homeland’s denial of responsibility for the Genocide.
Though Turkey’s leadership since the 1920s had no direct ties to the slaughter of the Armenians, “some of the founders of the state were members of the party who organized the Genocide,” Akcam says. “The Turks glorified these people as founding heroes.”
Admission of Turkey’s role in the genocide would “question the very foundation of the state,” he says.
Armenian- Americans tell of being raised on stories of the Genocide, like American Jews who heard about the Holocaust while growing up. But the Armenian Genocide did not become a public issue in the Armenian community for a few generations because émigrés here and in other countries lacked the numbers or political clout of Jewish Holocaust survivors who raised public consciousness of the Shoah, starting in the late 1970s.
“After any genocide, the victims don’t like to talk about it – it happened after the Holocaust,” Gugarats says.
Thousands of people, including politicians, are expected to attend Sunday’s memorial ceremony in Times Square. As Turkey seeks membership in the European Union, demands by EU countries, especially France, that Turkey admit responsibility for the deaths of Armenians during the Genocide will focus increased attention on the subject. And the recent $20 million settlement by the New York Life Insurance Company to descendants of Armenians who held insurance policies at the turn of the last century adds to the historical record.
In recent decades the European Parliament, the UN Committee on Human Rights, the Vatican and several European governments and scholarly organizations have acknowledged the Armenian Genocide. In June 1998 the Association of Genocide Scholars defined the Armenian tragedy as the 20th century’s first genocide.
Israel took a neutral position until 1994, when Deputy Foreign Minister Yossi Beilin declared in the Knesset that “it was not war. It was most certainly massacre and genocide … We will always reject any attempt to erase its record, even for some political advantage.”
Apparent Jewish indifference to the issue has drawn Armenian criticism, and, three years ago, a protest rally outside the Israeli Consulate in Los Angeles.
The Armenian National Committee in 2002 criticized “nine major Jewish organizations” – including the American Jewish Committee, the American Jewish Congress, the Anti-Defamation League, and Hadassah – for signing a letter that urged President Bush to provide Turkey with economic and military aid.
The letter, the committee said, “appears to represent a retreat from the Jewish American community’s proud tradition of standing up for human rights, universal values, and the cause of international justice.”
Next year, the Jewish and Armenian communities will be closer, symbolically – Yom haShoah and Genocide Commemoration Day occur on consecutive days in 2006.
‘The Hidden Holocaust’
On anniversary of 90-year-old genocide that paved the way for the Final Solution, campaign for recognition draws limited attention in the Jewish community.
Steve Lipman - Staff Writer
“Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?”
Adolf Hitler, to his generals,
before the invasion of Poland in 1939
In the coming days, a people nearly annihilated during the last century will pause to remember its losses.
In commemorations here, in Jerusalem and in other cities around the world, relatives of survivors will discuss painful memories, members of the clergy will offer prayers for the victims and leaders of the dispersed community will call for justice. Historians will reflect on a legacy of hatred that led to mass killings. Stories of brutality and statistics about the murder of a third of a people will be cited.
And hardly a Jew will be present.
The people who died in what has come to be called “The Hidden Holocaust” are the Armenians, Indo-Europeans with roots in the area between the Caspian and Mediterranean seas. They lived for two millennia, until their national tragedy, as citizens in the Ottoman Empire, which fell when Turkey was on the losing side in World War I.
The country of Armenia — the first Christian nation, formerly a republic in the Soviet Union, independent since 1990 — now occupies only 10 percent of the Armenians’ historic homeland, the rest of which is part of neighboring Turkey.
April 24, this year the first day of Passover, is alternately known as Martyrs’ Day or Genocide Commemoration Day. It marks the start of the planned destruction of the Armenian community in Turkey 90 years ago during WWI.
Of the 2 to 2.5 million Armenians there on the eve of the war, an estimated 1 million to 1.5 million were killed by Turkish soldiers and sympathetic Kurds in a campaign that peaked in 1915-16. The carnage lasted sporadically until 1923 and the ascension of Kamil Ataturk, who did not share an animus toward Armenians.
The Armenian losses in those years represented at least a third of their total population in the world — the same percentage as the Holocaust took from the Jewish people.
Front-page news in the 1920s, largely forgotten in the West within a decade, as Hitler’s documented 1939 statement testified — his words are inscribed on a wall of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, despite Turkish pressure — the Armenian experience was overshadowed by the Six Million victims of the Shoah. Holocaust survivors’ efforts to remember the Six Million and obtain reparations served as a model for the Armenians’ belated campaign for recognition.
Historians call the slaughter of Armenia “the forgotten genocide.” Israeli historian Israel Charny called it “a dress rehearsal for the Holocaust.” Raphael Lemkin, the Polish-born Jewish lawyer who coined the term genocide in the 1940s, did so in part on the basis of what happened to the Armenians.
Each year the Jewish and Armenian communities commemorate their 20th century tragedies within a few weeks of each other, but few members of one group attends the other’s events.
“We finally came to the conclusion that we were not going to get participation of the establishment Jewish organizations,” says Samuel Azadian, a longtime leader of the local Knights of Vartan fraternal group that has organized the April 24 Times Square memorial ceremony for 19 years.
This year that’s 11 days before Yom Ha-Shoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day.
The parallels between the Armenian Genocide and the Nazis’ Final Solution are chilling, but the issue of the Armenian Genocide and Armenian efforts for international acknowledgement of their tragedy has received little support from the organized Jewish community.
The Armenian Genocide issue presents the Jewish community with a classic conflict: realpolitik (Turkey is a strategic ally of the United States and Israel) vs. ethics (sympathy for an oppressed minority).
Realpolitik has triumphed, and Armenians recognize this.
“Jews and Armenians are linked forever by Hitler,” Armenian Foreign Minister Vartan Oskanian said during the UN’s recent special assembly marking the 60th anniversary of the Auschwitz liberation. “After Auschwitz, one would expect that no one any longer has a right to turn a blind eye or a deaf ear. As an Armenian, I know that a blind eye, a deaf ear, a muted tongue perpetuate the wounds.”
While Jews traditionally participated in disproportionate numbers in such causes as civil rights and South Africa’s anti-apartheid movement, “I have not seen any major involvement of the Jewish community in this issue,” says Haik Gugarats, assistant to the Armenian ambassador in Washington. “It’s surprising.”
Doug Geogerian, director of the Eastern Region of the Armenian National Committee, adds: “We don’t really understand; we’re a little surprised.”
Veteran Israeli politician Yossi Sarid, who as education minister declared at a Genocide commemoration ceremony in Jerusalem’s Old City in 2000 that “for many years, too many, you were alone on this, your memorial day,” will attend an international conference in Yerevan, Armenia’s capital, on April 24 as a private citizen.
“As opposed to many other nations, Israel has never recognized the murder of the Armenian people, and in effect lent a hand to the deniers of that Genocide,” Sarid wrote in a recent essay in Haaretz. “The Israeli Foreign Ministry, and not only it, is always afraid of its own shadow and thus it casts a dark shadow over us all as accomplices to the ‘silence of the world.’ ”
The Genocide — 20 years after an estimated 200,000 Armenians were killed during the reign of Turkey’s Sultan Abdul Hamid II — was carried out by the Ittihad government that took power in 1913. The Ittihad claimed it feared the “infidel” Armenians, the only remaining major Christian group in the Muslim Ottoman Empire, taking up arms for Russia, Turkey’s enemy in WWI.
Already the Armenians “were lobbying for basic guarantees, for civil rights,” says Peter Balakian, an English professor at Colgate University and author of two books with an Armenian theme.
Like the Jews in Nazi Europe, the often prosperous Armenians, pilloried as a Fifth Column, earned the enmity of the majority population, often former neighbors and co-workers. Like survivors after World War II, Armenians tried to put their recent past behind them.
Like the Jewish community today, the Armenians face a problem of keeping the memory of their tragedy alive after the last survivors die.
In 1915, under the cover of war, Armenian soldiers in the Turkish army were disarmed and conscripted into labor battalions. On April 24, 1915, Armenian political and intellectual leaders were arrested and killed. The remaining Armenians — mostly women, children and elderly men — were rounded up by army units composed of violent criminals released from prison.
The Armenians were marched to what they were told would be new homes in the desert hundreds of miles away; most of the captives were killed along the way, or they starved to death, or they were fatally beaten upon arrival. Some were herded into caves and burned alive, or placed on barges that were sunk on the Black Sea, or thrown into gorges.
Reports of rape and theft were common.
James Russell, professor of Armenian studies at Harvard University, calls the Turks’ treatment of the Armenians during WWI “the model that Hitler used.” Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s deputy, was among the German soldiers stationed in Turkey during the Genocide, Russell points out. “Germans assisted the Turks logistically,” he said.
Turkish denials of responsibility offer “a picture of what might have happened [after World War II] if Germany had not been held to account or if Germany had not been defeated,” Russell says.
Henry Morgenthau, the American ambassador in Constantinople during World War I, said in his memoirs that Turkish leaders made no attempt to deny reports of the violence against the Armenians.
“One day I was discussing these proceedings with a responsible Turkish official, who was describing the tortures inflicted,” Morgenthau wrote. “He made no secret of the fact that the government had instigated them, and like all Turks of the official classes, he enthusiastically approved this treatment of the detested race.”
“The great powers did little to prevent the mass murder of the Armenians,” Israeli historian Yair Auron writes in “The Banality of Indifference: Zionism and the Armenian Genocide.”
“Germany, an influential ally of Turkey, although able to do much to stop the murders, had no interest in doing so and was involved directly and indirectly in the Armenian Genocide,” Auron writes. “England and France remained on the sidelines. The United States, and Ambassador Morgenthau in particular, tried to help by diplomatic and monetary means, limited by the fact that the U.S. was neutral during most of the war.”
In Turkey, only Damad Ferit Pasha’s government immediately after the war was forthcoming about the massacres, holding war crimes trials that condemned to death the architects of the Genocide, who had fled the country.
While now-independent Armenia and activists in the Armenian community abroad seek Turkey’s recognition of the Genocide – Turkish governments since the 1920s have denied that genocide occurred, have claimed that the number of victims is exaggerated, have attributed the deaths to disease and famine, have claimed Turks were provoked by attacks by Armenians, have opposed artistic or political efforts to document the tragedy, and have refused to consider the type of reparation payments made by Germany after World War II to Israel and individual Holocaust survivors – the government of Israel and many prominent Jewish organizations in the United States have challenged Armenian claims about their early 20th-century history and have lobbied on behalf of Turkey.
“It’s a wrong-headed view,” says Dr. Robert Jay Lifton, visiting professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and author of “The Nazi Doctors.”
“Often in official Jewish groups there can be insensitivity to others’ suffering,” says Dr. Lifton, who has written his support of the Armenian cause.
The Turkish Embassy in Washington, the Israeli Consulate here, and major Jewish organizations contacted by The Jewish Week did not respond to requests for comment on this issue.
Few Jewish schools in Israel or abroad teach about the Genocide, few rabbis preach about it, few Holocaust institutions pay more than passing attention to the subject.
“Yad Vashem’s mandate is to keep the memory of the Holocaust alive,” a spokesman for the Holocaust memorial center in Jerusalem says. “As such we are dedicated to educating, researching, studying and memorializing the Shoah. However, in the course of our educational and research activities, other instances of genocide, ethnic cleansing and mass murder are raised, including the case of Armenia.”
“It is a Jewish issue and should be a Jewish issue,” says Yair Auron, the Israeli historian who has written two books about the Armenian Genocide. “The world committed genocide before the Holocaust.
“We have to be with the Armenians on their memorial day,” says Auron, who attends the annual commemoration in Jerusalem. “We have to be at the front of the struggle for recognition of the Genocide.” Otherwise, he says, “We’re doing exactly what the deniers of the Holocaust do.”
Israel’s small Armenian community, based in the Armenian Quarter of Jerusalem’s Old City, sponsors a commemoration ceremony there each year on April 24. Few Israelis attend.
In this country, while most major Jewish organizations have distanced themselves from the Armenian Genocide issue, a few groups, notably the Reform movement’s Religious Action Center, and individual Jewish politicians and intellectuals have lobbied for recognition of the Genocide, Armenian and Jewish spokesmen agree.
“You can’t be silent when you see injustice,” says Rabbi David Saperstein, director of the Religious Action Center.
“Armenian community leaders ask me about this,” says Rep. Adam Schiff, a three-term congressman from California who represents a district with a large Armenian population and serves each year as a sponsor of a non-binding resolution that urges Turkey to admit its past.
“There is a sense that the Jewish organizations lobby actively against the resolution,” Schiff says.
The apolitical Joint Distribution Committee, which assists Armenia’s small Jewish community, provided humanitarian aid when a devastating earthquake struck the country in 1988.
Besides Schiff, and Morgenthau, who alerted the American government to the Genocide, individual Jews associated with the Armenian cause include Franz Werfel, a Czech-Jewish novelist whose “The Forty Days of Musa Dagh,” about Armenian resistance to the Genocide, was passed from hand to hand as inspiration among Jewish resistance fighters in World War II ghettos; New York filmmaker Andrew Goldberg, who has produced three documentaries about aspects of Armenian life and is working on a major project about the Genocide that will appear on PBS within a year; and Harvey Weinstein, who, as president of Mirimax, agreed in 2002, despite reported threats from Turkey, to distribute “Ararat,” a film centered around the Genocide.
“Some of the strongest defenders of the Armenians are the Jews” – individual Jews, not heads of Jewish organizations, says Holocaust historian Michael Berenbuam, who has written and spoken extensively on the subject.
“This was a sense of tzedakah for me … a sense of justice,” Goldberg says.
Weinstein, who had not heard about the Genocide until he read the Ararat script, said he agreed to back the project because “the denial of the Armenian Holocaust reminds me of the denial of our own Jewish Holocaust.”
Weinstein “felt it was time to tell the story,” The Los Angeles Times reported. “Having lost eight relatives at Auschwitz, Weinstein related well to the subject.”
The Jewish community has been cautious about embracing the Armenian Genocide issue, observers say, for several reasons. The two primary ones are:
• Pressure by Turkey. Turkey, a political, economic and military ally of Israel, was the first majority-Muslim nation in the Middle East to establish diplomatic relations with Israel. A refuge for endangered Jews from the Inquisition to the Holocaust, the country is hospitable to the 27,000 Jews who still live there.
Turkey consistently challenges any Armenian assertions of Turkish responsibility for a genocide. As far back as the 1930s, it pressured the State Department to block an MGM movie version of “The Forty Days of Musa Dagh.” In 1982 Turkey, according to many media reports, pressured Israel – with threats against the safety of Turkish Jews and indications that it might close its borders to Jews fleeing Iran—to cancel an academic conference on genocide that was to include references to the Armenian experience; a scaled-down gathering was eventually moved from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv.
• The uniqueness of the Holocaust. Many protectors of the Holocaust’s legacy resist attempts to compare the scope of the Shoah to any other mass extermination of a people, feeling that references to such examples as Rwanda, Cambodia or Sudan would diminish the Jewish suffering’s unique status.
The Turkish Daily News in 2001 quoted Shimon Peres, then Israeli foreign minister, as saying, “We reject attempts to create a similarity between the Holocaust and the Armenian allegations. Nothing similar to the Holocaust occurred. It is a tragedy what the Armenians went through but not a genocide.”
“We are teaching the Holocaust in too particularistic a way,” Auron says.
What do the Armenians want?
“We want Turkey to acknowledge the genocide,” Haik Gugarats of the Armenian Embassy says. “All we want from Turkey is the establishment of normal diplomatic relations and the opening of borders.”
Armenia has no territorial or monetary demands, Gugarats says.
“The Turks feel they are unjustly accused,” says Taner Akcam, a Turkish historian and sociologist who is a visiting professor at the University of Minnesota. He is among a handful of Turkish scholars to challenge his homeland’s denial of responsibility for the Genocide.
Though Turkey’s leadership since the 1920s had no direct ties to the slaughter of the Armenians, “some of the founders of the state were members of the party who organized the Genocide,” Akcam says. “The Turks glorified these people as founding heroes.”
Admission of Turkey’s role in the genocide would “question the very foundation of the state,” he says.
Armenian- Americans tell of being raised on stories of the Genocide, like American Jews who heard about the Holocaust while growing up. But the Armenian Genocide did not become a public issue in the Armenian community for a few generations because émigrés here and in other countries lacked the numbers or political clout of Jewish Holocaust survivors who raised public consciousness of the Shoah, starting in the late 1970s.
“After any genocide, the victims don’t like to talk about it – it happened after the Holocaust,” Gugarats says.
Thousands of people, including politicians, are expected to attend Sunday’s memorial ceremony in Times Square. As Turkey seeks membership in the European Union, demands by EU countries, especially France, that Turkey admit responsibility for the deaths of Armenians during the Genocide will focus increased attention on the subject. And the recent $20 million settlement by the New York Life Insurance Company to descendants of Armenians who held insurance policies at the turn of the last century adds to the historical record.
In recent decades the European Parliament, the UN Committee on Human Rights, the Vatican and several European governments and scholarly organizations have acknowledged the Armenian Genocide. In June 1998 the Association of Genocide Scholars defined the Armenian tragedy as the 20th century’s first genocide.
Israel took a neutral position until 1994, when Deputy Foreign Minister Yossi Beilin declared in the Knesset that “it was not war. It was most certainly massacre and genocide … We will always reject any attempt to erase its record, even for some political advantage.”
Apparent Jewish indifference to the issue has drawn Armenian criticism, and, three years ago, a protest rally outside the Israeli Consulate in Los Angeles.
The Armenian National Committee in 2002 criticized “nine major Jewish organizations” – including the American Jewish Committee, the American Jewish Congress, the Anti-Defamation League, and Hadassah – for signing a letter that urged President Bush to provide Turkey with economic and military aid.
The letter, the committee said, “appears to represent a retreat from the Jewish American community’s proud tradition of standing up for human rights, universal values, and the cause of international justice.”
Next year, the Jewish and Armenian communities will be closer, symbolically – Yom haShoah and Genocide Commemoration Day occur on consecutive days in 2006.
04/22/05: Jewish Journal: Jewish Split Marks Armenian Genocide
2005-04-22
Jewish Split Marks Armenian Genocide
by Larry Derfner, Tel Aviv Correspondent
In the cemetery of the 1,500-year-old Armenian Quarter in the Old City of Jerusalem there rises a memorial to genocide — the Armenian genocide. This horror set the stage for the Jewish Holocaust, but as a human calamity, it also stands alone.
George Hintlian, a 58-year-old Armenian historian, grew up in the quarter. He’s interviewed hundreds of exiled survivors; two are left in the quarter, he said, the oldest, is a 100-year-old woman.
“My grandfather and uncle were killed in the genocide, and so were many other members of my family,” Hintlian said.
His friends include Hebrew University professors who attend the quarter’s genocide memorial ceremony each year. They’ll be hosting a memorial conference at the university later this month, but such attention is the exception rather than the rule.
Armenians “would expect a natural alliance [with Israelis and Jews], or at least empathy,” Hintlian said. “But in the end, a kind of indifference has set in.”
There’s always been a strong Jewish angle to the story of the Armenian genocide, whose 90th anniversary is commemorated this weekend. At the beginning, Jews numbered disproportionately among those who called attention to the atrocities, among those who tried to provoke the conscience of the world.
Then, in the nine decades after, Jewish intellectuals and scholars worked to expose and commemorate this brutal episode — out of a sense of decency, of historical accuracy and also with an understanding that genocides are not a Jewish phenomenon alone, and that the tragedy of a single people is a tragedy also for all humanity.
But there’s been another quite different strain of Jewish reaction to the Armenian genocide. American and Israeli Jews also have been prominent among those who refuse to define the slaughter of more than 1 million Armenians as genocide. They refuse to blame the Turkish regime of old for the crime — largely out of respect for Turkey’s long history of protecting Jews and out of deference to the current pro-Israel Turkish government.
Turkish governments for more than 80 years have denied that any genocide took place, claiming instead that a war was on and Armenians weren’t its only victims. This view holds that Turks weren’t responsible for Armenian suffering then and certainly are not now. In its public relations battle vs. Armenians, Turkey has had no greater ally than Israeli governments and elements of the U.S. Jewish establishment, notably the American Jewish Committee.
The official Israeli line, stated most authoritatively in 2001 by then-Foreign Minister Shimon Peres on the eve of a state visit to Turkey, is that what happened to the Armenians “is a matter for historians to decide.”
Peres didn’t stop there. Speaking to a Turkish newspaper, Peres said, “We reject attempts to create a similarity between the Holocaust and the Armenian allegations.”
Hebrew University professor emeritus Yehuda Bauer, Israel’s leading Holocaust scholar, minces no words: “Frankly, I’m pretty disgusted. I think that my government preferred economic and political relations with Turkey to the truth. I can understand why they did it, but I don’t agree with it.”
Witness to History
Henry Morganthau, the U.S. ambassador to Turkey through the first half of World War I, was an early, crucial witnesses to the Ottoman Turks’ slaughter of 1 million-1.5 million Armenians, and the permanent exile of approximately 1 million more from 1915 to 1916.
In a cable to the U.S. State Department, Morganthau wrote: “Deportation of and excesses against peaceful Armenians is increasing, and from harrowing reports of eyewitnesses it appears that a campaign of race extermination is in progress under a pretext of reprisal against rebellion.”
Morganthau, one of a few Jews then in U.S. government service, also wrote that the “persecution of Armenians is assuming unprecedented proportions. Reports from widely scattered districts indicate a systematic attempt to uproot peaceful Armenian populations and ... arbitrary efforts, terrible tortures, wholesale expulsions and deportations from one end of the empire to the other, accompanied by frequent instances of rape, pillage and murder, turning into massacre, to bring destruction and destitution on them.”
Years later, Prague-born Jewish author Franz Werfel immortalized the scattered, desperate Armenian acts of resistance against Ottoman marauders in his classic 1933 novel, “The Forty Days of Musa Dagh.” Today, numerous Jewish Holocaust scholars, including Elie Wiesel, Deborah Lipstadt, Daniel Goldhagen, Raul Hilberg and Bauer, are among the most prominent voices calling for recognition of the Armenian genocide and Turkish historic responsibility for it.
The forces that carried out the killing included Kurds and Circassians, as well as Turks, Bauer said, but the decision-making leaders behind the onslaught were the Turkish rulers of the Ottoman Empire.
“There’s no doubt about it whatsoever — it’s absolutely clear,” said Bauer, citing “thousands” of testimonials from U.S. consuls, missionaries, social workers, nurses, doctors and businessmen present at the time, as well as thousands more from Austrian and German officials who were there. The various sources tell “the same story, and they were completely independent of each other,” Bauer said.
Decades of Denial
A post-World War I Ottoman Turk government convicted and executed many perpetrators of the Armenian massacre, Bauer added, but the Turkish leadership that overthrew that post-war government, and every Turkish regime since, has denied the genocide.
“Many of these denials say, ‘Yes, there was terrible suffering on both sides, the Turkish vs. the Armenian, these things happen in war,’” Bauer said. “But that’s nonsense. This was a definite, planned attack on a civilian minority, and whatever Armenian resistance there was came in response to the imminent danger of mass murder.”
The Turkish version has sympathizers among university historians, including UCLA’s Stanford Shaw, University of Louisville’s Justin McCarthy and Princeton’s Bernard Lewis, but they are a distinct minority.
Israel’s reaction to the Armenian genocide has become an academic focus of Israeli Open University professor Yair Auron. His books include “The Banality of Denial: Israel and the Armenian Genocide.” Israel’s Education Ministry blocked his 1990s attempt to introduce the Armenian genocide and other genocides into Israeli schools out of concern for “objectivity.”
Auron contends that the Israeli government’s abetting of Turkey’s denial is not only a “moral disgrace,” it also “hurts the legacy and heritage of the Holocaust. When we help a country deny the genocide of its predecessor, we also help the deniers of the Holocaust, because they watch what’s happening. They see that in this cynical world, if you invest persistent efforts in denial, then denial, to some extent at least, succeeds.”
But Jewish and Israeli silence is about more than a misguided attempt to preserve the Holocaust’s “uniqueness.” There’s also the pragmatic issue of Israel’s all-important military, economic and political relations with Turkey. Israeli Foreign Ministry sources, who insisted on anonymity, characterized the official Israeli approach to the Armenian genocide as “Practical, realpolitik”
Repeated requests to the Turkish Embassy in Tel Aviv for an interview went unanswered. But Turkey remains a major customer of Israel’s defense industries, and the two countries share considerable military and anti-terrorism expertise. Turkey also stands as a bulwark of moderate Islam in the Middle East, a vital regional site of U.S. and NATO military bases, as well as an ally of America and an enemy of Iran and Syria.
Then there’s Turkey’s historical treatment of Jews, beginning with the Spanish Inquisition more than 500 years ago, when it provided a safe haven for Jewish refugees fleeing murderous persecution.
Officially, Israel doesn’t use the word “genocide” to describe the slaughter of the Armenians, preferring the word “tragedy.”
In contrast to some 20 other countries, the United States also has never recognized the Armenian genocide. Congressional resolutions to that effect have repeatedly failed to pass, despite backing from Jewish congressmen such as Adam Schiff (D-Burbank), Barney Frank (D-Mass.) and Stephen Rothman (D-N.J.).
Israel and Jewish lobbyists in the United States have opposed these efforts. For its part, the American Jewish Committee has taken no official position on a proposed congressional resolution urging President Bush to use the term “Armenian genocide” in his own upcoming remarks related to the genocide’s 90th anniversary.
Barry Jacobs, director of strategic studies at the American Jewish Committee’s Washington office pointedly refused to agree or disagree with the judgment of Holocaust and genocide scholars on who was responsible for the slaughter of Armenians.
The L.A. Story
In Los Angeles, the Museum of Tolerance “has educated more people about the Armenian genocide than any other institution in America,” said Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean at the affiliated Simon Wiesenthal Center.
The calamity is included in a map of 20th century genocides in the museum’s permanent exhibition, and the museum’s library has numerous books and videos discussing it, Cooper noted. He employs the term “Armenian genocide,” but he will not place responsibility for it on troops of the Ottoman Empire or on Turkish leaders, past or present.
Two years ago, a handful of young Armenian activists targeted the center in a six-day hunger strike, demanding greater representation of their people’s victimization. Talks between the Wiesenthal Center and Armenian community officials ended that dispute, Cooper said.
Summing up the center’s approach, Cooper said: “We try to take a stand that is true to history, but which is also true to our friends, and hopefully our Armenian and Turkish friends understand. That a genocide of the Armenian people took place is a fact, and that for hundreds of years, the Turkish people [aided Jews in danger], when Christian and Muslim nations did not is also a fact, and that Israel needs close relations with Turkey is also a fact. That’s not an easy triangulation, but it’s our responsibility to make it.”
Despite Turkish and Israeli lobbying against including any mention of the Armenian genocide, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., makes three mentions of the genocide in its permanent exhibit. One is Hitler’s infamous exhortation urging his invading troops to be merciless: “Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?”
Armenian in Jerusalem
Armenian historian Hintlian takes Israeli school groups on tours of Jerusalem’s Armenian Quarter. One stop is the memorial in the cemetery. It’s something he can do to keep the memory and lessons of that history alive.
Hintlian appreciates the support he gets from well-known Jewish Holocaust historians. Bauer and Auron will be among four Israelis traveling to the Armenian capital of Yerevan to participate in an academic conference on the genocide. Still, Hintlian is “distressed” at the overall Jewish response. It has regressed, he said, from Morganthau’s valiant example of 90 years ago.
“Armenians expect that Jews would have a natural sympathy for them,” the historian said. “We are two ancient nations with the same diaspora problems of survival. We’ve suffered the same kind of persecution. And fate decided that our two nations would both be victims of genocide in the last century.”
Source: http://www.jewishjournal.com/home/preview.php?id=14011
Jewish Split Marks Armenian Genocide
by Larry Derfner, Tel Aviv Correspondent
In the cemetery of the 1,500-year-old Armenian Quarter in the Old City of Jerusalem there rises a memorial to genocide — the Armenian genocide. This horror set the stage for the Jewish Holocaust, but as a human calamity, it also stands alone.
George Hintlian, a 58-year-old Armenian historian, grew up in the quarter. He’s interviewed hundreds of exiled survivors; two are left in the quarter, he said, the oldest, is a 100-year-old woman.
“My grandfather and uncle were killed in the genocide, and so were many other members of my family,” Hintlian said.
His friends include Hebrew University professors who attend the quarter’s genocide memorial ceremony each year. They’ll be hosting a memorial conference at the university later this month, but such attention is the exception rather than the rule.
Armenians “would expect a natural alliance [with Israelis and Jews], or at least empathy,” Hintlian said. “But in the end, a kind of indifference has set in.”
There’s always been a strong Jewish angle to the story of the Armenian genocide, whose 90th anniversary is commemorated this weekend. At the beginning, Jews numbered disproportionately among those who called attention to the atrocities, among those who tried to provoke the conscience of the world.
Then, in the nine decades after, Jewish intellectuals and scholars worked to expose and commemorate this brutal episode — out of a sense of decency, of historical accuracy and also with an understanding that genocides are not a Jewish phenomenon alone, and that the tragedy of a single people is a tragedy also for all humanity.
But there’s been another quite different strain of Jewish reaction to the Armenian genocide. American and Israeli Jews also have been prominent among those who refuse to define the slaughter of more than 1 million Armenians as genocide. They refuse to blame the Turkish regime of old for the crime — largely out of respect for Turkey’s long history of protecting Jews and out of deference to the current pro-Israel Turkish government.
Turkish governments for more than 80 years have denied that any genocide took place, claiming instead that a war was on and Armenians weren’t its only victims. This view holds that Turks weren’t responsible for Armenian suffering then and certainly are not now. In its public relations battle vs. Armenians, Turkey has had no greater ally than Israeli governments and elements of the U.S. Jewish establishment, notably the American Jewish Committee.
The official Israeli line, stated most authoritatively in 2001 by then-Foreign Minister Shimon Peres on the eve of a state visit to Turkey, is that what happened to the Armenians “is a matter for historians to decide.”
Peres didn’t stop there. Speaking to a Turkish newspaper, Peres said, “We reject attempts to create a similarity between the Holocaust and the Armenian allegations.”
Hebrew University professor emeritus Yehuda Bauer, Israel’s leading Holocaust scholar, minces no words: “Frankly, I’m pretty disgusted. I think that my government preferred economic and political relations with Turkey to the truth. I can understand why they did it, but I don’t agree with it.”
Witness to History
Henry Morganthau, the U.S. ambassador to Turkey through the first half of World War I, was an early, crucial witnesses to the Ottoman Turks’ slaughter of 1 million-1.5 million Armenians, and the permanent exile of approximately 1 million more from 1915 to 1916.
In a cable to the U.S. State Department, Morganthau wrote: “Deportation of and excesses against peaceful Armenians is increasing, and from harrowing reports of eyewitnesses it appears that a campaign of race extermination is in progress under a pretext of reprisal against rebellion.”
Morganthau, one of a few Jews then in U.S. government service, also wrote that the “persecution of Armenians is assuming unprecedented proportions. Reports from widely scattered districts indicate a systematic attempt to uproot peaceful Armenian populations and ... arbitrary efforts, terrible tortures, wholesale expulsions and deportations from one end of the empire to the other, accompanied by frequent instances of rape, pillage and murder, turning into massacre, to bring destruction and destitution on them.”
Years later, Prague-born Jewish author Franz Werfel immortalized the scattered, desperate Armenian acts of resistance against Ottoman marauders in his classic 1933 novel, “The Forty Days of Musa Dagh.” Today, numerous Jewish Holocaust scholars, including Elie Wiesel, Deborah Lipstadt, Daniel Goldhagen, Raul Hilberg and Bauer, are among the most prominent voices calling for recognition of the Armenian genocide and Turkish historic responsibility for it.
The forces that carried out the killing included Kurds and Circassians, as well as Turks, Bauer said, but the decision-making leaders behind the onslaught were the Turkish rulers of the Ottoman Empire.
“There’s no doubt about it whatsoever — it’s absolutely clear,” said Bauer, citing “thousands” of testimonials from U.S. consuls, missionaries, social workers, nurses, doctors and businessmen present at the time, as well as thousands more from Austrian and German officials who were there. The various sources tell “the same story, and they were completely independent of each other,” Bauer said.
Decades of Denial
A post-World War I Ottoman Turk government convicted and executed many perpetrators of the Armenian massacre, Bauer added, but the Turkish leadership that overthrew that post-war government, and every Turkish regime since, has denied the genocide.
“Many of these denials say, ‘Yes, there was terrible suffering on both sides, the Turkish vs. the Armenian, these things happen in war,’” Bauer said. “But that’s nonsense. This was a definite, planned attack on a civilian minority, and whatever Armenian resistance there was came in response to the imminent danger of mass murder.”
The Turkish version has sympathizers among university historians, including UCLA’s Stanford Shaw, University of Louisville’s Justin McCarthy and Princeton’s Bernard Lewis, but they are a distinct minority.
Israel’s reaction to the Armenian genocide has become an academic focus of Israeli Open University professor Yair Auron. His books include “The Banality of Denial: Israel and the Armenian Genocide.” Israel’s Education Ministry blocked his 1990s attempt to introduce the Armenian genocide and other genocides into Israeli schools out of concern for “objectivity.”
Auron contends that the Israeli government’s abetting of Turkey’s denial is not only a “moral disgrace,” it also “hurts the legacy and heritage of the Holocaust. When we help a country deny the genocide of its predecessor, we also help the deniers of the Holocaust, because they watch what’s happening. They see that in this cynical world, if you invest persistent efforts in denial, then denial, to some extent at least, succeeds.”
But Jewish and Israeli silence is about more than a misguided attempt to preserve the Holocaust’s “uniqueness.” There’s also the pragmatic issue of Israel’s all-important military, economic and political relations with Turkey. Israeli Foreign Ministry sources, who insisted on anonymity, characterized the official Israeli approach to the Armenian genocide as “Practical, realpolitik”
Repeated requests to the Turkish Embassy in Tel Aviv for an interview went unanswered. But Turkey remains a major customer of Israel’s defense industries, and the two countries share considerable military and anti-terrorism expertise. Turkey also stands as a bulwark of moderate Islam in the Middle East, a vital regional site of U.S. and NATO military bases, as well as an ally of America and an enemy of Iran and Syria.
Then there’s Turkey’s historical treatment of Jews, beginning with the Spanish Inquisition more than 500 years ago, when it provided a safe haven for Jewish refugees fleeing murderous persecution.
Officially, Israel doesn’t use the word “genocide” to describe the slaughter of the Armenians, preferring the word “tragedy.”
In contrast to some 20 other countries, the United States also has never recognized the Armenian genocide. Congressional resolutions to that effect have repeatedly failed to pass, despite backing from Jewish congressmen such as Adam Schiff (D-Burbank), Barney Frank (D-Mass.) and Stephen Rothman (D-N.J.).
Israel and Jewish lobbyists in the United States have opposed these efforts. For its part, the American Jewish Committee has taken no official position on a proposed congressional resolution urging President Bush to use the term “Armenian genocide” in his own upcoming remarks related to the genocide’s 90th anniversary.
Barry Jacobs, director of strategic studies at the American Jewish Committee’s Washington office pointedly refused to agree or disagree with the judgment of Holocaust and genocide scholars on who was responsible for the slaughter of Armenians.
The L.A. Story
In Los Angeles, the Museum of Tolerance “has educated more people about the Armenian genocide than any other institution in America,” said Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean at the affiliated Simon Wiesenthal Center.
The calamity is included in a map of 20th century genocides in the museum’s permanent exhibition, and the museum’s library has numerous books and videos discussing it, Cooper noted. He employs the term “Armenian genocide,” but he will not place responsibility for it on troops of the Ottoman Empire or on Turkish leaders, past or present.
Two years ago, a handful of young Armenian activists targeted the center in a six-day hunger strike, demanding greater representation of their people’s victimization. Talks between the Wiesenthal Center and Armenian community officials ended that dispute, Cooper said.
Summing up the center’s approach, Cooper said: “We try to take a stand that is true to history, but which is also true to our friends, and hopefully our Armenian and Turkish friends understand. That a genocide of the Armenian people took place is a fact, and that for hundreds of years, the Turkish people [aided Jews in danger], when Christian and Muslim nations did not is also a fact, and that Israel needs close relations with Turkey is also a fact. That’s not an easy triangulation, but it’s our responsibility to make it.”
Despite Turkish and Israeli lobbying against including any mention of the Armenian genocide, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., makes three mentions of the genocide in its permanent exhibit. One is Hitler’s infamous exhortation urging his invading troops to be merciless: “Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?”
Armenian in Jerusalem
Armenian historian Hintlian takes Israeli school groups on tours of Jerusalem’s Armenian Quarter. One stop is the memorial in the cemetery. It’s something he can do to keep the memory and lessons of that history alive.
Hintlian appreciates the support he gets from well-known Jewish Holocaust historians. Bauer and Auron will be among four Israelis traveling to the Armenian capital of Yerevan to participate in an academic conference on the genocide. Still, Hintlian is “distressed” at the overall Jewish response. It has regressed, he said, from Morganthau’s valiant example of 90 years ago.
“Armenians expect that Jews would have a natural sympathy for them,” the historian said. “We are two ancient nations with the same diaspora problems of survival. We’ve suffered the same kind of persecution. And fate decided that our two nations would both be victims of genocide in the last century.”
Source: http://www.jewishjournal.com/home/preview.php?id=14011
04/21/05 Jerusalem Post: Rattling the Cage: Playing politics with genocide
Rattling the Cage: Playing politics with genocide
By LARRY DERFNER
Jerusalem Post
Apr. 21, 2005 1:52 | Updated Apr. 21, 2005 6:45
"And the world stood silent." This is one of the most indelible Jewish memories of the Holocaust, and one of our most bitter accusations.
On Sunday, in the Armenian capital of Yerevan, the90th anniversary of the Armenian genocide - the slaughter of at least 1 million Armenian civilians by the Turkish Ottoman regime - will be memorialized.
What does the State of Israel and many of its American Jewish lobbyists have to say about it, about this first genocide of the 20th century? If they were merely standing silent, that would be an improvement. Instead, on the subject of the Armenian genocide, Israel and some US Jewish organizations, notably the American Jewish Committee, have for many years acted aggressively as silencers. In Israel, attempts to broadcast documentaries about the genocide on state-run television have been aborted. A program to teach the genocide in public schools was watered down to the point that history teachers refused to teach it.
In the US Congress, resolutions to recognize the genocide and the Ottoman Turks' responsibility for it have been snuffed out by Turkey and its right-hand man on this issue, the Israel lobby.
Jeshajahu Weinberg, founding director of the US Holocaust Museum, wrote that when Armenians lobbied to show the genocide in the museum, Turkey and Israel counter-lobbied to keep out any trace of it. The museum decided to make three mentions of the genocide, including Hitler's call to his troops to be merciless to their victims: "Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?"
Over 125 Holocaust scholars - including ElieWiesel, Deborah Lipstadt, Daniel Goldhagen, Raul Hilberg and Yehuda Bauer -have signed ads in the New York Times demanding acknowledgement of the Armenian genocide and the Ottoman Turks' culpability for it. Wiesel testified in Congress on behalf of such a resolution. The International Association of Genocide Scholars - which, by the way, is studded with Jewish names - holds the same view as a matter of course.
In the face of all this, Israel's position, as articulated by then-foreign minister Shimon Peres before a 2001 visit to Turkey, says the Armenian genocide is "a matter for historians to decide."
The American Jewish Committee's position is that of "the US government, the government of Israel, and the Turkish Jewish community: that this is an issue best left to historians, not politicians," says Barry Jacobs of the AJC's Washington office.
Off the record, a Foreign Ministry official describes Israel's approach to the issue as "practical, realpolitik.Whoever sees our position in this region can understand how important our relations with Turkey are."
And that's what determines the Israeli and US Jewish establishment stand on the Armenian genocide - Israel's crucial military, economic and political ties with Turkey.
Then, along with the "realpolitik" considerations, there's the Jewish people's weighty moral debt to Turkey, a safe harbor for Jews since the Spanish Inquisition over 500 years ago.
Finally, on a petty level, there's the worry that letting the Armenian genocide out of history's closet might diminish the "uniqueness" of the Holocaust in people's minds.
"Frankly, I'm pretty disgusted. I think that my government preferred economic and political relations with Turkey to the truth. I can understand why they did it, but I don't agree with it."
That's Yehuda Bauer talking. He's Israel's leading Holocaust historian, an Israel Prize winner, and now academic adviser to Yad Vashem. He began studying the Armenian genocide about 25 years ago as a natural outgrowth of his study of the Holocaust.
For 80 years, says Bauer, Turkey has been "denying the genocide... saying, 'Yes, there was terrible suffering on both sides, the Turkish versus the Armenian, these things happen in war.' But that's nonsense. This was a definite, planned attack on a civilian minority, and whatever Armenian resistance there was came in response to the imminent danger of mass murder."
To Turkey's claim, backed by Israel and its Washington lobby, that there's no conclusive proof of a Turkish Ottoman order for the mass murder of Armenians, Bauer says, "Oh, there's no doubt about it whatsoever. It's absolutely clear." He cites "thousands" of testimonials from US, German and Austrian officials who were in Turkey and what is now Armenia when it happened.
One of the most important of those witnesses was US ambassador to Turkey Henry Morganthau - a Jew, incidentally. He wrote that the "persecution of Armenians is assuming unprecedented proportions. Reports from widely scattered districts indicate a systematic attempt to uproot peaceful Armenian populations and... arbitrary efforts, terrible tortures, wholesale expulsions and deportations from one end of the Empire to the other, accompanied by frequent instances of rape, pillage and murder, turning into massacre, to bring destruction and destitution on them."
Israel and the Israel lobby fully acknowledge that the Armenians suffered a terrible "tragedy." A Foreign Ministry statement even notes that "the Jewish people have a special sensitivity tot he murders and human tragedies that occurred during the years 1915 and1916."
They just won't say who was to blame, or whether Turkey bears historical responsibility. Mention Wiesel and all the rest of the Holocaust and genocide historians, and the Israeli and US Jewish officials comeback - off the record - with the renowned Bernard Lewis. Along with a few other American historians, Lewis says it wasn't a genocide at all, that World War I was going on and Armenians were fighting with Russia against the Turks, and that you can't blame Turkey for what happened, not then and certainly not now.
Thus the official Israeli/Jewish line: "It's a matter for historians to decide."
Fair enough. Even though Lewis's side is terribly out numbered among Western historians, let's say the burden of proof lies with Wiesel, Bauer, Lipstadt et al, who say the Ottoman Turks ordered the massacre of 1 million-1.5 million Armenians. Let's say Israeli and US Jewish leaders aren't competent to judge who's right and who's wrong.
And let's even give their declared neutrality the benefit of the doubt because of Israel's relations with Turkey, and Turkey's long history of welcoming Jews in distress.
The point is this: Israel and the US Jewish establishment may say they're neutral over what happened to the Armenians 90years ago, but their actions say the opposite. They've not only taken sides, they're on the barricades. They've done everything they can to cover up what the great majority of historians, including the entire community of Holocaust scholars, say was a clear-cut case of genocide.
Jews shouldn't do this - for any reason. Ninety years after the Armenian genocide, there is a decent Jewish response to the sickening behavior of the State of Israel, the American Jewish Committee and other US Jewish organizations:
Not in our name.
Source: http://www.genocidewatch.org/rattlingthecageplayingpoliticswithgenocide21april05.htm
By LARRY DERFNER
Jerusalem Post
Apr. 21, 2005 1:52 | Updated Apr. 21, 2005 6:45
"And the world stood silent." This is one of the most indelible Jewish memories of the Holocaust, and one of our most bitter accusations.
On Sunday, in the Armenian capital of Yerevan, the90th anniversary of the Armenian genocide - the slaughter of at least 1 million Armenian civilians by the Turkish Ottoman regime - will be memorialized.
What does the State of Israel and many of its American Jewish lobbyists have to say about it, about this first genocide of the 20th century? If they were merely standing silent, that would be an improvement. Instead, on the subject of the Armenian genocide, Israel and some US Jewish organizations, notably the American Jewish Committee, have for many years acted aggressively as silencers. In Israel, attempts to broadcast documentaries about the genocide on state-run television have been aborted. A program to teach the genocide in public schools was watered down to the point that history teachers refused to teach it.
In the US Congress, resolutions to recognize the genocide and the Ottoman Turks' responsibility for it have been snuffed out by Turkey and its right-hand man on this issue, the Israel lobby.
Jeshajahu Weinberg, founding director of the US Holocaust Museum, wrote that when Armenians lobbied to show the genocide in the museum, Turkey and Israel counter-lobbied to keep out any trace of it. The museum decided to make three mentions of the genocide, including Hitler's call to his troops to be merciless to their victims: "Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?"
Over 125 Holocaust scholars - including ElieWiesel, Deborah Lipstadt, Daniel Goldhagen, Raul Hilberg and Yehuda Bauer -have signed ads in the New York Times demanding acknowledgement of the Armenian genocide and the Ottoman Turks' culpability for it. Wiesel testified in Congress on behalf of such a resolution. The International Association of Genocide Scholars - which, by the way, is studded with Jewish names - holds the same view as a matter of course.
In the face of all this, Israel's position, as articulated by then-foreign minister Shimon Peres before a 2001 visit to Turkey, says the Armenian genocide is "a matter for historians to decide."
The American Jewish Committee's position is that of "the US government, the government of Israel, and the Turkish Jewish community: that this is an issue best left to historians, not politicians," says Barry Jacobs of the AJC's Washington office.
Off the record, a Foreign Ministry official describes Israel's approach to the issue as "practical, realpolitik.Whoever sees our position in this region can understand how important our relations with Turkey are."
And that's what determines the Israeli and US Jewish establishment stand on the Armenian genocide - Israel's crucial military, economic and political ties with Turkey.
Then, along with the "realpolitik" considerations, there's the Jewish people's weighty moral debt to Turkey, a safe harbor for Jews since the Spanish Inquisition over 500 years ago.
Finally, on a petty level, there's the worry that letting the Armenian genocide out of history's closet might diminish the "uniqueness" of the Holocaust in people's minds.
"Frankly, I'm pretty disgusted. I think that my government preferred economic and political relations with Turkey to the truth. I can understand why they did it, but I don't agree with it."
That's Yehuda Bauer talking. He's Israel's leading Holocaust historian, an Israel Prize winner, and now academic adviser to Yad Vashem. He began studying the Armenian genocide about 25 years ago as a natural outgrowth of his study of the Holocaust.
For 80 years, says Bauer, Turkey has been "denying the genocide... saying, 'Yes, there was terrible suffering on both sides, the Turkish versus the Armenian, these things happen in war.' But that's nonsense. This was a definite, planned attack on a civilian minority, and whatever Armenian resistance there was came in response to the imminent danger of mass murder."
To Turkey's claim, backed by Israel and its Washington lobby, that there's no conclusive proof of a Turkish Ottoman order for the mass murder of Armenians, Bauer says, "Oh, there's no doubt about it whatsoever. It's absolutely clear." He cites "thousands" of testimonials from US, German and Austrian officials who were in Turkey and what is now Armenia when it happened.
One of the most important of those witnesses was US ambassador to Turkey Henry Morganthau - a Jew, incidentally. He wrote that the "persecution of Armenians is assuming unprecedented proportions. Reports from widely scattered districts indicate a systematic attempt to uproot peaceful Armenian populations and... arbitrary efforts, terrible tortures, wholesale expulsions and deportations from one end of the Empire to the other, accompanied by frequent instances of rape, pillage and murder, turning into massacre, to bring destruction and destitution on them."
Israel and the Israel lobby fully acknowledge that the Armenians suffered a terrible "tragedy." A Foreign Ministry statement even notes that "the Jewish people have a special sensitivity tot he murders and human tragedies that occurred during the years 1915 and1916."
They just won't say who was to blame, or whether Turkey bears historical responsibility. Mention Wiesel and all the rest of the Holocaust and genocide historians, and the Israeli and US Jewish officials comeback - off the record - with the renowned Bernard Lewis. Along with a few other American historians, Lewis says it wasn't a genocide at all, that World War I was going on and Armenians were fighting with Russia against the Turks, and that you can't blame Turkey for what happened, not then and certainly not now.
Thus the official Israeli/Jewish line: "It's a matter for historians to decide."
Fair enough. Even though Lewis's side is terribly out numbered among Western historians, let's say the burden of proof lies with Wiesel, Bauer, Lipstadt et al, who say the Ottoman Turks ordered the massacre of 1 million-1.5 million Armenians. Let's say Israeli and US Jewish leaders aren't competent to judge who's right and who's wrong.
And let's even give their declared neutrality the benefit of the doubt because of Israel's relations with Turkey, and Turkey's long history of welcoming Jews in distress.
The point is this: Israel and the US Jewish establishment may say they're neutral over what happened to the Armenians 90years ago, but their actions say the opposite. They've not only taken sides, they're on the barricades. They've done everything they can to cover up what the great majority of historians, including the entire community of Holocaust scholars, say was a clear-cut case of genocide.
Jews shouldn't do this - for any reason. Ninety years after the Armenian genocide, there is a decent Jewish response to the sickening behavior of the State of Israel, the American Jewish Committee and other US Jewish organizations:
Not in our name.
Source: http://www.genocidewatch.org/rattlingthecageplayingpoliticswithgenocide21april05.htm
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