ARMENIAN GENOCIDE RESOLUTION: TURKEY’S CHUTZPAH

Assyrian International News Agency, CA
Feb 28 2007

We are certainly not insensitive to the significance of Turkey’s
support of Israel. But the Turkish government’s attempt to capitalize
on that support by pressing the American Jewish community to oppose a
Congressional resolution that condemns as "genocide" Turkey’s murder
of a million and a half Armenians during World War I strikes us as
being the height of chutzpah.

As The New York Sun reported, on February 5 the Turkish foreign
minister met with representatives of several major Jewish groups
and "made a hard sell" against House Resolution 106, which now has
176 co-sponsors. The Turkish official reportedly appealed to the
participants by noting — outrageously, we think — the uniqueness
of the German genocide against the Jews. The Turks do not deny that
between 1915 and 1917 they conducted a devastating military campaign
against the Armenians and that thousands of Armenians were killed on
forced marches. They claim, however, that the hapless Armenians were
a fifth column, often armed and working on behalf of the Russian army
in World War I.

But the American ambassador to the Ottoman Empire at the time, Henry
Morgenthau, wrote in his memoir, "I am confident that the whole
history of the human race contains no such horrible episode as this."

The orders for the deportations of the Armenian families in 1915
"were merely giving a death warrant to a whole race," he wrote.

Anyone who seriously and objectively considers those events cannot
but conclude that there was a calculated and purposeful effort to
exterminate the Armenians. After all, approximately 1.5 million
perished.

That said, we understand that opposition to House Resolution 106 does
not necessarily signify lack of sympathy with the victims, or, indeed,
sentiment against the concept itself. Not buying into an initiative
on someone else’s schedule is not always an indicator of nefarious
motives at play.

We also have no doubt that some would argue the Jewish community should
oppose the resolution if only to preserve the aura of uniqueness
surrounding the destruction of European Jewry in the Holocaust. And
this, perhaps, was the point the Turkish foreign minister was trying
to make in his presentation to Jewish leaders.

But acknowledging as genocide the systematic murder of a million and a
half human beings of a particular ethnic heritage in no way detracts
from recognition of the Holocaust as a uniquely monumental evil in
the blood-soaked annals of human history.

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