GABE PRESSMAN’S VIEW: THE FORGOTTEN GENOCIDE

WNBC, NY
April 18 2007

When Adolf Hitler was trying to persuade his aides that a Jewish
holocaust would be tolerated by the west, he said, "Who, after all,
speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?"

In 1915, the Turks began a systematic slaughter of the Armenian
people — an estimated 1.5 million were killed. The Turkish government
still denies it ever happened, despite convincing evidence, including
photographs and the testimony of respected scholars.

Systematically, the Turks rounded up Armenian men, women and
children. Some were executed outright. Many were tortured first, with
implements modeled after the fiendish devices used in the Spanish
Inquisition. There were death marches in which tens of thousands of
Armenians were forced to walk hundreds of miles into the deserts of
Syria. Many perished on the way.

There were massacres delivered, historians say, with great cruelty.

One bizarre feature of this period was that, while torturing was
taking place at night, people would gather outside, beating drums
and blowing whistles, trying to drown out the screams of the tortured.

Henry Morgenthau Sr., the grandfather of Manhattan’s district attorney,
was American ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, and did much to inform
the world of the genocide taking place.

This is the month in which the world remembers the Holocaust, in
which 6 million Jewish people perished. April 24 has been set aside
for remembering the Armenian genocide. In many ways, the Armenian
genocide was a precursor of what would happen to 6 million European
Jews three decades later.

You can’t blame the Armenian people, those who’ve settled in the
states and those in Europe, for feeling neglected. The world seems
to have virtually forgotten their ordeal. But it is still remembered
with great pain by the descendants of those who suffered or died.

An editorial in the New York Times points out that the Armenian killing
was the 20th century’s first genocide, setting an example that later
emboldened Hitler, the Hutu leaders of Rwanda and the Sudanese in
the present day. The New York Times deplores as a "cover-up" the
fact that the United Nations has blocked a scheduled exhibit at
United Nations headquarters commemorating the 13th anniversary of
the Rwandan genocide.

The reason: because this exhibit mentions the mass murder of Armenians
and Turkey objected.

We need to remember this shameful episode in world history. If the
United Nations and the Turks turn their backs on the Armenians,
they demean us all. The Armenians should not be ignored or forgotten.

Their ordeal should be honored — at the United Nations. There should
be a ceremony and the hard-nosed Turkish diplomats should lay a wreath.

ail.html