The ADL’s unfinished business

August 23, 2007

IN 1951, six years after the end of World War II, at the urging of Raphael
Lemkin, the United Nations adopted a five-point definition of genocide. It
wasn’t just the Holocaust that led Lemkin to demand that the world recognize
as a crime systematic cultural and racial annihilations and atrocities, it
was also the massacre of more than 1.5 million Armenians by the Ottoman
Turks that occurred between 1915 and 1921. Has Abraham Foxman, national
director of the Anti-Defamation League, not learned anything from history ("ADL
chief bows to critics: Foxman cites rift, calls Armenian deaths
genocide< l/massachusetts/articles/2007/08/22/adl_chief_bows _to_critics/>,"
Page A1, Aug. 22)?

It would behoove him to educate himself on the moral, as opposed to the
political, issue of genocide by reading Samantha Power’s Pulitzer
Prize-winning book "A Problem from Hell," which chronicles the moral
corruption of American foreign policy when it comes to taking a stand in
such places as Rwanda, Cambodia, Serbia, and now Darfur.

Foxman is dissembling when he says, "On reflection, we have come to share
the view . . . that the consequences of those actions were indeed tantamount
to genocide," and then describes the proposed congressional resolution
recognizing the Armenian genocide as a "counterproductive diversion." This
"political" position is morally reprehensible.

LOIS A. ROSENFELD
Acton

WHILE THE recalcitrance of the national ADL in acknowledging the Armenian
genocide was troubling, the fact that some politicians and Armenian groups
have responded to Abraham Foxman’s capitulation with further hostility is
equally troubling.

Watertown Councilor Marilyn Pettito Devaney, the Armenian Assembly of
America, and US Representative Adam Schiff, the California Democrat who
introduced the genocide resolution in the House, may believe strongly in
declaring the slaughter of 1.5 million Armenians a genocide, but it is
unfair to unilaterally declare support of a particular piece of legislation
to be a litmus test that another organization must submit to in order to
prove itself.

Does the NAACP have a position on the resolution? How about the Council on
American-Islamic Relations, or the National Council of La Raza? Has anyone
thought to ask them? Or is an organization devoted to fighting anti-Semitism
the only anti-hate group held to such a standard?

DAVE BROWN
Malden
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2007 The New York Times Company

Source:
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