Tawdry genocide tale
By Bruce Fein
The Washington Times
September 2, 2007
On Tuesday, Aug. 21, the national director of the Anti-Defamation
League (ADL), Abraham H. Foxman, somersaulted from a longstanding ADL
policy. The ADL had declined to characterize as genocide the killings
of Armenians during World War I by Ottoman Muslims. In Mr. Foxman’s
change of position hangs a tawdry tale of intellectual dishonor.
On the Friday before, the national director had fired ADL’s New
England regional director, Andrew H. Tarsy, for defying the national
policy of nonendorsement of the genocide. Yet four days later, Mr.
Foxman was parroting the regional director whom he had just fired.
Four days is not much time to study an issue as complex as the
Armenian genocide narrative – especially when proper deductions are
made for the ordinary inclination to devote the lion’s share of
weekends more to leisure than to lucubration.
Mr. Foxman, moreover, did not claim to have perused the works of
impressive scholars who dispute the Armenian genocide claim. The list
would include Bernard Lewis and Heath Lowry of Princeton, Guenther
Lewy of the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, Justin McCarthy of
the University of Louisville, and Professor Norman Stone, who taught
at Cambridge and Oxford in Great Britain for 30 years before retiring
early from the chair of modern history.
Mr. Foxman also did not assert even a passing acquaintance with the
meaning of genocide as recently expounded by the International Court
of Justice in Bosnia and Herzogovina v. Serbia and Montenegro (Feb.
26, 2007). There the court declared: "It is not enough to establish…
that deliberate unlawful killings of members of a group have
occurred…. It is not enough that the members of the group are
targeted because they belong to that group, that is because the
perpetrator has a discriminatory intent. The acts listed in [the
Genocide Convention] must be done with intent to destroy the group in
whole or in part."
Mr. Foxman voiced no rebuttal to the credible evidence undermining an
Armenian genocide. During World War I, many Armenians were killed
because they had defected to the enemy and were slaughtering Ottoman
Muslims. Others were suspected of treason or disloyalty. The vast
majority of Armenian casualties were occasioned by wretchedly executed
deportations undertaken by the Ottoman government for war purposes. In
1916, the Ottomans themselves prosecuted about 1,300 soldiers and
civilians for crimes against the Armenian deportees. One governor was
executed. Tens of thousands of Armenians in Istanbul, Izmir and Aleppo
were left undisturbed.
As Bernard Lewis has observed, an analogy would have been if Adolf
Hitler had left Jews in Berlin, Frankfurt and Vienna exempt from the
Final Solution. For more than three centuries, under the Ottoman
millet system, Armenians enjoyed religious, cultural and social
harmony. Conflict with the Ottoman Empire was largely provoked by
Armenian terrorism and plotting secession comparable to the
Confederate States of America, not by a late-blooming desire to
destroy Armenians as a group.
It seems self-evident something other than the truth about the
Armenian genocide claim was at work with Mr. Foxman. That suspicion
was reinforced in an Aug. 22 interview with the Boston Globe. He
unconvincingly asserted that for an unstated time he had held a
private conviction that Armenians had suffered genocide, but thought
characterizing their mass killings by the Ottoman Empire as atrocities
or massacres was a sufficient description.
But he was provoked to go public with his true belief because the
Jewish community was fracturing over endorsing the Armenian genocide.
As reported in the Globe, he elaborated: "So if that word [genocide]
brings the community together, that’s fine…. In this time, for us to
be split apart on an issue, which, as important as it is, is not
foremost on the agenda of our safety and security, I found very
troubling. I therefore did what I did to bring the community
together."
Mr. Foxman’s explanation is dubious. He is to ADL what Moses was to
the Jews. It strains credulity to believe ADL would have balked at any
time over his desire to officially acknowledge an Armenian genocide.
Indeed, when Mr. Foxman did so on Aug. 21, there was no audible ADL
protest.
The national director declared he had suppressed his opinion over the
Armenian genocide because he believed an open ADL endorsement would
anger Turkey and jeopardize both Jews living there and Israeli-Turkish
relations. But when nonendorsement began to divide the Jewish
community, Mr. Foxman believed its splintering was more dangerous to
Jewish safety or security than any rift with Turkey. Accordingly, the
ADL altered its longstanding position.
This gets to the crux of the matter. The Armenian genocide question
should be settled by truth, not by the political calculations of Mr.
Foxman or any other influential figure. The strength of the Armenian
lobby or the geostrategic importance of Turkey to the United States
should also be irrelevant.
The government of Turkey has opened its archives for more research and
has supported further examination of the genocide question through
debate and evaluation before an impartial body. Armenians have not
reciprocated with either archival openness or willingness to debate as
opposed to denigrate or intimidate scholars who question the genocide.
Mr. Foxman should be exerting his energies to convince the Armenians
to join the debate in lieu of jumping on their bandwagon and endorsing
their conclusion for ulterior motives.
Bruce Fein is a resident scholar at the Turkish Coalition of America.
Source: TARY02/109020014/1012/COMMENTARY