ABE FOXMAN’S FEAR
By Robert Spencer

FrontPage magazine.com, CA
UID=681E5075-B42C-4501-94EF-A38915A3DA04
Sept 4 2007

As American Airlines Flight 11 began heading toward the North Tower
of the World Trade Center, Muhammad Atta announced to the passengers:
"We have some planes. Just stay quiet and you’ll be OK….Nobody move.

Everything will be OK. If you try to make any moves, you’ll endanger
yourself and the airplane. Just stay quiet."

This has been the modus operandi of bullies and thugs throughout the
ages: telling their victims, keep quiet, just go along, or things will
go even worse for you. And of course, the only effective response to
the bullying of the weak by the powerful has always been not to keep
quiet, but to speak out, to resist, and thereby to draw attention to
the bullying and make life as uncomfortable as possible for the bully
unless and until he stops. But this, unfortunately, is a lesson that
human beings have had to relearn again and again. The impulse to stay
quiet, to appease, to give the bully what he wants, wasn’t invented
by Neville Chamberlain in his Munich meeting with "Herr Hitler":
it is as old as human conflict itself, and is alive and well today
despite the voluminous evidence that it only emboldens thugs, rather
than pacifying them.

And so it played out again in recent weeks, when Abraham H. Foxman,
national director of the Anti-Defamation League, fired the New England
regional director of the ADL, Andrew H. Tarsy. Tarsy’s crime?

He recognized the 1915-1918 Turkish genocide of the Armenians,
and expressed his support for H.R. 106, a Congressional resolution
recognizing and deploring that genocide. After encountering a storm
of disapproval, Foxman rehired Tarsy and conceded that the Turkish
actions were "tantamount to genocide," but still refused to throw
the ADL’s support behind H.R. 106, explaining: "We continue to
firmly believe that a congressional resolution on such matters is a
counterproductive diversion and will not foster reconciliation between
Turks and Armenians, and may put at risk the Turkish Jewish community
and the important multilateral relationship between Turkey, Israel,
and the United States."

In other words, one of the main reasons why we have to keep quiet
about the Armenian genocide for fear that the Turkish government,
which still refuses to acknowledge that it happened, will cause
trouble for the Jews remaining in Turkey. Just stay quiet and you’ll
be OK. And Foxman is by no means alone. Steven M. Goldberg of the
Zionist Organization of America notes that "HR 106 already has 227
co-sponsors in the House of Representatives and is supported by
a majority of Jewish senators and congressmen across the nation,
including Sens. Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.),
and Reps. Henry Waxman (D-Los Angeles), Howard Berman (D-Van Nuys),
Brad Sherman (D-Sherman Oaks) and Jane Harman (D-Venice). Most of the
Jewish organizational establishment, however, is either waffling or
desperately trying to avoid the issue. The facts are embarrassing."

Indeed they are. Outside of the Turkish government and those who
want to impress it, the reality of the Armenian genocide is not in
serious doubt. On December 15, 1915, the New York Times reported on
a statement by Samuel T. Dutton, Secretary of the American Committee
for Armenian and Syrian Relief: "of the 2 million Armenians in Turkey
a year ago, at least 1 million have been killed or forced into Islam,
or compelled to flee the country, or have died upon the way to exile,
or are now up on the road to the deserts of Northern Arabia, or are
already there." The Times included a notorious statement by the Ottoman
Sultan Abdul Hamid II: "The way to get rid of the Armenian Question
is to get rid of the Armenians." The massacres went on for several
years thereafter, and were widely reported in the American press;
the Literary Digest referred in 1921 to the "systematic destruction
of Christian peoples in the Near East." A million and a half Armenians
were killed between 1915 and 1923.

What can be gained by remaining silent about these atrocities? Only
a new boldness by those who would emulate the Turks – as Adolf
Hitler said, "Our strength lies in our intensive attacks and our
barbarity…After all, who today remembers the genocide of the
Armenians?" Of all organizations, the ADL, which speaks out so strongly
and eloquently against Holocaust denial, should recognize this.

But fearful and shameful silence in the face of barbarity is not
the province of the ADL alone. Foxman’s refusal to endorse H.R. 106
is of a piece with a much larger denial: the refusal on the part of
the mainstream media and government officials to examine the jihad
ideology of Islamic supremacism that helped fuel the Armenian genocide,
and fuels contemporary terrorism. Much of this refusal stems from
an impulse similar to Foxman’s: a desire to avoid offending Muslims,
so as to keep those who are not yet radicalized from becoming so.

But this, as Muhammad Atta’s advice to the passengers of American
Airlines Flight 11 makes clear, only emboldens the jihadists. Those
who stay quiet and avoid unpleasant realities in hopes of thereby
appeasing the violent are in for a rude awakening. Their supine
response will only make bullies step up their bullying, secure in
the knowledge that decent people do not have the will to stop them.

Robert Spencer is a scholar of Islamic history, theology, and law
and the director of Jihad Watch. He is the author of seven books,
eight monographs, and hundreds of articles about jihad and Islamic
terrorism, including the New York Times Bestsellers The Politically
Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades) and The Truth About
Muhammad. His latest book is Religion of Peace?.