Turkey and the Armenians
Today’s denial is tomorrow’s holocaust
Haaretz
12/10/2007
By Yossi Sarid
Congressman Adam Schiff, who proposed the resolution to name the
Armenian massacre a genocide, is Jewish. The Jewish nation should be
grateful for Schiff’s initiative, for he has saved Jewish honor in
America, Israel and everywhere. He restored our humane image, in
contrast to the cynics and genocide deniers who are forever demanding
payment for being perpetual victims.
Congressman Schiff is following in the footsteps of another Jew, Henry
Morgenthau, who served as U.S. ambassador in Turkey in those days. He
called the massacre "the greatest crime in modern history."
Schiff is also the student of another Jew, Franz Werfel, who on his way
to the Land of Israel stopped in Damascus and was appalled to see "the
starving, mutilated and sick Armenian refugee children." He published
the novel "The Forty Days of Musa Dagh" (1933), which shocked the world.
In 1918 Shmuel Talkovsky, then secretary of Haim Weizmann, wrote with
Weizmann’s approval: "Is there any nation whose fate is more similar to
ours than the Armenians?"
But in Israel today there are Jews who are less than Jewish and Zionists
who are less than Zionist – including heads of state and heads of
government. Denying another nation’s Holocaust is no less ugly than
denying ours. It is also dangerous. Today’s denial is tomorrow’s
Holocaust. The Armenian genocide wasn’t the first in this era. The
German imperial army slaughtered 100,000 Namibians in 1904. In 1915, the
Armenian genocide began; the Ottomans killed 1.5 million of them in
various ways. If the world had risen up in protest against the genocide
of the Namibians and Armenians, the Holocaust of the Jews might also
have been averted. This is not a mere assumption; it’s probably a fact.
A week before invading Poland, Hitler addressed his officers (August 24,
1939): "It’s a matter of indifference to me what a weak western European
civilization will say about me … I have ordered my Death-Head
Formation to kill mercilessly and without compassion men, women and
children of Polish derivation and language. Who, after all, speaks today
of the annihilation of the Armenians?"
Such was Hitler’s calming message to his troops.
The next time some Israel hater – Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, for example –
denies the Jewish Holocaust, and we raise a hue and cry about it, there
will be some self-righteous Gentiles ready to say, "You’re right, but we
have our own Turkeys."
As natural and historic victims, we should be the ones to spread the
message from one end of the world to another: what happened to us can
happen again, to us and to the people of Rwanda, Bosnia, Cambodia,
Sudan, Burma.
There is no need to compare between holocausts to recognize other
nations’ suffering.
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