TWO STANDARDS ON 20TH-CENTURY ATROCITIES
The Washington Post
October 16, 2007 Tuesday
Regional Edition
Last week, the House Foreign Affairs Committee approved a resolution
commemorating the Armenian genocide. As the principal author of the
measure and one of more than 225 sponsors, I was deeply disappointed
by The Post’s editorial in opposition to the bill ["Worse Than
Irrelevant," Oct. 10].
Earlier this year, the House passed a resolution calling on Japan to
accept responsibility for and apologize to the thousands of "comfort
women" who were forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese army during
World War II. Despite vociferous Japanese opposition, The Post had
rightly criticized Tokyo for its failure to accept responsibility
for the suffering of the "comfort women" ["Shinzo Abe’s Double Talk,"
editorial, March 25].
That the deliberate murder of 1.5 million Armenians between 1915 and
1923 constitutes genocide is almost universally accepted by historians
and is chronicled in great detail in our National Archives. This
wound festers because Turkey refuses to acknowledge the crimes of
its Ottoman forebears. As Elie Wiesel has said, genocide denial is a
"double killing": It murders the dignity of the survivors and seeks
to destroy remembrance of the crime.
How can a newspaper argue in March that recognizing the suffering of
the comfort women is vital but assert now that recognizing the murder
of 1.5 million is somehow "petty"?
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
