THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MEDALLION IN ARMENIAN GENOCIDE DISPUTE
The Van Der Galiën Gazette, Netherlands
Oct 17 2007
Today I want to draw your attention to two excellent articles:
One from Washington Times written by Bruce Fein, and the other from
Guardian by Stephen Kinzer.
Mr Fein writes:
Armenian crimes against humanity and war crimes against the Ottoman
Turkish and Kurdish populations of eastern and southern Anatolia
during World War I and its aftermath have been forgotten amidst
congressional preoccupation with placating the vocal and richly
financed Armenian lobby.
A historically supportable resolution would have condemned massacres
against Armenians with the same vigor, as it should have condemned
massacres by Armenians against the innocent Muslim populations of
the crumbling Ottoman Empire.
This is exactly what the Turkish people voice all the time, but the
world has a deaf ear to Turkish voices, could it be because Turks
are predominantly Muslim? Would the world hear these statements when
voiced by non-Muslims, I wonder?
To manipulate the emotions of the congressmen/women, Armenian
diaspora always bring forward survivors of the tragic events to US
Congress. It’s easy for them because these people are all living
here. Turkey also has many witnesses, however, those who are still
alive are living in remote areas of Turkey and bringing these old
people all the way to the USA just to play with the emotions of
the congressmen/women is extremely difficult, if not impossible and
almost cruel. It is not because Turks do not have living proofs of
what transpired back in those days.
Mr Fein explains:
Capt. Emory Niles and Arthur Sutherland, on an official 1919
U.S. mission to eastern Anatolia, reported: "In the entire region
from Bitlis through Van to Bayezit, we were informed that the
damage and destruction had been done by the Armenians, who, after
the Russians retired, remained in occupation of the country and who,
when the Turkish army advanced, destroyed everything belonging to the
Musulmans. Moreover, the Armenians are accused of having committed
murder, rape, arson and horrible atrocities of every description upon
the Musulman population. At first, we were most incredulous of these
stories, but we finally came to believe them, since the testimony was
absolutely unanimous and was corroborated by material evidence. For
instance, the only quarters left at all intact in the cities of Bitlis
and Van are Armenian quarters … while the Musulman quarters were
completely destroyed."
Niles and Sutherland were fortified by American and German missionaries
on the spot in Van. American Clarence Ussher reported that Armenians
put the Turkish men "to death," and, for days, "They burned and
murdered." A German missionary recalled that, "The memory of these
entirely helpless Turkish women, defeated and at the mercy of the
[Armenians] belongs to the saddest recollections from that time."
The United States neglected Col. Furlong’s admonition in 1920,
and again last Wednesday. Nothing seems to have changed from those
days, when Christian lives were more precious than the lives of the
"infidels."
Justin McCarthy of the University of Louisville concluded that a
staggering 2.5 million Anatolian Muslims died in World War I and
the Turkish War of Independence. More than 1 million died in the Six
Provinces in Eastern Anatolia, as Armenians with the help of Russia’s
invading armies sought to reclaim their historical homeland.
In contrast, best contemporaneous estimates place the number of
Armenians who died in the war and its aftermath at between 150,000
and 600,000. The Armenian death count climbed to 1.5 million over
the years on the back of political clout and propaganda.
Mr Fein’s article continues to explain the Armenian terrorism against
Turkish nationals, which I also had pointed in a previous post.
Nor did the committee deplore the 60 years of Armenian terrorism in
the Ottoman capital Istanbul, including assassination of the Armenian
patriarch and an attempted assassination of the sultan as he was
leaving prayer. Armenian terror was exported to the U.S. mainland and
Europe by fanatics who murdered over 70 Turkish diplomats, three of
them in Los Angeles and one honorary consul general in Boston.
Mourad Topalian, erstwhile head of the Armenian National Committee
of America, a lead lobbying group behind the resolution and major
campaign contributor to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other members,
was sentenced to 36 months in prison for complicity in a conspiracy
to bomb the Turkish mission at the United Nations. Yet Toplain has
escaped a terrorist label by either Armenian-Americans or their echo
chambers in Congress.
Mr Fein points out to a very important fact:
…the Holocaust was proven before the Nuremburg Tribunal with
the trappings of due process. Armenians, in contrast, have forgone
bringing their genocide allegation before the International Court of
Justice because it is unsupported by historical facts.
In contrast to open Ottoman archives, significant Armenian archives
remain closed to conceal evidence of Armenian terrorism and massacres.
Mr Fein concludes:
If the resolution’s proponents had done their homework and put aside
religious bigotry, they would have reached the same conclusion as
author and Professor Bernard Lewis of Princeton University: "[T]he
point that was being made was that the massacre of the Armenians in the
Ottoman Empire was the same as what happened to Jews in Nazi Germany
and that is a downright falsehood. What happened to the Armenians
was the result of a massive Armenian armed rebellion against the
Turks, which began even before war broke out, and continued on a
larger scale."
Brian Ardouny of the Armenian Assembly of America in a videotaped
interview for a documentary on the Armenian Revolt clucked: "We don’t
need to prove the genocide historically, because it has already been
accepted politically." Congress should reject that cynicism in defense
of historical truth.
Mr Kinzer writes:
Pushing the Armenian genocide resolution through Congress is a reckless
act that reflects the corruption of the American political system.
Referring to a pulitzer prize winning non-fiction book called ‘Imperial
Reckoning’ which is based on historical research that accuses Britain
of having committed genocide in Kenya during the 1950s, Mr Kinzer asks:
Will the United States Congress endorse this claim and pass a
resolution condemning Britain?
And continues:
Of course not. Congress is not equipped to make such judgments. More
important, that is not the job of Congress. It exists to make laws,
not to condemn evil-doers from past centuries.
There is another reason why Congress will never condemn the British
for killing hundreds of thousands of Kenyans, and for what Imperial
Reckoning calls "their campaign of terror, dehumanizing torture and
genocide." Kenyans in the United States do not have a powerful lobby
that wins influence in Washington by channeling millions of dollars
into election campaigns.
That is not the case with Armenian-Americans. After years of
intense effort, they have persuaded the house committee on foreign
affairs to approve a resolution declaring that Turks were guilty of
genocide against Armenians in eastern Anatolia during the spring of
1915. The speaker of the house, Nancy Pelosi, has pledged to bring
this resolution to a vote by the full House, where it will almost
certainly pass. In doing so, she satisfies the wealthy Armenian
community in her home state of California.
In considering the resolution that accuses Turks of genocide, thereby
placing them on a level with Nazis, members of Congress must answer
two questions.
First is whether the slaughter of Armenians in 1915 constitutes
genocide. That depends on one’s definition of genocide.
The second and more fundamental question Congress must consider is
whether it should make decisions about which powers from past centuries
were genocidal and which were not. If the job of Congress is to respond
to political pressure, it should embrace this resolution. If it wants
to contribute to peace among nations, it should not.
Passing this resolution would place a moral obligation on Congress
to decide whether Britain, France, Germany, Holland, Russia, Serbia,
Spain, Portugal, Cambodia and China are guilty of genocide – not to
mention the United States itself, which was built on piles of native
American and African bones. Few members of Congress, however, reflect
on such abstract concepts as moral obligation.
Turkey’s position on this issue is wrong. So, however, is the
position of the Armenian-American lobby. It seems uninterested in
reconciliation. The resolution for which it has worked so hard, and
paid so much money, is producing exactly the results it seeks. It
undermines efforts at reconciliation between Turkey and Armenia, and
also weakens the Turkish-American alliance that is one of the few
points of light in the dark relationship between today’s Christian
west and the Muslim world.
If Pelosi and her comrades in Washington cared to go beyond rhetoric,
expediency and the lust for campaign contributions, they would be
seeking to promote the urgently important process of Turkish-Armenian
reconciliation. Instead they have chosen to take a lamentable and
revoltingly cynical political step.
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