TO DENY WHAT THE TURKS DID WAS GENOCIDE IS INTOLERABLE
by jeff jacoby

J. – the Jewish News weekly of Northern California, CA
Oct 19 2007

Was there an Armenian genocide during World War I?

While it was happening, no one called the slaughter of Armenian
Christians by Ottoman Turks "genocide." No one could: The word wouldn’t
be coined for another 30 years. But those who made it their business
to tell the world what the Turks were doing found other terms to
describe the state-sponsored mass murder of the Armenians.

In its extensive reporting on the atrocities – 145 stories in
1915 alone – The New York Times described them as "systematic,"
"deliberate," "organized by government," and a "campaign of
extermination." A Sept. 25, 1915 headline warned: "Extinction Menaces
Armenia." What the Turks were embarked upon, said one official in the
story that followed, was "nothing more or less than the annihilation
of a whole people."

Foreign diplomats, too, realized that they were observing genocide
avant la letter. American consular reports leaked to the Times
indicated "that the Turk has undertaken a war of extermination on
Armenians, especially those of the Gregorian Church, to which about
90 percent of the Armenians belong." In July, U.S. Ambassador Henry
Morgenthau cabled Washington that "race murder" was underway – a
"systematic attempt to uproot peaceful Armenian populations and …

to bring destruction and destitution upon them." These were not random
outbreaks of violence, Morgenthau stressed, but a nationwide slaughter
"directed from Constantinople." In his memoirs, he bluntly labeled
the butchery "The Murder of a Nation."

Another US diplomat, Consul Leslie Davis, described in grisly detail
the "reign of terror" he saw in Harput, and the corpses of "thousands
and thousands" of Armenians murdered near Lake Goeljuk. The mass
deportations ordered by the Turks, in which hundreds of thousands
of Armenians were crammed into freight cars and shipped hundreds of
miles to die in the desert or at the hands of killing squads, were far
worse than a straightforward massacre, he wrote. "In a massacre many
escape, but a wholesale deportation of this kind in this country means
a longer and perhaps even more dreadful death for nearly everyone."

Other eyewitnesses, including American missionaries, provided
stomach-clenching descriptions of the "terrible tortures" mentioned
by Morgenthau. Women and girls were stripped and raped, then forced
to march naked through blistering heat. Many victims were crucified
on wooden crosses; as they writhed in agony, the Turks would taunt
them: "Now let your Christ come and help you!" Reuters reported that
"in one village, 1,000 men, women, and children are reported to have
been locked in a wooden building and burned to death." In another,
"several scores of men and women were tied together by chains and
thrown into Lake Van."

Talaat Pasha, the Turkish interior minister who presided over the
liquidation of the Armenians, made no bones about his objective. "The
Government … has decided to destroy completely all the indicated
persons" – the Armenians – "living in Turkey," he wrote to authorities
in Aleppo. "An end must be put to their existence … and no
regard must be paid to either age or sex, or to conscientious
scruples." Talaat told Morgenthau that "we have already disposed of
three-quarters of the Armenians; there are none at all left in Bitlis,
Van and Erzerum." To the ambassador’s remonstrations, Talaat curtly
replied: "We will not have the Armenians anywhere in Anatolia."

Was there an Armenian genocide during World War I? The Turkish
government today denies it, but the historical record, chronicled
in works like Peter Balakian’s powerful study, "The Burning Tigris"
(HarperCollins, 2003) is overwhelming. Yet the Turks are abetted in
their denial and distortion by many who know better, including the
Clinton administration and both Bush administrations, and prominent
ex-congressmen-turned-lobbyists, including Republican Bob Livingston
and Democrats Dick Gephardt and Stephen Solarz.

Particularly deplorable has been the longtime reluctance of some
leading Jewish organizations, including the Anti-Defamation League,
the American Jewish Committee, and the American Israel Public Affairs
Committee, to call the first genocide of the 20th century by its
proper name. When Andrew Tarsy, the New England director of the
ADL, came out last week in support of a congressional resolution
recognizing the Armenian genocide, he was promptly fired by the
national organization. Shaken by the uproar that followed, the ADL
finally backed down. The murder of a million Armenians at the hands
of the Ottoman Turks in 1915, it acknowledged yesterday, was "indeed
tantamount to genocide."

Now the other organizations should follow suit. Their unwillingness
to acknowledge that the Turks committed genocide stems from the
fear that doing so may worsen the plight of Turkey’s beleaguered
Jewish community, or may endanger the crucial military and economic
relationship Israel has forged with Turkey – the Jewish state’s only
such relationship with a major Muslim nation. Those are honorable
concerns. But they cannot justify keeping silent about a most
dishonorable assault on the truth. Genocide denial must be intolerable
to everyone, but above all to those for whom "never again" is such a
sacred principle. And at a time when jihadist violence from Darfur to
Ground Zero has spilled so much innocent blood, dissimulation about
the jihad of 1915 can only aid our enemies.

The Armenian genocide is an incontestable fact of history. Shame on
anyone who refuses to say so.

Jeff Jacoby is a writer for Aish Hatorah Resources, where this story
first appeared.

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