LETTER
Garen Megerditchian Toronto, Ontario

The Columbian, WA
32007_Our-readers-views.cfm
Oct 23 2007

Cavalier attitude resented

Amid all her brouhaha about the risks the Armenian genocide
resolution would pose to U.S. foreign relations, glaringly absent
in Ellen Putman’s Oct. 19 letter ("List of past abuses is long")
is any discussion about the moral imperative to speak out against
genocide denial.

Raphael Lemkin, the Polish-Jewish legal scholar who coined the
word "genocide," invented the concept partly on the basis of the
extermination of the Armenians in 1915. Lemkin, who lost 49 members
of his family during the Holocaust, said the following in an 1949
interview with CBS on the UN Convention on Genocide:

"I became interested in genocide because it happened to the Armenians;
and afterwards the Armenians got a very rough deal at the Versailles
Conference because their criminals were guilty of genocide and were
not punished."

This month the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs presented UNESCO
with a draft resolution for the preservation of the memory of the
Holocaust and prevention of its denial. Approval of this resolution is
all the more pressing given Ahmadinejad’s remarks denying the veracity
of the Holocaust. But according to Putman, there would be no need to
"revisit" this 60-year-old crime against humanity that surely did
not involve most UNESCO member countries.

I am a Canadian of Armenian origin. It sickens me to see people like
Putman take so cavalier an attitude vis a vis such a serious matter
as genocide denial.