Waco Tribune Herald, TX
Oct 28 2007

Turkey blackmails U.S. to ignore its sins
Art Tonoyan, guest columnist

Sunday, October 28, 2007

Some 90 years ago the Ottoman Turkish government set out in the most
thorough fashion to destroy its Christian minorities. But the brunt
of the Turkish ire fell on Armenian Christians.

Death came in many guises. As a result, some 1.5 million Armenian
men, women and children were killed – nearly two-thirds of all
Armenians in Turkey.

You might ask why I care.

By chance or providence, my grandparents managed to survive the
massacres.

Actually, considerable credit went to the combined relief efforts of
American Protestant missionaries, philanthropists such as John D.
Rockefeller and statesmen such as William Jennings Bryan.

The U.S. Congress is debating a non-binding resolution recognizing
that the Ottoman government’s efforts to destroy Armenians indeed
constituted a genocide. That’s the position of the International
Association of Genocide Scholars.

This initiative, backed by self-evident facts, has brought shameless
Turkish tantrums combined with political blackmail, and meddling into
U.S. internal affairs.

So doing, Turkey indirectly has threatened the lives of U.S. service
personnel in Iraq.

As the saying goes, `With friends like these . . .’

The Bush administration has urged Congress not to follow through with
the resolution.

Who would have thought that the United States could be so bullied?

The timing of the resolution? I would argue it is 90 years too late.
But similar resolutions have come up year after year in Congress.
Year after year the proposal is shot down for fear of offending the
Turks.

Always, say the opponents, the time is not right.

Either it’s the Cold War, or the first Gulf War, or this Gulf War or
the war on terrorism.

We’re told that Turkey is a reliable ally ad infinitum. Reliable to a
point. And why?

Turkey has been on the receiving end of U.S. favors for the past 50
or so years without much positive change in its cultural outlook.

Regardless, this Turkish government, while allowing the shipment of
supplies, refused to allow the staging of coalition troops in opening
of the northern front into Iraq. Turkey did so in hopes of scoring
political points with the European Union.

This ended up costing time, U.S. lives and U.S. tax dollars.

That’s not all. Turkey’s Islamist government has courted the
Palestinian terrorist group Hamas, called the Israeli treatment of
the Palestinians a `genocide’ (a dose of inescapable irony) and has
signed lucrative business deals with the regime of Iranian mullahs by
effectively sidestepping U.S. calls to isolate Iran.

But these facts are not the only ones that put Turkey’s democratic
credentials in doubt. The Turkish state spares no effort to silence,
intimidate, imprison or even kill anybody who dares to challenge the
official narrative on the Armenian genocide.

Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk was tried for `insulting Turkishness’ when
he mentioned it in a Swiss interview.

Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink was murdered in front of his
offices for an article he wrote about the genocide in his newspaper.

Then his son was convicted for `insulting Turkishness’ for reprinting
his father’s original article. He may well end up in a prison ward
somewhere in Istanbul, if he doesn’t end up with a bullet in his
forehead.

The symbolic resolution in question before Congress is a simple act
of affirmation of history. It is not by any stretch of the
imagination directed at the current Turkish government, although
Turkey perceives it as such.

Some 23 nations have passed similar resolutions in the past decade.

The fault for the current debacle should not therefore be located in
partisan politics, as the cynics at the Fox News and the likes of
Rush Limbaugh would have us believe.

It’s in the fact that Turkey is yet to take an honest look at a past
it tries so hard to deny. The tantrums it now throws are more worthy
of my 2-year-old than a modern state aspiring to join the family of
European nations.

Art Tonoyan is a Ph.D. candidate at Baylor University’s J.M. Dawson
Institute of Church-State Studies.

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From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress