SHAME ON US FOR WEAK STANCE ON TURKEY
By Theodore M. Polychronis

Hellenic News of America, PA
Nov 14 2007

Regarding recognition of the Armenian Genocide in the U.S. Congress
(?Genocide vote gets postponed,? Oct. 27): When the Iranian President
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad questioned the genocide perpetrated against the
Jews by Adolf Hitler, our entire administration and Congress, as well
as some academics (such as the infamous Columbia University President
Lee C. Bollinger), protested vehemently and expressed moral outrage.

Many of these people are urging severe punishment of Iran, including
going to war against it.

To my knowledge, the Germans did not deny their crimes committed
against the Jews, and we never concerned ourselves with their feelings
during the Nuremberg trials and later, and as far as I know they
continue to pay reparations to this date. We did the moral thing.

advertisement When a nonbinding resolution is introduced in our
U.S. Congress to call the genocide perpetrated against the Armenians
by the Turks?

only about 20 years before Hitler ? a genocide, our administration
and pathetic Congress go wild and refuse to do so, lest the Turks be
offended. They then proceed to present the arguments that our entire
Iraq war effort will collapse and that, if the Turks are upset, this
will have dire effects on the national security of the United States.

And they proceed to laud Turkey as being the only ?secular democracy?

in the region, and if we pass such a nonbinding resolution
(acknowledging a historical event) all will be lost forever. The
position of our administration and Congress in this affair is
unacceptable, shameful and immoral. The fact of the matter is that
the genocide against the Armenian population in Turkey did occur,
as did the genocide against the Greek populations in the region at
about the same time, and the refusal of our elected representatives
to accept it does not alter this fact.

To dispel some of the myths perpetrated by the well-funded Turkish
lobby and their powerful agents here in the U.S., the present-day
Turkey is not, in my opinion, a democracy and has never been one.

Turkey depends on the U.S. and its handouts. Until recently, and
probably still today, Turkey has been a large recipient of U.S. aid,
military and economic.

Turkey is an international outlaw nation, maintaining after more than
30 years a disputed occupation of part of the Republic of Cyprus,
maintaining a blockade of the Republic of Armenia, threatening Kurdish
Iraq, threatening Greece and its Aegean islands and continuously
violating the Greek airspace.

The ?democratic? Turkish state, which imprisons people for ?insulting
Turkishness,? has embarked on a campaign against the large Kurdish
minority.

Sadly, our U.S. press and media collaborate with the Turks and go
to great lengths to present them in a favorable light, in spite of
facts. An example was the newspapers calling the recently elected
Turkish President Gul a ?former Islamist? (I am curious to ask exactly
what a ?former? Islamist is).

Let us also briefly refresh our memories as to what kind of allies
the Turks are, when they prohibited our military to use some bases
in Turkey during our invasion of Iraq.

To all this I ask, where is our moral outrage? We don�t
need Turkey; Turkey needs us. Our free speech rights supersede the
limitations of the Turkish dictators. To allow the Turks with their
sordid historical and human rights record to lobby and interfere with
our political institutions and dispute our decisions and beliefs and
threaten us when we disagree is unconscionable.

How dare the Turks impose upon us their undemocratic censorship on our
free speech and our right to call a spade a spade ? and the Armenian
Genocide a genocide?

And what are we to think of our elected representatives and
administrations on the matter?

Shame on all of us.