ISRAEL TO RECOGNIZE GENOCIDE?
by Pamela Geller
Atlas Shrugs
December 24, 2007 Monday 9:39 AM EST
Dec. 24, 2007 (Atlas Shrugs delivered by Newstex) — Wouldn’t
be something if if small, vulnerable Israel did so before the
mighty hyperpower US?? Armenia optimistic Israel will recognize
‘genocide’J Post hat tip Andy Bostom The government of Armenia is
"very hopeful" that Israel will soon recognize the World War I-era
massacre of Armenians by Turks as an "act of genocide," a senior
Armenian official told The Jerusalem Post last week. "The Armenian
and Israeli people are united in the suffering that each endured, and
no one but the Jewish people can better understand our situation,"
Sergo Yeritsyan, a former education minister who now serves as a
senior adviser to President Robert Kocharian, said. "The world has
recognized and accepted the Holocaust as an historical event, and the
world is now acknowledging the genocide of Armenians," Yeritsyan said
in an interview in his office in the Armenian capital of Yerevan. "I
am very hopeful that Israel, step by step, will recognize it as
well… We are very hopeful and we are waiting for it," Yeritsyan
said. Contacted by the Post, a spokesman for Israel’s Foreign Ministry
declined to comment. Historians estimate that as many as 1.5 million
Armenian Christians were killed by Ottoman Turks in a massacre that
began in 1915, in what some scholars have declared to be the first
systematic act of genocide in the 20th century. Turkey, however,
denies the deaths constituted genocide, saying the toll has been
grossly inflated and that those killed were victims of civil war
and unrest. Israel has thus far tried to distance itself from the
issue, not wanting to offend Ankara and souring relations. Yeritsyan
insisted that the killings constituted genocide and stressed that it
was essential for the international community to recognize it as such.