EDITORIAL — FINDING SOLUTIONS

Marshfield Mariner
July 9 2008
MA

Marshfield – Maybe Marshfield’s efforts to stamp out hate in town
could be better served by working with a program other than the
Anti-Defamation League’s No Place for Hate. Perhaps the ADL’s stance
on the Armenian Genocide has compromised it so much that it is not
credible as an organization that fights racism.

That will be up to the selectmen to decide, and while withdrawal
from No Place for Hate might be the option they choose — and that
would certainly be a defensible position for them to take — any
racial problems that may exist in Marshfield will require solutions
that have nothing to do with what anyone calls the mass killings of
Armenians by the Ottoman Empire from 1915 to 1918.

It could be that the alleged racially motivated beating of an
African-American teenager from Jamaica Plain in Marshfield last month
was an isolated incident, and we obviously hope that it was, if that
was indeed what happened. But any steps the town takes going forward
will have to be about education and, as was written in this space in
the June 18 issue, getting people to realize that this is the year
2008 and it’s about time old attitudes on race get tossed into the
trash where they belong. (By the way, an acknowledgement of an error
in that editorial is due here, as the last two U.S. secretaries of
state have been black.)

If No Place for Hate is the best way to accomplish that objective,
that’s what the town should do. If it’s not — either because of the
Armenian Genocide issue or some other reason — then the town should
do something else.

And while we’re at it, a little more education on the Armenian Genocide
wouldn’t be a bad idea either.

From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress