HAIM ORON: IT’S IMPOSSIBLE TO ACCEPT ANY DISREGARDING FROM ARMENIAN GENOCIDE
/PanARMENIAN.Net/
09.02.2010 11:39 GMT+04:00
/PanARMENIAN.Net/ The discussion about the Armenian Genocide and the
need to recognize it should have taken place in the Knesset a long
time ago, said Haim Oron, Knesset member and the head of Meretz party.
"I think that as sons of the Jewish People that knew the Holocaust
and constantly fighting against those who deny the Holocaust, it’s
impossible to accept any disregarding from the Armenian Genocide. I
hope that one day this recognition will be possible because we have
moral and educational duty to this subject especially in this time
when Israel keep stressing the need to preserve the memory of the
Holocaust," Mr. Oron told PanARMENIAN.Net.
As to war with Iran, he said it is possible. "I think that nuclear
armed Iran is a world wide problem that should be solved in
international framework," Mr. Oron said.
Haim Oron was born in Tel-Aviv in 1940. He served as secretary of
the Hashomer Hatzair movement from 1968-1971, and as later secretary
of the movement’s leadership. He was a founding member of the Peace
Now movement. From 1994-1995 he was treasurer of the Histadrut (New
General Federation of Labor). Haim Oron has been a Member of Knesset
since 1988. In 2009, he introduced a draft resolution on recognition
of the Armenian Genocide but the motion failed to gain the essential
number of co-sponsors.
The Armenian Genocide (1915-23) was the deliberate and systematic
destruction of the Armenian population of the Ottoman Empire during
and just after World War I. It was characterized by massacres, and
deportations involving forced marches under conditions designed to
lead to the death of the deportees, with the total number of deaths
reaching 1.5 million.
The date of the onset of the genocide is conventionally held to be
April 24, 1915, the day that Ottoman authorities arrested some 250
Armenian intellectuals and community leaders in Constantinople.
Thereafter, the Ottoman military uprooted Armenians from their homes
and forced them to march for hundreds of miles, depriving them of
food and water, to the desert of what is now Syria.
To date, twenty countries and 44 U.S. states have officially recognized
the events of the period as genocide, and most genocide scholars
and historians accept this view. The Armenian Genocide has been also
recognized by influential media including The New York Times, BBC,
The Washington Post and The Associated Press.
The majority of Armenian Diaspora communities were formed by the
Genocide survivors.
The Holocaust was the systematic, bureaucratic, state-sponsored
persecution and murder of approximately six million Jews by the Nazi
regime and its collaborators. "Holocaust" is a word of Greek origin
meaning "sacrifice by fire." The Nazis, who came to power in Germany
in January 1933, believed that Germans were "racially superior"
and that the Jews, deemed "inferior," were an alien threat to the
so-called German racial community.
The slaughter was systematically conducted in virtually all areas
of Nazi-occupied territory in what are now 35 separate European
countries. It was at its worst in Central and Eastern Europe, which
had more than seven million Jews in 1939. About five million Jews were
killed there, including three million in occupied Poland and over
one million in the Soviet Union. Hundreds of thousands also died in
the Netherlands, France, Belgium, Yugoslavia and Greece. The Wannsee
Protocol makes clear that the Nazis also intended to carry out their
"final solution of the Jewish question" in England and Ireland.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress