WHITEWASHING GENOCIDE THE EASY WAY
By Seth J. Frantzman

Jerusalem Post
le.aspx?id=171195
March 17 2010

How easy would it be to rewrite the history of the Shoah?

It came as a great surprise when reading Lonely Planet’s Turkish
guide to see that reference to the Armenian genocide, in fact almost
any mention of the once huge Armenian population that was indigenous
to eastern Turkey, was nonexistent. The latest on-line version of the
guide denies the genocide thus: "It was during this time of confusion
and turmoil [World War I] that the Armenian scenario unfolded."

Lonely Planet is a premier travel guide, the largest guidebook
publisher in the world. So when it tells us the Armenian genocide
is something open to debate, a series of events or a "scenario,"
one has to wonder what is going on.

First and foremost, it is not the job of a travel guide to be an
arbiter of history. In addition, since guidebooks by definition must
be carried by travelers, the book must legally be able to enter the
country. Turkey’s law against "denigration of Turkishness" encapsulated
in article 301 of the criminal code has been used to prosecute those,
such as author Orhan Pamuk, who have spoken up about the genocide. Thus
those carrying an offensive travel guide might theoretically run afoul
of the authorities. So Lonely Planet treads carefully in Turkey and
in other states that have a thought police, such as China.

But that’s not the whole story. The authors of the guide tend to have
become cheerleaders for the countries they write about, toeing the
party line and thus spouting off the Turkish claim that the genocide
should be "left to historians."

It is common to other guides as well. Lonely Planet Egypt claims that
the country is a land of "more or less easy coexistence," despite the
fact that every year minority Coptic Christians are rioted against
and their churches are attacked by Muslims. A recent survey by the
Pew Research Center shows that half the Muslims in Egypt view Copts
negatively. Egypt is a coexistence country in much the same way the
American South of the 1950s, with its "colored" drinking fountains,
was a land of coexistence.

THE EXTRAORDINARY thing about the whitewashing of the Armenian genocide
is that with a magic wand the entire history of Armenians in Anatolia,
which dates from the sixth century BCE, disappears. A whole chapter
in the history of Turkey, how almost its entire minority Greek,
Assyrian and Armenian populations disappeared between 1915 and 1922
is rewritten. To be fair Lonely Planet’s Armenia guide describes the
genocide as "the first mass extermination" of people and cites the
figure of 1.5 million killed, but this is no excuse for the Turkish
version.

There is a tendency in the wider world of the media to portray
massacres and genocides as something other than what they are. In the
first week of March 2010 there was a massacre of Christians by Muslims
in the villages of Dogo Nahawa, Zot and Ratsat in central Nigeria.

More than 300 women and children were hacked to death with machetes
in scenes reminiscent of the 1994 Rwandan genocide.

However, there was immediately an attempt to cover up the religious
killings are often painted by local politicians as a religious or
sectarian conflict. In fact it is a struggle between ethnic groups
for fertile land and resources in the region."

UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay said, "It would be a
mistake to paint this purely as sectarian or ethnic violence… what
is needed is a concerted effort to tackle the underlying causes of
repeated outbreaks of ethnic and religious violence which Nigeria
has witnessed in recent years, namely discrimination, poverty and
disputes over land."

Even the Vatican’s Rev. Federico Lombardi didn’t have the guts to
condemn the murder of his own constituents: "The conflict must be
interpreted in the light of social, economic, ethnic and cultural
factors rather than religious hatred."

Really? Then why were all the victims Christian and the perpetrators
Muslim?

THE SUDANESE genocide is another example. Economist Jeffrey Sachs
argued that "the deadly carnage in Darfur, Sudan, for example, which
is almost always discussed in political and military terms, has roots
in an ecological crisis directly arising from climate shocks."

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon jumped on the bandwagon, noting that
"amid the diverse social and political causes, the Darfur conflict
began as an ecological crisis, arising at least in part from climate
change."

How easy would it be to rewrite the history of the Holocaust? Had
Germany not owned up to it and instead passed laws against "denigration
of Germaness," perhaps we would today have guidebooks that speak of the
"Jewish scenario" in Germany and the need to let "historians decide."

The BBC might inform us that the destruction of the Jews was "in fact
a struggle between ethnic groups for fertile land and resources."

Isn’t that what Hitler said about lebensraum? Were not the Germans and
Jews simply "ethnic groups" vying for resources? Navi Pillay might
tell us to address the "underlying causes of discrimination." The
Catholic Church might add that there are "social, economic, ethnic and
cultural factors." Yes, too easily the Holocaust could be explained
away, perhaps even due to climate change.

It is bad enough that millions of Armenians were slaughtered in 1915
and that thousands of Christian Nigerians are hacked to death and
buried in mass graves. It is worse that their deaths are denied or
ascribed to "underlying causes." Make no mistake, such language is
akin to Holocaust denial.

From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress