“You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your neighbor’s eye!”

Matthew 7:5

It was December 2019 and I was driving home from a successful Christmas shopping run when I had to pull off the road and take a moment to collect myself. I had gotten an alert announcing that the US senate had, despite all odds and precedent, passed the Menendez Resolution recognizing the Armenian Genocide. Even though the House had passed a resolution six weeks earlier recognizing the systematic mass murder and ethnic cleansing of 1.5 million Armenians by Ottoman Turks as a genocide, almost nothing that passes in the House these days also passes in the Senate. I had not been holding my breath for the recognition to move forward in any way. Learning that the senate passed the resolution, by unanimous consent no less, took my breath away.

I found myself weeping on the Garden State Parkway as other cars sped by. I texted my spouse and daughters with the news and said that even though Donald Trump would never take it any further, it was an important milestone to celebrate. I was sad that my mother had not lived to see this day. Her mother, my grandmother, survived the genocide by walking into Iran as a 10-year-old refugee. My mother passed away in 2014, one year before the centennial commemoration of the Armenian Genocide, when we had hoped to return to Armenia to pay our respects at the memorial in Yerevan.

This year on on April 24th, Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day, a US President at long last referred to the events as genocide in a statement released by the White House. With the complicated power dynamics between the US, Turkey, the Turkish lobby in the US, Israel and the Israel lobby who all worked against recognition of the Armenian Genocide, Biden’s statement was historic and radical; it is the culmination of decades of work and advocacy by the US Armenian community for the US to stand on the right side of history. I never thought this day would come. It is a good and necessary milestone, but it almost feels anticlimactic. As a descendant of the first holocaust of the 20th century — which is how Winston Churchill described the Armenian Genocide — it was a relief for me to hear President Biden say it, but it did not feel like a victory like the day the Senate finally did the right thing in 2019.

The hours since Biden’s statement have been a roller coaster, with many messages of congratulations dropping in my inbox. And yet they’ve been accompanied by insulting and offensive reactions from genocide-deniers getting air time on the news. Today, there was one such message in my email inbox that gave me a real shock. The email newsletter Global Justice in the 21st Century, featured an article from Richard Falk entitled “Addressing Alleged Genocide by China Against the Uyghur People,” which also addressed Biden’s declaration with startling disdain.

Falk, a professor emeritus of International Law at Princeton University and retired UN Rapporteur on Palestinian Human Rights, is a hero in the Palestine advocacy community. Because he is Jewish and speaks out against Israeli human rights abuses with great clarity, he is held in high regard by those working to stop the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, including myself. But reading his dismissive words today dredged up that deep pain I am carrying for my mother and her mother before her to the point where I felt the need to respond.

Falk writes:

Biden has added another dimension to the misuse of ‘genocide,’ making another indirect controversial intrusion on past memories and present realities by fulfilling on behalf of the United States Government his campaign pledge to declare what befell the Armenian community in 1915 as ‘genocide’ on April 24, 2021 without bothering to clarify whether this was a legal, political, or moral assessment of events that occurred in the midst of World War I. The Nuremberg Judgment was very clear that for action to legally qualify as an international crime it must have been preceded by the enactment of the relevant legal norm. Otherwise, it is an instance of retroactive criminalization, and cannot validly be prosecuted, however abhorrent.

It is strange to see that Falk can be brave when calling out Israel’s present day crimes, but cannot acknowledge the truth over a century on when it comes to genocide committed by the Ottoman Turks. He even uses the crutch that the term “genocide” didn’t exist at the time of the Ottoman crimes:

As we know the word ‘genocide’ was a linguistic innovation of the 1940s, and it only became criminalized by the adoption of the Genocide Convention in 1948. For Biden to come along in 2021 and pronounce these events as genocide is again to trivialize this ultimate crime for the sake of domestic political gain and as a way of demeaning Turkey because of some foreign policy differences. If genuinely motivated for historical redress, a responsible approach might have been to call for an independent international inquiry to interpret the events, giving Turkey, as well as representatives of the Armenian community, an opportunity to present its narrative which is more an explanation than a justification.

Did he just say we need “an independent international inquiry to interpret the events”? After a century of study and interpretation of this history, Falk suggests we now do more study and interpretation. And give the Turks a seat at this table of interpretation. Is that what we did for the Germans after their heinous crimes? Why does this hero of Palestinian rights with his rigorous work on international law, not see the forest for the trees? How is he able to have such a huge blind spot?

It is true that the word “genocide” did not come about until the Nazi atrocities against the Jews of Europe, when Polish-Jewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin formed the word by combining geno-, from the Greek word for race or tribe, with –cide, from the Latin word for killing. According to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum:

The US Holocaust Memorial Museum documents The Armenian Genocide, saying it refers to “the physical annihilation of Armenian Christian people living in the Ottoman Empire.” The Armenian National Institute lists dozens of global resolutions, laws and declarations affirming the Armenian Genocide.

By 1915, the Ottoman Empire was at the end of its seven-centuries-long reign and way past its glory years when religious and ethnic diversity in the empire was its strength. Having lost pieces of the empire in the 19th century (Greece, Egypt, Bosnia, Serbia, Romania, to name a few) with losing more territories leading into WWI, the fact remains that the Armenians lived in the “heart” of the empire and were not in a far-flung region the Ottomans could afford to lose. The Ottomans set out to ethnically cleanse their lands, based on religion, of the Christian Armenians. Ottoman political reasons and their intentions to wipe out the Armenian people have been well documented by international scholars as well as Turkish ones, and do in fact fit the description of genocide established later in the century. For Richard Falk, an expert on International Law, to deny this reality is shocking and shameful.

And speaking of shameful, the Turkish narrative says the “Armenian massacres” happened as a part of WWI, with “both sides” killing the other. Pointing to the “log in their own eye”, acclaimed Turkish historian Taner Akçam, disproves this narrative in his groundbreaking book, A Shameful Act, showing that the Ottoman Turks committed the crimes not as part of WWI but under the cover of WWI. Pan-Turkism, a movement to consolidate all Turkish-speaking peoples and establish a power stretching from Istanbul across Asia Minor to Central Asia and beyond, was part of the motivation for the Turks to ethnically cleanse their country of the Christian Armenians in their midst. Armenians are in fact the indigenous people on the land, having lived there from time immemorial; the Turks arrived from the East as part of the Mongol conquests that began in the 13th Century CE which relatively-speaking is not that long in SW Asia, or “the Middle East”. (see also the religion-based Greek/Turkish population exchanges, i.e., the intentional ethnic cleansing of Greeks after WWI).

Ethnically cleansing an entire region of a certain population by attempting to destroy them is genocide. And what about the “hidden Armenians”?

As NPR reported in 2015:

A century after Ottoman forces massacred an estimated 1 to 1.5 million Armenian Christians, some of the remaining Armenian Turks are taking tentative steps out into the open. They survived because their ancestors were taken in by Muslim families and raised as Muslims.

Their “ancestors” being Armenian children. Again, the fifth of five elements that define genocide is “forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.” There are “hidden Armenians” all over Turkey today.

We Armenians carry the silent pain of many generations within us, and it wells up and lifts to the surface on days like this, making it hard to ignore the injustice of the last 100 years of denial. It is powerful to have influential people such as President Biden acknowledge the basic truth at the root of our collective grief. It’s been a long journey, not just in advocacy for justice by the global Armenian diaspora, but also literally a long journey from the mountains of the Caucasus and Anatolia, to all the communities where Armenians have had to resettle around the world. The finish line has always been in sight but never reachable. Now that in the US we have official recognition, it is beyond disappointing to see such stubborn refusal from a champion of human rights such as Falk, who has called the intolerable situation in Gaza “a prelude to genocide” and has worked for years to hold Israel accountable for heinous human rights abuses. When it comes to the undeniable truth of genocides past, apparently, someone needs to point out there is a log in his eye.

Noushin Darya Framke is an award-winning writer and editor who has worked as an advocate for Palestinian rights since 2004. She is Armenian on her maternal side (Lazarian) and Iranian on her paternal side. She has been living in the US since 1978 and has been a US citizen for 35 years.