The Armenian Resolution: Pure Grandstanding

THE ARMENIAN RESOLUTION: PURE GRANDSTANDING
By Timothy R. Furnish

History News Network, WA
Oct 15 2007

Mr. Furnish, Ph.D (Islamic History), is Assistant Professor, History,
Georgia Perimeter College, Dunwoody, GA 30338. Mr. Furnish is the
author of Holiest Wars: Islamic Mahdis, Their Jihads and Osama bin
Laden (Praeger, 2005). He is the proprietor of

House Resolution 106, first proposed when the Democrats took over
control of Congress back in January 2007, was just voted out of the
Foreign Affairs Committee last week and, according to Majority Leader
Steny Hoyer (D-MD), will pass before Congress adjourns next month.

H.R. 106 puts the government of the United States on record
as affirming that the Ottoman Empire pepetrated "genocide" on its
Armenian subjects, killing at least 1.5 million of them between
1915 and 1923; furthermore, it "calls upon the President to ensure
that the foreign policy of the United States reflects appropriate
understanding and sensitivity concerning issues related to human
rights, ethnic cleansing, and genocide…."1

The Republic of Turkey recalled its ambassador, Nabi Sensoy, and
"warned the vote threatens its strategic partnership with the U.S." 2
A senior Turkish general officer said that passage of this resolution
could permanently harm U.S.-Turkish military relations.3 Yet the
Democrats are plunging ahead with this legislation, willing to risk
further alienating our major ally in the Islamic world at a time when
our list of allies there has grown quite thin and just when we need
them most. Why?

For one thing, the bill’s primary sponsor, Rep. Adam Schiff
(D-CA), represents the district with the highest concentration of
Armenian-Americans in the country (California’s 29th, which includes
Glendale, with the largest Armenian-American population of any city in
America: 85,000, or about 40% of the urban headcount4 ). The Speaker
of the House, Nancy Pelosi, of course hails from California herself
and knows full well the political power of the Armenian-American
lobby. (And over in the Senate, Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton
(D-NY) has co-sposored the resolution,5 despite the fact her own
husband, while in office, opposed it.)

No doubt the resolution, in no small measure, is aimed at further
embarrassing the Bush Administration ("See, the same folks who
brought you Gitmo and Abu Ghrayb support what the Sultan did to the
Armenians!"), even as the Democrats claims that it has primarily an
apolitical, utilitarian cast. According to Rep. Schiff, "How can we
take effective action against the genocide in Darfur if we lack the
will to condemn genocide whenever and wherever it occurs?"

This logic is really quite unconvincing. Must Congress pass a
resolution retroactively condemning slavery in the Old Confederacy
before we are morally justified in opposing modern human trafficking?

But even giving Mr. Schiff and the Democratic leadership the
benefit of the doubt and not chalking up their fervent support for
H.R. 106 to anything as crass as making political hay, or raking in
Armenian-American campaign contributions, we are still left with a
major problem.

The whole basis of the bill-the "genocide" alleged-is historically
unverifiable as such.

Of course, questioning the Armenian "genocide" is a
politically-incorrect sin today, on a par with questioning global
warming. After all, we are continually told that the "consensus" of
experts-historians or scientists, respectively-supports each claim,
er, unvarnished truth. H.R. 106 has no fewer than 14 points alleging
to corroborate historically the genocidal nature of the very real
Ottoman massacres of Armenians around, and after, World War I.

But in fact there are a number of problems with the received "truth"
about what happened to Armenians in the late Ottoman Empire. There
is a scholarly consensus of about 1.2 million Armenian deaths
(although the Armenian groups claim more, and the Turks considerably
fewer). But just how and why that many Armenians were killed-and
whether it constitutes "genocide"-is still being hotly debated by
historians, contrary to what the House Democrats think. Genocide is
"the deliberate and systematic destruction of a racial, political or
cultural group." To prove that the Ottoman Turks committed genocide,
one must adduce evidence of just those points. The three legs upon
which the genocide claim usually rests are: 1) the post-WWI Ottoman
courts which tried some government officials for the massacres; 2)
the alleged depredations of the Teskilat-i Mahsusa (Ottoman "Special
Forces"); and 3) the memoirs of one Naim Bey. 6 However: the original
Ottoman legal documents no longer exist; no one has ever proved the
involvement of the Ottoman Special Forces in the killings; and the
"memoirs" of Naim Bey-who allegedly provided evidence that Ottoman
officials ordered the "genocide"-are suspect at best and may have
even been forged.

No one can deny that hundreds of thousands of Armenians were killed:
Western sources, and Armenian eyewitness survivors, attest to that
fact. But to this day no one has found the Ottoman "smoking gun" that
proves, beyond the shadow of a doubt-and don’t we want a rather high
bar of proof for something as serious as genocide?-that the authorities
in Istanbul ordered the "deliberate and systematic destruction" of the
Armenians in the eastern part of the Empire.7 Perhaps those records are
tucked away in some dark corner of the Basbakanlik, waiting to see the
light of day. But the few Western scholars who can read Ottoman Turkish
tend to shy away from this topic; and those who do study the Armenian
question either cannot work in Ottoman, or are not given access-all
of which tends to back up what Zbiginew Brzezenski said recently:
"I never realized the House of Representatives was some sort of
academy of learning that passes judgment on historical events….;"
and whether what happened to the Armenians "should be classified as
genocide or a huge massacre is, I don’t think, any of its business."8

Steny Hoyer tried to reassure the Turks by telling them that this
resolution is "not about your government." The Majority Leader,
unlike some in the press,9 seems to realize that it was not the
Turkish government that killed Armenians-it was the old Ottoman
imperial one. And one might reasonably wonder why the modern Turks
are so paranoid about claims of genocide being perpetrated by their
predecessor regime. However, that scimitar cuts both ways: one
might also ask why the Democrats in Congress are so eager to pass a
meaningless, toothless resolution condemning a government that hasn’t
existed for 85 years- in the process estranging us even further from
one of our few close allies in the Muslim world-when the historical
record fails to support their opportunistic legislation?