Daily Bruin – View Point
Tuesday, February 22, 2005
Remembering Armenian Genocide admirable, not hateful
Students working to spread awareness provide opportunities for valuable
dialogue
By Paul Von Blum
Like many others in the UCLA community, I was distressed to read Fatma
Asli Velieceoglu’s submission to the Daily Bruin misleadingly titled
“Armenian propaganda against Turkey untrue, divisive” (Feb. 10). Her
allegation that Armenians have engaged in a campaign of hatred against
Turkey utterly contradicts my experience as a teacher at UCLA for the
past 25 years.
During that time, I have had the pleasure of having hundreds of students
of Armenian heritage here. My contact with these intellectually and
morally engaged young men and women has been a highlight of my academic
career.
One major reason is that all of them have been passionately concerned
about Turkey’s shameful denial of the Armenia Genocide almost 90 years
ago. Their focus has properly been on educating their fellow students
about one of the most horrific eras of 20th-century history.
In all of my conversations with Armenian American students and others,
with no exceptions whatever, I have heard no expression of hatred toward
Turks or anyone else. Their sole focus has been on demanding that Turkey
acknowledge its historical accountability for the mass murders of
Armenians.
I join my Armenian brothers and sisters in working against genocide
denial. As the son of a Holocaust survivor, I feel an enduring
solidarity with all people whose lives have been shattered by both
genocide and its progeny, the cynical refusal to acknowledge historical
responsibility.
We live in an era where countless thousands of human beings were
slaughtered in Cambodia and Rwanda and presently in Sudan. Velieceoglu
should take advantage of her educational opportunity at UCLA to learn
about the sorry historical legacy of the 20th and early 21st centuries,
including her own government’s continuing refusal to acknowledge its
past.
Genocide deniers might begin by engaging in thoughtful dialogue with
many of the students Velieceoglu foolishly maligned in her Daily Bruin
submission.
————————————————————————
Von Blum is a professor of African American studies and communication
studies.