ADL FINDS ARMENIAN GENOCIDE RECOGNITION UNTIMELY FOR NOW
PanARMENIAN.Net
18.01.2010 16:49 GMT+04:00
/PanARMENIAN.Net/ The Anti-Defamation league (ADL) has not changed
its position on Armenian genocide, according to Jess Hordes, the
director of the ADL’s Washington office.
"We continue to believe that there was a genocide, but there’s no
useful purpose in the House or the Senate passing a resolution on it
at this time. It’s a principled post that the better way of addressing
this issue is for the Armenians and the Turks to move forward with
this through the historical commission," he said.
As the diplomatic row between Israel and Turkey continues, attempts
are being made by the Israel lobby in the U.S. to infuse some calm,
The Jerusalem Post said in a recent article
According to the Israeli newspaper, Jewish organizations have helped
Turkey in the past to lobby against the legislation in Congress to
declare the event a genocide.
Turkish Ambassador to Israel Namik Tan recently told the periodical
that Turkey expects Israel to "deliver" American Jewish organizations
and ensure that the USCongress does not pass a resolution
characterizing as genocide the massacre of Armenians during World War I
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. Massacres were
indiscriminate of age or gender, with rape and other sexual abuse
commonplace. The Armenian Genocide is the second most-studied case
of genocide after the Holocaust.
The Republic of Turkey, the successor state of the Ottoman Empire,
denies the word genocide is an accurate description of the events. In
recent years, it has faced repeated calls to accept the events as
genocide.
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.