ARMENIANS AND ANTI-SEMITISM: CRITICISM, NOT SLANDER, NEEDED IN ISSUE OVER “CATACLYSMIC” WORD
Anti-semitism is a deplorable phenomenon that has haunted Jews throughout history, so any manifestation of it by Armenians is doubly hurtful because Armenians themselves were treated as an unwanted minority in Ottoman Turkey. German anti-Semitism resulted in the dreadful holocaust before and during World War II, while Armenians who were damned as giavur (infidels) in Turkey, suffered genocide earlier in the century. Anti-Jewish remarks made during the disputed presidential elections in February were ignorant and ugly. Rimma Varzhapetyan, who heads the organized Jewish community in Armenia, told an ArmeniaNow reporter, “There is no anti-Semitism in Armenia as such; however, sometimes anti-Semitic materials appear in the press.” She stated that this increased during the election campaign. Both former President Robert Kocharian and the current Prime Minister Tigran Sargsyan publicly reprimanded those media outlets that carried anti-Jewish statements. This said, public criticism of Jewish individuals and organizations that support Turkey’s campaign of genocide denial is another matter. It is important and necessary to expose and protest genocide denials from any source. A few years ago Israel’s President Shimon Peres, on returning from a trip to Turkey, explicitly denied that the horrors perpetrated on the Armenian population in Ottoman Turkey constituted genocide. Denial from a man of Peres’s political rank is particularly condemnable and Armenians had the duty to publicly expose him. To the credit of other Israeli politicians, the issue of the Armenian Genocide was debated within the Israeli Knesset recently. No resolution was adopted, but a public exposition of the Armenian Genocide took place. American Jewish organizations have recently been engaged in active debate over the issue, as well. Most prominent was the controversy within the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) that compelled its National Director, Abraham Foxman, to reverse ADL’s denial of the Armenian Genocide. Foxman, who had just arrived in Israel after visiting Ankara, told the Jerusalem Post on July 7, that he had engaged Turkey’s leaders about ADL’s new policy. He said that the Turks had been angry about his reversal of the ADL’s genocide position. But, he added, “The issue is behind us.” It seems the Turks are now reassured that ADL’s opposition to the enactment of a congressional genocide resolution remains firmly intact. However, he claimed he advised Turkey to take a proactive posture towards Armenia. He urged them to strengthen Turkey’s relationship with Armenia, saying, “By strengthening relations today, it will place the historical issue into the background and will be easier to deal with.” But in a curious postscript, Foxman also told Turkish leadership, “there is nothing cataclysmic about using the ‘genocide’ word.” Foxman’s dilemma with this issue is that he is trying to please everyone. First, he tried to placate outraged members of ADL by reversing his denial statements. Then, by opposing Congressional action on the Genocide resolution, he tried to comfort Turkey. Now, he seeks to please Armenians by urging Turkish proactive relations with Armenia. But at no time does Foxman, or other Jewish community figures, question why they have intruded into this issue in the first place, or why they are acting as surrogate lobbyists for Turkey on a matter that is of no direct concern to Israel or the Jewish community in America. The answer is obvious. Ankara demands that the Jewish lobby oppose the Armenian Genocide recognition effort. It is a condition to going forward with its security and economic relations with Israel, and Foxman and others meekly go along. The most recent example of intrusion was by Barry Jacobs, Director of Strategic Studies of the American Jewish Committee (AJC). Jacobs was pictured in a page-one story in the New York Times, seated in the midst of Turkish demonstrators at the hearing of the House of Representatives Committee on Foreign Affairs. The demonstrators wore a “NO” sticker on their lapels urging the Committee to reject the resolution acknowledging the Armenian Genocide. Jacob’s actions that day contradicted AJC’s promise to remain neutral as the resolution was being debated in Congress. Jacobs was also openly hostile to the genocide recognition resolution in a verbal exchange he had on February 21, with Aram Hamparian, Executive Director of the Armenian National Committee. Hamparian criticized Jacobs saying “Your efforts to score points in Ankara, at the expense of the Armenian Genocide issue, is a transparent transaction that I think, squanders the moral capital of the Jewish Community.” In a less than articulate response, Jacobs suggested that the AJC and the American Jewish community are not historians. “We are not going to make a decision on 1915,” he said. He insisted that U.S.-Turkish relations will suffer if the resolution passed saying, “The Jewish community believed that also and that’s been our position.” He then emphatically concluded, “And that’s the real world and that’s the position of the United States Government and of the Government of Israel.” But the real world is more than that. Turkey compels its friends and supporters to suspend acknowledgement of the Armenian Genocide despite the confirmation by an overwhelming majority of renowned genocide scholars and international historians. It is just a matter of time before Jacobs and others call the tragedy of 1915 “genocide,” and as Foxman did in Ankara, they too will finally tell the Turks, “There is nothing cataclysmic about using the word Genocide.”
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- 1894 Birth of Vahan Totovents (writer). He was murdered by the Soviet Secret Police in 1937.
- 1914 The Central Committees of Taron and Sassoon present the reform program to three embassies in Constantinople.
- 1938 Birth of Perch Zeytuntsyan (playwright) in Cairo (Egypt).
- 1988 The USSR Supreme Soviet, relies on Article 78 of the Soviet Constitution (prohibition of any territorial changes to a Union Republic without its consent) to deny the 1988 02 20 petition by the Autonomous Region of Nagorno Gharabagh to rejoin Armenia.
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