ROBERT FISK'S WORLD

Yervant1 · January 30, 2010

ROBERT FISK'S WORLD: ISRAEL CAN NO LONGER IGNORE THE EXISTENCE OF THE FIRST HOLOCAUST

The Independent

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/fisk/robert-fiskrsquos-world-israel-can-no-longer-ignore-the-existence-of-the-first-holocaust-1883686.html

Saturday, 30 January 2010

Recognition of the Armenian genocide is a paramount moral and

educational act

While Israelis commemorated the second Holocaust of the 20th century

this week, I was in the Gulbenkian library in Jerusalem, holding the

printed and handwritten records of the victims of the century's first

Holocaust. It was a strange sensation.

The Armenians were not participating in Israel's official ceremonies

to remember the six million Jewish dead, murdered by the Germans

between 1939 and 1945, perhaps because Israel officially refuses

to acknowledge that Armenia's million and a half dead of 1915-1923

were victims of a Turkish Holocaust. Israeli-Turkish diplomatic and

military relations are more important than genocide. Or were.

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George Hintlian, historian and prominent member of Jerusalem's

2,000-strong Armenian community in Jerusalem, pointed out the posters a

few metres from the 1,500-year old Armenian monastery. They advertised

Armenia's 24 April commemorations. All but one had been defaced, torn

from the ancient walls or, in at least one case, spraypainted with

graffiti in Hebrew. "Maybe they don't like it that there was another

genocide," George told me. "These are things we can't explain." More

than 70 members of George's family were murdered in the butchery and

death marches of 1915 - when German officers witnessed the system of

executions, rail-car deportations to cholera camps and asphyxiation

by smoke in caves - the world's first "gas" chambers. One witness,

the German vice-consul in Erzurum, Max von Scheubner-Richter, ended

up as one of Hitler's closest friends and advisers. It's not as if

there's no connection between the first and second Holocausts.

But the times, they are a-changing. For ever since Turkey began

shouting about Israel's slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza a year ago,

prominent Israeli figures have suddenly rediscovered the Armenian

genocide. Who are the Turks to talk about mass murder? Has anyone

forgotten 1915? For George and his compatriots - there are in all

10,000 Armenians in Israel and the occupied West Bank, 4,000 of

them holding Israeli passports - they had indeed been forgotten

until the Gaza war. "In 1982, the Armenians were left out of a

Holocaust conference in Jerusalem," he said. "For three decades,

no documentary on the Armenian genocide could be shown on Israeli

television because it would offend the Turks. Then suddenly last year,

important Israelis demanded that a documentary be shown. Thirty Knesset

members supported us. We always had Yossi Sarid of Peace Now but now

we've got right-wing Israelis."

Maariv and Yediot Ahronot began to mention the Armenian genocide and

George Hintlian turned up on Israeli television with Danny Ayalon -

the foreign office minister who humiliated the Turkish ambassador by

forcing him to sit on a sofa below him - and Knesset speaker Reuven

Rivlin who said that Israel should commemorate the Armenian genocide

"every year". The Israeli press now calls the Armenian genocide a

"Shoah" - the same word all Israelis use for the Jewish Holocaust. As

George put it with withering accuracy: "We have been upgraded!!!"

This piece of brash hypocrisy has not gone unnoticed by Yossi Sarid who

has described how, a few months after Recep Tayyip Erdogan denounced

the Gaza war, "an important Israeli personality telephoned me and said

the following: 'Now you have to hit back at the Turks, to denounce

them for the crimes they committed against the Armenians You, Yossi,

have the right to do so...'" Sarid was appalled. "I was filled with

revulsion and my soul wanted to puke," he wrote in Haaretz. "The

person who telephoned me was an example of the ugly Israeli who had

disgracefully been at the forefront of those who denied the Armenian

Holocaust." So now "new tunes" - Sarid's phrase - are being heard in

Jerusalem: "The Turks are the last ones who have the right to teach

us ethics."

The bright side to this anguished debate is that one of Israel's

top Holocaust experts bravely insisted - to the fury of then-foreign

minister (now president) Shimon Peres - that the Armenian massacres

were undoubtedly a genocide. Tens of thousands of Israelis have

always believed the same; several hundred are expected to turn up at

the Armenian commemoration on 24 April, and most Israelis refer to

the Armenian genocide as a "Shoah" rather than the tame "massacres"

hitherto favoured by the political elite.

Yet the most extraordinary irony of all occurred when the Armenian and

Turkish governments last year agreed to reopen diplomatic relations and

consign the Armenian Holocaust to a joint academic enquiry which would

decide "if" there had been a genocide. As Israeli Professor Yair Oron

of the Open University of Israel said, "I am afraid that countries will

now hesitate to recognise the (Armenian) genocide. They will say: 'Why

should we grant recognition if the Armenians yielded?' Recognition of

the Armenian genocide is a paramount moral and educational act. We

in Israel are obliged to recognise it." And American-Armenian UCLA

Professor Richard Hovannisian asked: "Would the Jewish people be

willing to forgo the memory of the Holocaust for the sake of good

relations with Germany, if Germany were to make that demand?" George

Hintlian described the Armenian-Turkish agreement - which in fact

may not now be ratified by either side - as "like an earthquake".

We walked together in the cold afternoon through the darkened

interior of the great Armenian monastery of Jerusalem with its icons

and candles. George opened a cabinet to reveal a hidden staircase

up which priests would creep for a secret week when invaders passed

through Jerusalem. In this dank, pious place, Ronald Henry Amhurst

Storrs, governor of British Mandate Jerusalem, would often sit to

ponder what he called "the glory and the misery of a people".

Miserable it has been for thousands of Armenians here. Up to 15,000

lived in Palestine until 1948, many of them survivors of the first

Holocaust. But 10,000 of these Armenians shared the same fate as the

Palestinian Arabs, fleeing or driven from their homes by the army of

the new Israeli state. Most lost their businesses in Haifa and Jaffa,

many of them seeking refuge - for the second time - in Jerusalem. A

few set out for Cyprus where they were dispossessed for the third

time by the 1974 Turkish invasion. As George put it bleakly, "Today,

6,000 Armenians are residents of Jerusalem and the West Bank. They

cannot travel and they are counted as Armenian Palestinians. For

Israeli bureaucracy, they are Palestinians."

George himself is the son of Garbis Hintlian who, as a 17-year-old,

survived the death march from his home at Talas in Cappadocia. "We

lost my uncle - my grandfather was axed to death in front of him."

After the 1918 armistice, he worked for the British, carrying files

of evidence to the initial (but quickly abandoned) Constantinople

trials of Turkish war criminals. To no avail.

And glory be, if the tables haven't changed again! Turkey and Israel

have made up and become good friends again. Yossi Sarid anticipated

this. "Let us assume that Turkey will renew its ties with Israel. Then

what? What then? Will we also renew our contribution to the denial

of the Armenian Holocaust?"

Arpa · January 30, 2010

Robert Fisk is a "Christian Moron". :oops: , did I say "mormon or Maronite"? He may best described as the "last romantic idiiot"

Does he know that other so called "Christian moron", aka Rat Pobertson who insists that the "world will end unless we acknowledge Israel as the "King of Kings and Lord of Lords".HALLEJEWYAH AMEN!!!!!

Of course. Below Handel is not speaking about thr "jewhovah" but the anti-jewhovah Jesus. But, how do explain the fact that Moshe and Mohammed are conquering the world? Did Handel and Bach know the meaning of "KING" and "LORD"? as in "kingkonigsburg" and lord "hitler" Zig heilelujah!!!----

http://image53.webshots.com/653/8/53/31/2967853310097580718UeNNXU_ph.jpg

From George Frederic Handel's

"MESSIAH"

Hallelujah! Hallelujah!

Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah!

Hallelujah! Hallelujah!

Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah!

for the Lord God Omnipotent reigneth.

Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah!

for the Lord God Omnipotent reigneth.

Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah!

for the Lord God Omnipotent reigneth.

Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah!

Hallelujah! Hallelujah!

The kingdom of this world is become

the Kingdom of our Lord and of His Christ, and of His Christ;

and He shall reign for ever and ever

King of Kings,