Israel's Armenian Genocide recognition dilemma, truth or political

[Yervant1]

Shameful to say the least!

 

Asbarez.com

What Would Happen If an Armenian Diplomat Questions the term Holocaust while in Israel?

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Israel’s Deputy Foreign Minister Alexander Ben-Zvi places a flower at the Dzidzernagapert Genocide Memorial on Tuesday

ARA KHACHATOURIAN

“The tragedy of the Armenian nation has never been questioned. There is a historical question of what to call it, but what has happened is a fact that everyone accepts. It’s not a matter of political discussion. Let historians decide what to call the tragedy.” This is what Israel’s Deputy Foreign Minister Alexander Ben-Zvi said on Tuesday when visiting the Dzidzernagapert Armenian Genocide Memorial Complex.

Upon reading this I thought what would happen if one of Armenia’s deputy foreign ministers visited Yad Vashem, The World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Jerusalem, and paid tribute to the victims of Nazi Germany’s systematic annihilation of Jews and pussyfooted around using the word Holocaust.

Most likely, all hell would break loose.

I envision Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu decreeing the immediate expulsion of the said diplomat from Israel and freezing the already cool diplomatic ties with Yerevan. World leaders would then chime in with their condemnation of Armenia’s insensitive and tone deaf approach to the Holocaust, while Jewish organizations, some of which just recently decided to call the events of 1915 “Genocide,” would be in an uproar renewing their lobbying to discredit efforts to pass a Genocide recognition bill in Congress. More important, the Israeli press would quickly pick up on the diplomatic gaffe and would mold Israeli public opinion against Armenia and Armenians. Not to mention the Israeli academicians, such as Israel Charny and Yair Auron to name a few,

Instead, according to the foreign ministry’s press office Foreign Minister Zohrab Mnatsakanyan “presented Armenia’s ongoing initiatives directed at prevention of genocides and crimes against humanity, noting that the third Global Counterterrorism Forum will be held in Yerevan on December 9 [and will be] dedicated to the role of education in the prevention of genocides. Referring to the process of international recognition and condemnation of the Armenian Genocide, the Foreign Minister mentioned that it is a moral responsibility and a tribute to the memory of innocent victims, while at the same time it is an important contribution to international efforts to prevent genocide and crimes against humanity.”

Yet Ben-Zvi stands on the grounds of the Armenian Genocide Memorial Complex and spits on the memory of the 1.5 million victims of the Genocide with no recourse or admonishment and walks away with the continued pledges of improving ties between Armenia and Israel.

And let’s look at those so-called “improving” ties.

Netanyahu, once again, halted the debate of a bill to recognize the Genocide in the Knesset in June, after the Israeli political apparatus, once again, decided to play the Genocide card when Turkey threated Tel Aviv after Israel attacked a Palestinian settlement in Gaza in May. The fact that the Genocide issue comes into play in Israeli politics only during spats with Turkey is proof enough that Israel does not necessarily want to become “a partner” with Armenia.

Then there’s that pesky issue of the estimated $5 billion in arms sales to Azerbaijan, whose army commanders urged a military contractor to “live test” an armed suicide drone directed at Artsakh military targets. While that military contract was allegedly suspended, again there has been no firm posturing from Armenia. Mnatsakanyan told Ben-Zvi that “our partners should abstain from all actions that could potentially result in arms race, as well as provoke instability in the region.”

Mnatsakanyan’s statements signal a more resolute tone toward Israel in comparison to his predecessor, Edward Nalbandian, who met with Netanyahu last fall with nary a mention of these thorny and contentious issues blocking normal ties with the Jewish State.

I am not suggesting that Mnatsakanyan should have started a diplomatic row with Israel, but he and other officials should consider what Israel would do if the situation were reversed and say Armenia were supplying arms to the Palestinians and disrespecting the Holocaust all at the same time.

 

 

http://asbarez.com/174504/what-would-happen-if-an-armenian-diplomat-questions-the-term-holocaust-while-in-israel/

 

 

[Yervant1]

The Times of Israel

Sept 7 2018

Before the Holocaust, Ottoman Jews supported the Armenian genocide’s ‘architect’ Author Hans-Lukas Kieser says a desperate Zionist press praised the empire even during the slaughter of its minority population, a murder which Israel continues to gloss over today

By JP O’ Malley Today, 6:14 am

Mehmed Talaat *****, left, with Ismail Enver ***** and Turkish colonel Halil Sami Bey. (Courtesy University of Princeton Press)

This past June, a scheduled Knesset vote to recognize the World War I killings of Armenians as genocide was canceled due to a lack of government support.

Because of Israel’s complicated on-again, off-again diplomatic relations with regional powerhouse Turkey, “it hasn’t been able to do what many Israelis have ethically wanted to do — publicly recognize the Armenian genocide in the Knesset,” Prof. Hans-Lukas Kieser tells The Times of Israel from his office at the University of Newcastle, Australia.

Last year Kieser was awarded the President of the Republic of Armenia Prize for his significant contribution to the history of the Armenian genocide. He has also recently published the book, “Talaat *****: Father of Modern Turkey, Architect of Genocide.”

The political biography explores how Mehmed Talaat, more commonly known as Talaat *****, almost single-handedly masterminded the Armenian genocide.

Armenian intellectuals in Constantinople (today’s Istanbul) were rounded up on April 24, 1915, followed by the systematic extermination of 1.5 million people, primarily because of their Armenian ethnicity.

The ideologically motivated genocide took place under the supervision of the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), led by three de facto leaders of the Ottoman Empire at the time: Ismail Enver, Ahmed Djemal, and Talaat. Collectively all three were known by their military titles as the “Three *****s.”

Even though Turkey continues to officially deny the Armenian genocide, historians unanimously agree that it is a historical reality.

Mehmed Talaat *****, along with Ismail Enver ***** and Ahmed Djemal *****, in 1912. (Courtesy University of Princeton Press)

Laying foundations for a Turkish state

Kieser’s book claims Talaat operated a new messianic form of nationalism that sought to “dilute” non-Muslim identities in his attempt at new nation building in Turkey in 1915. Talaat was the “mastermind of his genocidal universe,” Kieser claims.

The historian also says it was Talaat — rather than Kemal Ataturk — who laid the foundations for the modern Turkish nation state, which began in 1923.

“Of course the Turkish Republic [itself] came about under Kemal Ataturk,” Kieser says. “Talaat did not plan a republic — he was a son of the empire, after all. But he made a number of important steps so that Ataturk could then establish the Turkish nation state.”

Talaat led the Ottoman Empire into World War I “in jihad,” says the historian, transforming Asia Minor into a Turkish national home and creating a “Turkey for the Turks,” as per the slogan at the time.

Kieser’s book, over 400 pages long, makes for tough reading at points — especially as the historian recollects the systematic murder of Armenian Christians. He notes, for example, that the “removal of Armenians from Eastern Asia Minor mainly took place from May to September 1915, where women and children endured starvation, mass rape, and enslavement on their marches [towards death].”

Kieser says a great number of villages in northern Syria became an “arena of mass crimes” in 1915, where Armenian civilians — who were considered “fair prey” — “were raped, abducted, and murdered en masse without any protection, or punishment for the offenders.”

Prof. Hans-Lukas Kieser, author of ‘Talaat *****: Father of Modern Turkey, Architect of Genocide.’ (Courtesy)

In the eyes of his admirers, however, Talaat is still seen as a great statesman, skillful revolutionary, and far-sighted founding father of the modern Turkish state, Kieser points out.

This narrative is especially pertinent in Turkey today, as it increasingly takes a more authoritarian and Islamist approach to its political identity. This is particularly notable, Kieser stresses, when it comes to the fundamentalist ideology of Turkey’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) and its authoritarian leader, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.

“Talaat really is the elephant in the room [in Turkish politics] today,” Kieser says. “Erdoğan is the master of a party, so in that sense his [ideas] fall in line with Talaat — even if it’s not acknowledged very much in AKP circles in an explicit way.”

“But implicitly, Erdoğan and Talaat share a number of similarities where a democratic start eventually moves to a very authoritarian end,” he says.

Kieser says that like Talaat, Erdoğan is “far from a real democrat,” and shows a very “vague notion of what constitutionalism really means.”

Moreover, like the CUP leader, Erdoğan places all his efforts “on how to achieve and keep power.”

Turkey’s President, Tayyip Erdogan reviews an honor guard as he arrives at the Turkish parliament in Ankara, on July 7, 2018. (AFP Photo/Adem Altan)

Ripples of shame

Israel’s recent decision to continue to remain silent on the 103-year-old genocide has garnered its share of criticism from historians, academics, writers and human rights activists — many from within Israel itself.

Prof. Yehuda Bauer, a leading Israeli historian and an academic adviser to the Yad Vashem Holocaust museum in Jerusalem, said in a June radio interview that the Israeli parliament’s failure to recognize the Armenian genocide was a “betrayal.”

Benjamin Abtan, the president of the European Grassroots Antiracist Movement (EGAM) and the coordinator of the Elie Wiesel Network of Parliamentarians of Europe, in an articlepublished in Haaretz in June claimed that Israel had “a particular responsibility in recognizing the Armenian genocide [to] ensure mass atrocities [were prevented] in the future.”

According to Kieser, recognizing the Armenian genocide holds a relevance for Israelis today beyond the usual discussion of Israel-Turkey relations. Jews, he says, historically played a key role in promoting propaganda from the Ottoman side as Armenians continued to be slaughtered.

The historian says that Talaat enjoyed “particularly good Jewish press” in Istanbul and abroad” during the period surrounding the genocide — notably in Germany, where newspapers like Deutsche Levante-Zeitung praised Talaat as “an outstanding leader” and the “savior of imperial Turkey.”

Although this glorification smacked of propaganda and lies, Kieser claims many Germans bought into the words of the Jewish press at the time and were affected by its corrosive logic.

A pro-Talaat ***** article in the Zionist newsletter, the Deutsche Levante-Zeitung. (Courtesy University of Princeton Press)

Currying favor?

The historian recalls how many Jews loyal to the Ottomans largely looked the other way where the suffering of Armenians was concerned. This included figures such as Alfred Nossig, who helped found both the General Jewish Colonization Organization (AJK) and the Zionist Organization (ZO).

Both were set up for the purpose of Jewish lobbying across the Middle East and elsewhere, and subsequently encouraged intimate relations between Jews and Ottomans.

However, Kieser is keen to emphasize that some historical context is needed. This was a crucial turning point in Jewish history — before the Balfour Declaration was announced in 1917. Jews were looking for diplomatic favors — from a myriad of countries — wherever they could find them, in the hopes of securing Zionism’s ultimate end goal: a Jewish state in Palestine.

Consequently, a number of Jewish newspapers purposely tried to promote relations between Talaat and Jewish politicos and diplomats within the dying Ottoman Empire. They even grossly exaggerated these relations for propaganda purposes, Kieser says.

The German Jewish newspaper Die Welt — the mouthpiece of the Zionist Organization — for instance, wrote in 1913 of Talaat’s “friendly relations with many Jewish personalities.”

Mehmed Talaat *****, pre-1921. (Public domain)

Still, even for all of the positive Jewish press Talaat received during this period, his attitudes to Zionism were complex. On the one hand, Talaat did not want to be associated much with Jews and Zionism. But on the other, there were potential benefits in publicly courting Jewish political interests.

In 1913, an article published in the Istanbul-based L’Aurore, a Jewish newspaper financed by Zionists, praised the benefits of Jewish-Turkish relations, even hinting that an alliance between Pan-Judaism and Pan Islamism in Turkey could be a viable political option — something Kieser says Talaat was seduced by.

But the historian is keen to stress that Talaat in no way sympathized with Zionism, despite claims from both observers of the time and a number of historians since.

“We know from what he said and what he wrote that he was in no way sympathetic with Zionism. It’s also clear from the negotiations that he only needed the Jews to a certain extent in order to survive internationally. And he was successful in this regard,” he says.

“The Jewish Question” involved Jews jostling for political favors from the Ottomans, who still held considerable sway in the Middle East. But the power dynamics also worked the other way too, the historian explains.

“Talaat’s relationship with Jews during this time gave him considerable international leverage that he successfully used to deflect attention from Armenia,” Kieser says.

“In spring 1915 — which was a honeymoon for the Zionists in Istanbul — Talaat made sure there were no conflicting issues internationally because he wanted to strike the Armenians,” says Kieser. “Jews feared they would suffer the same fate as the Armenians, so they in no way welcomed any pro-Armenian or pro-victim activity [reporting] because they feared for themselves.”

Sara Aaronsohn, one of the founders of the pre-British Mandate Palestine espionage ring NILI. (Public domain)

Upstart Zionist youth take a stance

There were, however, some exceptions — notably, a group of young Zionists called Netzah Yisrael Lo Yeshaker (NILI), or, The Eternal One of Israel Will Not Lie, a pro-British espionage group in Palestine at the time.

NILI felt a strong sense of solidarity with the Armenian victims, even writing reports which they sent out to the international community in the hope of waking them up to the atrocities.

“The NILI group — which contained people like Aaaron Aronson and others — saw the Armenian genocide, and even wrote long reports about it,” Kieser says. “They saw that this total stigmatization and finally extermination was a process that could also happen with the Jews.”

“So they were deeply sympathetic not just emotionally, but also in a Biblical and prophetic approach,” he adds. “But they were a small minority.”

“Unfortunately, the silence carried on many decades after the war. So you had Jews in Israel and the Jews in Turkey who continued to help Turkey deny the Armenian genocide,” Kieser says.

Kieser makes a point in the book of comparing the Armenian genocide with the Holocaust, and finds some similarities.

‘Talaat *****: Father of Modern Turkey, Architect of Genocide,’ by Hans-Lukas Kieser. (Courtesy Princeton University Press)

“Imperial cataclysm and a particular combination of circumstances in the first months of WWI made the Armenians an obvious target,” he writes.

He goes on to state, “Actors from the top and below, extremist ideas, entrenched prejudices, and material incentives colluded in the brute destruction [of the Armenians].”

A little more than two decades later, Europe’s Jews were to experience “an analogous situation,” he observes.

“Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?” Hitler asked his generals in his infamous Obersalzberg speech on August 22, 1939 — just days before Germany’s invasion of Poland.

Talaat “certainly wasn’t Hitler,” says the historian, admitting that he is reluctant to make direct comparisons between both far-right demagogues.

Nevertheless, both leaders share a number of similarities, Kieser says — they represented societies, states and political parties that embraced radical domestic violence to overcome what they believed were crisis and defeat.

“Talaat was the mastermind of a single party regime,” Kieser concludes. “It was a single party rule that very strongly stigmatized one particular group.”

https://www.timesofisrael.com/before-the-holocaust-ottoman-jews-supported-the-armenian-genocides-architect/

[Yervant1]

Mr. Yair while at it, would you remind your dad also about the Armenian Genocide. When your country (Dad prime minister of Israel) hasn't acknowledged the genocide itself, makes your claim self serving and nothing else.

Panorama, Armenia

March 14 2019

Netanyahu’s son reminds Turkey of committing the Armenian Genocide

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s son, Yair, took to Twitter to accuse Turkey of being guilty of committing the Armenian Genocide, after a day of tit-for-tat exchanges between government officials in both countries.

“I will remind him [President of Turkey Erdogan] about the Genocide committed against Greeks, Kurds, and the Armenians. They committed ethnic cleansing, expelling the whole Christian population from Asia Minor,” Yair tweeted, adding also that the current day Istanbul was Constantinople, capital city of the Byzantine Empire and the center of Orthodox Church for more 100 years before the Turkish occupation .

Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Wednesday blasted Israeli premier Benjamin Netanyahu as a "tyrant" who "massacred" Palestinian children as the two leaders exchanged insults in their latest spat.

Erdogan was responding to earlier comments from Netanyahu who slammed the Turkish leader as a "dictator" and "a joke", after a day of tit-for-tat exchanges between government officials in both countries.

The latest exchange came after Netanyahu had called Israel the nation-state of “the Jewish people” only, not all its citizens. That prompted Turkey on Tuesday to accuse the Israeli leader of “blatant racism.”

https://www.panorama.am/en/news/2019/03/14/Armenian-Genocide/2086014

 

 

[Yervant1]

Wishy washy, is it a plane or is it a bird. Talk about double talk!

News.am, Armenia

July 10 2019

Israeli ambassador: Terrible tragedy of Armenians is a great act of murder in history of 20th century

21:29, 10.07.2019

YEREVAN. – Terrible tragedy that happened to the Armenians is one of the greatest acts of deliberate murder in the history of the 20th century and in the history of mankind, Israel’s Ambassador to Armenia, Eliav Belotserkovsky, told reporters during a reception in honor of Israel’s Independence Day.

According to him, the Jewish people, as well as people living in Israel, “actively oppose this.”

“This was discussed in our parliament, let's see how things go ahead,” he said when asked why Israel has not yet recognized the Armenian Genocide.

To the journalist’s remark that he didn’t use the word genocide, the Ambassador replied: “The question is not whether to look for this or that word, it is not quite suitable. We need to study the history so that such tragedies do not occur in the future. ”

https://news.am/eng/news/523244.html

 

 

[Yervant1]

RT - Russia Today

Sept 26 2019

Awkward! Netanyahu roasts Erdogan for denying Armenian genocide… which Israel doesn’t recognize

Published time: 26 Sep, 2019 09:25 Edited time: 26 Sep, 2019 10:42

© REUTERS/Ronen Zvulun; Carlo Allegri

Benjamin Netanyahu’s latest denouncement of Recep Tayyip Erdogan for denying the Armenian genocide would have sounded more sincere if he hadn’t personally blocked an attempt to recognize it as such last year.

There is no love lost between the leaders of Israel and Turkey, who have spent years publicly accusing each other of dictatorial and murderous policies. The latest barb from Prime Minister Netanyahu claimed that President Erdogan “denies the terrible slaughter of the Armenian people” and thus “shouldn’t preach to Israel.”

Invoking the mass murder of Armenians by the Ottoman Empire would have sounded more appropriate if Israel actually recognized it as genocide, some commenters were quick to point out.

Israel’s official position on the genocide is the same as the country’s stance on its presumed nuclear arsenal: to neither deny nor acknowledge. Historically, this position was taken so as not to alienate Turkey, which was one of few nations in the Middle East that was friendly with Israel and offered lucrative trade opportunities for its arms producers.

While the countries’ relationship under Netanyahu and Erdogan has soured, affecting both security cooperation and trade, Israel’s position has never changed. Turkey’s role as a key buyer of arms and a strategically placed ally was replaced by Azerbaijan in the past decade. A neighbor of Israel’s arch-nemesis Iran, Azerbaijan is locked in a bitter cold war with Armenia, having lost a significant part of its territory to Armenian-backed separatists. The nation also has close ties with Turkey.

It’s not clear how big of a consideration Azerbaijan was when Netanyahu personally intervened to block an attempt to recognize the Armenian genocide last year. His official explanation was that a debate on such a move would mobilize Turkish nationalists and help Erdogan in an upcoming election.

Netanyahu’s statement was apparently a response to Erdogan’s reference to Israel’s policies during his speech at the UN General Assembly earlier this week. The Turkish president even used some visual props to make his point, which incidentally is Netanyahu’s trademark approach.

https://www.rt.com/news/469652-netanyahu-erdogan-armenian-genocide/

 

[Yervant1]

Armenpress.am

Armenian Genocide Memorial to be unveiled in Israel

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15:25, 10 October, 2019

YEREVAN, OCTOBER 10, ARMENPRESS. A memorial dedicated to the victims of the Armenian Genocide will be erected in Israel, Dr. Alexander Tzinker, co-chair of the Armenia-Israel international public forum, told reporters today.

“The necessary permission has been received, the respective model has been developed, and we already launched a fundraising for the creation and inauguration of the memorial. The memorial is expected to be unveiled in the Israeli city of Petah Tikva. The city’s mayor changed, we thought there would be problems, but thanks God, all issues are solved”, he said.

A decision has been made to make the monument in Armenia and then to transport to Israel.

Dr. Alexander Tzinker informed that there is also another initiative. The Mayor of Petah Tikva and the Mayor of Gyumri exchanged letters on declaring Petah Tikva and Gyumri sister cities. The new Mayor of Petah Tikva approved the proposal.

Edited and translated by Aneta Harutyunyan

 

 

https://armenpress.am/eng/news/991206.html?fbclid=IwAR3ro77-Eu0EHgL3TxBWlNCHyP8qZg2ow4VLyQRIMjrpWiUt9fI20tzQdw0

[Yervant1]

The Times of Israel

Oct 30 2019

Israeli politicians call for recognition of Armenian genocide after US vote House measure came three weeks after Turkey invaded northeastern Syria and launched a broad assault on Kurdish-controlled areas

By TOI staff and Agencies

Two prominent Israeli politicians on both sides of the political aisle independently called for Jerusalem to acknowledge the Armenian Genocide after the US House of Representatives overwhelmingly voted to officially recognize the World War I-era crime on Tuesday.

Cheers and applause erupted Tuesday when the House voted 405 to 11 in support of the measure “affirming the United States record on the Armenian Genocide,” a first for the US Congress, where similar measures with such direct language have been introduced for decades but never passed.

The Armenians say the mass killings of more than 1.5 million of their people from 1915 to 1917 constituted genocide, a claim recognized by some 30 countries.

Turkey strongly denies the accusation of genocide and says that both Armenians and Turks died as a result of World War I. It puts the death toll in the hundreds of thousands.

The House measure, which passed on Turkey’s national day, came three weeks after Turkey invaded northeastern Syria and launched a broad assault on Kurdish-controlled areas that was made possible by the withdrawal of US troops. Angry US lawmakers launched a two-punch rebuke, with the genocide measure passing alongside a bill that slaps sanctions on Turkey for its incursion.

“The US House of Representatives vote to recognize the Armenian Genocide is a vote for historical truth and justice. Turkey cannot be allowed to intimidate the world into denying genocide,” Blue and White co-leader Yair Lapid tweeted.

“I will continue to fight for Israeli recognition of the Armenian Genocide.”

Lapid was a strong proponent of a failed push for a Knesset bill recognizing the genocide earlier this year. Citing what he called Israel’s “moral and historical responsibility,” he tweeted in April that it was time for the government “to officially recognize the Armenian genocide and stop folding in the face of Turkish pressure.”

Former Likud minister MK Gideon Sa’ar also called for recognition, tweeting on Wednesday that he “welcome[d] the moral and principled stance of the US House of Representatives in recognizing the mass killing of #Armenians 100 years ago as #genocide. Israel should make similarly clear its recognition of this terrible atrocity.”

 

Despite repeated opposition by the Likud party, there are individual Likud MKs who support recognition. In 2016, Knesset Speaker Yuli Edelstein urged Israel to recognize the Armenian genocide, despite the friction that might cause in ties with Turkey.

“We must not ignore, belittle or deny this terrible genocide,” Edelstein declared as the Knesset marked the 1915 mass killing. “We must disconnect the current interests, bound to this time and place, and the difficult past, of which this dark chapter is a part.”

President Reuven Rivlin, who was one of the most outspoken advocates for recognition of the genocide during his time as Knesset speaker, eschewed using the term during the centenary commemoration in 2015, disappointing Armenian leaders. He used it, however, several weeks earlier at a different event.

An Armenian demonstrator holds up a historic photograph of the Armenian genocide during a demonstration in Jerusalem, April 24, 2015 (Hadas Parush/Flash90

In May, Knesset lawmakers voted to debate the recognition of the Armenian genocide in the parliament chamber. The debate came as relations between Israel and Turkey soured dramatically in the aftermath of clashes on the Israel-Gaza border in which dozens of Palestinians were killed, leading to a diplomatic spat that saw the ambassadors and consuls general of both countries expelled or withdrawn to their respective countries.

The issue of recognition of the Armenian genocide is raised every year in the Knesset, usually in the form of proposed legislation rather than a call for a debate, and has been knocked down by sitting governments annually since 1989, when MK Yair Tzaban first brought it to the floor.

Israel’s refusal thus far to formally recognize the Armenian slaughter as genocide is based on geopolitical and strategic considerations, primary among them its relations with Turkey.

In June, a full plenum debate on the issue was postponed until after Turkish elections. A ministerial debate on recognizing the genocide was also delayed at Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s request after the Foreign Ministry advised the initiative could aid Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in elections.

By the end of June, a scheduled Knesset vote on recognition was canceled due to a lack of government support.

 

https://www.timesofisrael.com/israeli-politicians-call-for-recognition-of-armenian-genocide-after-us-vote/

[Yervant1]

Jewish Journal

Oct 29 2019

Jewish Groups Praise House of Representatives for Recognizing Armenian Genocide

BY Aaron Bandler | Oct 29, 2019

Various Jewish groups praised the House of Representatives for passing a resolution on Oct. 29 recognizing the Armenian genocide.

The resolution, which passed with 405 votes in favor, 11 against and three abstaining, states “that it is the policy of the United States to commemorate the Armenian Genocide through official recognition and remembrance; reject efforts to enlist, engage, or otherwise associate the United States Government with denial of the Armenian Genocide or any other genocide; and encourage education and public understanding of the facts of the Armenian Genocide, including the United States role in the humanitarian relief effort, and the relevance of the Armenian Genocide to modern-day crimes against humanity.”

The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) praised the House of Representatives in a tweet.

“Thank you to the House of Representatives for passing a bipartisan resolution stating that the U.S. officially recognizes the Armenian Genocide and encouraging education about it,” the ADL wrote. “We hope to see action soon on the Senate companion measure as well.”

The American Jewish Committee (AJC) similarly tweeted, “The Turkish government refuses to even acknowledge it, but today the U.S. House of Representatives passed a historic resolution to officially recognize the #ArmenianGenocide. We stand with Armenians the world over in this important struggle.”

The Progressive Zionists of California wrote in a Facebook post that the resolution’s passage was “truly surreal.”

One of the House members to vote present was Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.). She explained in a statement to CNN, “Accountability and recognition of genocide should not be used as a cudgel in a political fight. It should be done based on academic consensus outside the push and pull of geopolitics. A true acknowledgment of historical crimes against humanity must include both the heinous genocides of the 20th century, along with earlier mass slaughters like the transatlantic slave trade and Native American genocide.”

For tweets, go to https://jewishjournal.com/news/nation/306335/jewish-groups-praise-house-of-representatives-for-recognizing-armenian-genocide/

[MosJan]

http://slim.am/%d5%a1%d5%b7%d5%ad%d5%a1%d6%80%d5%b0/9465116545/?fbclid=IwAR3H3Gss3xj7w4TmvtbruXp4qG5U4Zo7TKvj1-YRtjWencyCVZzRqyhsgJk

 

 

«Ամոթ է մեզ , որ մենք նույնպես չենք ճանաչում ցեղասպանությունը» . Իսրայելի ներքին գործերի նախկին նախարար Գիդեոն Սաար

Իսրայելում երկու նշանավոր քաղաքական գործիչներ, հետևելով ԱՄՆ Ներկայացուցիչների պալատի օրինակին, երկրի իշխանություններին կոչ են արել ճանաչել Հայոց ցեղասպանությունը:

[Yervant1]

News.am, Armenia

Jan 23 2020

President Sarkissian raises issue of Armenian Genocide recognition by Israel parliament

13:45, 23.01.2020

While on a working visit to Israel, Armenian President Armen Sarkissian and Mrs. Nouneh Sarkissian visited the Israeli parliament, the Knesset, where they were hosted by Knesset Speaker Yuli Edelstein and Mrs. Irina Nevzlin.

Edelstein expressed confidence that Sarkissian's visit, as well as Armenia’s decision to open an embassy in Israel, would be an important cornerstone for the further development of bilateral relations.

President Sarkissian noted that he had been at the bases for Armenia’s establishing diplomatic relations with Israel, highlighting Israel's experience in various fields, as well as the exchange of experience.

Sarkissian said that the similarities between the two peoples' destinies are impressive, and they prompt us to think about the future.

Noting that many chapters of history are tragic for both the Armenian and Jewish peoples, President Sarkissian said efforts should be combined in order to prevent such humanitarian catastrophes from happening again. The Armenian President also raised the issue of Armenian Genocide recognition by the Israeli Knesset, stressing that recognition and condemnation of this shameful chapter in history should not be conditioned by today's political interests and realities.

At the end of the visit, the President of Armenia made a note in the Knesset guestbook. Afterwards, President Sarkissian and Mrs. Nouneh Sarkissian toured the Israeli parliament building.

https://news.am/eng/news/556128.html

[Yervant1]

Armenpress.am

There is no and has never been Antisemitism in Armenia – head of Jewish community in Armenia

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19:57, 24 January, 2020

YEREVAN, JANUARY 24, ARMENPRESS. Head of Jewish community in Armenia Rima Varzhapetyan-Feller is confident that in Armenia there has never been and cannot be manifestations of Antisemitism. In an interview with ARMENPRESS Varzhapetyan said that there are all the conditions in Armenia allowing them to proudly voice about their Jewish origin.

“We have a Jewish community here and Armenia is a very tolerant country. It can never happen here that someone’s blood is shed for being a representative of other nationality. We feel very well here and there can be no anti-Semitism or xenophobia in Armenia. Armenians also have ethnic minorities in other countries for which they always understand the situation of other ethnic minorities in their country”, Rima Varzhapetyan-Feller said.

Today in Armenia 300-400 Jewish families reside. They have been present in Armenia since the 19^th century.

Edited and translated by Tigran Sirekanyan

 

 

https://armenpress.am/eng/news/1002603.html?fbclid=IwAR3DApr3gz7WdHPfLKhAsZyLjpJC2cGH2aIh3IS34AuDVIiOSHbdT-BFmFw

[Yervant1]

Jerusalem Post

Jan 27 2020

Armenia’s antisemitism? The truth is different

Armenia sent its highest-ranking citizen to the World Holocaust Forum in Jerusalem, H.E. Armen Sarkissian, the president of Armenia.

By YOAV LOEFF

JANUARY 27, 2020 21:57

President Reuven Rivlin holding a working meeting with President Armen Sarkissian of Armenia.

Maayan Jaffe-Hoffman describes two monuments in Armenia and Azerbaijan, in an attempt to portray the Armenians as antisemitic as opposed to Jew-loving Azeris (“At Auschwitz liberation tribute, Israel should study tale of two monuments,” January 21). The problem is that the author uses facts selectively, and even with some significant inaccuracies.

The article opens with the monument of Garegin Nzhdeh in Yerevan, giving the impression that the “antisemitic” Armenians chose to glorify his heritage as a Nazi collaborator. But Nzhdeh was first and foremost a military hero and a central leader of the Armenian liberation movement who sought to achieve independence for his nation after hundreds of years of occupation. He fought against the Ottoman Empire when it systematically slaughtered its own Armenian minority and played a major role in the establishment of the First Republic of Armenia (1918-1920) which, post-genocide, gave the suffering Armenian nation a short period of renewed hope.

That hope was brutally cut off by invasion by the Red Army in 1920, and the fledgling Republic of Armenia was annexed by the Soviet Union. During that invasion, Nzhdeh led a struggle to prevent a Soviet attempt to hand over major areas in the south of Armenia to the newly established Azerbaijan, a country that was created by the Soviets. That struggle was partially successful, though two historically Armenian areas, Nagorno-Karabakh and Nachichevan (Nzhdeh’s birthplace) were handed to the Azeris as part of the Soviet policy of divide-and-rule.

It is true that Nzhdeh joined the army of Nazi Germany where he served for a short period. There is no justification for that collaboration, though it is quite clear that his motivation in joining the Wehrmacht had nothing to do with antisemitism, but an unrealistic hope that this collaboration might have led to re-liberation of the Armenian people. That was not the only mistake he made, since just after he realized that this way would not be effective, he tried to establish a new collaboration, this time with Stalin.

Stalin sent him a message to come to discuss this issue in Moscow, where Nzhdeh was arrested and finished his life in jail. It is also important to note that at the same time that an Armenian legion fought for Germany (unlike Nzhde and Kanayan, Armenians who for the most part were Red Army prisoners of war forcibly recruited to the Wermacht). Hundreds of thousands of Armenians served in the Soviet Army and took an active part in the victory against the Nazis. Nzhdeh is not praised in Armenia for his collaboration with the Nazis, but for his unceasing, lifelong struggle to liberate the Armenian people.

JAFFE-HOFFMAN goes on with her theory about antisemitism in Armenia. I travel quite a lot all over Armenia, both on my own and with other Jews and Israelis. I always make it clear that I am a Jew and an Israeli, and never heard a hint of antisemitic _expression_. If there is some criticism, it is usually about Israel’s hesitation to recognize the Armenian genocide that was perpetrated by the Ottoman Empire and led to the extermination of some 1.5 million Armenians during WW1, and was a kind of a “general rehearsal” for the Holocaust.

The other criticism is about Israel’s alliance with the Azeri dictatorship, Armenia’s enemy. What you can unfortunately find in Armenia is a strong sense of nationalism, not very different from what we experience here in Israel.

Armenia’s small Jewish community never suffered antisemitism in their adopted homeland. Most of them left in the early 1990s, after the severe earthquake in the north of the country in 1988 and the collapse of the Soviet Union. At that time, during the Karabakh war, Armenia suffered from a harsh economic crisis and shortage in basic necessities. Many people left the country seeking better life abroad. Not only Jews left, but the Jews had an easy way out – moving to Israel. They did not leave because they faced any antisemitism; they left because they sought better life.

Jaffe-Hoffman refers to what she calls the “brutal invasion” of Nagorno-Karabakh by Armenia. She “forgets” to mention that this region has been inhabited since antiquity mainly by Armenians. They were still the majority there even after 70 years of Soviet Azeri sovereignty and Azeris striving to change that demographic situation.

She also ignores the fact that Karabakh’s Armenians demanded liberation after a long history of pogroms by Azeris in Baku, Shushi, Sumgait and other places, starting in the early 1900s, then around 1920, and again in 1988. History is a wonderful Hollywood-style movie with clear distinction between good guys and bad guys when you ignore facts that do not support your thesis.

I will conclude with drawing the attention to three facts. The first is that for many years now there is a monument standing in the heart of Yerevan with inscriptions in Hebrew and Armenian, commemorating both the Holocaust and the Armenian Genocide. Unfortunately, there is no parallel such monument in Israel.

Second, Armenia sent its highest-ranking citizen to the World Holocaust Forum in Jerusalem, H.E. Armen Sarkissian, the president of Armenia.

The third is that Armenia has decided to open an embassy in Israel soon, regardless of whether Israel opens one in Yerevan. There could be no clearer statements that Armenia opposes antisemitism.

The writer teaches Armenian History and culture at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

https://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Armenias-antisemitism-The-truth-is-different-615588

[Yervant1]

Jerusalem Post

Jan 31 2020

ARMENIAN PRESIDENT TO 'POST': FAILURE TO RECOGNIZE GENOCIDE WILL BACKFIRE

By MAAYAN JAFFE-HOFFMAN

Israel will not win the battle against antisemitism until it recognizes the Armenian Genocide, President Armen Sarkissian told The Jerusalem Post.

Sarkissian, who was in Israel over the past week for the Fifth World Holocaust Forum, which marked the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, said that most of the Armenian population does not understand the logic behind Israel’s refusal to officially recognize the mass killing of more than 1.5 million Armenian men, women and children by the Ottoman government between 1915 and 1917.

The Armenian Genocide is recognized by more than 30 countries, including the United States as of October 2019, but Israel has resisted formally naming the genocide for what it is.

“A lot of Armenians ask, ‘Why on earth would Israel, a country whose people have seen their own huge tragedy, not recognize the Armenian Genocide?’” Sarkissian said. “There is no logical answer. I cannot say that Israel has relations with Turkey and that is why – I cannot say that.”

But he acknowledged that Israel-Turkey relations, which were formalized in March 1949, are likely the catalyst for Israeli silence.

The Turkish government for more than a century has denied that there was ever any plan to systematically wipe out the Armenian population. Although, here and there, Turkish officials – including President Recep Tayyip Erdogan – have offered condolences to the Armenians, none has ever labeled the tragedy a genocide, and most call it a lie or say that the Ottoman Turks simply took “necessary measures” to counter Armenian separatism at the time.

“Israel has relations with Turkey,” Sarkissian said. “Today, those relations are good, tomorrow they are bad, and then the other way around. But the truth will remain the truth.”

He said that recognizing human tragedy is a matter of morality more than anything else, and he can only hope that one day Israel will recognize the genocide and that “human values, moral values and the importance of history will prevail. Recognition will not be connected with this or that interest of the State of Israel or something else that is important only in the moment.”

But he also believes that Israel’s failure to commiserate with Armenia over their comparable tragedies – the Holocaust and the Armenian Genocide – is harming Israel and the Jewish people’s efforts to combat an ever-expanding epidemic of antisemitism.

“All of the reasons why this happened have not disappeared,” Sarkissian told the Post, referring to both the Holocaust and the genocide. “Antisemitism is alive. Extreme nationalism is alive everywhere in the world.... It can all come back.”

He said that human tendency is to forget the lessons of history for the convenience of the present.

Sarkissian believes that Turkey has not recognized the genocide because it would be “inconvenient: millions of people lost their lives; a culture was destroyed; and Turkey is probably afraid of claims – material and moral claims.

“Maybe they are afraid because for years they didn’t tell the truth to their children and grandchildren in their schools,” he continued.

“It does not matter to me personally whether this country or that country will or will not recognize [the genocide]. It will not change my life or the lives of the millions of Armenians who lost their homes and are scattered all over the world in the Armenian diaspora. But it is going to backfire.”

He said that a country’s recognition of the genocide or not will decide if that country is able to build for itself a tolerant society. A country that does not recognize the genocide, he said, is a country that will ultimately lack tolerance for other people’s religion, nationality, faith and culture.

“The biggest disease of humanity today is not a virus in Hong Kong,” Sarkissian said. “It is not AIDS or cancer. With new technologies we are learning more and more how to fight cancer and defeat viruses. But technology will not teach us how to cure the disease of inhumanity.

“No medicine can be taken with water to help you become more human, more tolerant – this is much more problematic,” he explained.

And he said that only in the moment that Israel recognizes the genocide will it truly be able to move into its rightful role as the worldwide leader in the fight against antisemitism and extremism.

“It will make Israel’s case much stronger when it partners with Armenia, Rwanda, Cambodia,” Sarkissian stressed. “Then, we can come together and say, ‘This is enough.’ If we don’t do that and everyone plays the game on their own, we are going to lose the battle.”

Sarkissian said that he attended the World Holocaust Forum because he does not think “it would have been right for any Armenian to connect the remembrance of the Holocaust tragedy” with whether the Israeli parliament recognizes the Armenian Genocide or not.

“There is no way that, as president of Armenia, I would ever consider not being here,” he said.

BUT HIS own country is in other ways as guilty as the Jewish state.

Armenia has held Israel to a double standard on its territorial conflict with the Palestinians, voting against and condemning Israeli presence in Judea and Samaria at the United Nations, while defending Armenia’s own occupation of Nagorno-Karabakh.

The United Nations Security Council in 1993 adopted four resolutions (822, 853, 874 and 884) that affirm Azerbaijan’s territorial integrity and demand Armenian withdraw from the area. Furthermore, the US State Department describes on its website that Nagorno-Karabakh’s leadership “is not recognized internationally or by the United States,” thereby acknowledging Armenian forces’ occupation of one-fifth of Azerbaijan’s territory during the 1988-1994 Armenia-Azerbaijan war.

At the time, Armenia expelled more than 800,000 Azerbaijani civilians and has since barred them from returning to their homes. At least 100,000 Azerbaijanis remain in refugee camps today under desperate living conditions.

There is striking parallelism between Israel’s fight for territory in the West Bank, often called the “biblical heartland,” because of the Jews’ thousands-of-years history there, and Armenia’s grasp on Nagorno-Karabakh. Most historians believe that Armenians had been living in the region as early as the second or even fourth century BCE.

When asked about this contradiction and why Armenia does not vote with tolerance toward Israel at the United Nations, Sarkissian said, “The Armenian state has to think of protecting Armenian life, and the Jewish state has to think about protecting Jewish life. Both Armenians and Jews are human, and yet politics decides many things.”

“Armenia is a landlocked country; it has only four neighbors: Turkey – and you know our relations with them; Azerbaijan – and you know our relations,” he continued.

“Armenia has only two ways of communicating with the world: One is Georgia, and the other is Iran. I’ll stop there. Don’t take me into the jungle of politics.”

Until the countries come to terms on these differences, Sarkissian said, he hopes that they will identify other areas in which they share common ground.

The president used his time in the country after the Holocaust forum to meet with top Israeli universities and with the Israel Innovation Authority, for example, and noted there are plans to collaborate on new projects in the artificial intelligence arena.

He also said he hopes to increase tourism between the two countries.

“Once we have Israeli citizens traveling to Armenia and learning about its history and culture, our beautiful land and fantastic food, and once more Armenians come to Israel and spend the holidays here, the better the world will be,” he concluded.

https://m.jpost.com/Opinion/Failure-to-recognize-our-genocide-will-backfire-616003/amp?fbclid=IwAR3DFmA_403ytjL9v6XfuEjudDyEjPAZiEHVkgZ6hOlWOKGJNbW9f7C-A9Q

[Yervant1]

Jerusalem Post

April 23 2020

Indefensible: Israel’s Failure to Recognize the Armenian Genocide

Many of Israel’s leaders have publicly recognized the Armenian Genocide at various points throughout Israeli history. But as a nation, the Jewish state has refused to do this.

By EMILY SCHRADER

APRIL 23, 2020 21:52

This week, Israelis and Jews around the world recognize and remember the six million Jews who were barbarically and cruelly murdered in the Holocaust at the hands of the Nazis. But only a few days after Holocaust Remembrance Day (Yom HaShoah), another genocide remembrance day falls – for the Armenian Genocide. April 24 is the official memorial day for the Armenian Genocide commemorating more than a million Armenians murdered at the hands of the Ottoman Turks. Yet in Israel, this day could pass without most of the country noticing.

Despite Israel’s history and the collective trauma of ethnic cleansing and pogroms against Jews from Arab states, and of course the Holocaust, Israel has not recognized the Armenian Genocide, nor does Israel place an emphasis on educating about the Armenian Genocide. In fact, the Knesset has failed to recognize the Armenian Genocide repeatedly due to various political interests, in an embarrassing national display of moral failure.

Many of Israel’s leaders have publicly recognized the Armenian Genocide at various points throughout Israeli history. But as a nation, the Jewish state has refused to recognize the genocide due to fear of Turkey’s reaction, a state which has historically been a key ally for Israel’s security. Today, the relationship with Turkey has changed due to Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan’s marked hostility toward Israel. Yet Israel has still not recognized the Armenian Genocide.

In 2018, MK Tamar Zandberg proposed a bill to address this gap, but the bill was cancelled due to government opposition. In 2019, many government leaders called on Israel to recognize the Armenian Genocide including Blue and White’s Yair Lapid, and Likud’s Gideon Saar, but the vote was delayed and ultimately cancelled – again, due to lack government (coalition) support. This political failure in 2020 on the most basic of issues is simply unconscionable.

APRIL 24, 1915, is internationally known as the start of the Armenian Genocide. But the murderous campaign of the Turks began many years before that in the 1890s under Sultan Abdul Hamid, whose leadership oversaw the murder of 100,000-300,000 Armenians.

On April 24, the Turks doubled down, launching an ethnic cleansing campaign against Armenian Christians, more horrific than the world had ever seen. They began by rounding up and murdering 250 Armenian intellectuals, and they continued with the Tehcir Law. Armenians were robbed of their property and belongings and deported en masse. They were sent on death marches into the Syrian desert in inhumane conditions, and women and girls were raped and enslaved. Those who survived were sent to concentration camps, executed, or left to die. Nearly 50,000 Armenians were tossed into the Black Sea and left to drown. Between 1914 and 1918, 1-1.5 million Armenians were murdered by Ottoman Turks, the direct predecessors of modern Turkey, in the largest race-based genocide in history (at the time).

Unlike Germany, Turkey and Turkish leaders have adamantly refused to acknowledge the Armenian Genocide at all, even oppressing Turkish citizens who do publicly acknowledge the crime against humanity. To date, there has been no recognition and no reparations made to the Armenian people for what is seen by many historians as a precursor to the Holocaust. Even Hitler himself is reported to have said in 1939: "Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?"

Imagine if the major perpetrators of the Holocaust were never caught for their crimes, and that adding insult to injury, the State of Germany denied altogether that the Holocaust had occurred. Imagine if Germany instead punished anyone who said otherwise, and threatened to end diplomatic ties with nations who recognized the Holocaust.

On top of this, suppose Germany also had a long and rich track record of destroying concrete evidence the Holocaust ever occurred so as to quash internal dissent. This is exactly what the modern state of Turkey has done, and that in and of itself should be a crime – just as Holocaust denial is a crime in Germany today.

ISRAEL’S LEADERS from the time of its founding in 1948 have carried with them the solemn obligation and promise to ensure that “Never again” is a reality. It is a promise that we as a people reaffirm this week with Yom HaShoah, remembering the six million Jews who were murdered by the Nazis. But part of ensuring that never means never is recognising what genocide looks like.

Some of Israel’s leaders already have, such as President Reuven Rivlin, who has long called for such recognition, stating in 2015: “It was… one of my eldest brothers, who said 25 years before the Holocaust that if we do not warn against what is going on with the Armenians, what will happen afterwards when they try to do it to us…? There is a saying that the Nazis used the Armenian genocide as something that gave them permission to bring the Holocaust into reality… 'Never again' belongs to every one of you, all the nations."

It’s time for Israel’s leaders to exercise true leadership and, as a state, recognize the Armenian Genocide. For the State of Israel, the Jewish state, to not recognise the Armenian Genocide is one of the greatest symbolic failures in the Israel today.

There are some lines that no political interest should be above. One of them is most certainly recognizing the Holocaust, which nearly all nations do today – but another is recognizing the Armenian Genocide, which far too many countries do not. Part of Israel’s historical challenge in recognizing the Armenian Genocide is the lack of moral clarity in the rest of the international community on this issue, giving Turkey more power to “punish” states which recognize the genocide.

At various points in Israel’s history, this may not have been a button Israel could push alone, without an existential risk. But Israel’s survival is not dependent on what Turkey and its current dictator Erdogan think of Israel today, and it’s high time that Turkey’s bullying tactics be universally and unequivocally rejected by all nations. For the world, and for Israel: Recognize the Armenian Genocide now.

Emily Schrader is the CEO of Social Lite Creative and a research fellow at the Tel Aviv Institute.

https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/indefensible-israels-failure-to-recognize-the-armenian-genocide-625722

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News.am, Armenia

April 23 2020

Jewish-Australian community calls for Armenian Genocide recognition

16:05, 23.04.2020

The Executive Council of Australian Jewry (ECAJ), which is the peak public affairs representative of the Jewish-Australian community has called for Federal recognition of the Armenian, Assyrian and Greek Genocides in the lead-up to the 105th anniversary of the crime against humanity, reported the Armenian National Committee of Australia (ANC-AU).

"The Executive Council of Australian Jewry, the elected peak national body representing the Australian Jewish community, joins with our colleagues in the Armenian National Committee of Australia in calling upon all nations and all governments to recognise the reality of the genocide that occurred between 1915 and 1923, when more than 1 million Armenians, Greeks and Assyrians, almost all of them civilians, lost their lives at the hands of the Ottoman Caliphate, and many more were expelled from their homes," reads the statement signed by the organisation's Co-CEO, Peter Wertheim.

"In light of all the evidence, it cannot seriously be suggested that these actions, targeted at civilians on such a vast scale, and carried out with systematic brutality, were a mere happenstance of war. The ECAJ has long accepted the overwhelming verdict of history scholars that the killings and expulsions were carried out with genocidal intent."

The statement concluded: "Political expedience must never blind us to historical truth. A crime does not cease to be a crime simply because it is denied, no matter how often the denial is repeated. The scourge of genocide can only be overcome when political leaders unite in identifying and condemning it."

https://news.am/eng/news/574333.html

[Yervant1]

Ha'aretz, Israel

April 23 2020

Opinion The Jews Who Befriended Turkey and Became Genocide Deniers

Prominent Jews, from Turkish chief rabbis to Israel's presidents to U.S. lay leaders, have propped up Turkey’s Armenian genocide denial. That's only just begun to change

Marc David Baer

Apr 23, 2020 5:16 PM

Members of Jerusalem's tiny Armenian community demonstrate in front of the Israeli Foreign Ministry in Jerusalem to demand Israel recognize the Armenian genocide. Oct. 22, 2007AP

Some disasters that plague humans are unavoidable, as they are acts of nature. The plagues that are avoidable are human made. Among them is genocide.

Every April 24 nations around the world commemorate the genocide of the Armenians committed by the Ottoman regime in 1915. The two nations that should be leading public commemoration of the tragedy are not among them. The two nations are Turkey and Israel.

Since its inception in 1923 the Turkish Republic has denied intentional mass murder of the Armenians happened. It has even gone so far as to make the preposterous claim that Armenians committed genocide against Turks. The tallest monument in Turkey is visible from over the border in the Republic of Armenia. It is dedicated to the "Martyred Turks Massacred by Armenians."

Despite the fact that its own foundation in 1948 was accelerated by the Nazi genocide of Jews, the State of Israel also does not remember the Armenian genocide. The Jewish state should be the first to recognize genocide wherever it occurs. But it prefers official silence to antagonizing its military and economic ally, no matter the anti-Semitic and anti-Israel rhetoric of Turkey’s current leader.

Most surprising is that Turkish and Israeli genocide denial has been facilitated by Turkish Jews. Despite their own long, sorry record of suffering discrimination and occasional violence in the Turkish Republic, for decades Turkish Jewish leaders have been among Turkey’s most reliable agents of genocide denial. Why is that?

The leaders of Turkish Jewry determined that the best way to guarantee the continued existence of the dwindling, insecure community is to demonstrate their unswerving loyalty to the state. The acid test for proving themselves useful allies is to agitate against genocide recognition in Israel, Europe, and the United States.

This history of alliance between Turkish Jewish leadership and Turkey’s regime goes back to when the territory ruled by the Turkish Republic today was part of the Ottoman Empire.

The Ottoman Empire allowed tens of thousands of Jews expelled from Spain and Portugal at the end of the fifteenth century to live with few hindrances. Grateful Jews depicted the Ottoman sultan as their savior, fulfilling a divine plan.

In the nineteenth century, Ottoman Jewish intellectuals recycled pre-modern views. They converted the sultan, and by extension all Turks, into tolerant hosts of their Jewish "guests." In 1892, during the four hundredth anniversary of the 1492 "welcome" given Iberian Jewry, Ottoman Jews began to publicize the Turk as humanitarian protector. This occurred alongside the first massacres of Armenians. Promoting themselves as loyal subjects of the sultan, Ottoman Jewish leaders sided with Sultan Abdülhamid II against Armenians, who became their common enemy.

Armenians executed in a public square in Constantinople in a photo taken by Armin Wegner, a German soldier stationed in the Ottoman Empire investigating reports of Armenian massacres Reuters

After the genocide in 1915, contemporary fear and anxiety was added to the Turkish Jewish emotional state of historical gratefulness. In the Turkish Republic, built in the ashes of the Ottoman Empire, anti-Jewish press campaigns, pogroms, and exorbitant taxation led to the loss of lives, wealth, and property.

During World War II thousands of Turkish Jews perished in Nazi camps in occupied Europe because Turkey did not recognize them as citizens. Assassination attempts of Jewish leaders and repeated deadly synagogue bombings have occurred since the 1980s.

Despite their experience, in 1989 Turkish Jewish elites working together with the Turkish presidency and foreign ministry established the Quincentennial Foundation. It celebrated "five hundred years of friendship" between Turks and Jews. Its proponents promoted the same stock figures of tolerant Turks and loyal Jews.

People walk past by Kumbet mosque, formerly an Armenian Apostolic church known as Church of the Twelve Apostles, in the eastern city of Kars, Turkey. February 1, 2020 MURAD SEZER/ REUTERS

To advocate a fantasy of five hundred years of harmony, the most influential Jewish leaders within Turkey - chief rabbis David Asseo and Ishak Haleva, the editors in chief of the Jewish weekly Salom and lay leaders such as industrialist Jak Kamhi andformer Jewish community president Bensiyon Pinto - opposed recognition of the Armenian genocide.

They were joined by supporters in Israel (including presidents Shimon Peres and Moshe Katzav, as well as the Foreign Ministry, and the Union of Turkish Immigrants in Israel) and almost every major American Jewish organisation, including the Anti-Defamation League, the American Jewish Committee, and the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, and the most influential Jewish historians of the Ottoman Empire, Bernard Lewis and Stanford Shaw.

They also denied the existence of Turkish anti-Semitism. In their view, genocide is an if/then proposition: if one accepts that Turks and Jews have lived in peace and brotherhood for five hundred years, then one trusts that Turks could not possibly have perpetrated a genocide against the Armenians.

In the United States Congress the spell of this myth has finally been broken. On October 29, 2019, the House of Representatives passed a resolution sponsored by Jewish-American Congressman Adam Schiff recognizing the 1915 Ottoman annihilation of Armenians as a genocide. On December 12, the Senate unanimously adopted a similar resolution.

Turkish President Recep Tayyib Erdogan’s anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, authoritarian crackdown on dissent, anti-Israel stance, and incursion into Syria to expel Kurds made the scales fall from their eyes. Despite Turkish state threats and Turkish Jewish lobbying, Congress has finally recognized the fact that in 1915 the Ottoman Empire intentionally annihilated its Armenian subjects.

Several major Jewish-American organizations have also recently recognized the genocide, including erstwhile skeptics such as the ADL and AJC. There are winds of change in Israel, too. What such actions will mean for the future of the historical Turkish-Jewish alliance is unclear.

One thing is certain: Armenians and Jews, two groups whose similar history makes them natural allies, will improve their relationship which was harmed by decades of denial done in part by some of the latter’s co-religionists.

Marc David Baer is Professor of International History at the London School of Economics and Political Science. His most recent book is "Sultanic Saviors and Tolerant Turks: Writing Ottoman Jewish History, Denying the Armenian Genocide" (Indiana, 2020)

Marc David Baer

https://www.haaretz.com/middle-east-news/.premium-the-jews-who-befriended-turkey-and-became-genocide-deniers-1.8792672

[Yervant1]

Turkey Attempts to Take Over

Armenian Properties in Jerusalem

By Harut Sassounian

Publisher, The California Courier

www.TheCaliforniaCourier.com

An article in the Jewish Press of February 13, 2020 exposed the
activities of the Turkish Government to take over the Armenian and
Christian Quarters of Jerusalem. The article by journalist Baruch
Yedid is titled, “Turkey Working to Take Over Armenian Quarters in
Jerusalem’s Old City.”

Jerusalem’s Armenian “residents have told TPS [Tazpit Press Service]
about efforts of Turkish officials in recent years to persuade them to
deny the Armenian holocaust perpetrated by the Turks a century ago and
other actions to acquire property owned by local Christians, according
to Yedid.

A Jerusalem Armenian, whose grandfather had survived the Armenian
Genocide, told TPS that 40 minutes into a meeting with a Turkish
female diplomat, she tried to convince him to drop his activities for
the recognition of the Armenian Genocide. “I realized that she wanted
to persuade me to cease my activity to preserve the Armenian
massacre.” The Armenian said that he immediately showed the door to
the Turkish diplomat who understood that the Armenian community will
never give up on the recognition of the Genocide. “We will wait
another 100 years, but we will never rescind our demand for
compensation until we reach a payment agreement, like the one that
Israel signed with Germany,” the Armenian said.

Other Armenian property owners in Jerusalem told TPS that Turkish
government representatives recently offered them $3,000 grants for
their various needs. However, Armenians rejected the Turkish bribes,
calling them “silencing grants designed to ensure that the Turkish
government will not be sued for the 1915-1917 massacres.” Even though
the Israeli journalist Yedid uses the term ‘massacre’ in line with the
Israeli Government’s denialist policy, he quickly deviates from that
policy by explaining that “the Armenian extermination was a deliberate
and systematic genocide perpetrated by the Ottoman Empire during the
First World War against the Armenian population in its territory. Even
after World War I, Turks, Kurds, and Arabs continued to massacre
Armenians until 1923, and it is widely believed that about half the
Armenians in Turkey, about 1.5 million people, were murdered.” Turks
and Kurds did commit Genocide against Armenians, but I am not aware of
any massacres of Armenians by Arabs.

Yedid continued his article by citing examples of Turkish attempts to
purchase Armenian properties in Jerusalem: “Turkish pressures are also
manifest in its activity to acquire Armenian assets. TPS learned that
a few months ago, the residents of the Armenian Quarter were shocked
to find that one of their homes was sold to a Muslim, three times its
real value. An inquiry revealed that funding for the purchase of the
Armenian property came from Turkey. Following the incident, some of
the community leaders met to review the chain of events and took
action to prevent the leakage of the community’s assets to the Turks.
There is still a lingering fear among the Armenians of the Turks
taking over or buying more property.”

Yedid cited another Turkish scheme to take over Christian properties
in Jerusalem: “One Christian trader, who asked to remain anonymous,
said that the Turks recently transferred to the Jordanian Waqf [Muslim
endowment] very old ownership certificates, some crumbling, including
Ottoman-era documents and property ownership documents in the Armenian
and Christian Quarters. The trader, who showed TPS photos of several
of the certificates, says the Turks have asked the Waqf to verify the
documents which are being used to purchase the assets.” It is
paradoxical that the Turkish government would not disclose from its
archives the certificates of properties (deeds of trust) owned by
Armenians prior to the Genocide, yet it would send copies of property
certificates to a Jordanian Waqf.

Yedid also covered in his article “the growing Turkish activity in
Jerusalem and its support for the Muslim Brotherhood [which] are of
concern to Israel. In its recent annual intelligence assessment, the
IDF [israel Defense Forces] Intelligence Division has, for the first
time, defined Turkey as a threat.”

Yedid then described Israel’s reluctance to recognize the Armenian
Genocide: “Israeli officials have often raised the possibility of
recognizing the Armenian holocaust as a counter-reaction to Turkish
activity against Israel, which includes the hosting of Hamas’
terrorist headquarters in Turkey. Over the years, Israel has refrained
from officially recognizing the Armenian genocide, fearing that such
recognition would damage diplomatic relations between Israel and
Turkey.” This is a nonsense argument as Israel’s relations with Turkey
are already damaged and its recognition of the Armenian Genocide will
not cause any further damage, just like last fall’s recognition of the
Armenian Genocide by the U.S. House and the Senate did not negatively
affect US-Turkish relations.

The Israeli journalist correctly pointed out that “Turkey monitors all
publications on the Armenian genocide and considers the issue of great
significance to Turkish national security, and accordingly, the Turks
have not relented with their attempt to persuade the Armenians in
Jerusalem to cease their commemorative endeavors.”

Yedid also reported that the Turkish government has been encouraging
Turkish tourism to Jerusalem by paying the cost of travel to mosques
in Jerusalem and the West Bank: “Turkish nonprofits operate in
Jerusalem daily, helping mainly the Muslim Brotherhood and Jerusalem
religious activities. A source in the Armenian Quarter said that
Turkish tourists in the Old City have also recently been working
against the Armenians, tearing up posters and publications about the
Armenian genocide. Graffiti inscriptions in condemnation of the
Armenians were sprayed on the Quarter’s walls.”

Furthermore, the Turkish ‘Heritage’ Society is active in Jerusalem “in
the fields of education, culture, real estate and welfare, and also
carries funding for the ‘convoy project’ to transport thousands of
Muslim worshipers to mosques as well as funding tens of thousands of
meals to break the Ramadan fast,” according to Yedid.

Similarly, TIKA, Turkey’s Ministry of Culture and Tourism’s Turkish
Cooperation and Coordination Agency, funded several projects in
Jerusalem. Dozens of mosques and houses have been renovated by Turkey.

It is up to the Armenian Patriarchate of Jerusalem to counter the
Turkish efforts by precluding local Armenians from selling their
properties to Turkish buyers. The Armenian Government’s Office of the
High Commissioner for Diaspora Affairs should assist the Armenian
Patriarchate of Jerusalem to oppose the Turkish attempts to encroach
on the Armenian Quarter in Jerusalem.

[Yervant1]

Modern Diplomacy

July 31 2020

Was the Jewish Holocaust Influenced by the Armenian Genocide? Part 1

Published

30 mins ago

on

July 31, 2020

By

David Bukay

Armenians and Jews – from Ethnic Cleansing to Extermination

The 20^th century witnessed perhaps the greatest two genocides in human history: the Armenian Genocide, perpetrated by the Muslim Turks and the Jewish holocaust, perpetrated by Nazi Germany. There seems to be something clearly obvious connecting both great genocides of the 20^th century. Though history books suggest that the two genocides were separated by a great distance in time and space and perpetrators, and though the Armenian Genocide is still unfortunately a peripheral story in the violent history of the 20^th century. However, there can be no doubt there is a deep connection between the two, and that the Armenian Genocide was the preamble to the Jewish Holocaust. Much more than the fact that both were an integral part of the history of humanity’s darkest century, the Armenian Genocide shaped and influenced the Jewish holocaust.

The crucial question is what were the imperatives and motivations for the radical change in Nazi policy from ethnic cleansing of the Jews to genocide? Himmler and Heidrich were in the front. As we shall see, like others among the Nazi leadership, they both were deeply influenced by the Islamic propaganda and operations of Amin al-Husseini. He pushed and pressured against the ethnic cleansing and deportations of Jews but propagated and implored for their extermination. However, from their vantage point, the trigger and the example model was the Armenian genocide perpetrated by the Ottoman Empire in 1915.

From Hitler down to his government officials, they believed that under the war situation and conditions they could exterminate the Jews and no one could care or condemn. Just like the Ottoman Empire did in WWI, without the reaction of the world and international groups. They believed their policy of final solution of the Jews can be achieved through the war processes. The German leaders were well acquainted with the consequences and the reality of the Armenian genocide and they believed that the ill-reaction, the lack of any retaliatory reaction against Turkey, and the use of words without deeds will duplicate itself with their policy of exterminating the Jews.

The question is why mainstream history writing has not only been reluctant to discuss the Armenian Genocide at all, but even do not think of the possible connections between the two. The most important fact is that Islamic atrocities through its 1400 bloody years of massacres, ethnic cleansing and genocides are almost obscure when it comes to the attention of mainstream research. The Muslims’ atrocities and abominations were not hidden in the dark. The Muslims did it in the light of the sun. They hailed and glorified it and have written about it. Yet, for our case, there is alleged and imagined controversy over the factuality of the Armenian Genocide and Turkey continues its campaign of denial as if nothing happened and all is just myth.

Why? Perhaps because the historians were afraid to do their research right. History proves that intimidation was an integral part of Islamic political processes. Like today, where there is a “Great Silence and Denial” concerning Islamic atrocities perpetrated all over the world. More than 90 percent of world terrorism is Islamic. More than 70 percent of world violence is Islamic. And the countdown continues. There is not even one state around the world that is not under Islamic attack by Jihad of terrorism, or by Da’wah, Islamic diplomacy of deceit of the infidels, or by Hijrah, the Islamic mass immigration. Still, just look around, astonished and perplexed, to realize the great denial from politicians, from the academia and the media, as if it is not Islam, as if Islam is a religion of peace and harmony and compassion, and as if the horrors and atrocities perpetrated are not Islamic, and those who execute them are in fact not Muslims but in disguise.

Can one explain this folly, this stupidity, this total absurd? Or perhaps because it was and still is convenient to blame the West of all its faults, including imperialist-colonialist crimes? Is it? Well, concerning this issue of imperialism and colonialism, academic research and political approaches ignore the fact that the 1400 years of Islamic history were by far the highest and darkest embodiment of imperialism and colonialism in the history of mankind. The Islamic traditions of Islamization and Arabization of the occupied territories is of utmost notoriety. This is how the Middle East which was mainly Christian has become Arab and Muslim. Afghanistan was Buddhist before its Islamization. This is the case of Indonesia and hundreds of millions in India and China, to mention but few.

Still Western historian blame the bloody history of the West, and stop there. It fits the Christian traditions of self-accuse and self-blame (Mia Culpa!) like the Jewish tradition (“we have sinned, we have transgressed, and we have committed crimes”). You will not find this approach in Islam. On the contrary, whereas Judaism and Christianity internalize the guilt, Islam always and under no condition externalize the guilt (“do I have problem? You are guilty and responsible!”). From here come the absurd and imagined accusations against Israel, which are intended to cover up, to conceal, to draw the veil over the Arabs and Muslims misdoings and crimes. The famous Jewish phrase “he who charges others, charge with his own defects”, is critically relevant to Islam. Muslims always deny their faults and always accuse their enemies. In their state of mind they are always the victims. Victimhood and accusing the other have become Islamic expertise and it is proven again and again in contemporary world. The brilliant research done by Ibn Warraq eloquently elaborates this issue while criticizing the notorious impostures of Edwards said.

Or perhaps Islamic atrocities are denied because Western appeasement policies so pervasive in Western traditions? Or perhaps the traumas of the two World Wars of the 20^th century of millions of deaths and destruction is the reason? Or perhaps the optimism of Western mind and thinking about the good in human nature and that in the end the good wins? Perhaps there are other reasons, but whatever the reasons are, Islam is the embodiment of evil, and out of Western weaknesses and lack of understanding Islamic victory seems very evident. Therefore the question to ask is what went wrong with the West, not with Islam, as Bernard Lewis suggests. It is in fact always What Went Wrong with the West. These are the four W’s that bring the greatest civilization in history, the Western civilization, to its demise. Like in the era of Byzantium, Islam wins not because and out of its powerfulness and abilities, but because of the vacuum created by Western failures and weaknesses.

As for the other statement, concerning the possible connections between the Armenian genocide and the Jewish holocaust, this research intends to put things straight and tries to explore the issue and draw the conclusions: was the holocaust of the Jews inspired by the events, the processes and repercussions of the Armenian Genocide? The Armenian Genocide is only one chapter in the notorious Islamic religious history in which Islamic scriptures order to hate and to destroy by all means all other religious groups, they regard as infidels. The Christians suffered the uppermost persecutions and massacres.

Gregory Stanton, the president of Genocide Watch, suggests how genocide develops in eight stages: Classification: categories to distinguish people into “us and them” by ethnicity, race, religion, or nationality. Symbolization: names or other symbols are given to the classification. Dehumanization: denying the humanity of the other group. Members of it are equated with animals, vermin, insects or diseases that must be eliminated. Organization: Genocide is always organized, usually by the state. It often uses militias or special army units to provide deniability of its responsibility. Polarization: groups are driven apart. Hatred and propaganda are broadcasted. Preparation: Members of victim groups are forced to wear identifying symbols and separated out. Their property is expropriated and they are segregated into ghettoes or deported. Extermination begins, and quickly becomes genocide. Denial follows a genocide. The victims are blamed.

The problem with the model is that The “measures” and “actions” he proposes are highly naïve; totally unrealistic as if other communities care about and are ready to take real actions; and they depend on wishful thinking as if there is a common interest and good will among the international organizations. Again and again reality proves that most of the genocidal acts were publicly known in real time, and still nothing was done. While the later on excuses were many, still measures were not taken.

Turkey – the Armenian Genocide, 1915

In 1915, leaders of the Ottoman Empire set in motion a strategy to massacre the Armenians living its territory. There were more than 2 million Armenians at that time. By early 1920s, when the genocide, a premeditated and systematic campaign to exterminate an entire people, finally ended, some 1.5 million of Turkey’s Armenians were butchered, slaughtered, burnt and drowned and more Armenians forcibly removed from the country. This was the greatest holocaust perpetrated ever, until the Jewish Holocaust by the Nazisin WWII. In 1922, when the “Medz Yeghern” or “the Great Disaster” was over, there were just 388,000 Armenians remaining. Every April 24 marks the “Great Crime,” the Armenian genocide that took place under Islamic Ottoman Empire. Still, the Turkish government until today does not acknowledge the genocide, and it is still illegal in Turkey even to talk about what happened to Armenians during this era.

The Armenian people have made their home in the Caucasus region of Eurasia for some 3,000 years, a thousand years before the invader Turks came to their territory. It became the first nation in the world to make Christianity its official religion. The Armenian community thrived despite the Ottoman discriminatory policy and forced Islamization. They had been better educated and wealthier than their Turkish Muslim neighbors. At the end of the 19th century, the despotic Turkish Sultan Abdul Hamid II was infuriated by the Armenian campaign to win basic civil rights, and declared that he would solve the “Armenian question” once and for all. “I will give them a box on the ear which will make them…relinquish their revolutionary ambitions.”

It should be clearly put that if early 20^th century Turkey had the apparatuses and technology to execute what Nazi Germany had, mainly the gas chambers, it is sure that the entire Armenian population may well have been annihilated. The genocide the Turks had operated must not be denied, neglected, or play down. It is exactly an Islamic attitude of denial and it must be understood mainly by Islamic terms and totally condemned.

The butchering of 1.5m Armenians by the Ottoman Turks during World War I remains one of the bloodiest and most contentious events of the 20th century, and has been called the first modern genocide. 25 concentration camps were set up in a systematic slaughter aimed at eradicating the Armenian people, classed as “vermin” by the Turks. The common description of the concentration camps was, like the gates of Dante’s Hell. Indeed, again it was Islam against Christianity. Winston Churchill described the massacres as an ‘administrative holocaust’ a crime that was planned and executed for political reasons. The opportunity presented itself for clearing Turkish soil of a Christian race.

Despite the amount of evidence eyewitness accounts, official archives, photographic proofs of crucified Christians including girls, reports of diplomats, and testimony of the survivors, the denial of the Armenian Genocide by successive regimes in Turkey to the present is overwhelming. To add pain to insult, the denial of the historical reality of the Armenian Genocide is also part of the Western world, for political and economic reasons. Even Israel, the land of the Jews, after the Nazi Holocaust, shamelessly continues to deny the Armenian Genocide. It is here to warn out: in the long run Turkey under Erdogan is more dangerous to Israeli national interests than Iran.

The age-old specter of Muslim persecution of Christian minorities was fundamental to the Armenian Genocide. For Winston Churchill this was an opportunity presented itself for clearing Turkish soil of a Christian race, without being disturbed by foreign intervention. There are huge crystal clear objective evidence and research studies which unequivocally agree that it was a deliberate, calculated genocide perpetrated in the light of the sun. U.S. Senate Resolution 359 from 1920 heard testimonies that included evidence of the most colossal crime of all the ages, of mutilation, torture, brutal death, destruction of an entire population. The 1919 film “Auction of Souls” reveals a small part of this horrible situation.

Almost 1.5 million Armenians perished as the result of direct and deliberate mass-murder, execution, starvation, disease, physical abuse, and mass-deportation. The original people who lived in Anatolia for nearly 3,000 years were perished. First, the Armenians in the Army and governmental branches were deported and sent to remote places, where they later on were killed. Then, intellectuals and community leaders were arrested and deported to the countryside, where they were executed. In May, the remaining Armenian population was deported by train and by foot(“Death March”) to concentration camps in the Syrian Desert under the supervision of the Teshikilati Mahsusa–the Special Organization ,a unit of the Turkish army made up of criminals released from prisons.

The annihilation of the Armenian children represents the genocide at its horrible side. According to Dadrian, “In the provinces of Sivas, Harput, Trabzon, Erzurum, Diyarbekir, as well as the independent sanjaks of Urfa and Maras the genocide was earned out in part through deportations and in part through massacres… In all of these operations children were part of the general population targeted for wholesale destruction. They were also subjected to differential forms of mass murder.” These forms of murder included methods such as mass drowning, mass burning, sexual assaults, and mutilations.

Between May and August 1915, the Armenian population of the eastern provinces was deported and murdered en masse. According to the American ambassador, Henry Morgenthau, the Armenians were “slaughtered like sheep.” Women and children were deported to concentration camps to be exterminated. Though they were crying out: “We will become Muslims! We will become anything you want, just save us!”nothing saved them. Women threw their babies into lakes rather than hand them over to the Turks.There was mass looting and pillaging of Armenian goods. Some were burned out to find the gold coins they swallowed.In four days alone, from 10-14 June 1915, the gangs ‘eliminated’ some 25,000 people in the Kemah Erzincan area alone.

The case of Elazig (historic Kharpert/Kharput) is the perhaps one of the best to internalize the horrors of the Armenian genocide. It was the “physical elimination of the Armenian people and most of the evidence of their ever having lived on the great highland called the Armenian Plateau, to which the perpetrator side soon assigned the new name of Eastern Anatolia.”The city of Elazig is located in the Armenian highland of eastern Turkey. The Ottomans captured the region in 1515, but the Armenian presence in the city remained strong despite all of the pressures to which the Armenians were subject, such as forced conversions to Islam. No matter how much the Turkish government is trying to erase the Armenian heritage in Kharput and the rest of Turkey, the Armenian roots of the region are undeniable.

On the eve of the genocide, the figures indicate that the Armenian population of Kharpert/Kharput remained relatively static for almost a century, never deviating much from approximately 40,000.”U.S. Consul at Kharput, Leslie A Davis, the American consul in Kharput, reported In September 1915 the discovering the bodies of nearly 10,000 Armenians, calling it the “slaughterhouse province.” He also described a horrendous scenes of butchering around Lake Goeljuk near Kharput: The killing squads dashed infants on rocks in front of their mothers. Orphanages in which Armenian children were gathered after the liquidation of their families served as transit camps for subsequent annihilation through drowning. In the mass burning of Armenian orphans, plain sadistic fiendishness was mostly at work and they ended their misery by torching them en masse.

Mass poisoning and rapes of children were also widespread.”The other modality involves rape before murder. In Ankara province, near the village of Bash Ayash, two rapist-killers raped twelve boys, aged 12-14, and subsequently killed them. Those who did not die instantly were tortured to death while crying ‘Mummy, Mummy’… A female survivor from Giresun relates how in Egin, Kharput province, some 500 Armenian orphans collected from all parts of that province were poisoned through the arrangement of the local pharmacist and physician.” He summed up the genocide by declaring: “I do not believe that there has ever been a massacre in the history of the world as general and thorough as that which is now being perpetrated in this region, or that a more fiendish, diabolical scheme has ever been conceived in the mind of man.”

In four provinces, Diyarbakir, Harput, Bitlis, and Aleppo, this method was applied with special ferocity that which took place around beautiful Lake Goeljuk in the summer of 1915 is almost inconceivable. Thousands and thousands of Armenians, mostly innocent and helpless women and children were butchered on its shore and barbarously mutilated. One village priest, kneeling down to pray for mercy, the Turkish soldiers beheaded him, and played football with the old man’s decapitated head before his devastated family (like the Islamic Caliphate State in Syria and Iraq!).At the horrific Ras al-Ain camp near Urfa, two German railway engineers reported seeing three to four hundred women arrive in one day, completely naked. One witness told how Sergeant Nuri, the overseer of the camp, bragged about raping children. Many mothers gave their children to Turkish and Kurdish families to save them from death. Of the 45,000 Armenians who made it to Deir al Zor, only 40 remained alive at the end of the war.

In her memoir, Ravished Armenia, Aurora Mardiganian described being raped and thrown into a harem. In the city of Malatia, she saw 16 girls crucified, vultures eating their corpses. “Each girl had been nailed alive upon her cross, spikes through her feet and hands. Only their hair blown by the wind covered their bodies.”Elsewhere, bodies tied to each other drifted down the Euphrates. And in the Black Sea region, the Armenians were herded onto boats and then thrown overboard. In the desert regions, the Turks set up primitive gas chambers, stuffing Armenians into caves and asphyxiating them with brush fires. Everywhere, there were Armenian corpses: in lakes and rivers, in empty desert cisterns and village wells. Travelers reported that the stench of death pervaded the landscape. By 1917, the Armenian ‘problem’, as it was described by Ottoman leaders, had been thoroughly “resolved.”

Often forgotten, the fact is that all Christians under Turkish rule, Assyrians and Greeks, and not only Armenians, were also targeted for massacre and ethnic cleansing. The only thing that distinguished Armenians, Assyrians, Greeks and others from Turks was that they were all Christian. Yet Turkey continues to aggressively deny the holocaust it perpetrated, and unlike Germany refuses to repent. Moreover, today Turkey moves back to reclaim its Islamic Ottoman heritage and systematically continues to persecute the Christian minorities. The Armenian massacre was the greatest crime of the war, and the failure to act against the Turkish horror means that all talk of peace is mischievous nonsense. These words are not only true to the Armenians alone but also to all Christians, and not only to Turkey but to the entire Islamic world. More than 100 years after the genocide, Turkey shamelessly still denies the Armenian Genocide and Turkish history textbooks even blame on the Armenians themselves. When experts deny the Armenian genocide and succeed in preventing world governments from officially recognizing it, they are killing the victims all over again. As long as the genocide remains unrecognized, justice will not be established. The curse of the genocide will not leave the land, and the hope is Turkey must never see the light of day.

Germany – the Jewish Holocaust, 1939-1945

Anti-Semitism did not start with Hitler and Nazi Germany, but the code “final solution” it was the horrible climax of Jew hatred. However, for the discussion here, it is important to understand that Islam was the first religion that developed anti-Semitism in scientific methods, both from religious and racist aspects, and that Muhammad was the first to perpetrate ethnic cleansing and genocide to the Jews in Arabia.

The roots of Hitler’s anti-Semitism are unclear. In 1933, Jews in Germany numbered around 525,000, only 1 percent of the total German population. When imprisoned for his role in the “Beer Hall Putsch” of 1923, Hitler wrote his memoirs and propaganda attitude, “Mein Kampf”(My Struggle), in which he predicted a general European war that would result in “the extermination of the Jewish race in Germany.” However, at that time Hitler was obsessed with the idea of the superiority of the “pure” German race, which he called “Aryan,” and with the need for “Lebensraum,” living space, for that race to expand. As for the Jews, it was ethnic cleansing and not genocide. It is of note that the Jews take only 1.5 percent in Mein Kampf, yet, 9 percent in the Qur’an.

One can trace three distinct stages: the first, “Aryanization” of Germany (1933-1939); the second, “Ghettoization”of the Jews in Poland (December 1939 to March 1942); the third, “the Final Solution” of the Jews (1942 to May 1945).

At first, the Nazis reserved their persecution for political opponents, Communists and Social Democrats. The first official concentration camp opened at Dachau in March 1933, under the control of Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS, and later on the chief of the German police. Its prisoners were Communists and “liberals.” The Nazis used harsh violence and economic pressuresas to encourage Jews who were harassed and boycotted to leave the country. It was pure racist Aryan nationalism exemplified by pan-Germanism as to enable the territorial expansionism of Lebensraum (living space) policy for the German people. The Nuremberg Laws, enacted in September 1935, stated that only those of German blood were defined as citizens. The Jews, being inferior to the Aryan master race were to be ethnic cleansing yet the exterminated solution, the genocidal policy was not yet formalized.

The important policy was “Aryanization” of Germany, dismissing non-Aryan Jews from civil service and liquidating Jewish-owned businesses. Under the Nuremberg Laws, Jews became routine targets for stigmatization and persecution and stripped of their citizenship. The aim was to deport the Jews out of Germany not to exterminate them. The culminated of this process was the “night of broken glass” in November 1938, when German synagogues were burned and windows in Jewish shops were smashed. The result, from 1933 to 1939, hundreds of thousands of Jews left Germany with the encouragement of the authorities.

One of the options devised by the Nazis was the scheme to rid Germany of the Jews by deportation and forced emigration under the code of “The Madagascar Plan.” At the beginning of 1940, plans were devised to ship the Jews under Nazi control to Madagascar, in the context of forced ethnic cleansing. Soon this was abolished and Poland became the alternative to the Jewish issue. After the occupation of Poland, the German police forced tens of thousands of Polish Jews from their homes into ghettoes, giving their confiscated properties to ethnic Germans from the Reich or Polish gentiles. The Jewish ghettoes in Poland characterized by widespread unemployment, poverty and hunger. In 1941, Jews from all over the continent were transported to the Polish ghettoes. On April 27 1940,Himmler ordered the establishment of a concentration camp at Auschwitz.

However, the drastic change came after the German invasion of the Soviet Union, in June 1941. Mobile killing units called Einsatzgruppenmurdered more than 500,000 Soviet Jews and others in few months. Now the road was clear to the Holocaust. On July 17, 1941, Hitler tasked Heinrich Himmler with responsibility for all security matters in the occupied Soviet Union. Two weeks later, on July 31 1941, Hermann Goring submitted a written authorization to Reinhard Heydrich, chief of the SD, the security service of the SS, to prepare a plan for a “final solution of the Jewish question” in territories under German control and to coordinate the participation of all involved government organizations.

The Nazis frequently used euphemistic language to disguise the true nature of their crimes. The term “Final Solution” referred to the annihilation of the Jewish people. The symbolization of the new policy was in September 1941, where every Jew was marked with a yellow star. Again, this was not Nazi invention but an Islamic one invented and practiced during the Abbasid Empire. This change can also be understood by the rise of Germany’s optimism of its victory over Europe: on September 27 1940,the Berlin-Rome-Tokyo Axis was established.

On October 1 1941, All Jewish emigration was halted, and on October 14 1941, Mass deportation to concentration camps of Jews from all over Nazi-controlled Europe began.The result, Himmler assigned General Odilo Globocnik to systematically implement the murder of the Jews under the code name “Operation Reinhard.” However, the first act of extermination was the “General Plan for the East” envisaged the deportation of the Jewish population of occupied Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union to Siberia for use as slave labor or to be exterminated. The minutes of the Wannsee Conference estimated the Jewish population of the Soviet Union to be five million, with another three million in Ukraine. Adolf Eichmann masterminded the logistics of the extermination of the Jews.

Though since June 1941, experiments with mass killing had been ongoing at the concentration camp of Auschwitz, the milestone was on December 8 1941, where Chelmno death camp in Poland was opened and the first mass gassing of Jew took place as an industrial project. Only then, five more mass killing centers were built at camps in Poland: Sobibor, Belzec, Treblinka, Majdanek and the largest of all, Auschwitz-Birkenau.

In mid-December 1941 the extermination policy was formalized to become official and abiding, as Hitler himself resolved that the Jews of Europe were to be exterminated immediately. The immediate reason was the military battleground. On December 5 1941, the Soviet Army began a counter-offensive, and on December 7 1941, Japan attacked the United States at Pearl Harbor, and the United States entered the war. Four days later, on December 11 1941, Germany declared war on the United States.

On 20 January 1942, the heads of the Nazi Germany officials and the SS leaders held a conference in Berlin suburb of Wannsee to discuss “the final solution of the Jewish question.” It was summoned by the director of SS, Reinhard Heydrich. The conference signaled a radical change in the attitude of Nazi Germany towards the “Jewish Question,” from ethnic cleansing to genocide in extermination camps in Poland, under the complete charge of the SS. From 1942 up to 1945, Jews were deported to the camps from all over Europe. At Auschwitz alone, more than 2 million Jews were exterminated in a large-scale industrial operation. The final stage of extermination was the crematorium, where the bodies were incinerated.

In contrast to Islamic history of massacres and the Armenian Genocide which were operated in the light of sun, the Nazis tried to keep operation of camps secret. However, eyewitnesses brought reports of Nazi atrocities in Poland to the Allied governments, who failed to respond or to publicize the news of the mass slaughter.

There were three stages in the Nazi policy concerning the “Jewish problem.” a) 1933-1938: encouragement to leave Germany and to immigrate, a soft kind of ethnic cleansing; 1938-1941: Ghettoization of the Jews; c) 1942-1945: extermination of European Jews.

a) 1933-1938: encouragement to leave Germany and to immigrate. Gilbert Achcar analyzed the meeting of Ibn Saud’s special envoy and Hitler, who noted that one of the three reasons why Nazi Germany had warm sympathies for the Arabs was “…because we were jointly fighting the Jews.” He then stated that he himself would not rest until the last Jew had left Germany. Kalid al-Hud observed that Prophet Muhammad had acted the same way. He had driven the Jews out of Arabia. Indeed, until 1938, Hitler encouraged German Jews to immigrate to Palestine. The Nazi leadership actively helped Zionist organizations to encourage the Jewish immigration against the British-imposed restrictions entering Palestine.

The most significant practical effect of Nazi policy on Palestine between 1933 and 1938, however, was to radically increase the immigration rate of German and other European Jews and to double the population of Palestinian Jews. Nazi policy for solving their Jewish problem until the end of 1937 emphasized motivating German Jews to emigrate from German territory. The Gestapo and the SS inconsistently cooperated with a variety of Jewish organizations and efforts to facilitate emigration to Mandatory Palestine. 60,000 German Jews immigrated into Palestine between 1933 through 1936, bringing with them $100,000,000 dollars ($1.6 billion in 2009 dollars).

1938-1941: Ghettoization of the Jews. However, in 1938 the German policy toward the Jewish Homeland in Palestine appears to have substantially changed, as indicated in the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs note from 10 March 1938. The excuse: most Jewish and Zionist organizations aligned with Britain and its allies to oppose Nazi Germany. Unfortunately, the real reason was the pressures put by Amin al-Husseini. Throughout the spring and summer of 1940, the German army expanded Hitler’s empire in Europe, conquering Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg and France. Beginning in 1941, Jews from all over the continent, as well as hundreds of thousands of European Gypsies, were transported to the Polish ghettoes. However, The German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 marked a new level of brutality. Mobile killing units called Einsatzgruppenmurdered more than 500,000 Jews over the course of the German occupation of Eastern Europe. This was the preamble to the extermination, and symbolically enough it was perpetuated in the Islamic countries of the Soviet Union.

c) 1942-1945: extermination of European Jews.

It was the greatest machinery of human slaughter ever in history of mankind, a smooth industrialized technological efficient process, and this extermination was operated during wartime with huge allocation of resources and manpower. The Ghettoization of the Jews helped the extermination, but the question still exist: why would Germany spend so much resources and manpower needed in its war objectives of hegemony?

Even the Jews of North Africa did not escaped the Nazi machine of extermination. At this Wannsee Conference, Reinhard Heydrich, Heinrich Himmler’s deputy and head of the Reich Security Main Office, or RSHA, noted the numbers of Jews to be eliminated in each territory. In the notation for France there are two entries, 165,000 for Occupied France, and 700,000 for the Unoccupied Zone, which included France’s North African possessions, Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia. The SS had established a special unit in 1942 “to Kill Jews in North Africa”. It was led by SS Walter Rauff, who helped develop the mobile gassing vehicles the Germans used to murder Russian prisoners and Jewish people in Russia and Poland. A network of labor camps was established in Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco.

Even after the D-Day invasion and the Soviet offensive the extermination of Jews continued in large scale and a large proportion of Hungary’s Jewish population was deported to Auschwitz, and exterminated. Now, the concentration camps were evacuated, but the so-called “death marches” continued all the way up to the German surrender, resulting in the deaths of some 250,000 to 375,000 Jews. Six million Jews were killed during the Holocaust, two-thirds of the Jews living in Europe before World War II.

A postscript to the Armenian Genocide and the Jewish Holocaust

Ten amounts of tragedies have been existing in the Middle East, and nine of them were fallen on the Kurds. A Muslim but not Arab religious minority, an old nation with a proven history and territory seeking for independence and asking to be recognized on its own territory. Yet, time and again the Kurds are denied as a nation and as a state, and time and again they are persecuted and massacred without the attention and the assistance of the world. The politicians close their eyes, the media becomes deaf, and the academia does not speak. It is a tragedy that cries out to the sky and implore for justice. Still nothing happens and the tragic events continue. Just to compare the Kurds dire and so tragic situation with the Palestinians, a group of people without a history, without nationhood, without the basic components to create a state, and still the world is busy perhaps without any precedence in endowing these corrupt imposters with billions of US dollars and chasing to establish for them a state.

The tragedy of the Kurds is really unbelievable. And now Turkey, yes, again Turkey, the notorious Islamic state under the dictatorship of Erdogan, is now conducting another genocide and ethnic cleansing against the Kurds in Afrin region in Syria, while the silence of the world is disturbing. The world does not know and does not care. Turkey continues its past genocidal policies and the world is silent again.

The Kurds have fought in the forefront battleground against the Islamic Caliphate State (ICS), and paid a high price in casualties and ruins. They have also fought for the sake of the world against the savages, barbarians Islamic Jihadists who have also butchered the Christian Yazidi minority, and the world was silent. It was the Syrian Kurds who lost 2500 of their young men and women fighters and their homes destroyed in liberating Raqqa and other regions from ICS. The Kurds are again abandoned by the West. This is unbelievably sad and extremely surprising since the Kurds were the Western countries most reliable partner in fighting and defeating ISIS.

Afrin is an area of North-Eastern Syria and Erdogan is trying to annihilate the Kurds and Christians of the area. The most maddening aspect of this horrible situation is that Turkey is a part of NATO. This means that the Turkish army is a NATO army. And yet the West is silent as Erdogan uses his NATO army to massacre the most loyal ally of the West in the fight against the Islamic Caliphate State. The Kurds of Afrin never attacked Turkey. There are hundreds of thousands of civilians in the city, yet Erdogan is calling them “terrorists” and bombing them and use unlawful atrocities against them. Moreover, Turkey refers to the attack against Afrin and the Kurdish people as “Jihad.” In this battleground Turkey is cooperating with al-Qaeda and ex-ICS fighters, and the world is silent. The Turkish invasion has already completely driven away the Yazidi people. This ethnic cleansing policy by the Turkish military intends to fulfill Erdogan’s promised: to deliver Afrin to its “true owners”, to replace the population of Afrin with his own jihadist proxies in his continued battle to topple down Bashshar al-Asad regime.

Whatever they worth, the Kurds are the best ally of the US, the West and Israel in the Middle East. Their defeat at the hands of Turkey and the Muslim Brotherhood groups is a defeat for the freedom loving world. They no longer trust that the US will help them. On the contrary, they feel that the US allows Turkey to destroy them. The Turkish army have been killing, raping and looting in the region completely. The Kurds have become so desperate that they want nothing more to do with Islam, let alone Turkey. In their words: “We never want to be Muslims again, we are Zoroastrians and Kurds but not Muslims…” they also praise Israel and press to take the Ka’bah and to control Saudi Arabia. It was the Syrian Kurds who destroyed ICS. Yet now one million people in Afrin region are facing genocide at the hands of Turkey and the Islamic Jihadi groups, and the West is silent again.

To close this vicious circle there came the butchering of an 85 year old Jewish Holocaust survivor woman, Mireille Knoll, on March 23 2018, in Paris. She had been stabbed to death time and again by her neighbor, a Muslim man whom she knew well from when he was a boy. She managed to escape the anti-Semitism of the Nazis, but she was killed by the anti-Semitism of Islam. This was added to the Islamic anti-Semitic butchering of Sarah Halimi, an elderly Jewish woman, on April 4 2017 in Paris.

The authorities in France called it a “hate crime,” but it was another anti-Semite act. The sad joke is that the French authorities are looking for a motive. The answer is clear and it comes from the Islamic Shari’ah. The Qur’an declares: Jews are the worst enemies of the Muslims (98:6), the strongest of all peoples in enmity toward the Muslims (5:82). They are like apes and pigs (2:63-65; 5:59-60; 7:166). They disobey Allah and do not observe his commands (5:13). They fabricate things and falsely ascribe them to Allah (2:79; 3:75, 3:181). They are hypocritical (2:14, 2:44), merciless and heartless (2:74); hiding the truth and misleading people (2:109; 3:78; 4:46); and they commit sins (5:79), staging rebellion against the prophets and rejecting their guidance (2:55).

There are two salient facts to consider: first, it was Islam which was the first and foremost originator of anti-Semitism as a religious and as a racial perspectives. Second, Islam is the main perpetrator of anti-Semite acts in contemporary world, together with its ally, the fascist left. Contrasting the lies and misdoings of the media, it is not Christianity and it is not the right wing. It is exactly Islam and the left.

It is futile to expect living peacefully together, especially in the Islamic states where minorities are harshly and systematically oppressed and politically destroyed. This is the history of Islam. A small reminder were the atrocities perpetrated by the Islamic Caliphate State in Syria and Iraq: on the one hand destroying world historical archeological treasures of humanity, and on the other, the extermination of religious minorities and even Muslims that were considered not religious.

By the same token, the genocide perpetrated against the Armenians was excluded from the category of “war crimes” to be prosecuted and punished by the Allies. As Willis put it:not until 1948 would genocide be clearly defined as an international crime. The Hague conventions did not deal with a state’s treatment of its own citizens. From this perspective, the Armenian genocide was considered a Turkish internal affair, not subject to the jurisdiction of other governments.

But the issue must take a very broader perspective. The Spanish writer, Sebastian Vilar Rodriguez, supposedly published in a Spanish newspaper, in 2006, an obituary: “All European life died in Auschwitz.” The source and validity of the writer and the newspaper are perhaps fake, but still the content is so accurate.

I walked down the street in Barcelona, and suddenly discovered a terrible truth – Europe died in Auschwitz. We killed six million Jews and replaced them with 20 million Muslims. In Auschwitz we burned a culture, thought, creativity, and talent. We destroyed the chosen people, truly chosen, because they produced great and wonderful people who changed the world. The contribution of this people is felt in all areas of life: science, art, international trade, and above all, as the conscience of the world. These are the people we burned.

And under the pretense of tolerance, and because we wanted to prove to ourselves that we were cured of the disease of racism, we opened our gates to 20 million Muslims, who brought us stupidity and ignorance, religious extremism and lack of tolerance, crime and poverty, due to an unwillingness to work and support their families with pride. They have blown up our trains and turned our beautiful Spanish cities into the third world, drowning in filth and crime.

Shut up in the apartments they receive free from the government, they plan the murder and destruction of their naive hosts. And thus, in our misery, we have exchanged culture for fanatical hatred, creative skill for destructive skill, intelligence for backwardness and superstition. We have exchanged the pursuit of peace of the Jews of Europe and their talent for a better future for their children, their determined clinging to life because life is holy, for those who pursue death, for people consumed by the desire for death for themselves and others, for our children and theirs. What a terrible mistake was made by miserable Europe.

*To be published by Mellen Press

https://moderndiplomacy.eu/2020/07/31/was-the-jewish-holocaust-influenced-by-the-armenian-genocide-part-1/

[Yervant1]

Times of Israel

April 12 2021

106 Years of Mourning — 73 Years of Shame

One hundred six years ago, 1915, the Ottoman Turkish Muslim regime in Turkey massacred and expelled many millions of the Christian Armenian population within the Turkish Empire. More than one million Armenian children were separated from their parents and were murdered.

Even Jews who lived in Ottoman Turkish Palestine were expelled or were murdered. Among them were thousands of Jews living in Jaffa and hundreds who lived in Jerusalem. The lucky Jews who survived fled to Alexandria in Egypt and remained there until the 1918 arrival of a British Mandate in Palestine and the end of the Ottoman Turkish regime forever.

Much, perhaps most, of the world remained silent during and after the bloody Turkish holocaust years.

It was Adolf Hitler who in 1939 made the remark “the world has forgotten the Turkish genocide. They will not remember our treatment of the Jews”.

But Hitler was both right and wrong. The Turkish genocide of Christian Armenians has been sadly forgotten while the massacres of six million Jews is widely remembered.

While many nations today recall the Ottoman Turkish genocide, seventy-three years have passed and Israel has not publicly acknowledged the inhuman tragedy of innocent Christians, the decent Armenian people. We are living seventy-three years of immense shame.

A nation and a people who suffered the greatest holocaust in world history, who endured the genocide of millions of Jews in every land where German Nazi boots trampeled, who witnessed death by poison gas and by flaming fires, by ghettos and mass killings such as Babi Yar, have closed eyes and mouths to our great shame and disgrace in not protesting Turkey’s annihilation of the Armenians.

Today’s Germany is not the Germany of its cruel past. Neither is today’s Turkey responsible for the genocide of its previous Ottoman government.

But today’s Germany admitted its previous guilt and made restitution while today’s Turkey denies guilt and refuses restitution to surviving members of murdered families. Land, home and property of Armenians were confiscated by Turks together with Armenian lives whose blood covered the lands of the Turkish Empire.

It is of interest to know that Armenia was the first nation to accept Christianity as its state religion. The Armenians are the world’s first Christians. Thousands of them succeeded in fleeing the massacres and made their way to the Holy Land in Palestine, settling mainly in Jerusalem where they work, live and pray in their communities today.

Israel has claimed that a reason for their withholding of recognition of the Turkish genocide between 1914-1918 was due to its favorable relations with modern Turkey, the first Muslim nation to recognize the Jewish State of Israel in 1948. Ultimately, Turkey became a favorite country for Israeli Jews to visit.

Gold jewelry and fine clothing were better buys in Istanbul than in Tel-Aviv. And gold was to be treasured more than remembrance of the deaths of millions at the hands of the many jewelry merchants and their past families in all the cities of modern Turkey.

We, as a Jewish nation and people, must recognize the tragedy suffered by the Armenian people. We owe it to their surviving families and to all our fellow Armenian citizens living in Israel among us.

Two years ago while spending a day in Jerusalem, I made my way to the Armenian Patriarchate and asked permission to enter. I was welcomed and was led to the office of the religious authorities of the Armenian monastery.

I spoke of my shame as an Israeli Jew in the failure of our country to officially recognize the genocide of the Armenian people which preceded the genocide of the Jews. I was offered a cup of coffee (hoping that it was not what is commonly called Turkish coffee which would have been inappropriate) and I listened carefully to the soulful remarks of the priest who was speaking with me.

At the end of my visit, I opened my wallet and handed a large bill of Israeli shekels to the priest and asked him to accept it as a donation to the Armenian poor from a Jew who suffers from their suffering.

It frankly surprised me to hear him telling me that my donation was the first he had ever received from a Jew living in Israel. Happy to be the first and hopefully never the last.

We owe much to the survivors of the Turkish tragedy. We owe them a recognition of the massacre of their families. We owe them our respect and our sympathies. As they recognize the tragedy of Jewish suffering so too are we obligated to recognize theirs.

Israeli Jews and Armenian Christians living as brothers in Israel, a land holy to us both, share a common devastation. Let us never forget our suffering nor theirs.

Speak up and let your voices be heard. It is time, after seventy-three years, to erase the shame of our silence.

Demand that our government join with other decent nations and peoples by officially recognizing the Armenian massacres by the genocide committed by the Turkish Ottoman regime 106 years ago.

We dare not remain silent any longer. We must not. We must cleanse ourselves of our national shame.

As our Jewish religion teaches us “v’im lo achshav, aimatai”. And if not now, when?

https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/106-years-of-mourning-73-years-of-shame/?fbclid=IwAR21UAZWLuhhUzQ_iPLTOE2hLK79_z2quKWfkT75_K3xoDRoxVTQgJYT5OM

[Yervant1]

Jerusalem Post

April 22 2021

Israel must recognize the Armenian Genocide - editorial For the world to ensure that these atrocities do not happen again, we have to be clear about what they are.

By JPOST EDITORIAL

APRIL 22, 2021 21:57

Members of the Armenian community in Israel attend a demonstration against Israel’s stance on the 1915 massacre of Armenians by Ottoman Turks outside the Foreign Ministry in Jerusalem; the sign on the left reads: ‘Judaism is for acknowledgement of Armenian Genocide, the State of Israel against?’

(photo credit: RONEN ZVULUN / REUTERS)

One and a half million Armenian men, women and children were killed in the final years of the Ottoman Empire in what has become known as the Armenian Genocide. In Israel, though, despite being a country created just after the Holocaust, you won’t hear much about it.

That is because the Jewish state – the home to the people who saw six million of their own exterminated by the Nazis – still does not officially recognize the Armenian Genocide. It is time for this to change.

The official day of commemoration for the massacre of Armenians by the Ottoman Empire during World War I is on Saturday. On Thursday, White House sources said that US President Joe Biden would formally recognize the massacre as an act of genocide even though the move would undoubtedly infuriate Turkey and further strain already frayed ties between the two NATO allies.

Last year, when he was running for president, Biden pledged to do exactly that. “Today, we remember the atrocities faced by the Armenian people in the Metz Yeghern – the Armenian Genocide. If elected, I pledge to support a resolution recognizing the Armenian Genocide and will make universal human rights a top priority,” he wrote on Twitter at the time.

For decades, measures recognizing the Armenian genocide stalled in the US Congress and presidents refrained from calling it that, stymied by concerns about relations with Turkey and intense lobbying by Ankara.

The same has happened in Israel. Here too, Israel feared Turkish retaliation if it were to recognize historical facts.

In 2018, Meretz MK Tamar Zandberg proposed a bill to recognize the massacre as genocide, but the bill was canceled due to government resistance. A year later, a number of high-profile members of Knesset like Yair Lapid and Gideon Sa’ar voiced support for the move, but again it did not proceed due to little government support.

Traditionally, the explanations for Israel’s failure to move on this have ranged from a need to leave a door open to better ties with Turkey to a clear government agenda that prefers Azerbaijan over Armenia. This was made clear this past fall, when Israel supplied weapons to Azerbaijan as it fought the Armenians in the disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh.

One, though, does not have to come at the expense of the other. Yes, Israel has geopolitical considerations and those cannot be ignored, but it also has a moral imperative that it cannot simply brush off. As a people who have experienced genocide and persecution since its founding, the Jews have a responsibility to stand with other nations who go through similar atrocities.

When we recite “Never Again” on Holocaust Remembrance Day, it is obviously “never again” for our people, but there is nothing wrong with making it clear that we also believe that genocide should never happen to anyone else as well. The first step in ensuring “never again” is recognizing history as it was and making clear that what happened to the Armenians was in fact a genocide.

In addition, when considering geopolitics, what exactly does Israel need to fear from Turkey? Can the relationship with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan really get worse?

There is no reason to fear Erdogan, who behaves like an antisemitic bully in the Middle East. It is true that Erdogan recently said that he would like better relations with Israel, but he still hosts Hamas leaders in Ankara and the ruling AKP Party still compares Israel to Nazi Germany. Turkey has claimed it wants to “liberate al-Aqsa,” asserting that “Jerusalem is ours” in the past year.

“The Palestine policy is our red line. It is impossible for us to accept Israel’s Palestine policies; their merciless acts there are unacceptable,” Erdogan said this past December after Friday prayers in Istanbul.

Israel should of course explore what this rapprochement with Turkey might mean, but it cannot do so while ignoring its moral and historical responsibility of standing alongside the Armenians in the face of evil.

For the world to ensure that these atrocities do not happen again, we have to be clear about what they are. Israel needs to recognize the Armenian genocide. It is a simple bill. It is time the Knesset pass it.

https://www.jpost.com/opinion/israel-must-recognize-the-armenian-genocide-editorial-666086

[Yervant1]

I'm seeing a lot of pro Armenian articles written by Jewish papers, is the Genocide acknowledgement near?

Times of Israel

April 26 2021

How Armenia’s 1915 ‘Musa Dagh’ fighters inspired Jews to resist Nazi genocide

Passed around Jewish ghettos across eastern Europe, author Franz Werfel’s fact-based ‘The Forty Days of Musa Dagh’ novel foreshadowed the Holocaust and galvanized resistance

Main image by Some of the 250 Armenians who took up arms against Turkish forced on Musa Dagh in 1915 (public domain)

By MATT LEBOVICToday, 3:22 am3

When Jewish fighters in Nazi-built ghettos were looking for inspiration to resist deportation to the death camps, they turned to a fact-based novel about the Armenian genocide.

Written by Prague-born Franz Werfel, “The Forty Days of Musa Dagh” was tailor-made for the plight of aspiring resisters. The novel, published in 1933, fictionalized the siege of Musa Dagh — Turkish for “Mount Moses ” — where 250 Armenian fighters held off Ottoman-Turkish forces for nearly two months in 1915.

Since then, Turkey’s government has denied a genocide took place during World War I. This week, United States President Joe Biden officially recognized the murder of up to 1,500,000 Armenians by Ottoman-Turkish forces as a genocide. Israel has continued to stop short of recognition.

Although Armenian fighters held out at Musa Dagh for 53 days, Werfel made the siege last 40 days to resonate with the Old Testament. The German-language novel brought the Armenian genocide to the attention of millions of people around the world, in turn helping to raise significant funds for the refugees.

“To be an Armenian is an impossibility,” according to an old Armenian saying included by Werfel in “Musa Dagh.”

‘The Forty Day of Musa Dagh,’ first published in German in 1933 (public domain)

Six years after the novel was published, Nazi Germany started to conquer Europe. Almost instantly, copies of “The Forty Days of Musa Dagh” spread like wildfire among young adults, some of whom found themselves in circumstances similar to those faced by Armenians during the previous war.

Under the cloak of the first global war, the Ottoman military carried out numerous massacres of Armenians beginning in 1915. In addition to open-air slaughters, thousands of Armenians were placed on boats that were sunk in the Black Sea.

The first death marches to be filmed and photographed were of Ottoman forces driving Armenian civilians toward the Syrian desert of Deir Zor. The elderly and infirm who could not keep up were shot. Thousands of people were pushed over cliffs, and children were regularly kidnapped by hostile tribes.

Decades after the massacres, for ghetto-imprisoned Jews, the Armenian atrocities resonated with accounts coming from Jewish communities in eastern Europe. As the novel was devoured in dozens of ghettos, thousands of Jews determined to take matters into their own hands when the time was right.

‘We compared their fate to ours’

In the Warsaw ghetto, “The Forty Days of Musa Dagh” was the most popular book in circulation. When Jewish resisters decided to fight back in the Bialystok ghetto, they spoke of the ghetto’s “Musa Dagh” moment at the planning meeting.

“Only one thing remains for us: to organize collective resistance in the ghetto, at any cost; to consider the ghetto our ‘Musa Dagh’ — to write a proud chapter of Jewish Bialystok and our movement into history,” wrote Mordechai Tannenbaum. “If you read [Werfel’s book], you will remember it for the rest of your life,” said Tannenbaum.

Armenians atop Musa Dagh plead with the world for help in 1915 (public domain)

For Tannenbaum and other fans of “Musa Dagh,” it was not difficult to empathize with the historical experience of Armenians. For centuries, Christian-practicing Armenians were persecuted by their “host country” — the Ottoman-Turkish Empire — and barred from civil and military service.

When some Armenians agitated for equal rights at the end of the 19th century, thousands of civilians were murdered in response. Not dissimilar to the Jewish experience in Europe, Armenians were long seen as a “fifth column” in the event of war, which became the authorities’ “justification” for genocide.

In Lithuania’s Vilna ghetto, “The Forty Days of Musa Dagh” was the most popular book in circulation, reported librarian Herman Kruk. Jewish resisters attempting to flee the ghetto to join partisan units “passed the book from hand to hand,” according to reports.

Thousands of Armenian children were murdered by Ottoman-Turkish forces in the genocide during World War I (public domain)

Writing from her ghetto about the popularity of the novel, resistance fighter Haika Grosman wrote the massacre of Armenians “in full view of the entire world reminded us of our fate.”

“The Armenians were starved to death, shot, drowned, tortured to exhaustion,” wrote Grosman. “We compared their fate to ours, the indifference of the world to their plight, and the complete abandonment of the poor people into the hands of a barbarous, tyrannical regime.”

Throughout eastern Europe, Jewish resisters used the term “to organize a Musa Dagh.” Warsaw ghetto historian Emanuel Ringelblum wondered on paper, “What, the world will ask, did people think of on Musa Dagh?” As far west as the Netherlands, accounts from the Dutch “underground” pointed to the novel’s tremendous popularity among resisters to Nazism everywhere.

About 4,200 Armenians were rescued from Musa Dagh by the French Navy in 1915 (public domain)

Poignantly, Warsaw ghetto orphanage director Janusz Korczak spoke with his staff about the book in 1941, including a chapter where a pastor abandons his children to save himself. Vowing never to abandon his charges, Korczak kept his promise when he turned down offers to hide in Aryan Warsaw, instead accompanying his children to the death camp Treblinka.

Similar to the Holocaust’s Warsaw Ghetto Revolt, the plight of Armenians made headlines around the world in almost live-time. The New York Times, for example, ran 145 articles on the slaughter in 1915, and US president Teddy Roosevelt called the Armenian genocide “the greatest crime of the war.”

Although he served as a corporal in the Austrian-Hungarian Army during World War I, Werfel learned even more about wartime persecution during a tour of the Mideast in 1930. Some of the accounts Werfel heard made their way into “Musa Dagh,” including the “banality” of bureaucrats tasked with carrying out genocide.

French navy rescue of 4,200 Armenians atop Musa Dagh in 1915 (public domain)

“The struggle of 5,000 people on Musa Dagh had so fascinated me that I wished to aid the Armenian people by writing about it and bringing it to the world,” said Werfel, who continually revised his book until publication, in part to evoke the emerging Nazi threat.

‘The Musa Dagh Plan’

Jews trapped in the ghettos of Nazi-occupied Europe were not the only ones deriving inspiration from “The Forty Days of Musa Dagh.”

In pre-state Israel, Jewish leaders were actively preparing for the prospect of a German invasion. The defense plan called for creating a Masada-like fortress atop Mount Carmel, where Jewish fighters could retreat for a “last stand” against German forces.

Although the plan is largely remembered as “The Masada Plan” or “The Carmel Plan,” it was also referred to as the “Musa Dagh Plan.” For months, the area around Haifa was stocked with weapons and supplies to hold out against a German siege, while fortifications were erected.

Armenians are marched to a nearby prison in Mezireh by armed Ottoman-Turkish soldiers, 1915. (public domain)

“[We will] turn Carmel into the Musa Dagh of Palestinian Jewry,” said Meri Batz, one of the plan’s organizers who had read Werfel’s novel. “We put our faith in the power of the Jewish ‘Musa Dagh’ and were determined to hold out for at least three to four months,” said Batz.

The Ottoman-Turkish attack on Musa Dagh did not end like Masada, however: French naval ships managed to evacuate 4,200 Armenians to Egypt. During the 53-day stand-off on the mountain and its foothills, 18 Armenian fighters had been killed.

According to historians, parts of the novel were eerily prophetic with regard to the looming Holocaust. For example, “concentration camps” are depicted with smoke arising from the forest.

Aftermath of a massacre during the Armenian genocide (public domain)

“The reader of this extraordinary novel will find it difficult to believe that the book was written before the Holocaust,” wrote historian Yair Auron, who is critical of the Israeli government’s refusal to recognize the Armenian genocide.

“In hindsight, the book appears an almost uncanny adumbration of aspects of the later Nazi Holocaust in which the Jews of Europe perished,” wrote Auron.

https://www.timesofisrael.com/how-armenias-1915-musa-dagh-fighters-inspired-jews-to-resist-nazi-genocide/

 

[Yervant1]

Jewish Insider

April 26 2021

Biden’s recognition of the Armenian genocide welcomed by many in the Jewish community

For decades, Jewish groups outside of California largely avoided weighing in, with Turkey urging Israel and its supporters to stay out of the debate

By

Gabby Deutch

April 26, 2021

On Saturday, in a statement marking the mass murder of Armenian Christians in Ottoman Turkey, President Joe Biden became the first U.S. president to refer to the atrocity as a “genocide,” a symbolic move that nevertheless marks a major shift in U.S. policy. The move was lauded by portions of the Jewish community.

More than a century after the Ottomans murdered between 650,000 and 1.2 million Armenian Christians, the question of whether to use the word “genocide” to describe the atrocity has morphed into a global geopolitical controversy, with Turkey exerting its muscle to urge countries like the U.S. and Israel to avoid using the term. Biden’s declaration marked the end of a years-long effort by activists to push the federal government to use the word.

The push for congressional recognition of the Armenian genocide, which culminated in a near-unanimous 2019 resolution recognizing the genocide, was led by Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), a Jewish member of Congress whose L.A.-area district includes a sizable Armenian population. “The word ‘genocide’ is significant because genocide is not a problem of the past — it is a problem of today,” Schiff told JI. “By speaking the truth about this horrific period of history, refusing to be silent, and calling it a genocide, we can ensure that the United States is never again complicit.”

The announcement was met with resounding praise from a number of Republicans as well — conservative commentator Ben Shapiro credited Biden and called the move “long overdue.”

Armenian Genocide Museum-Institute (Carsten ten Brink)

Turkey has long claimed that both Armenians and Turks were killed at the time as part of the devastation of World War I, rather than any concerted ethnic cleansing by the Ottomans.

The issue remains a source of controversy. Although Turkey and Israel no longer enjoy particularly close relations, for many years Turkey was Israel’s closest Muslim ally, leading the Jewish state to refrain from referring to the massacre as genocide. A statement Israel’s Foreign Ministry released on Saturday mentioned the “terrible suffering and tragedy of the Armenian people” without using the term genocide.

In 2007, the Anti-Defamation League urged members of Congress to vote against a resolution recognizing the genocide. (Similar legislation passed for the first time in 2019.) Abe Foxman, the longtime former national director of the ADL, said at the time that “Israel’s relationship with Turkey is the second most important, after its relationship with the United States. All this in a world that isolates Israel, and all this can’t simply be waved away.” Seven years later, in 2014, Foxman updated his position and referred to the massacre as genocide in a speech. By that point, Israel’s relationship with Turkey soured, after the Israeli military raided a Turkish flotilla that intended to break Israel’s blockade of Gaza.

More recently, as Armenia and Azerbaijan have clashed over the territory Nagorno-Karabakh, Turkey has come to the defense of Azerbaijan, a fellow Muslim nation. The Azerbaijani Ministry of Foreign Affairs announced it was backing Turkey following Biden’s declaration. Israel and Azerbaijan have cooperated in recent years, and Armenia recalled its ambassador from Tel Aviv after Israel went through with an arms sale to Azerbaijan in October 2020.

Nagorno-Karabakh conflict highlights Israel’s strategic role in region

Read more

Some Jewish organizations lauded Biden’s declaration. “We believe that remembrance of any genocide is imperative to preventing future tragedies, and that process begins with recognition,” Jonathan Greenblatt, the current CEO of the ADL, told JI.

“Bravo to President Biden for being the first American leader to stand up to Turkey and say what was needed,” David Harris, CEO of the American Jewish Committee, told JI. “AJC cannot sit idly by and allow that outrageous denial to take root. And next, by the way, it could be about the Holocaust.”

Mark Weitzman, the director of government affairs at the Simon Wiesenthal Center, was one of 126 prominent Holocaust scholars who signed a statement two decades ago calling for official recognition of the genocide. He told JI, “President Biden’s statement not only affirms historical truth but represents a moral commitment to the repudiation of political support for genocide denial. It honors the memory of the victims by not distorting their fate and allows for the honest assessment of responsibility.”

JI did not receive responses from the Jewish Federations of North America and the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations, two prominent national Jewish organizations, seeking comment on whether they now support such a declaration.

In California, home to the country’s largest Armenian population, local Jewish organizations were some of the first Jewish groups in the nation to publicly refer to the massacre in Armenia as a genocide.

“Nearly all nations have been victimized during the course of history. Yet being singled out for genocide is a horror that, fortunately, has been visited upon very few peoples,” Ephraim Margolin, then the chairman of the San Francisco Jewish Community Relations Council, wrote in a 1990 letter to the Armenian bishop in San Francisco. “We applaud the efforts of the Armenian community to educate those in this country about ‘the forgotten genocide.’ Please convey to the leaders of the Armenian community our most sincere support for this measure.”

Memorial to the Armenian genocide (Arev G)

Speaking to JI the day before Biden’s announcement, Richard Hirschhaut, director of the AJC’s Los Angeles office, said that “if President Biden indeed invokes the term genocide in his remarks on Saturday, that step surely will be met by a chorus of relief, exaltation, tears of joy and an affirmation of the fundamental goodness of America as a beacon of hope to the world.”

“The relationship between the Armenian and Jewish communities in Los Angeles is strong [and] vibrant,” said Hirschhaut. “We worked very closely together, just especially in the last two years with the introduction of a model ethnic studies curriculum in California, and its initial exclusion of the Jewish experience [and] the Armenian experience among other ethnic and minority groups.”

Hirschhaut was referring to a years-long effort by activist groups in California to provide ethnic studies resources to the state’s education system. A coalition of Jewish organizations in the state worked to amend the curriculum after earlier drafts included material that was deemed by some to be antisemitic, while largely leaving out the experiences of Jewish Americans as well as an explanation of antisemitism. Armenians and some other ethnic minorities were also excluded from core sections of the curriculum.

Information about the state’s Armenian and Jewish communities was included in the final version of the curriculum. (The final version of the ethnic studies curriculum does refer to both the mass killing of Armenians and the Holocaust as “genocide.”)

“The Armenian genocide has been too long denied, diminished in importance or politicized,” Deborah Lipstadt told JI. “This is a step in rectifying that. It comes too late for those who experienced this horror, but it will be a bit of a balm to their children, grandchildren and other descendants.”

“Certainly, the shared experience of genocide and trauma that our communities have been through is is a point for people to bond around,” California Assemblymember Jesse Gabriel, a Democrat who represents the San Fernando Valley, told JI. Gabriel, who serves as majority whip and chair of the California Legislative Jewish Caucus, said Biden’s announcement “will be warmly applauded by a lot of folks in the Jewish community in Los Angeles.”

When Armenians in California protested Azerbaijan’s actions in Nagorno-Karabakh last year, members of the Jewish community came out in support. “When Azerbaijan was bombing [the region] and Turkey was supplying military weapons and artillery, Jewish World Watch took the lead and reached out to a number of Jewish elected officials and leaders” to get them to rally in support of Armenia, said Serena Oberstein, executive director of the Los Angeles-based anti-genocide organization.

Historians have long declared that what occurred in Armenia between 1915 and 1916 was, in fact, a genocide. The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum writes that the mass murder of Armenians by the Ottomans “aimed to solidify Muslim Turkish dominance in the regions of central and eastern Anatolia by eliminating the sizeable Armenian presence there.”

An Armenian genocide commemorative march in London in 2009. (Jason Karaian)

“The Armenian genocide has been too long denied, diminished in importance or politicized,” Deborah Lipstadt, the Dorot professor of modern Jewish history and Holocaust studies at Emory University, told JI. “This is a step in rectifying that. It comes too late for those who experienced this horror, but it will be a bit of a balm to their children, grandchildren and other descendants.”

Historians acknowledge that the Armenian genocide served as a frame of reference for Raphael Lemkin, the Polish lawyer who coined the term genocide in the mid-1940s as a Jewish refugee living in Washington, D.C. He used the term in a book about the Nazis, but his definition was broad, referring to the “destruction of a nation or of an ethnic group.” Lemkin stated on many occasions that learning about the Ottoman Empire’s persecution of Armenians from 1915 to 1916 influenced his thinking on the topic.

“Historians have long recognized the atrocities against Armenians of 1915-1916 as a genocide, as did Raphael Lemkin,” said Jeffrey Veidlinger, the Joseph Brodsky collegiate professor of history and Judaic studies at the University of Michigan. “From a Jewish perspective, it provides a frame of reference for the Holocaust. We can better understand the Holocaust and the pogroms that preceded it when we contextualize them within the wider patterns of ethnic bloodshed that occurred as old empires collapsed and new nation-states emerged in their place.”

https://jewishinsider.com/2021/04/armenia-genocide-biden-jewish-community/

[Yervant1]

Jerusalem Post

April 27 2021

Jews didn't support the designation of the Armenian Genocide, why now?

By RON KAMPEAS/JTA

APRIL 27, 2021 01:15

Jewish lawmakers, as recently as 2007, were not in favor of designating the Armenian Genocide as such, yet today they do. What changed over time is the crumbling of the Turkey-Israel alliance.

WASHINGTON — One Wednesday in October 2007, seven Jewish lawmakers on the House Foreign Affairs Committee did something extraordinary: They ignored the pleas of the Jewish establishment.

Jewish politicos were often happy to advance the the agenda of the Jewish groups because it lined up with their ideals.

On this occasion, several powerhouse lobbying groups in the Jewish community were pressing the committee not to advance a bill that would recognize as a genocide the 1915 Ottoman massacres of an estimated 1.5 million Armenians during World War I.

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The bill passed out of the committee in a landmark vote but ultimately failed. It wasn’t until this weekend that President Joe Biden made history and became the first US president to formally recognize the Armenian genocide. (Ronald Reagan on one occasion referred in passing to the massacres as a genocide.)

Among the many organizations welcoming Biden’s statement were at least two of the Jewish groups that had lobbied against recognition 14 years ago, the American Jewish Committee and the Anti-Defamation League.

What changed since ’07?

It’s not complicated: The Turkey-Israel alliance fell apart.

Turkey interprets criticism of the Ottoman Empire as attacking the modern state and says any deaths in 1915 – no more than 300,000, the nation claims – must be understood in the context of a war that claimed massive casualties on both sides.

Back when the bill was under debate, Turkey was Israel’s closest regional ally and, with Jordan, one of only two Muslim majority allies. AIPAC, the ADL and AJC, along with some smaller groups, made it clear to the Foreign Affairs Committee that it would be better if the bill never got to the full US House of Representatives.

The custom for Israel-related issues, then as now, was for Jewish groups to make Jewish lawmakers their first stop when lobbying: The Jewish members were the likeliest to take the lead on a favored issue in Congress. (That’s hardly unusual: Other minority lobbies take the same tack.)

The Jewish lawmakers often heeded the Jewish establishment. Except in this case.

On Oct. 10, 2007, at a committee meeting that lasted hours, seven of the eight Jewish Democrats on the committee said they could not in good conscience deny a genocide when they were so often forced to repudiate Holocaust denial.

Some of them gazed at four survivors of the Armenian genocide, three nonagenarians and a centenarian, and cast their “yes” votes. A few of them said they had only just decided to vote in the affirmative.

“With a heavy heart, I will vote for this resolution,” Rep. Eliot Engel of New York, one of the most reliable friends of the pro-Israel lobby, said in casting his vote.

Brad Sherman of California said his lifetime of Jewish advocacy left him no choice.

“Genocide denial is not just the last step of a genocide, it is the first step of the next genocide,” he said.

In the months prior to the vote, there had been a full-court press against advancing the resolution. Turkish officials flew to Washington, DC, to make their case, often at private events hosted by Jewish groups.

So did Turkish Jewish community officials who met with influential folks on the sidelines of AIPAC’s conference that year and made clear in so many words that their comfortable existence would be less so if Congress passed the law. In the end, the committee approved the bill – a first – but it died on the House floor.

Privately, officials of the Jewish groups acknowledged that they were wary of the Islamist direction that Prime Minister Recep Erdogan was leading the country. Three years later, after the Mavi Marmara crisis, when Israeli commandoes raided a Turkish-flagged convoy attempting to breach Israel’s blockade of the Gaza Strip, the crisis burst into the open.

The Israeli commandos killed 10 Turkish citizens (one a dual American citizen) in the clashes aboard one of the ships. Ten Israeli soldiers were wounded. Erdogan recalled the Turkish ambassador and canceled Israel-Turkey joint military exercises.

The relationship never fully recovered, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has successfully cultivated other Muslim majority allies in the region. Erdogan became one of the few allies of Hamas, Israel’s deadly Palestinian enemy.

By 2016, major Jewish groups were lining up to press for recognition of the Armenian genocide, including eventually the ADL and AJC. Congress recognized the genocide last year with nary a peep of Jewish protest.

In fact, those two major Jewish groups that had lobbied in ’07 against genocide recognition were vocal this weekend in their support of Biden. (AIPAC did not comment.)

“This long overdue step is vital for raising awareness about the atrocities committed against the Armenian people and in efforts to address other mass atrocities occurring today,” the ADL said.

The American Jewish Committee’s executive director, David Harris, decried those who would buckle to pressure.

“Despite pledges by some, no other US leader was willing to state the full truth,” Harris said on Twitter. “Instead, they buckled to pressure by Turkey. In doing so, they sacrificed truth for political expediency. President Biden didn’t.”

https://m.jpost.com/diaspora/jews-didnt-support-the-designation-of-the-armenian-genocide-why-now-666433/amp

[Yervant1]

Australian Jewish News/Times of Israel

April 29 2021

Calls for Israel, Australia to back Armenians

“It is our moral duty as Jews and as supporters of Israel to be tellers of truth in matters such as these”.

By Shane Desiatnik April 29, 2021, 12:02 am

“I WOULD like to acknowledge just how much the Jewish community does for this cause – they have always delivered in helping us . . . [and] it’s sincerely appreciated,” executive director of the Armenian National Committee of Australia, Haig Kayserian, said with emotion at a particularly timely NSW Jewish Board of Deputies (JBOD) plenum on April 20.

https://ajn.timesofisrael.com/calls-for-israel-australia-to-back-armenians/

[Yervant1]

Newsweek
April 30 2021



Israel Faces Pressure to Follow U.S. Armenian Genocide Move Despite Turkey Ties

BY TOM O'CONNOR ON 4/30/21 AT 1:46 PM EDT

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is facing mounting pressure to ignore protests by Turkey and follow U.S. President Joe Biden in declaring the mass killings of Armenians and other minority groups a century ago a genocide.

Biden's historic genocide recognition made the United States the 30th country in the world to classify as such the ethnic cleansing that experts estimate killed a million Armenians and hundreds of thousands of other minorities, including Assyrians and Greeks, at the hands of the Ottoman Empire during World War I.

The decision immediately put the U.S. at odds with NATO ally Turkey, the modern successor to the Ottoman Empire. Ankara acknowledges that there were widespread killings amid clashes at the time, but denies that it was part of a systematic campaign that qualifies as genocide.

The move also put the spotlight on another U.S. ally in the Middle East, Israel. Despite the country's intrinsic ties to the systematic massacre of more than six million Jews and other minorities in the Holocaust during World War II, Israel has not recognized an Armenian Genocide.

Today, it still stops short of doing so.

"The State of Israel recognizes the tragedy and terrible suffering of the Armenian people," the Israeli Foreign Ministry said in a statement sent to Newsweek. "At this time in particular, it is our responsibility, and that of other countries in the world, to ensure that such events are not repeated."

While Israel has extended its sympathy to those killed and displaced during the event, Netanyahu's reluctance to take the next step has spurred calls for a new approach that more closely resembled that of the U.S., even from some of Israel's most ardent supporters.

"While some U.S. leaders, most notably Barack Obama, talked about using the 'g word'— genocide—in referring to the Armenian tragedy, in the end they all blinked when faced with Turkey's intense pushback," American Jewish Committee CEO David Harris said in a statement sent to Newsweek. "That's what makes President Joe Biden's decision, which the American Jewish Committee warmly welcomed, all the more significant. He didn't compromise on truth for the sake of political expediency."

AJC, an influential Jewish advocacy organization that predates even the mass killings and displacements in question, "has also encouraged Israel to consider the American step," he said.

Harris said it should be done, even if it came at the cost of fueling further tensions with a powerful regional player.

"It's not been an easy call for Jerusalem, since Ankara plays hardball, and has made it crystal clear that any such move could trigger a costly reaction affecting core Israeli interests," he said. That's far from easy to dismiss or sideline."

"Nonetheless, as a country where the genocide against the Jews is seared into the national consciousness, can Israel afford to avoid recognizing the same Armenian reality?" Harris asked. "When values and interests collide for any country, the latter usually win out."

"On this issue, in Israel's case," he added, "perhaps it will eventually produce a different result."

Armenians carry national flags during a march to commemorate the anniversary of the 1915 massacre of Armenians by the Ottoman Empire during World War I, in Jerusalem, on April 23, ahead of President Joe Biden's announcement. Israel has acknowledged atrocities committed against Armenians and other minorities at the time but has not declared it a "genocide" even as the United States now has.EMMANUEL DUNAND/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

Relations between Israel and Turkey today are already severely strained. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has often railed against Netanyahu, and has voiced consistent support for the right of return for Palestinians who themselves were forcefully displaced from lands also claimed by Israel during the country's 1948 establishment.

But relations between the two countries haven't always been hostile. Just a year after Israel came into existence, Turkey was the first majority-Muslim nation to recognize it. Ties between the two countries fluctuated with the tumultuous tides of Middle East politics throughout the following decades, but saw a marked improvement through the turn of the 21st century, with Turkey emerging as Israel's closet regional partner.

But the relationship became strained as tensions in the Palestinian-controlled Gaza Strip erupted into a series of wars. Turkey condemned Israeli operations across the tiny coastal enclave. In one 2010 incident, 10 Turkish citizens—one of them a dual U.S.-Turkish citizen—were killed when Israeli troops raided a flotilla of civilian ships seeking to break the Israel-imposed blockade on Gaza.

Over the past decade, the situation has only worsened. In spite of sporadic attempts at reconciliation, the two powers find themselves on opposite ends of two camps locked in an emerging geopolitical contest in the Mediterranean region. Israel has recently shored up ties with Turkey's historic rival Greece and more closely aligned itself with Egypt, France and the United Arab Emirates, while Turkey has sought to expand its footprint across lucrative maritime gas fields off the coast of Libya.

And while Israel has managed to make inroads across the Arab World over the past year with a set of deals that normalized ties with the UAE, Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco, the country remains deeply unpopular in the region. A study published last year by Qatar's Doha Institute showed a mere 6% average of support for establishing diplomatic relations with Israel among 13 Arab populations polled.

Erdogan, on the other hand, has emerged as an important leader. He ranked ahead of Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in five countries surveyed by the polling project Arab Barometer: Algeria, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco and Tunisia.

In Libya, where Turkey has backed an internationally recognized government against an influential military leader supported by the Egypt-France-UAE bloc, Erdogan was seen as second to the Saudi royal in a tight race among the three leaders listed in the survey.

Only two Arab countries, Lebanon and Syria, have fully recognized an Armenian Genocide.

Turkey, meanwhile, continues to actively campaign against the use of the term, and has similarly beckoned Israel not to shift its stance.

"If there is one country in the whole world which understands the absolute need to refrain from politicizing the use of the term 'genocide,' it is probably Israel," the Turkish embassy in Washington said in a statement sent to Newsweek. "Having suffered the horrors of Holocaust, Israel and Jews all around the world know too well that passing political judgments as such on historical events does neither serve the commemoration of the sufferings of the past nor help prevent the repeat of these crimes."

"On the contrary," the embassy added, "it undermines the weight and importance of the term "genocide" in disrespect of those who actually suffered from this appalling crime."

Ankara argues the debate over what really happened remains ongoing.

"We cannot speak of the motives of the Israeli government, but it is only natural to think that they do not take it lightly the use of the term 'genocide,'" the Turkish embassy said. "This should be particularly so given that none of the conditions required for the use of this term for the events of 1915 are met, including the lack of a decision by a competent international court."

The embassy highlighted decisions adopted by the French Constitutional Council in 2012 and 2017 and by the European Court of Human Rights in 2015 and 2017, that "clearly established that events of 1915 constitute an issue of legitimate historical debate."

The embassy also pointed out Turkey's involvement in promoting Holocaust awareness, including by co-sponsoring the 2005 U.N. General Assembly resolution that established January 27 as International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

"As to Holocaust, on the other hand, safeguarding the memory of this horrific crime and protecting it from the shameful attacks of denialism and distortion is of utmost importance for us," the embassy said.

The embassy also reiterated Turkey's criticism of Biden's decision last week, which it claimed did more harm than good.

"We hope that the entire international community continues to remember this dreadful chapter of the history of mankind with due respect and refrains from exploiting the term "genocide" for narrow political considerations, as President Biden did on April 24 this year," the embassy said, "which only weakens the importance of this term and disrespects the memory of the millions of people who lost their lives as a result of the genocides perpetrated in Nazi Germany, Rwanda or Srebrenica."

For Israel, there's also the additional question of its growing ties with Azerbaijan, a close Turkish partner that fought against Armenia over contested territory last year in an explosive conflict that saw Baku employ Israeli drones that devastated Armenian forces, a campaign that Yerevan likened to a continuation of an Armenian Genocide. Azerbaijan, which neighbors both Turkey and top Israeli foe Iran, has proven a key partner for Israel in defense and energy.

Armenia rejects the position taken by Turkey and Azerbaijan, and argues that countries acknowledging the weight of past human rights abuses was key to preventing new violations on such a scale.

"Armenia condemns the denialistic policy which aims at justifying the Armenian Genocide and preparing grounds for new crimes against humanity," the Armenian Foreign Ministry said in a statement sent to Newsweek. "The strong position of the international community on condemnation of genocides is an important prerequisite for truth and historical justice, as well as prevention of massive human rights violation."

Andranik Israelyan, a Turkologist who formerly served in Armenia's Foreign Affairs and Defense Ministries, provided insight into the Armenian perspective on Israeli hesitance.

"From the Armenian point of view it is very strange to see such a policy," Israelyan told Newsweek. "An average Armenian is always perplexed why people who are victims of a genocide find it hard to acknowledge others' tragedy."

But he saw potential change on the horizon in Israel.

"My opinion is that Israeli recognition is an upcoming development, but will depend on its relationship with Turkey and Azerbaijan," he said.

And major factors have come into play at home as well. As Netanyahu faces a new chorus of critics, Israelyan said there had been a "significant change in Israeli attitude to the issue." He argued that "Israeli society is nowadays more inclined towards recognizing the Armenian genocide."

To demonstrate this, Israelyan took note of the Israeli Knesset Committee on Education Culture and Sports decision in 2016 to recognize an Armenian Genocide. A number of nations have seen their legislatures take action on the issue and in some cases, like that of the U.S. Congress' 2019 vote, it preceded eventual movement on the executive level.

Israeli President Reuven Rivlin was among the nation's leading proponents for the move during his tenure as speaker of parliament, but he has avoided using the term "Armenian Genocide" since taking office in Netanyahu's government in 2014.

Still, Netanyahu's political opponents have continued to call for a new policy regarding Armenian Genocide recognition at a time of political deadlock in Israel.

One of Netanyahu's top rivals, center-right Yesh Atid leader Yair Lepid, called Biden's announcement "an important moral statement," vowing to "continue to fight for Israeli recognition of the Armenian Genocide; it is our moral responsibility as the Jewish state."

Left-wing Meretz Knesset member Tamar Zandberg said "the time has come for Israel to also clean itself of political interests and act for the most basic justice and recognize the Armenian genocide" and that "the Jewish state cannot lend a hand to attempts to erase history."

Another leading opponent, center right-wing to right-wing New Hope head Gideon Sa'ar, has also expressed support for recognizing an Armenian Genocide in the past.

In Washington, the head of one leading institution raising awareness on systematic atrocities joined others in drawing parallels between the experiences of the Jewish and the Armenian peoples. U.S. National Holocaust Memorial Director Sara J. Bloomfield welcomed Biden's move and emphasized the need for global recognition.
"Holocaust history teaches that an honest reckoning with the past is a prerequisite to understanding the present and building a better future," Museum said in a statement sent to Newsweek.

The U.S. National Holocaust Memorial has also classified as genocides the mass killings against Tutsis in Rwanda in 1994, against Muslims in Bosnia and Herzegovina's Srebrenica in 1995, against non-Arab minorities in Sudan's Darfur in the early 2000s, against Yezidis in Islamic State militant group (ISIS)-controlled Iraq in 2014 and against the Muslim Rohingyas in Myanmar in 2017.

The museum pointed out that the Armenian experience is central to our current understanding of what defines genocide.

In the midst of the Holocaust in 1944, Polish-Jewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin drew upon the events that befell the Armenians and other communities in the Ottoman Empire when he coined the term "genocide." The crime was first recognized as such under international law by the United Nations General Assembly in 1946.

As the international community continues to grapple with conflicting narratives 75 years later, Bloomfield urged countries across the world to come to terms with the past.

"Recognizing the full magnitude of the crimes committed against the Armenian people, even a century following the events, is important not only for the victims and their descendants," she said. "We know from watching Europe deal with the Holocaust and its legacy since 1945, just how important it is for all societies to openly acknowledge difficult national history."


https://www.newsweek.com/israel-pressure-follow-us-armenian-genocide-despite-turkey-1587626