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ACKNOWLEDGING THE ARMENIAN GENOCIDE
By Youssef Ibrahim
New York Sun, NY
http://www.nysun.com/article/64553?page_no=2
Oc t 15 2007
America has moral and strategic purposes in denouncing the massacre
of 1.5 million Armenians in 1915 as a horrendous genocide perpetrated
by Turks.
The facts are not in dispute. Ample documentation shows that for
two years, hundreds of thousands of Armenian Christians were forcibly
marched out of their towns and villages, killed, starved, and crucified
until death as part of a deliberate ethnic cleansing campaign by the
Young Turks government of the dying Ottoman Empire.
Twenty-two countries, including those of the European Union - which
Turkey aspires to join - have marked those events as genocide.
For Americans, the moral imperative is intuitive. Which Greek, Jewish,
Italian, Irish, Hispanic, or black American in this kaleidoscopically
diverse nation of immigrants - all touched in one way or another by
discrimination - can look in the mirror and say, "It's okay with me
to kill people because of their religion, ethnicity, or origin"?
In that sense, the American Congress, which occasionally rises above
its partisan instincts, was right to draft the resolution condemning
the Turkish massacre nine decades after the fact. The Congress should
now vote it in.
The American government's strategic imperative to do so is even more
compelling, regardless of the protests by Turkey and the Arab world.
Turkey lives in a region where many governments and terrorist groups
are actively engaged in a variety of ethnic cleansings. These are
directed especially but not exclusively at the 20 million Arab
Christian minorities. Another 50 million people, including some 20
million Kurds living in Iraq, Syria, and Turkey are sitting ducks; not
to mention the Druze, Yazidis, Bahais, Maronites, Christian Palestinian
Arabs, and Sudanese Africans, all of whom are in the process of being
killed or evicted from their places of origin right now.
By Youssef Ibrahim
New York Sun, NY
http://www.nysun.com/article/64553?page_no=2
Oc t 15 2007
America has moral and strategic purposes in denouncing the massacre
of 1.5 million Armenians in 1915 as a horrendous genocide perpetrated
by Turks.
The facts are not in dispute. Ample documentation shows that for
two years, hundreds of thousands of Armenian Christians were forcibly
marched out of their towns and villages, killed, starved, and crucified
until death as part of a deliberate ethnic cleansing campaign by the
Young Turks government of the dying Ottoman Empire.
Twenty-two countries, including those of the European Union - which
Turkey aspires to join - have marked those events as genocide.
For Americans, the moral imperative is intuitive. Which Greek, Jewish,
Italian, Irish, Hispanic, or black American in this kaleidoscopically
diverse nation of immigrants - all touched in one way or another by
discrimination - can look in the mirror and say, "It's okay with me
to kill people because of their religion, ethnicity, or origin"?
In that sense, the American Congress, which occasionally rises above
its partisan instincts, was right to draft the resolution condemning
the Turkish massacre nine decades after the fact. The Congress should
now vote it in.
The American government's strategic imperative to do so is even more
compelling, regardless of the protests by Turkey and the Arab world.
Turkey lives in a region where many governments and terrorist groups
are actively engaged in a variety of ethnic cleansings. These are
directed especially but not exclusively at the 20 million Arab
Christian minorities. Another 50 million people, including some 20
million Kurds living in Iraq, Syria, and Turkey are sitting ducks; not
to mention the Druze, Yazidis, Bahais, Maronites, Christian Palestinian
Arabs, and Sudanese Africans, all of whom are in the process of being
killed or evicted from their places of origin right now.