SAN DIEGODAN DOCENT ESRA OZYUREK ERMENI SAFLARINAMI GECDI .. HAKIKATI ONA ANLATABILECEK BIR KISI VARMI KALIFORNIYADA??
Florida Turks Complain:
“Never a break…They started again!”
By Appo Jabarian
Executive Publisher
& Managing Editor
& Managing Editor
USA Armenian Life Magazine
Friday, January 9, 2009
On Friday January 2, my first workday coffee of 2009, at the Glendale, CA-based Urartu (ancient Armenia) café came with much laughter and flair.
While sipping my coffee, I logged into my inbox to browse through the subject lines of dozens of e-mail messages. One particular subject line caught my attention. A friend had forwarded that message to me. The subject line read: “[FLTURK] Never a break…They started again!”
A Florida Turk who had just learned that a lecture was going to be delivered on January 7 by the daughter of a genocide survivor made that complaint to his fellow deniers.
I told my fellow coffee connoisseurs about the FLTURK’s member’s reaction, one friend countered: “These denialist Turks should know that we have not yet began to fight, and that they should expect more such events not just in Florida but all around the world.”
At the beginning of the New Year, while several Armenian organizations and groups were busy observing the Armenian Xmas on Jan. 6, the Florida Atlantic University was set to present the following day well-known author Margaret Ahnert with the lecture “The Knock at the Door: A Journey Through the Darkness of the Armenian Genocide.”
In June of 2007, several denialist Turks disrupted her book reading at a Barnes and Noble bookstore in New York City’s Upper East Side. One of the Turks was arrested by fast-responding New York police.
The sentence “Never a break…They started again!” hilariously reflects the frustration of the denialist Turks here in the United States at anyone or any entity that dares to openly discuss the calamity that befell the Armenians at the turn of the 20th century.
The words “They started again!” also illustrates the sense of being in a hot pursuit by the evangelizers of the truth. In this particular case, the organizer of the lecture was not an Armenian-American group but an American university.
On January 5, The Los Angeles Times featured a truthful opinion article by Esra Özyürek, an associate professor of anthropology at UC San Diego and the author of “Nostalgia for the Modern: State Secularism and Everyday Politics in Turkey” and “Politics of Public Memory in Turkey.”
Prof. Özyürek wrote: “I grew up in Turkey in a politically engaged, educated and reasonably liberal family in the 1970s and the 1980s, and I had only a vague idea about the animosity between Turks and Armenians. It wasn’t until I enrolled in graduate school at the University of Michigan, one of the most important centers of Ottoman and Armenian studies in the United States, that I learned about the unacceptably sad end of the Armenian subjects of the Ottoman Empire.”
He concluded: “Turks growing up today surely are better informed about the history of the land they inhabit. Even those who accept the nationalist line have to be aware of the sudden end of the centuries-long Armenian presence in Anatolia [Western Armenia and Cilicia – Ed]. Regardless of the terms they employ or the specific amount of responsibility they willingly shoulder, this next generation of Turks is already in a much better position to face the darkest aspect of their national history and develop a more responsible relationship to it.”
The sense of being “under siege” by these denialists must be growing stronger on a daily basis as the number of righteous Turks grows steadily not only in the United States and other countries but in Turkey itself.
Very soon, these Turkish denialists will complain “they started again,” against righteous Turks.