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‘Genocide’ Is A Matter Of Opinion

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Column by Scott Simon

Simon Says

by Scott Simon

Weekend Edition Saturday, April 11, 2009 · When President Obama was beginning his run for office, he said he believed the 1915 slaughter of 1.5 million Armenians by Turkey was not war but genocide and that the American people deserved “a leader who speaks truthfully about the Armenian genocide and responds forcefully to all genocides.”

But when Obama addressed the Turkish parliament this week, he referred only to “the terrible events of 1915.”

I was part of a PBS program called The Armenian Genocide. There was no question mark in the title. I think there are times when you have to say “genocide” to be accurate about mass murder that tries to extinguish a whole group. That’s why slaughter of a million Tutsis in Rwanda is not called merely mass murder. An American politician who got to Germany, for example, and called the Holocaust of European Jews merely “killings” would be mocked.

I don’t doubt that Obama is still outraged by the Armenian genocide. But when he ran in the presidential primaries, it was important to win support from people concerned about human rights and, perhaps, Armenian-Americans in California.

Now, Obama may feel that it is more important for the United States to win Turkey’s cooperation on a range of issues than it is for him to be consistent on a controversy that may seem like old history.

But it’s not. Almost every year, the Turkish government has charged reporters and writers, including the Nobel laureate, Orhan Pamuk, for “insulting national identity” by referring to the massacres of 1.5 million Armenians as genocide.

Peter Balakian, the pre-eminent scholar of the genocide and co-translator of a new, widely lauded family memoir called Armenian Golgotha: A Memoir of the Armenian Genocide, told us this week that he admires President Obama for telling Turkish leaders that confronting the past and restoring good relations with Armenia is important.

But he believes Turkey’s campaign against acknowledging its genocide raises questions about reliability.

Balakian told us, “A country that spends millions of dollars a year in an effort stop the facts about the Armenian genocide from being known and that persecutes and prosecutes its own citizens for speaking truthfully about the extermination of the Armenians is hardly a government to trust to broker honest and just foreign policy.”

In a way, the president’s choice to say “killings” in front of his hosts may remind us that it might be wise to regard what any politician says as the words of a suitor who coos “I love you” during courtship. They mean it in the moment. But any adult should know that they may not mean it in just a few weeks.


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6 responses to “‘Genocide’ Is A Matter Of Opinion”

  1. DCTRK Avatar
    DCTRK

    Save the lies and premeditated intense marketing campaigns. Turkey, The Turkish Republic and the Turkish people, most of all its military has time and time again throughout history proven itself as one of Americas most TRUSTWORTHY allies. We have always come through for he United States and the American people on the grounds of what is right and just! However we Turks will in no way comprimise our rights, the truth or our reputation of 1000s of years of justice in standing for truth, protecting the comprimised, the weak who is subject to injustice. From rescuing and providing a safe haven to Jews of the Spanish Iquisition to Bosnians being slaughtered by Serbs, to Kurds from the attacks of Saddam Hussein we have proven what pillars of human rights are! We who have this compassion in our history will never allow our respect for human rights to be comprimised, degraded and smeared by your fabricated campaign of lies based on years old multinational marketing of rancorous hate, slander and defamation due to your embarrassing treasonous failures in attacking Ottoman Turkey in the back for the Russians when they werent looking as they fought WWI with battles on multiple fronts! Your lies are your shame of a purely ethnic based project of murdering of all non-Armenians (this including Turks, Jews, Kurds and Arabs) in southeast Turkey by organized Armenian gangs LONG BEFORE 1915!! You have brainwashed some but this is as far as it goes..Justice of failure of even those that profess loyalty to you will always refuse you in the end this is and will continue to be your disgraceful and humiliating fate for your lies, hate and rancor!

  2. Vmanv Avatar
    Vmanv

    Thank you for the article as well as your contribution to the documentary ‘The Armenian Genocide’. Ultimately it is through documentaries that the general public are informed about past and present events in depth.

    It would also be important to note that Turkey is not only spending millions to cover up the Genocide for external audiences, but internally with DVDs such as ‘Sari Gelin’ (which blames and depicts Armenians as murderers and liars) aimed at children between 6 and 12 in the school system, it is continuing to brainwash and instill racial hatred in the next generation of Turks – and yet it says it wants a ‘Historical Commission’ to be set up!

  3. Mel Avatar
    Mel

    Dear DCTRK you have hit it right on the nose..my mother and her family lived in Subatan and we have had our family members tortured and killed by the Armenians yet we were never brain washed and lived with any kind of hatred…25 years ago I had been confronted by a young Armenian in his early 20’s asked me my nationality and when I told him I was a Turkish he told me how much he hated me… I had never been told by my family of the killings they had done to my family.. I went home and told my mother and wondered why he would have said this to me? She then began to tell me about what had happend. I then grew angry for what they did to us but my mother then told me it was a long ago and it was a bad time for our people we must leave it behind and move on… so our government and our parents do not teach us to hate but you still do…shame on you for doing that. This is why you will never have love and compasion as we have and always will. Ne Mutlu Turkum diyene!!

  4. Robert Avatar
    Robert

    Well, here we have another sterling example of an ultra left-wing liberal who doesn’t have a clue as to what he is talking/writing about! Hey, it’s NPR, so what would one expect! For these brainwashed and mindless puppets not to tow the Dashnak Armenian diaspora line, while engaging in their usual brown-nosing of their Dashnak Armenian masters at the same time, would be unthinkable!

    Mr. Simon, I’d like to pose several questions for you. You speak of genocide and the Holocaust, along with mass murders. How would you characterize the murders of 518,000 Turks, before and during World War I, by traitorous Dashnak Armenians who betrayed the Ottoman Government, sided with the Czar and Mother Russia, then formed a fifth column to attack and slaughter not only Turkish soldiers, but thousands of innocent civillians as well? Would you say that these mass atrocities were a Turkish genocide committed by Dashnak Armenians? My grandfather, and what was left of his family, relatives and friends, were survivors of the slaughters of Turks by Armenians in Van (where Armenians murdered 25,000 Turks within 48 hours!), Kars, Erzincan and Ersurum! Fortunately, they documented everything (now in the Turkish archives, with some in family libraries), for future war crime trials, as well as mass civil suits, against Armenia. How would you classify whole innocent Armenian villages being completely obliterated by Dashnak Armenians, who murdered their own people because they would not go along with their heinous plans of ethnically cleansing Turks and other moslems, and who then turned around and told christian missionaries (who hadn’t even been to the site until the crimes were completed) that the “terrible Turk” had done these crimes (of course, being that Armenians love to use the religion card, it was a no-brainer that they wouldn’t be able to convince (CON!!) these christian missionaries into believing that the Turks were the culprits)? Indeed Mr. Simon, what term would you use to describe the ultimate total deaths of 2.5 million Turks, Azeris, Tartars, Greeks, Persians, Kurds, Georgians, Arabs and Jews as a result of Dashnak Armenian actions? How convenient that in your piece, you don’t mention a single word about these mass CRIMES AGAISNT HUMANITY & mass WAR CRIMES committed against moslems, and non-moslems alike, during this period! By doing so, are you implying that the life of a christian is far more precious than that of a moslem? Mr. Simon…IS THIS JUSTICE…OR IS IT “JUST US”!?? The Dashnak Armenians have perpetrated the biggest con job of the 20th century upon the christian nations for almost 100 years! And they are all still being duped to this very day! Finally Mr. Simon, you mentioned the Holocaust. What are your feelings about the Dashnak Armenian’s claims that they are the true Arryian race, before, during and after (yes, even to this day) World War II, and that Adolph Hitler actually anointed them as such? How do you feel about the numerous Armenian newspapers and magazines in Berlin who, between 1935-1944, published countless anti-semetic cartoons, articles, editorials, statements, all exhalting the work of Hitler and his Master Plan for the extermination of the Jews? What say you, Mr. Simon, to the infamous 812th Nazi Battalion of WWII, comprised of over 20,000 Armenians volunteers (lead by a WWI era homicidal psychopath by the name of General Dro), which operated in the Northern Caucusus and the Crimean regions (they hunted down thousands of Jews. Those that they did not enjoy murderung outright, they would gather and have shipped out to the notorious concentration camps to face almost certain death.)? What is your reaction, Mr. Simon, when you read or hear about these anti-semetic Dashnak Armenians SHAMELESSLY trying to equate an event that never transpired (they have yet to actually prove any of their allegations from WWI…they are terrified to debate us in public, and they can not produce a single court verdict in their favor, from any court at any time), with something so horrific as the Holocaust? Unfortunately, there are still some ignorant Jewish people who believe every word spewed out of the mouths of these hate mongering Dashnak Armenians! To this day, Dashnaks can still be identified by some of the swaztika tattoos that they wear, or by the swaztika emblazzened in the center of the Armenian flag!

    Well Mr. Simon, there is so much more that I could write about in rebuttle, but I believe that you must, by this time, have gotten my point! Perhaps these will help to open your eyes and see reality! There are always more than one side to any story! Next time, please do some basic research and home work before you write about something that you simply know nothing about!!

  5. Robert Avatar
    Robert

    This is to VMANV and Mr. Simon:

    It is stated that Turkey spends millions to “cover up the genocide”. First of all, what “genocide”? Secondly, how about the countless millions that come from the deep pockets of the Armenian diaspora to bribe, pay off, intimidate, manipulate, coerse, brainwash, etc. politicians, local, state and federal officials, as well as high school and college students (let’s not forget the massive influence peddling upon the media (print, radio and TV))! Thirdly, the video Sari Gelin has been introduced by VMANV. My question is this, please explain to the rest of the world about your Armenian Youth Federation (AYF) and how they are practically a mirror image of the Hitler Youth Camps, complete with swaztika-like armbands, brown uniforms and Naziesque flags with tassles? These are camps where they take young Armenian children and then put them through several weeks (usually in the summer) of intense brainwashing and hate indoctination against Turkish and Turkic moslems! So, instead of trying to cloud the true issues here with typical Dashnak rehashed garbage, why don’t you debate us in an open public forum with FULL media coverage? We have quite a bit of archival documents to back us up and to disprove your usual BS statements! Also, why are the archives inYerevan, Armenia and the Armenian Revolutionary archives in Boston, MA still closed to the public? What are you all hiding? What are you so afraid of (as if we already don’t know!)? To quote the respected author, Samuel A. Weems, “Armenia’s major export is terrorism while it’s major import is foreign aid”! If the world finally learned the truth, they’d lose all of that foreign aid! That’s WHY Dashnak Armenians must continue this con job against the ignorant Christian nations (especially when they’ve been using the Religion Card for 100 years!)! Sir Ellis Bartlett summed it up the best in Feb of 1895, when he spoke on the floor of Parliament in London and said…”Armenians are, of all the oriental races, the most subtle, adroit and PRONE TO LYING”!

  6. F. Demirmen Avatar
    F. Demirmen

    Scott Simon was the pathetic character that tried to moderate the panel discussion at the end of the shameless “The Armenian Genocide” propaganda film (“documentary”) that some PBS affiliates aired in the United States in April 2006. Financed by the Armenian Diaspora, and put together by an Armenophile producer, the film was grotesquely one-sided in favor of the Armenian point of view. As usual, Armenian gangs and their followers that betrayed Ottoman Turks, soldiers and civilians alike, during World War I were portrayed as the victims and the defending Turks as monstrous killers. The mass killings of Turks and other moslems, even some Jews, were somehow didn’t matter. The anti-Turkish prejudice that permeated the film was nauseating.

    But the panel discussion scheduled at the end of the film was expected to be different. It was assumed that the panel discussion would offer a balanced exchange of opinions from both sides. Thanks to Mr. Simon’s pro-genocide bias, however, the discussion was anything but balanced. Mr. Simon, with a façade of impartiality at the beginning, could not hide his true self at the end when he turned to the two panelists on the Turkish side and asked impishly: “Why can’t Turkey admit genocide and get over with it”?

    Yes, Mr. Simon, it was no surprise that you, like so many in the media, fell for the Armenian propaganda. But since you accepted to act as the moderator, couldn’t you remain impartial? Or should we be more forgiving and attribute your pro-Armenian stance to pure ignorance? This is a question only you can answer.

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