Category: Main Issues

By David Boyajian

USA Armenian Life Magazine

By any objective measure, the two-year old campaign against the Anti-Defamation League’s (ADL) denial of the Armenian genocide has been a spectacular success.  The ADL, the Jewish American community, Israel, and Turkey were taken by surprise and shaken to their roots.  As shockwaves from the campaign spread, Turkey’s ambassador to Israel cut short his vacation to return to Tel Aviv to complain to Israeli leaders.

Grassroots Armenians in Massachusetts have flexed, and continue to flex, their political muscles as never before, targeting the Massachusetts Municipal Association and the elected officials and human rights commissions of 14 cities: Arlington, Bedford, Belmont, Easton, Lexington, Medford, Needham, Newburyport, Newton, Northampton, Peabody, Somerville, Watertown, and Westwood.
As a result, they have all ceased sponsoring No Place for Hate (NPFH), the alleged anti-bias program created, trademarked, and funded by the ADL.  See NoPlaceForDenial.com.

Successful Results

Among campaigns initiated by Armenian Americans, only the Congressional genocide resolution has generated more exposure and controversy.

The campaign has spawned thousands of news reports, editorials, commentaries, radio interviews, and letters in non-Armenian media in the U.S. and around the world.

The battle against the ADL and NPFH has underscored to non-Armenians that the genocide issue directly affects them, their cities, and their schools.

Armenian Americans now have a louder voice in their communities.  And those who deny the genocide have been put further on the defensive.

Exposing the ADL’s holocaust hypocrisy reportedly helped to push the House Foreign Affairs Committee into approving the genocide resolution two years ago.

The campaign is the main reason why recent news reports on the strained relations between Turkey and Israel refer to the Jewish lobby’s collusion with Turkey in genocide denial.
Other denialists, such as the American Jewish Committee and B’nai B’rith, have also been exposed.

Armenian Leaders Fall Short

Sadly, outside Massachusetts, Armenians and lobbying organizations such as the Armenian National Committee of America and Armenian Assembly of America have done little to defend Armenians and others against the ADL denialism and programs.  This is a major failure.

Even in Massachusetts, the Armenians who have been fighting the ADL are mostly grassroots activists and several ANCA leaders.  With rare exceptions, our so-called Armenian leaders in politics, academia, business, journalism, law, medicine, and the church have remained shamefully silent and uninvolved.  The reasons?  Laziness and, in my opinion, an unwarranted fear of criticizing a Jewish organization.

The fact is that the Massachusetts campaign has drawn enormous support from non-Armenians, many of them Jews: human rights commission members, city officials, journalists, academicians, and more.

Armenians must not permit genocide denial, whether by a Turkish, Jewish, or any other kind of group.

The ADL and America

As Americans, Armenians have a wider responsibility to expose the ADL and similar organizations that falsely claim to espouse “human rights.”

ADL programs besides NPFH, such as World of Difference (WOD), have infiltrated thousands of cities, workplaces, law enforcement agencies, and public schools, the latter often attended by Armenian American children.

When Glendale’s Hoover High issued an invitation to WOD, the Armenian community put a stop to it, but only – only – because it was aware of the campaign in Massachusetts.  WOD even tried to penetrate St. Stephen’s Armenian Elementary School in Watertown.

Were it not so damaging to society, it would be laughable that an organization that conspires with Turkey to cover up mass murder is strong-arming countless American citizens – children, teachers, workers, law enforcement officers, and ordinary citizens – into its “anti-hate” and “tolerance” training programs.

Some ADL members who conduct these programs may be well intentioned.  But the national ADL leadership is not.   It is clear, particularly given its collusion with Turkey, that the ADL is a political, not a civil or human rights, group.  Its “human rights” programs are a cover – a way to influence and buy unsuspecting Americans who will later support, or at least not criticize, the ADL’s foreign and domestic agenda.

Incredibly, ADL agents have also conducted illegal surveillance of African Americans, Latinos, labor unions, and others.  The police chief of Arlington, Massachusetts has even admitted that the ADL provides police with investigative intelligence that they cannot legally obtain themselves.

One can surmise, therefore, that the ADL may operate covertly against Armenian Americans.

Continuing the Campaign

There are compelling moral and practical reasons why Armenians must continue this campaign.
Human rights experts say that the Armenian genocide was – and denial of any genocide is – an offense against humankind as a whole.  All people, therefore, Armenians included, have a responsibility to confront denialists.

Even Israelis acknowledge that Israeli – Turkish accords include an unwritten proviso that top Jewish lobbying groups such as the ADL work against Armenians on virtually every issue of concern to Armenian Americans, such as military aid to Azerbaijan and Turkey.

According to political analyst Harut Sassounian, for example, AJC and B’nai B’rith officials issued “a public pledge to help enact pro-Azeri and pro-Turkish legislation and counter Armenian and Greek initiatives in the U.S. Congress.”

Exposing the holocaust hypocrisy of the ADL and other organizations reduces their credibility and, therefore, their ability to damage Armenian American interests.

Even locally, ADL members have worked against Armenian interests.  A top ADL officer and well-connected Boston figure, Peter Meade, has made himself the main opponent of the proposed Armenian Heritage Park – which includes a genocide plaque – on Boston’s Rose Kennedy Greenway.

Will Armenian Americans confront organizations that harm not just their interests, but also those of the wider American society?  In Massachusetts, yes.   Elsewhere, it remains to be seen.
The author is a freelance writer. Several of his articles are archived at Armenianpedia.org.

PRESS RELEASE

A letter sent to the House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and signed by almost all of the retired Turkish Ambassadors is disclosed Thursday morning April 2nd, just a few days before President Obama’s visit to Ankara. Unusually strong wording reflects their serious concerns regarding a recent initiative taken by the Armenian-American lobby in Washington.

Every year in April, Armenian lobby asks the US Congress, so far without success, to adopt a resolution recognizing their claims of “Armenian Genocide” perpetrated according to them at the beginning of last Century, during the First Wold War, under Ottoman rule.

Diplomats state that the arguments used in the draft resolution are inaccurate or unfounded. The silence regarding the losses and sufferings of the Turkish people during the same period adds to its total one-sidedness, therefore to its fairness and credibility.

In a long text they highligt one by one the shortcomings and the distortions of the historic events mentioned in the draft. For instance, they point out that the court martials formed in 1919 at the end of the War in Istanbul under Allied military occupation are taken as valid bases to prove the guilt of the Ottoman rulers, while they were considered at that time even by British lawyers as a “farce” undermining their credibility. They also underline that the US archive documents had been dismissed by the British Attorney General in 1920 as “personal impressions and opinions” unsuitable for use in legal proceedings.

They explain how Armenians manipulated US Ambassador Morgenhtau, who had some particular vision about Turks and “Orientals” in general and how some subsequent American ambassadors, including Admiral Bristol and the “US Observer Mission” had contradicted him.

They reject references made to International institutions stating that neither the United Nations, nor the Genocide Convention have ever recognized or made mention of “an Armenian Genocide”, as suggested in the draft resolution. Consideration of a report with these claims was refused on the grounds that it was not the UN’s task to pass judgment on history.

They quote a report of Secretary of State R.Lansing to President Wilson, where R.Lansing express the opinion that “The betrayal of the Armenians against the State is the cause of their relocation”. They also mention official records in which Armenians present themselves as “de facto participants in the war” on the Allied side against the Ottoman State, just to be admitted in the Peace Conference.

Providing detailed census figures taken from various official records, they make the following interesting observation to illustrate what they call as “the malicious exaggeration” of the death toll: \”If the present global Armenian population is accepted as the descendants of a a limited number of Armenians to have survived the relocation, this would mean a population explosion unheard in the history of mankind. By the same rate of growth, the present day
population of Turkey would have reached three hundred million, almost equal to the population of the United States, instead of the present 72 million”. Adding that: “Prominent scholars (Turkish, American and others), refute these exaggerations as the remnants of war propaganda (as later acknowledged by British historian Arnold Toynbee) or as the products of ethnic and religious bias. The same bias also explains the lack of any reference to Turkish-
Muslim deaths”.

They also draw our attention to the juridical inconsistencies of the Armenian claims by stating that “Genocide” is a legal concept defined in the 1948 UN Convention and only a due and impartial legal process by a competent court can certify its existence and issue an indictment to this effect. Hence, they expect the Congress of the United States, itself an edifice of law, to refrain from acting as a self-appointed tribunal.

The following paragraph in the letter is particularly interesting. They recognize that “the number of casualties is important”. “However” they say: ” in order to qualify such unfortunate events as “genocide”, it is not the numbers, but irrefutable proof about the existence of the intent to destroy a people “as such” that needs to be established. At the end of the War, Allied governments who were in possession of all official records and archives could not produce any credible document or evidence proving this element of intent. They consequently released all the ministers and parliamentarians who were detained or interned in Malta for prosecution of war crimes”.

They suspect that some Armenian circles may consider such allegations as politically useful, even a convenient cover for the ongoing occupation of a fifth of the territory of the Republic of Azerbaijan and the expulsion of more than one million people from their homes.

According to them, if the US Congress adopts this draft Resolution failing to take the slightest trouble to consider arguments other than those raised by ethnic Armenian activists, that will inevitably have a serious debilitating effect on Turkish-American relations and will postpone indefinitely the normalization of Turkish-Armenian relations. They add that, to speak about different versions of the events is not phibited in Turkey, contrary to prohibition imposed by some European states. The refusal by the Armebian side of a Turkish proposal for the establishment of a commission composed of Turkish and Armenian scholars clearly demonstrates who in reality is afraid of facing the truth.

They are warning that “many possibilities of cooperation between Turkey and the USA in the Middle East, the Caucasus, the Balkans, in Afghanistan and Iraq, in the field of energy, in the joint struggle against terrorism and other transnational challenges are likely to suffer as a result” and that “the goodwill already generated by the planned visit of President Barrack Obama to Turkey”, as well the positive effects of the overtures made to Armenia for the normalisation of relations “may be lost”.

Ali Hikmet Alp