What the heck is wrong with us?
Turkey expects Israel to "deliver" American Jewish organizations and ensure that the US Congress does not pass a resolution characterizing as genocide the massacre of Armenians during World War I, Turkish Ambassador to Israel Namik Tan told The Jerusalem Post Sunday.
Tan cut short a vacation and rushed back to Israel Thursday to deal with the Anti-Defamation League's reversal last week of its long-standing position on the issue.
Tan said he understood that Israel's position had not changed, but "Israel should not let the [US] Jewish community change its position. This is our expectation and this is highly important, highly important."
Turkey's concern is that last week's decision by ADL national director Abe Foxman would open the dikes and enable the passage in Congress of a nonbinding resolution calling Ottoman Turkey's actions against the Armenians "genocide."
I sure hope so. It's long overdue. The power of Abe Foxman and "The Lobby" to open those dikes, however, is vastly overrated. I guess Walt & Mearsheimer are the new gospel in Turkey.
I'm not a big fan of Foxman, but I applaud what seems to be the unclouding of his vision on this issue. If the massacre of Armenians during WWI wasn't attempted genocide, what was it? Yes, I've read the conflicting reports. I've also spoken with children of survivors.
Did you know that 39 of the 50 United States have officially recognized the Armenian genocide? So have a number of nations. But, so far, the US government has not nor, obviously, has Israel.
Here's a small excerpt from Andrew Bostom's analysis at The American Thinker (it's long but well worth the time):
But ninety-two years after the events of April 24, 1915, the Turkish government persists in its denials of the Armenian genocide, abetted by a well-endowed network of unsavory political and pseudo-academic lobbyists operating with the imprimatur of morphing geo-strategic rationales. Until the Soviet Union imploded, "Turkey as a bulwark against Communism," was the justifying mantra; now, "Turkey as a bulwark against radical Islam," is constantly invoked
This leeway afforded Turkey is both morally indefensible, and increasingly, devoid of any geo-strategic value. West Germany was arguably a much more direct and important ally against the Soviet Communist bloc, while each successive post-World War II West German administration, from Konrad Adenauer through Helmut Kohl, made Holocaust denial a punishable crime. Moreover, there is burgeoning evidence, available almost daily, that Turkey's government under the Muslim ideologue Erdogan, and large swaths of the Turkish media, intelligentsia, and general public, are stridently anti-American, and hardly qualify as "bulwarks against radical Islam." Indeed, Turkey's contemporary Islamic "revival" is of particular relevance to the tragic events that transpired between 1894 and the end of World War I, precisely because the Armenian genocide was in large measure a jihad genocide.
And here's what I say: How indignant can we get about Holocaust denial when, due to political expediency, we're afraid to stand behind the Armenian people in this fight for recognition of their own national tragedy? Turkey would benefit by finally coming to grips with its culpability in this matter. And rather than allowing Israel to pressure the American Jewish community into trying to bury the issue, the American Jewish community ought to be encouraging Israel to stop equivocating on it. If Turkey's friendship (such as it is these days) depends on our complicity in denying genocide, we need to find a way to do without Turkey's friendship. To paraphrase an overused quote from the sage Hillel:
-- If we are not for ourselves, who will be for us? And if we are only for ourselves, what are we? And if not now, when?
