Tragic bond

January 13, 2008
Boston Globe
By Erica Noonan
Globe Staff

The history ties between Jews and Armenians are so strong that it is doubly tragic and transparent when some organizations including Israel play their political cards to minimize the importance to history of the Armenian genocide.

For over 60 years, Meyer Hack, who survived the notorious Nazi death camp of Auschwitz, hid a grim secret - artifacts he found while processing clothes confiscated from new arrivals. Now, Hack has donated the items to the Israeli national Holocaust memorial. But first, they will appear in Watertown, in an unusual collaboration between the local Armenian and Jewish communities, which have been at odds over interpretations of history.

WATERTOWN - Auschwitz survivor Meyer Hack kept his secret for more than 60 years - a small cache of pocket watches, an exquisite diamond ring, an ornate Old World bracelet of gold and emerald, and other jewelry that Jewish Holocaust victims took to their deaths.

Hack spent four years as an inmate at the notorious Nazi concentration camp, where he worked on the camp's laundry crew - processing clothing the Nazis had confiscated from new arrivals to Auschwitz, and handing out uniforms to other prisoners. He would occasionally find jewels and other valuables in the pockets, or sewn into garment linings, and kept them hidden in a sock in his barracks.

As Hack and his wife, Sylvia, also an Auschwitz survivor, raised their two sons, and moved to Brighton in the 1960s, the 16 pieces of jewelry remained with him, hidden in his attic, a morbid collection he could not bring himself to reveal.

Now a frail 92-year-old, Hack has chosen to unveil the precious artifacts on Jan. 20 in an unusual joint exhibit at the Armenian Library and Museum of America in Watertown, home of the nation's only permanent display on the Armenian genocide. As the first public unveiling of the objects he kept secret for so long, the exhibit offers some closure to Hack, but it also offers the hope of resolution for members of two communities split over interpretations of history.

[...]

The Armenians understand Jewish suffering, said Hack, who will be joined at the exhibit opening by Armenian genocide survivor Kevork Norian of Arlington.

"We have to tell the world what happened. My diary is written on my heart, and I have to tell the world about what I saw," said Hack, a Polish-born Jew who was deported to Auschwitz in 1941 at age 27. His mother, brother, and two sisters were put to death.

Norian, who is also 92, will sit side-by-side with Hack during the two-hour long event, and tell the assembled crowd about his own connection to tragedy. "We can't let these memories die," said Norian. "I do not expect to be around too much longer."

The local showing was organized by Susie Davidson, a writer from Brookline who profiled Hack in her 2005 book about Boston-area Holocaust survivors, "I Refused to Die."

Watertown, home to 8,000 Armenian-Americans, is an ideal place for the joint exhibit to reaffirm relations between the Jewish and Armenian communities, she said, adding her hope that it will also heighten awareness of modern-day genocide.

"You realize how similar suffering is between people who have gone through something like this," said Davidson, who has studied contemporary genocides in Africa, as well as mass murders in Bosnia, Cambodia, and Europe.

[...]


Note: Above are excerpts from the article. The full article appears here. Clarifications and comments by me are contained in {}. Deletions are marked by [...]. The bold emphasis is mine.

From the mountains of Ararat

21/12/2007
Ha'aretz, Israel
By James R Russell

I am an American Jewish scholar, a Zionist, and though I have devoted a lifetime to studying the culture of Armenia, it is not my own. Nonetheless, it is fascinating, perplexing and relevant to, and intertwined with, important Jewish issues today. Armenia's uniqueness among the countries of the Near East is striking: Unlike surrounding Georgia, Kurdistan and Iran, it has no indigenous Jewish community; yet its history is more closely analogous to our own than that of any other nation. The Armenians formed the first Christian state, one that has endured in embattled isolation and proud independence: In their literature, written in a unique script unchanged over 15 centuries, the Armenians accordingly identify themselves with the Maccabees.

Their stubborn determination to be themselves, and to be free, made Armenians the object of fear and hatred in the disintegrating Ottoman Empire. During World War I, they endured the 20th century's first genocide, a term coined some years later by a Jewish jurist, with the avowed purpose of giving legal definition to this unprecedented crime. At the time the Turkish rulers called their campaign a "jihad." The people of a handful of Armenian villages on Musa Dagh, a mountain on Turkey's Mediterranean coast, just north of the present-day Syrian border, fought off several Turkish armies until the French navy rescued the survivors.

The year before Hitler came to power an Austrian Jew, Franz Werfel, published his novel "The Forty Days of Musa Dagh." The Nazis banned it, its best-selling author fled to the United States, and in 1939 the German dictator assured his generals that just as nobody remembered the Armenians, whatever the Germans might do in Poland, they would never be punished for it. As the Wehrmacht advanced in 1942 through North Africa, some leaders of the pre-state Jewish community in Israel even talked about preparing for a last stand on Mt. Carmel on the model, not of Masada, but of Musa Dagh.

Not all the Armenians were murdered: Many fled into the northeastern part of their ancient homeland, still ruled then by the Russian Empire; and in 1918, the first independent Armenian state in half a millennium was proclaimed at the capital, Erevan. But a bitter civil war ensued among the Armenians: The Communists took control, the centrist government of the Dashnak (Armenian Revolutionary Federation) party fled into exile, and Armenia disappeared behind the Iron Curtain. America, fearful of the Red Menace and anxious to maintain good relations with strategically important Turkey, did indeed forget the Armenians. In 1935, the State Department, acceding to Turkish pressure, even forced MGM in Hollywood to cancel production of a film version of Werfel's book.

The embittered Dashnaks had in the meantime embraced racist and fascist ideology. On Christmas Day of 1933, at an Armenian church in Manhattan, two of their leaders disemboweled a political opponent, Archbishop Leon Tourian, during mass, in full view of thousands of parishioners. In Boston, their newspaper Hayrenik ("Fatherland") praised the German Fuehrer and youths of the Tseghagron ("Race Worship") group marched. Hitler intended to finish off the Armenians, though, and the Luftwaffe dropped leaflets over Erevan inviting the local Azerbaijani Turks to sharpen their knives. In fact, Soviet Armenia lost a quarter of its population in the fight against fascism.

Meanwhile, in New York, Avedis Derounian, a young man from a family of genocide survivors who himself had witnessed the murder of Archbishop Tourian, vowed to waken the U.S. to the dangers of homegrown fascism. After the war he traveled to the Middle East, and in his 1950 report on that trip, "From Cairo to Damascus," described how Nazism had been transplanted into the Arab world and offered the prescient declaration that radical Islam would prove to be a greater and more enduring danger to mankind than Communism.

Derounian saw Israel as the model for a free and democratic Armenia, and felt instinctively that Jews were his brethren. Many Armenians, however, were and are on the other side of the Arab-Israel divide; some Armenians had even supported the Nazis; and Israel, for its part, was to find it politic to court Turkey's friendship.

In Jerusalem four years ago, a young Armenian nurse who was to be honored on Israel Independence Day for her work rehabilitating victims of suicide bombings had to watch as Turkish pressure on the Israeli government led the ceremony's organizers to remove from the program all reference to her family having been survivors of the genocide. Armenians have reacted to this kind of holocaust denial with justifiable rage.

As Harvard's only professor of Armenian studies, I have found myself attempting to negotiate a viable, middle way, and have suggested that the Jewish community in America support genocide recognition by the U.S., which Israel might then follow, in the face of Turkish threats, which have included an attempt to blackmail the small Sephardic community in Turkey. Turkish intellectuals and defenders of human rights, like the historian Taner Akcam and the Nobel Prize-winning writer Orhan Pamuk, have insisted at great personal risk that Turkey reexamine its past. We should support them.

At the same time, I have pointed out, one needs to recognize that there is real anti-Semitism in the Armenian community, and scapegoating of Israel and Zionism often goes well beyond the issues and becomes a cover for deeper hatreds. The Dashnaks, Hitler's wartime buddies, who are still a presence both within Armenia and in the diaspora, have jumped on the anti-Israel bandwagon, championing the Palestinian cause on American campuses. Their central committee sponsors a traveling circus called "Armenians and the Left," featuring Israel-bashers like Noam Chomsky and Robert Fisk.

Hannah Arendt was right: Anti-Semitism is the only survivor of the totalitarian ideologies of the last century. Not only that, but the "socialism of fools" is truly international again, and gaining strength. So if it comes to it, I'll leave my books and shoulder a rifle on Musa Dagh or Mt. Carmel. But until then I'll carry on studying the mystical meditations, poems and myths of the ancient and indestructible people from the mountains of Ararat, the Armenians.

James R. Russell is Mashtots Professor of Armenian Studies at Harvard University.

Note: Above are excerpts from the article. The full article appears here. Clarifications and comments by me are contained in {}. Deletions are marked by [...]. The bold emphasis is mine.

The Enemy of My Friend is My Enemy? The Jewish Diaspora and Genocide Denial

20.12.2007
Die Jüdische, Austria

Noah's Ark

With all due respect to the numerous Jewish-born humanists, historians, writers, individual personalities, Chief Rabbi, Yona Metzger and many other that have had the courage to take a stand for the recognition of the Armenian Genocide and justice for this crime, it is none the less obvious that the official representatives of Judaism and above all Jewish/Israeli politicians still have a lot to catch up on.

Even though the internationally recognized and respected Jewish jurist and human rights activist Rafael Lemkin already concerned himself with and recognized the systematic destruction of the Armenians as a "murder of race" at the start of the 1930s, the fact remains that justice for the Armenian Genocide is still being aggressively denied by influential organizations of the Jewish Diaspora as well as by the State of Israel itself.

Genocide - extermination of a race - is a political crime. Genocides are not committed by private individuals, but by the state itself. The reference to historians and historical science in regard to the Armenian Genocide is a tactical and spurious argument to relieve the world governments from the responsibility to act while simultaneously giving the perpetrators carte blanche. The proper reaction to political crimes is therefore only possible through political response - from the parliamentary houses, the politicians and the governments.

Now more than ever the denial of genocide must be responded to, for denial is intrinsic to the methodology of genocide. Genocide is denied even as it is practiced.

From the beginning, the perpetrator seeks pretexts and justifications to conceal the real intentions. Thus, the extermination is referred to as "transporting," as "deportation" or "resettlement" - "moving to secure places" or even as the "final solution." A verbal code is used to camouflage and thus deny the annihilation, even as it is being committed.

Genocide without simultaneous denial is unthinkable - yes, even impossible. The first thing that must be done is to consider what the perpetrators want to attain through denial. Denial is not just the simple negation of an act; it is much more the consequent continuation of the very act itself. Genocide should not only physically destroy a community; it should likewise dictate the prerogative of interpretation in regard to history, culture, territory and memory. As the victims- Armenians - "never exists".

The Turkish have not only murdered humans , destroyed an ancient culture/civilization and rewritten history, but they continue to legitimize the act as well as the racist ideology that led to the act. This includes the legitimization of any and all stereotyping of the Armenian people as a dangerous enemy, as a deadly bogeyman in the closet.

Denial is the final step in the completion of a mass extermination - and the first step towards the next genocide. If genocide is committed in Ruanda or Sudan, it is done with the knowledge that the rest of the world will only watch and then forget.

They look to Turkey and think themselves safe in the assumption that their actions will likewise remain unpunished! Whether in Sudan or Ruanda or any other potential hotspot of mass murder the accountable powers-that-be rhetorically ask - as Hitler supposedly did just before invading Poland - "Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?"

The Republic of Turkey has denied the Armenian Genocide for the past 84 years, and politicians in Israel and a vast majority of officials of Jewish Diaspora are aboard their boat now. In the USA, for example, the Jewish Anti-Defamation League (ADL) not only denied the Armenian Genocide in the past but also actively fought against the Congressional Resolution for the Recognition of the Armenian Genocide. At the end of August 2007, the ADL finally recognized the Armenian Genocide through gritted teeth. The acknowledgment given, however, was qualified to such an extent that one could have done without it. A similar statement of recognition was also simultaneously supplied by the American Jewish Committee.

Presently, the AIPAC totally denies to have ever fought against the official recognition of the Armenian Genocide by the US government and now presents itself as being neutral in regard to the subject. (And apparently "neutral" is just what they are.)

Pierre Besnainou, the acting president of the European Jewish Congress (EJC) until early 2007, stated in 2006 that the Armenian people should stop making fools of themselves: there has been only one genocide in modern times and as everyone knows it was that of the Jews - an Armenian Genocide never happened. (We have yet to see what the attitude of Moshe Kantor, the current president of the EJC, is in this regard.)

In 2001, while he was the Israeli Foreign Minister, Nobel Prize winner and current President of Israel Shimon Peres described the Armenians as "meaningless" ("Armenian allegations") Moreover, this year President Shimon Peres and the current Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni did a heroic act that in no way pales to the statements regarding the Holocaust expressed by the President Ahmadinejad: Peres affirmed Israel's attitude to the "Armenian Question" and promised the Turkish Prime Minster Erdogan to lobby against the Armenians, while Minster Livni prevented the Knesset from officially recognizing the Armenian Genocide.

The statement given: "Genocide never happened. There was a "tragedy" with victims on both sides. Please reconcile yourselves now and start a dialog." Once again, a replay of the Turkish argument of shameless denial by a Israeli official: "There were mutual killings and No mass Killings."

Just recently Israeli President Shimon Peres let himself be vocally celebrated by hundreds of Genocide deniers in the Turkish Parliament, including numerous Turkish fascists, racists, ultra-nationalists and fundamentalists In Ankara, President Shimon Peres reiterated his support for the denial of the Armenian Genocide and conveyed his full acceptance of the Turkish politics of lies and denial. But it cannot escape the notice of an experienced politician like President Shimon Peres that the Genocide deniers in Ankara are no longer simply satisfied with the repudiation of the Armenian Genocide.

Turkish Prime Minster Erdogan and the other Turkish nationalists have long since joined forces to create panturanic - "Pan Turkish"- institutions with the specific aim of try(ing) to prove the 'illegality' of the existence of the Armenian people to the world.

When the French Ambassador to Great Britain, Daniel Bernard, referred to Israel as "this shitty little country" in 2001, there was a storm of protest and he was quickly labeled an Anti-Semite. But what should an Armenian call someone that denies the Armenian Genocide and refers to Armenians as "meaningless"? If that were even just all that is being done: Above and beyond this, Turkey has demanded that Israel instruct the "Jewish Lobby" to agitate against the Armenians. Of course the reference to the "Jewish Lobby" is an allusion to the Jewish Diaspora and - as is the case when talking of Diasporas - carries a whiff of world conspiracy and global domination.

Thus, the "Jewish Conspiracy" should follow Ankara's tune and eliminate, obliterate, purge (whatever you choose to call it) the "Armenian Conspiracy." Under normal circumstances the concept would be laughable, but laughter is not advisable as it could result in asphyxiation.
Why Do Jewish Organizations and their Functionaries Deny the Armenian Genocide as Turkey Does Deny recognition and Justice for this Crime?

How can this act of denial be harmonious with the Jewish moral concepts and identity in light of the xenophobia, racism, Anti-Semitism, hostility and intolerance that the sorely tested Jewish People are themselves confronted with on a daily basis? Genocide is racism: it is the most paramount and aggressive form of racial discrimination, and is aimed at the obliteration of the existence and life of a people only because they belong to a specific community or collective - a community that is defined by the aggressors as "the others," as "the alien."

Two reasons are commonly given for the "placating" activities of the international Jewish community in regard to Turkey's denial policies: Israel needs Turkey, and the Holocaust is unique. On occasion a third reason is also offered: to do otherwise would result in repercussions against the Jewish community in Istanbul. (Although if this were true, the US Congress and Senate could never pass any resolutions against Iran: as is well known, numerous Jewish people also live in Tehran, Yazd, and Isfahan for centuries!) Statements such as those are, in the end, nothing but hollow attempts to justify denial-
The attitude of Jewish Organizations and their functionaries in regard to the Armenian Genocide not only results in their involvement in the guilt of the perpetrators but also produces a culpability of their own as well.

An attitude such as theirs supports and perpetuates the bogeyman image of the Armenians that has long been cherished by the Turkish while simultaneously strengthening the Turkish nationalistic self-image. Above and beyond this, when Jewish functionaries describe the Ottoman Turkey as a paradise of earth, they both distort history and negate the inhumanities experienced by the Armenian People; instead, an unmerited image of a heroic and pro-Judaic Turkey is propagated throughout Jewish communities and private homes.

Thus, in turn, within the sphere of the Jewish Diaspora and even Israel itself, a new generation grows that is spoon-fed the misconceptions of the valiant Turk and perfidious Armenian. In regard to this current situation, is oddly ironic that the modern usage of the word "Holocaust" - used so often by international communities to describe the Shoah - was first introduced to describe the Turkish bloodbath suffered by the Armenians in Adana in 1909. (Ferriman, Z.D.: The Young Turks and the Truth about the Holocaust at Adana in Asia Minor during April 1909; London, 1913.)

The Enemy of My Friend is also My Enemy
Is the demonization of the Armenian Community within the Jewish Diaspora done with this concept in mind? Some examples among others: In July 2007 an article was published in the "Jüdische Zeitung" ("Jewish Newspaper") in Germany which totally supported and serviced the policies of genocide denial and victim-perpetrator-reversal as practiced alla Turca.

The "Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs" published in November this year in its webpage an article written by Ms. Aydan Kodaloglu, an advisor to the former Turkish President Turgut Özal; in her article, Kodaoglu attempted to make the denial of the Armenian Genocide (even more) palatable for the Jewish and Israeli population. (Ironically enough, according to Nüzhet Kandemir, the former Turkish ambassador to the USA, President Turgut Ozal was himself on the brink of recognizing the Armenian Genocide.)

In turn, in the Jerusalem Post Joel J. Sprayregen (the former National Vice-Chair of the ADL and a member of the Executive Committee of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA)) took the Armenian resistance during the Genocide to justify denial alla Turca - "There was no genocide" - he was referring to history fakers - despite the fact that he must be fully aware that one could easily reinterpret reality and deny the Jewish Holocaust through the misrepresentation of the Warsaw Uprising, the Theresienstadt- deportation camp, the "sale" and departure of the Jews to Switzerland during the Holocaust and survival of millions of Jews people ...

And in the US, one could easily come to assume that Washington Times - which often reads as a copy of the Turkish press - aims at leading a war against the Armenian Genocide Resolution (HR 106) in the US Congress.

Holocaust-denier, David Irving, is serving more and more as example as a paradigm for the denial of Armenian Genocide. Mr. Lenny Ben-David, former undersecretary at the Israeli Embassy in the US and A adviser for five years to the Turkish embassy in Washington, until earlier this summer, In his article published in the Oct. 5 issue of the Jerusalem Post, titled "Turkey and Armenia: What Jews should do," Not only denied the Armenian Genocide and creates hysteria and Armenophobe but in his article he gives a lot of credit to the fabrication of Turkish and Azeri nationalists and fascists. This is again not a hidden fact even for this politician that the aim of Turkish fabrications against Armenians in the next step includes: suggesting removing Armenia from the maps, as a people and country which doesn't exist...

If you assume A Armenian student from Jerusalem will be allow in an official ceremony in Israel to refer to the Armenian Genocide, you are mistaken. This shouldn't come to you as a surprise either; in Istanbul the remaining Armenian children from "Western Armenia" (After Gencode renamed to "Eastern Anatolia") are forced to write essays how their ancestors committed "genocide against Turks" (This is just distressful, nauseating, sadistic and perverse.)

Denial is known as a second killing (a "bloodless-killing"). There is an aggressive denial of Armenian Genocide on going by Turkey. Unfortunately, a big part of officials of Jewish Diaspora and Israel are involved in the denial of Armenian Genocide and this act - their involvement in denial - doesn't differ much from the involvement of German military officer in Armenian Genocide in 1915 (This reference should make clearer - to help to reach a better understanding- what really the denial of Armenian Genocide by Jewish politicians means for Armenian people and other Christian people who were subject of genocide by Turkish!)

If politically allies do it, it's not genocide but "Tragedy". There are Turkish "palace historians" that aim to erase all references to "Armenia" and "Armenian people" in the libraries of the world. This is a fact that is easily documented. Professor Dr. Yusuf Halaçoðlu, the racially motivated President of the Turkish Historical Society with the assistance of Turkish fascists, extends great effort on proving the non-existence of the Armenian People and, in turn, the state of "Armenia." The statements of many Jewish Diaspora officials that "there was no Armenian Genocide" play directly into the hands of the official policy Turkey and the Turkish Nationalists and fascists.

A nation that has been the victim of genocide should not be forced to prove the fact of genocide. For a nation to support the perpetrators of genocide by placating the world with official statements supporting the Turkish government's shameless policies of denial is disgraceful and appalling; for a nation that itself has likewise suffered an attempted obliteration to do so is incomprehensible. The "placating" efforts by Jewish officials and functionaries are doomed to backfire: the denial of the Armenian Genocide in no way helps to make Israel stronger or to increase the security of the Jewish People.

Turkey and Turkish nationalists have always used other people for the implementation of their inhuman policies against "non-Turks" in order to achieve their own final goals, if not their own "final solution"

Words such as dialogue, reconciliation, and rapprochement are terms that awaken fundamentally positive associations, but they are being used without any reflection upon or reference to historical fact or fairness, let alone justice. It is beyond understanding that the newspapers of the Jewish Diaspora present the Armenians as the "irreconcilable" or "troublemaker", as the "true" disruptor in international relations, when it is the Turkish that continually attempt to illegalize or negate the discussion. (What dialogue would the Jewish Nation have with Germany had Germany demanded and been permitted to forbid the acknowledgment of the holocaust and justice?)

Is the Jewish community the "troublemaker" when the Iranian President Ahmadinejad denies the Shoah? A crime that happened 60 years ago and that he himself did not participate in?

The statement that the genocide happened 90 years ago or the insinuation that the Armenian Diaspora - the "Armenian Conspiracy" - are endangering world peace because they are motivated by self-swerving interests serve again nothing else than to protect the perpetrator. But is it not the purpose and duty of international criminal law to protect the victim? Should criminal law protect the rapist or killer because the victim supposedly "asked for it"? Is international law only a "law for the stronger" and thus only there to protect the state and not the
individual?

Are terms such as "crimes against humanity," "genocide," "war crimes" and "war of aggression" only there to protect the aggressors and not the victims?
The Armenian Diaspora - the masses of people forced to disperse throughout the world - is a result of the genocide executed by the Turkish; the Diaspora Armenians are not pursuing an arbitrary and unfounded interest, they have a justified demand for justice and recognition. At the same time, this demand is also a concern of the international community of states which created and approved the legislation known as "public international law" or "international criminal law."

It is not just a matter of morality to condemn genocide, it is a premise for peaceful coexistence. It is a cornerstone of international peace, and the looming threat of this very crime is a principal reason behind military intervention and self-defense.

A question that might arise when reading this text is why do I only write about the Jewish Community and Israeli politicians? Well, this is due to the following fact: aside from the Turkish themselves, Israeli politicians and the Jewish Diaspora are the only ones that go beyond the "simple" denial of the Armenian Genocide (and denial of Turkish genocides against other Christian people, e.g. The Assyrian Genocide) to both aggressively practice a virulent policy of denial and likewise try to inspire others to do the same.

For example, the unprecedented dedication with which Shimon Peres supported the "fight" against the Armenian Resolution in the US Congress while Bill Clinton was still president.

The relationship between the Jewish People and the Turkish is based on lies and the denial of the Armenian Genocide - the denial of the 1.5 million Armenians that died by the hands of the Ottoman Turkey from 1915-1923. It is a relationship that is based on criminal complicity in hushing up a horrific transgression against humanity and that totally disregards all concepts of moral and justice.

Namik Tan, the Turkish Ambassador to Israel, described this relationship in September 2007: "The Turkish People make no differentiation between Israel and the Jews of the world. To us, you are all one. We have no pact with Israel, but rather with the whole Jewish world. If the Jewish lobby disappears, Israel loses its importance to us. Therefore, Israel takes the responsibility when a Jewish organization speaks of Genocide."

The truth will set Turkish and Jewish officials free. Implementation of international agreed reforms for "Western Armenia/ Turkish Armenian" and eliminating - "getting rid" - of a nation/people by Turkey are not the same. Only the fact of genocide can keep alive disinformation policy, the genocide denial industry and the nationally authorized and aggressive Turkish politics of denial. Israeli/Jewish officials should advice their "friends/allies" in Ankara to stop making fools of themselves. Armenian Genocide was proved as Armenian Genocide was happening.

The whole world was witness of this genocide. Besides this: Armenian Genocide is well documented above all by Turkish war time ally Germany (even though a part of this documents being destroyed in1919 and 1940s.)
According to Taner Akcam, a nonconformist Turkish historian, "The denial of the Armenian Genocide is the basis of Turkey's existence." At the latest, Namik Tan's statements above and the aggressive denial of Armenian Genocide by President Shimon Peres also reveal and proves that the relationship between Israel and Turkey is also based the denial of the Armenian Genocide (raison d'État instead of right to truth and justice.)

One cannot help but wonder how long a relationship built on boundless dishonesty, immorality, denial and lies is capable or destined to last... Indeed, it is truly incomprehensible that the Jewish Diaspora denies the Armenian Genocide for the "good" of Israel. What lasting "good" has ever come from the denial of genocide, from the denial of truth, from the denial of the justice?


Author's Note: I am aware of the fact that my analyze of Jewish Denial of Armenian Genocide may upset some so please feel free to write comments on it . And, in the meantime, the author likes to let you know: who ever denies one genocide he/she denies all genocides. Jewish denial of Armenian Genocide kills not only the Armenian Genocide but in the end this denial kills The Jewish Holocaust too...

E-mail: noahsark2008@yahoo.com

"die jüdische" 20.12.2007 13:10

Note: Above are excerpts from the article. The full article appears here. Clarifications and comments by me are contained in {}. Deletions are marked by [...]. The bold emphasis is mine.

Armenian and Jewish groups join together

Tuesday September 11 2007
Jewish Advocate, MA
By Molly Ritvo

Attendees gather in front of the State House.Councilor Ross: 'Never again' for all communities

Political and religious leaders from the Jewish and Armenian-American communities gathered at the State House Aug. 30 to display their solidarity and to recognize the Armenian genocide. The event was held in response to the recent controversy surrounding the Anti-Defamation League’s refusal to acknowledge the genocide.

“The two communities joined hands to ensure that a genocide will never, ever again happen,” said State Representative Rachel Kaprielian of Watertown, who organized the event along with Councilor Michael P. Ross, a member of the Boston City Council.
The late afternoon event was not heavily attended, but those who spoke emphasized the importance of their message.

“In our community we use the phrase ‘never again and never forget,’ and that doesn’t just refer to the Jewish community,” said Ross. “It refers to the acknowledgment of all humanity and all genocide and all intolerance. It’s very important that we show the Armenian community that there’s support.”

Ross added that his father, who was originally scheduled to speak at the event, is a Holocaust survivor, which has helped inform his opinion on genocide recognition.
Ross and Kaprielian, longtime friends, said it was important to join their communities together now to avoid further fallout from the recent tensions.

“We want to soothe ongoing animosities that have developed of late,” said Ross.
As local pressure mounted on the ADL and Abraham H. Foxman, the organization’s national director, the human rights group eventually switched its stance and recognized the Armenian massacres as “tantamount to genocide.” Still of concern to the Armenian community, however, is Foxman’s assertion that the genocide is an issue that only Turkey and Armenia should address. Foxman said he will not support a congressional resolution recognizing the genocide.

“The most important step in stopping genocide is to recognize it,” said Kaprielian.
Holocaust survivor Izzy Darakhoyskiy, who also spoke at the event, agreed with Kaprielian.

“Instead of bread, we got bullets,” he said of the Holocaust. “Without acknowledging genocide, people deny it happened.”

Steve Grossman, a former ADL board member and leader in the local Jewish community, said that the two communities should be tightly bonded because both have been through genocides in the 20th century.

Nancy K. Kaufman, executive director of the Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Boston, Sheila Decter, director of the Jewish Alliance for Law and Social Action, and Rabbi Ron Friedman of Temple Israel were also in attendance.

Following the event, Kaprielian noted that many members of the Jewish community came out in a show of support.

“I was pleased with the breadth of Jewish groups that were there,” she said. “This is not just an ADL issue, but an issue for all human rights organizations. Our goal was creating awareness, affirming that genocide happened, coming together as one community and moving forward to ensure that genocide never happens again.”

Kaprielian added that there will be a continuing effort to foster the partnership between the Jewish and the Armenian communities.

Note: Above are excerpts from the article. The full article appears here. Clarifications and comments by me are contained in {}. Deletions are marked by [...]. The bold emphasis is mine.

Joining hands with the Armenians

Monday August 27 2007
The Jewish Advocate

James R. Russell - A Harvard professor reflects on his work in the Armenian community

Many readers of this paper will share my early memory of being told to eat up because of the “starving Armenians.”

Even in first grade, at the Walden School on 88th & Central Park West (it’s no longer there) I learnt from my friend Maro Avakian, whose Mom was a violinist and whose Dad was a record exec (they lived next door), that something terrible had happened to her grandparents. Armenians didn’t speak about the Genocide in public much then. (Raphael Lemkin, the Jewish lawyer from Poland who coined the term, said he invented it partly to flesh out a legal nomenclature for the horrible, unprecedented phenomenon of the premeditated murder by a modern state – Ottoman Turkey – of an entire people in its midst – Armenians). Jews said little, until after the Eichmann trial, about the Holocaust: We were immigrants making it in an America where we were barely welcome and it was uncool to be a victim.

I learnt Armenian and, as I did ethnography and became a scholar, I interviewed countless hospitable old ladies (Turkish coffee, homemade dolma). The narrative always ended with the death march, the lost relatives, the terminal point in the giant nullity of the Syrian desert with a whole ancient, civilized nation dying. Later, I went to eastern Anatolia, where Turks and Kurds, untutored in denial, said:
See that house? That was where such-and-such an Armenian family lived.

We leave it empty here in Efkere (near Kayseri), because Islam condemns taking the property of a murdered man. In Havav, near Kharpert, a Kurdish teenager takes me behind a barn, away from the security men: Do you know the real name of this country? It’s Armenia. They killed them all!

Were all these hardworking greenhorns, Kurdish and Turkish farmers, secretly meeting to concoct an alibi? Writing fiction? Engaging in a conspiracy? The Austrian Jew Franz Werfel, who wrote “The Forty Days of Musa Dagh” about the Armenian genocide, didn’t think so, and neither did Adolf Hitler when he banned the book, or MGM, when they tried to make a movie of it in 1935 and the U.S. State Department, under Turkish pressure, leaned on them to stop filming. But when Hitler’s forces were advancing through north Africa, our Hagana in the land of Israel (we weren’t a state yet) made plans, on the model of Musa Dagh (it means Mount Moses) to make a last stand on Mount Carmel if the Germans came.

There are some Armenians who are not our friends: A fascist organization called the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (“Dashnak” in Armenian) ran a “Racial Worship” youth group in Boston in the 1930s, raised a unit for Hitler’s Wehrmacht that fought in the North Caucasus in World War II, and supports Arab terrorism against Israel today. They run a traveling circus called “Armenians and the Left”(though they were Red baiters in the 1950s) that features Fisk and Chomsky, and promotes an anti-Israel agenda. They have no problem with Ahmadinejad’s Holocaust denial.

Armenia has strong ties to Iran and Syria; Israel has a strategic alliance with Turkey. We Jews need not apologize to anybody: Our country is in a dangerous neighborhood. I’m glad the Anti-Defamation League recognizes the Armenian genocide now. But I feel uneasy when the spotlight of denial is focused on us, especially by the Dashnaks and their ilk. It’s more appropriate to insist that the next president of the U.S. – the leader of NATO, of which Turkey is a member – recognize the Armenian genocide. Only then can Israel perhaps follow. And let’s be sensible in choosing which people to talk to in the Armenia ncommunity: not the not-so-crypto-Nazi Dashnaks who side with Hamas, but with folks like Maro Avakian. There are a lot of great people out there in the Armenian community with whom we’re natural allies. Let’s extend both of our hands to them.

Before James R. Russell was the Mashtots professor of Armenian Studies at Harvard University, he taught at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem. The picture shows him eating a pirozhok (a sort of small meatpie) at the Zimnyaya Kanavka in St. Petersburg, where he regularly lectures in Russian on Armenian themes.

Note: Above are excerpts from the article. The full article appears here. Clarifications and comments by me are contained in {}. Deletions are marked by [...]. The bold emphasis is mine.