Thanks for some great coverage of these issues. As an Armenian-American with many Jewish friends, it is good to see so many Jewish-Americans' stance now on this issue and their pointing out the hypocrisy of Bush and even the ADL & Foxman regarding the Armenian Genocide.

Our DC politicians have told us the recognition of the Amenian genocide of 1915 would insult our Turkish allies. We have insulted many an Arab and Muslim ally with our support of fascistic Israeli policies towards the Arabs for decades. I bet the Armenians will they had an Israel Lobby!

The Zionists don't want to anger their Turkish friends. Since even before 1915 they have kissed every Turkish ass they could find, from Abdulhamit II on down. For their part, the Armenians are pro-Arab because the Arabs welcomed them as refugees from the Turks. The Armenians also resent the Zionist refusal to share victimhood. The Zionists want to be the only Holocaust victims.

Abraham Fox's antics are about what you can expect from obnoxious professional Jew.

My father was a survivor of the Armenian situation in 1915. He survived and in many cases Turkish people helped him survive. Yes more then a million Armenians were killed. However, my father always said we must learn to forgive and move on.

I am an Armenian and know my history very well. The problem I have with all Armenians fighting for this issue is what do Armenians want, recognition? If so what is the next step? Well I believe it will be retribution…Retribution for Armenians from Turkey is not just about Money. It will become an issue of land. Land that was once Armenia, which is a major part of Turkey.

The Turkish Government is never going to give any land back to Armenia. It will not happen. It is like saying to American to give the land back to the American Indian natives…it will not happen. So Armenians, what do you want? If you are a citizen of any country other then Armenia of today…focus on your current country. If you want to be an Armenian go to Armenia, Don’t get money fat and talk about Armenian issues when you enjoy life elsewhere. As for me I feel I am a man with much exposure and have no problems with any nationality, color religion or race issues.

Excuse me? You are calling the systematic butchering of 1.5 million Armenians by Turks as a mere "Armenian situation". Do you know what genocide mean? If you look up the word genocide, you will undoubtedly see Turkey's picture in it.....BTW, There is no Armenian father who will say such a thing, let alone a genocide survivor. Nice try.

In reaction to Wednesday's Foreign Affairs Committee vote, Turks in the provinces are burning Barbie and Spiderman dolls. (At least they're not burning Armenians and Jews, or they can't find any.) Also, dozens of McDonald's employees in Istanbul did not show up for work.

Read Omer Bartov's new book ERASED about how Ukrainians in Eastern Galicia have destroyed even the memory of the Jews they once helped the Nazis kill.  After killing comes killing of what remains.  Go to eastern Turkey and you will find Turkish officials and Kurdish inhabitants deny that Armenians ever lived there -- even though they had lived there for almost two thousand years. 

 

To deny the Armenian genocide is to kill.

I don't think for one minute that commenter who claims to be the son of an Armenian genocide survivor is in fact an Armenian. 

 

The area in Syria that was recently bombed by IAF is Der Zor, infamous for skeletal remains of Armenians killed there. It is odd to me that no one says what exactly was bombed there, could it be that AIF is helping Turkey erase some of the evidence?

Joey,

It may not be a good idea to agitate Southern California Armenians any more, in majority they are not as calm and educated as the ones in New England area. Some of them might decide to get violent, and we surely do not want that, even though I would not mind driving over to West LA to protect you.. :-)

"My father was a survivor of the Armenian situation in 1915."

People, read this post carefully...and then read it again.

 One of the drawbacks due to the anonymity on the internet is that one can pose as something they are not. The person above is a Turk portraying himself as an Armenian. In each sentence above he repeats the standard official Turkish arguements that are part and parcel of denial. This person is blatantly not Armenian. I am a member of several Armenian forums and we get this from time to time and ussually the impostor posts the exact sentiments, many even admit after much proding that they are indeed Turks. Here is the following evidence:

- No reference to the Genocide...in this case he/she has used "situation"

- Stating that the recognition campaign is about land

-Stop blaming the Turks and focus solely on Armenia...you know, they country we are blockading

-Armenians in the diaspora are all rich and should leave Turkey alone.

Armenians have varing opinions on many different things but all of us agree in the recogintion of the Armenian Genocide. This may indeed seem like a blanket statement but it is true.

The above post shows waht level certain people are willing to go to keep up the charade.

Hitherto, has U.S. Congress ever passed any Jewish holocaust resolution? if the answer is yes, how many? If the answer, is no. You may stop here and thank you so very much for your time. However, if the answer is greater than zero. Then, lets call that value X, if you will.

Now, suppose the Armenian Genocide Resolution # 106 (presently pending in Congress) was instead, Jewish Holocaust Resolution # X+1. Which do you think the right answer below might be? A or B?

A. The Resolution will pass in U.S. Congress.

B. The Resolution will be denied passage in U.S. Congress.

Feel free to elaborate if you think this "hypothetical substitution" would generate a different set of outcome then a set without any substitution. If this indeed alters aftermath. Then what might one learn about the "behind-the-scene-forces" that propagate such diametric opposite outcome when juxtaposed in the aforementioned manner?

Finally, does Justice change form just like matter does relative to the temperature of morality? So solid for some to clench their grasp on, but yet so elusively fluid for others to even dream of.

Vrezh, huh?? What do you mean? Do you live in Glendale? What signs of agitation have you seen? Don't you think an angry protest outside the Federal Building on Wilshire Blvd. would probably have to happen before we started worrying about violence?

Joey,

Civilized people demonstrate, but thugs and blind patriots commit irrational acts of violence, that is what I'm refering to. I'm worried that there will be lots of hotheaded angry young people causing trouble when Bush vetos HR 106.

I think a demonstration in front of the Museum of Tollerance is more in order than the Federal Administration Building. For a long time the museum refused to have a section on Armenian Genocide, even though they get funding from the State of California which officially recognizes the Genocide. I'm sure Abe had some hand in that as well.

I live 20 minutes east of Glendale, 1 mile from the Armenian Genocide Memorial.

Vrezh,

Ah, gotchya. But Bush won't have a chance to veto HR 106. Simple resolutions aren't submitted to the Prez, they're passed as a statement of the will of that chamber of Congress. For same reason, if SR 106 gets voted down, this will not affect the status of HR 106. This is my understanding, anyway.

I agree that a protest in front of Museum of Tolerance is warranted. Rabbi Cooper's statements on the issue seem to suffer from a bit of Foxmania...dancing around intentionality and claiming that the museum has to be sensitive to Turkey's importance to Israel and to the wonderful history of Jews in Turkey. Huh? Because it treated one minority well, Turkey's atrocity against another minority gets downgraded? And why do Israeli foreign policy concerns influence the curatorial decisions of the LA Museum of Tolerance? Isn't their job to protect and perpetuate the memory of the most egregious expressions of intolerance? Like genocides?

On the other hand, I disagree that a protest outside the Los Angeles MoT is more in order than one in front of the Los Angeles Federal Building. All the Jewish institutions in the country couldn't have done nearly as much to damage the resolution's prospects as the White House is now doing.

>>I'm worried that there will be lots of hotheaded angry young people causing trouble when Bush vetos HR 106. <<

Someone correct me if I am wrong, but I don't believe non-binding resolutions progress beyond the body that passes them.  So, if H. Res. 106 passes the House, that's it.  Bush doesn't get the opportunity to veto it.

Yep, that's my understanding. It's a simple resolution which means it passes without being submitted either to Prez or Senate.

Joey you commented that just because Turkey is good to one minority (Jews), does that mean it was good to all its minorities?  This statement might confuse some readers into thinking that Turkey has been good to Jews or any minorities.  It has not!  If Turkey was good to its Jewish citizens, there would be closer to 500,000 Jews living in Turkey today instead of 20,000.  Turkey has been institutionally and socialogically bad to all of its significant minorities: Jews, Armenians, Greeks, Assyrians, and Kurds.  And among these minorities, it is only the Kurds that speak up.  The rest, including the Armenian remnants, shut their pieholes, take their periodic bitch-slapping from the Turkish government and the Turkish people, and then ask if they may have another.  We should ask ourselves, what is it about Turkey that makes it able to turn its minorities into subservient sheep?  Moreover, it even turns their diasporas (at least in the Jewish case) into subservient sheep.  If Mein Kampf and the Valley of the Wolves were the most popular forms of entertainment and pop culture in Great Britain, I think we can all agree that Jews from America to China would be saying something about it.  But not Turkey!  They can elect leaders whose anti-semitism knows no bounds and not a peep from Jews anywhere.  Why is that?

Phantom, yes, I only meant to ask it as general question, removed from the actual history of Jews in Ottoman Empire: why would good treatment of one minority entitle the majority to a "downgrading" of its atrocities against other minorities?

I once heard a Israeli Jewish professor from Hebrew University tell an Israeli Arab Muslim that the claim that Jews had always been treated well in Dar al-Islam was a myth, and as an example he named some historical event. The Israeli Arab shouted, "that wasn't because they were Muslim! It was because they were Ottoman! The Ottomans treated everyone like shit!"

I assume that treatment of Jews and other minorities under the OE varied depending on the time period and context. I don't know enough to safely speak in generalities about it, really.

But two things are certain: (1) I sure wouldn't want to be an ethnoreligious minority in today's Turkey, and (2) The treatment of Jews by the Ottoman Empire is absolutely, totally irrelevant to the question of whether the Ottomans conducted a genocide of Armenians from 1915-1923.

Does the ADL care about the Iranian Jews? 

ADL makes a point to oppose the Armenian genocide resolution in Congress citing the safety of  20,000 Jews in Turkey.  Huh?  Wait a minute!  Did the ADL not care about the 19,000 Jews living in Iran when it supported dozens of resolutions in Congress condemning Iran and Mahmoud Ahmedinajad?

The hypocricies of the ADL just keep on coming... 

Who needs an enemy like Iran's Ahmedinajad when you have Foxman's ADL The #1 bigot and promoter of Antisemitism.

I recommend you read Andrew Bostom's books, an authority on Turkish treatment of the Jews during the Ottoman Empire and present day Turkey. It will make you come up with your own resolution in Congress to condemn Turkey.

As an example, Turks turned away several ships loaded with European Jewery refugees escaping the Holocaust. The ships were ordered off the Turkish coastline and were sank at a distance.

But then again, who cares? we can forget, forgive, minimize, downplay, diminish anything for a price.

Abe and ADL do not worry about jews in Iran, because they know that Iranians have lot more honor than Turks. Iranians will not resort to any unreasonable massacres of jews, where as Turks are capable of mass frenzy and mass killing. When Iranians took the embassy and hostages they were able to restrain themselves from killing them, if that sort of thing were to happen in Turkey, those hostages would have been cut up to pieces in no time.

you are lying turkish "Anonymous" you monkies like to play pretend i'm armenian game. go to hell.

you are absolutely right anonymus. you cannot even compare Iranians to the turks the differance is black and white. my grandparents are survivers of the genocide. they used to tell me the horrific stories of what the murderous turks did to the local armenians from the unborn to very old people.make no mistake about it they were all organized planned murders on an unbelievable scale. I used to have nightmares and i still do from time to time. I was born and raised in Iran. the armenians  had no problems the iranians they are very warm and good people.