Knotty theodicy confronts nitwits like McCain and patriotic fundamentalists here, apart from their self-congratulatory air because they purport to be Christians. (Me, I always thought they were Protestants, and God was cursing them endlessly with besetting, fruitless, myopic, fissile quarrels among themselves):

Why did God wait 1776 years after the putative birth of Christ to set about establishing said Christian nation? If this was the way to go, 33 CE would have been nicer--given Bar Kochba and the Zealots a better deal too. Not to mention 1915 years of trouble for the Jews.

Why did God pick a continent whose very existence was not suspected, in a hemisphere that was "recognized" to have no landmass, in a language not even a faint inkling of which was discernible in 33 CE, and a secular constitutional regime that gave human slavery and genocidal policies toward the native inhabitants a legal basis, to declare His National Purpose? Must pursue sometime the lack of even a hint in any Scripture that this US Project was to come. That absence of any explicitly declared Divine Sanction is what caused major anxiety among Protestants though, with all their Scriptural fictions. So they wrote some new ones, and they are still writing them . . . ).

Why did God pick a bunch of lawyers to carry off the covert Christianization of the state. Why were policies so ineffective that the country fell into a bloody civil war a mere 85 years later. Why are we still litigating effects of that war?

The only possible resolution is that the United States is the Second Coming of Christ. And that is all that Murricans like McCain get by way of salvation. God plays gotcha! every day with the arrogant.

No, no, blow job or not, you're missing the point (!), Michael. No matter how many Jewish groups are set to the task of vilifying each other, none is supposed to mount its attacks in a manifestly nitwitted and sloppy manner. A shanda of argument. Factional hatred is to be carried off with logic, arrogance, and panache, please. As my grandfather used to say (this remark excluded Jews, Greeks, and Italians north of Naples): "Some of these odars (goyim) have all they can do just to get their underwear on straight in the morning." As I watch official Mr. Foxman and the official Turks slurping deeply in stupid clichés, I have to wonder whether they have indeed got their underwear on straight, and whether an underlying inadequacy to argue trimly is what really drives them compulsively to self-righteousness. A moment ago I googled Jewishist, to see if there was such a word to go with Islamist and Christianist; and sure enough: 57 hits. Turkishist has yet to find its first commentator--I guess no one's checked the wretched state of underwear in Ankara yet.

Whether Mr. Foxman knows it or not, the ADL in this matter is folding so fast that it has never had a moment even to catch its breath to do battle against Jewcy. Not a faction fight at all; and hatred of Jewcy must be mixed with confusion: "Where did that puny group come from anyway?" ADL was blindsided, the way Old Régimes often are, through its own myopia and rigidity and false sense of invincibility.

But then, if Mr. Foxman and Mr. Gul could argue trimly, they wouldn't be persisting along such a stupidly hopeless tack as denial of the Armenian Genocide, would they? So maybe Mr. Foxman and Mr. Gul really do simply like each other and are going through a spell of personal hurt. Note Foxman's apology.

If we who are oppressed by derogatory ethnic associations can't always control the narrative, we can still control the symbolism. If those of Jewish faith and/or heritage were to adopt a spelling Gieu (plural: Gieux), the detractors would be confounded. Same for Armenians: Armeau (plural: Armeaux). Such upper-class respellings and reconfigurations are a staple of both Jewish and Armenian assimilatory surnames in the US and Britain anyway. Families have long adopted this practice, since the nineteenth century. Why not take the final step and redesignate the entire community with a prestigious label? A poke in the eye and a gag down the throat of those who would torment us! Outside foes would never dare to accord either Jew or Armenian such a high level of well-bred affirmation. Every time they repeated a "slur", they would contribute to raising our public esteem by the mere fact of utterance.

Yes, Hagop, West Coast, farm boy. Saturday Armenian school. Thank you for the (disheartening) correction re Armo. I was good with my fists: too bad I didn't get a chance to use them for that particular bad word.

All last week Turkish columnists for the newspapers Zaman, Sabah, and Milliyet have been writing that "the perception has become the reality," and that diplomatic pressure on foreign governments to stop Armenian Genocide recognition has failed utterly. The stronger articles have been appearing only in the English, French, and other international wire services of the newspapers, because journalism within Turkey is not yet free, and to state anything for general Turkish readership that comes close to admission of the Genocide would trigger prosecutions under Article 301 ("insulting Turkishness"). But Turkey's facade of denial is showing cracks: 301 is likely a dead letter already, since too many Turkish journalists have skirted it in these last weeks to chase them all down, and no arrests or other concrete government reactions to their articles have followed. Official Turkey looks exhausted. A done deal. What's the use? Trace the slow course of Turkish collapse on No Place for Genocide Denial.

Now comes this:

For the first time in history a Turkish MP speaks of Armenian Genocide recognition

/PanARMENIAN.Net/ For the first time in history a member of the Turkish parliament has recognized the Armenian Genocide and spoken of restitution of the despoiled property.

In an interview with journalist Raffí Arax recently, Turkish MP Mehmet Ufuk Uras said, "We committed a terrible massacre against Armenians and Turkey must recognize it. It’s not important how we name this calamity: genocide, ethnic purification, etc. The most important thing is that a terrible massacre was committed and it is undeniable.”

“We must face up to the history, bandage the wounds, develop the relations with Armenia, defend our Armenian compatriots and restore what was the property of their ancestors. I come from the area of Durig close to Sebastia where I heard the truth from my parents,” he said.

“We are confident that negationism will take us nowhere,” he resumed.

Jewcy explains the story it tells. The Jewish Daily Forward does not.

The editorial in The JDForward approves the benefits of state policies in Israel guided by realpolitik to the detriment of ones guided by moral principles, as if what is on offer is intrinsically an equal-opportunity choice. These two do not have parity: in the long term, moral principles steadfastly hold the upper hand in framing astute political motives of nations. Absent real moral principles, look at what hell modern Turks have put themselves through globally every day and year since 1965 for those crude, contrived threats they levy upon any who consider recognition of the Armenian Genocide. A mess: the Turks squirm this way and that against steady bodies of Armenian and Jewish--even universal--educated opinion. The JDForward editorial further counsels American Jews, in the present "post-post-Holocaust era", to trust in the rightness of an Israeli realpolitik that forged an open-ended alliance with such a dissembling and inconstant Turkey (whether or not one assumes that Israel in fact has this outlook or has weighed the outlook wisely). In the short term, approving the realpolitik which The JDForward discerns in Israel's alliance with Turkey will encourage a nugatory stance toward the Armenian Genocide. Whew, got rid of that pesky problem. Such approval will focus American Jewish attention where it belongs, the script runs. Grappling with the Armenian Genocide is supposed to vanish thereby from many sectors of American Jewish opinion as trifling and irrelevant. All that remains will be to explain Israeli policies tout court plausibly to the wider audience as they unfold. The new "post-post-Holocaust era" will resemble nothing so much as the failed, discredited nineteenth-century "Great Game" of Middle Eastern diplomacy, but with Israel as an added piece.

Israel in fact is going to do what it is going to do, but a compass will be lost if The JDForward does not give attention to moral principle as an explanatory ground. More than that, however, realpolitik has its own internal dynamic--which is a problematic dynamic, devilishly hard to manage. If you are serious, you have to blend cynicism with arrogance to hold the realpolitik patches steady, and let your experience feed the scheme. If you are not serious, you can be cavalier toward the whole enterprise. You can be either, and remain in good standing, because realpolitik is a reactive, opportunistic, and self-contradictory force, without any explanatory underlay beyond the fugitive interpretive goals of whoever is writing about policy at The JDForward that week. The control and delivery of a misshapen perception count for all. Realpolitik in this guise is an invader's rationale. A "defensive" policy fashioned on realpolitik is elsewhere usually a prop for a scheme of naked aggression. Are readers of The JDForward so gullible as to turn on a dime again and again and follow editorial views of Israeli "realpolitik" wholeheartedly as the component factors churn through all sorts of labyrinths, no matter what? Soon everyone, subscribers and others, will simply turn off attention and leave commentary on Israel to its squishy fate.

We as human beings now have achieved, in the definition of genocide, alertness to a universal moral standard in politics for the first time. That definition of genocide is a compass upon which to plot one lone bit of rightness of any nation's internal and foreign policies. American Jewish efforts have done a lot to inform the result. In denoting this scant distance, by forging a definition of genocide that pretty much every nation can figure out, we have reached a moral terra firma to measure nations and for nations to measure themselves. One hopes that we humans will build on the success and agree on still more definitions in common to reduce politically-caused disorder and suffering. Why pull back from this gain? In realpolitik what goes around comes around. Let the tough moral choices lie where they are, then try to clear them up the hard way--with a compass in mind. Israel ought to take on a proactive role here. Good for the long term, you know.

DK writes: "You may be helping Armenians, but you are doing so at the expense of Israel's alliance with Turkey. The more you win, the more it hurts that alliance."

A canard. I've thought a bit about these scary "consequences" to countries which recognize the Armenian Genocide myself. Let's see, in the retaliation mode, Turkey ought no longer to deal with France, Belgium, Italy, Sweden, Switzerland, The Netherlands, Canada, Russia, Spain, several other countries, and, it seems, soon the United States as well. You can bet your bootie that Great Britain will be next in the crosshairs of Armenian and Jewish efforts--Wales has already fallen. That done, who's left? Well, Israel. Beyond Israel though, say, who's left? By 2010 Turkey will be turning for technological aid and weapons systems to the flourishing scientific and military export industries of Antigua, Nepal, Costa Rica (which has no army itself), and, in a pinch, Andorra.

Anon. writes: "as soon as Stalingrad (St. Petersburg) fell to the Germans, Turkey was to invade the Soviet Union via Armenia."

But Stalingrad today is not St. Petersburg. It is Volgograd. Leningrad is St. Petersburg. Both were under siege. Loss of Leningrad would have had greater impact on the general balance of military forces, although the contest over Stalingrad ("the meat grinder") bore immense symbolic status to both sides, and moreover was far nearer Turkey. Which of these in German hands would have impelled Turkey, or both?