From: All the News That Doesn't Fit <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: [NYTr] Mathis: None Dare Call It Genocide
Online Journal - Oct 12, 2007 http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_2525.shtml None dare call it genocide By Andrew E. Mathis Online Journal Guest Writer In case you missed it (and really, unless you live in New England, or you're Armenian, or you have some interested in the Anti-Defamation League [ADL] of B'nai Brith, you probably did), there's been something of a to-do between the ADL and very specifically its leader, Abraham Foxman, and the Armenian-American community of Watertown, Mass. It seems the ADL recently honored the city as one of its "No Place for Hate" cities, only to have the city reject the honor because of the ADL's position on the mass killings of Armenians by the Turkish governments between 1895 and 1922 (peaking in 1915 under the so-called Young Turks). Estimates run between 600,000 and 1.5 million Armenians killed during this period -- either slaughtered wholesale by Ottoman troops and auxiliaries or starved, beaten, and raped on death marches out of Anatolia for "relocation in the east" in Syria and elsewhere. The Armenians have been living in a diaspora very much like that of the Jews for a large portion of their history -- certainly since the conquest of their land by the Turks -- and these massacres took a serious toll on the Armenian population not already safely domiciled in North America, South America, Australia, and other points outside Asia Minor and the Caucasus. So what is the ADL's position on the Armenian massacres? It's shifted in the last month. Originally, the position of the ADL and Foxman was that what happened to the Armenians does not constitute genocide. I'll go over the U.N. definition of genocide in a few moments and show that the Armenian massacres more than meet the criteria set forth there, but what Foxman and the ADL were up to (and still are) is something much more sinister, and the ideology behind what they're doing has two prongs: (1) Insisting on the uniqueness of the Holocaust; and (2) Trying to preserve the generally positive relationship between Turkey and Israel by denying the genocide against the Armenian people. The first issue is a thorny one, because I, personally, would say that the Nazi Holocaust against European Jewry was unique in some ways and not unique in others. But the uniqueness that Foxman and others like him (notably Elie Wiesel) argue for is on a mystical level (which is garbage -- the Nazis killed the Jews because they were in the way and they were deemed as subhumans, and this is pretty much the prerequisite conditions for all genocides), on an historical level (the Holocaust was the culmination of 2,000 years of European anti-Semitism -- and with this point I can agree to a certain extent), and the mechanization of the killing of Europe's Jews (fair enough -- on this point I agree wholly). But am I, a Jewish person and Holocaust educator, willing to say that this was the worst genocide in history or that other mass killings don't count as genocide? In short, do I harbor that level of chutzpah? The answer is no. I am personally of the opinion that the worst genocide in history took place on the continent where I am currently writing this, and that this genocide is continuing as I write. This genocide was/is against the indigenous pre-1492 populations of North and South America by European conquerors and was one of the most wholly effective genocides in all of history. More than 95 percent of the original population of these two continents were either decimated by disease or simply murdered, mainly by the Spanish and British colonists, and later by the U.S. military and Latin American death squads. Entire nations were wiped off the face of the earth, and because they were often preliterate cultures, no trace of them is left except for the occasional archaeological find. That I sit on land right now that used to belong to Lenape Indians, and I've never met a Lenape Indian (and I've lived in this part of the country my entire life) should speak volumes. I would refer the interested reader to David E. Stannard's "American Holocaust," published 15 years ago but no less relevant today. So, in the sick moral calculus to which all of us in Holocaust studies must resort to at one time or another, I rank the American genocide as a greater crime against humanity than the Nazi Holocaust. But I digress. Back to the ADL's uniqueness argument: I deny any ontological uniqueness to the Holocaust, and I deny that it was worse than other genocides. That's the first prong of the ADL's ideology. As noted, the ADL's second prong here involves the "special relationship" between Turkey and Israel (not to mention Turkey and the U.K. and Turkey and the U.S.). Turkey is the only secular Muslim state in the world. It is also one of very few Muslim nations that has relations with Israel. The Turkish military and the IDF engage in joint training exercises and arms sales, and basically Israel counts on Turkey as a regional ally, figuring that in a regional war, Turkey might side with Israel, and that, subsequently, any attack on Turkey by a hostile party would then be an attack against NATO and would then involve European-wide involvement. In short, along with nuclear weapons, Turkey is Israel's ace in the hole. The issue that remains before us, now, is whether what happened to the Armenians constitutes genocide. Recalling the U.N. definition, a genocide is characterized by any combination of the following: (1) Killing members of the group; (2) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (3) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life, calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; (4) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; and (5) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group. The Armenian genocide meets all five of these critiera. Armenians could only save their own lives (and even then it was a stretch) if they agreed to abandon the Armenian language and adopt Islam as their faith (an action that should, under no circumstances, be considered "typical" of Islam as a faith). Armenian children were given to Turkish families. Forcible relocation always (not sometimes, but always) results in deaths of the "relocated" groups. So what was Foxman thinking in this odious example of genocide denial (denial being what genocide scholar Gregory Stanton has noted is typically the final stage in a genocide)? Well, his "denial" is really his opposition to a congressional resolution on the Armenian genocide. Asked to explain further, Foxman said this: "This is not an issue where we take a position one way or the other . . . This is an issue that needs to be resolved by the parties, not by us. We are neither historians nor arbiters." I'd take him at his word were it not for the ADL's unbending support for similar resolutions regarding the Holocaust, not to mention the Stalinist firings of New England ADL officers who publicly disagreed with Foxman. Outrage against Foxman was not limited to Armenians. Jewish and Israeli newspaper columnists commented on the issue and Holocaust denial scholar Deborah Lipstadt stated categorically that no reasonable person could look at the Armenian massacres and not conclude it was genocide. Finally, on August 21, Foxman and the ADL, in their own words, "revisited" the Armenian genocide. "We have never negated but have always described the painful events of 1915-1918 perpetrated by the Ottoman Empire against the Armenians as massacres and atrocities," Foxman said. "On reflection, we have come to share the view of Henry Morgenthau, Sr., that the consequences of those actions were indeed tantamount to genocide. If the word genocide had existed then, they would have called it genocide." Pardon me if I'm a little less than impressed. Fire existed before it was called fire, and it should be borne in mind as well that fire is not "tantamount" to fire. Fire is, quite simply, fire. "Having said that," Foxman said in the same statement, "we continue to firmly believe that a congressional resolution on such matters is a counterproductive diversion and will not foster reconciliation between Turks and Armenians and may put at risk the Turkish Jewish community and the important multilateral relationship between Turkey, Israel and the United States." In the end, Foxman tipped his hand on both prongs of the ADL's campaign to sanctify the Holocaust as the sine qua non of Jewish existence. There was a time when the work of the ADL was useful and productive. Those days, sadly, are gone, as the ADL has sunk to the level of spying on private citizens, blindly supporting Israel in whatever endeavor she undertakes, however wrongheaded, and "expressing outrage" at the slightest provocation. The little boy who cried wolf comes to mind. Or was that the little boy who cried fox? [Andrew E. Mathis is a medical editor, Holocaust historian, and adjunct professor of English and humanities at Villanova University.] Copyright: 1998-2007 Online Journal *** >From Nancy Kent / 818-242-4320 / 818-749-8134 FOR WIDE DISTRIBUTION. PLEASE EXCUSE DUPLICATE POSTS. A Glendale Peace Vigil Film Forum + Political Costume Contest "War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us To Death" Friday October 19 Doors open 7:00 pm Glendale Central Library 222 E. Harvard St., Glendale 91205 (1 block northeast of Colorado & Brand) free - donations welcome refreshments information available from other community groups books, DVDs and more for sale = = = $10 cash, DVD/CD prizes for each category: ~ best anti-war costume ~ scariest political costume ~ funniest political costume ~ most thought-provoking costume ~ best presentation during the costume parade COSTUMES OPTIONAL - STREET CLOTHES WELCOME = = = Narrated by Sean Penn, "War Made Easy" shows how the U.S. government has repeatedly worked to have public opinion favor war since the end of World War II. "Superb" - Howard Zinn "Searing" - San Francisco Chronicle "Chilling and Persuasive" - Katrina Vanden Heuvel, The Nation San Francisco Chronicle August 24, 2007 By Mick LaSalle "War Made Easy" is an expertly edited and researched documentary that attempts to explain how the United States government has gone about moving public opinion in favor of war, in the decades since the end of World War II. The story isn't pretty. Basically the government lies, distorts, claims reluctance to engage in conflict, manipulates the media and pretends at lofty, selfless goals. Narrated by Sean Penn and based on the book of the same name by Norman Solomon, the documentary is both a genuine eye-opener and a treat for history buffs who use archival footage to draw parallels between the lead-up to Vietnam and the process by which the United States has twice gone to war in Iraq. Solomon, who is interviewed throughout, shows how television and even newspapers become complicit in pushing the government's narrative. Then, as the public swallows the official line, the media ends up finding it easier to go along rather than risk public displeasure through independent reporting and honest analysis. Seen four years later, the pre-Iraq war coverage from 2003 looks practically demented, as though each news station - and not just Fox News - were promoting a popular sporting event and not a war. Reporters are shown oohing and ahhing over the latest in military hardware - just as even Walter Cronkite was shown doing it, during Vietnam - in a way that's curiously divorced from the real intent of this machinery: killing people. Either consciously or unconsciously, the result is to desensitize the public as to what is actually about to happen. Of particular interest is Solomon's assessment of the media's coverage of Colin Powell's U.N. speech, which turned public opinion in America, even though the information contained therein later turned out to be false or wildly exaggerated. Solomon demonstrates that it was only the American media that believed Powell delivered an open-and-shut case. The British and Continental press greeted the speech with considerable skepticism and demanded proof. Had the American done the same - that is, done their job - the rush to war might have been stalled. Instead, the media assessed Powell's presentation as though it were theater and gave him high marks for his performance. "War Made Easy" is most disturbing in the ways in which the government, with the help of its media minions, works to curtail debate and silence dissent. The most insidious of these time-honored tactics is to conflate the administration with "the troops," so that disapproval of politicians is equated with abandonment of frontline soldiers. It's the ultimate in cynicism, though wrapped in the trappings of patriotism, and it's a grotesque spectacle - the mature and the powerful taking cover behind the young and powerless. = = = Film running time: 72 minutes PARKING: 3 hours free with library validation in the structure at Maryland & Harvard (northeast of Brand & Colorado). Parking meters on streets and in city lots are free after 6 pm. Metro bus trip planning: (800) 266-6883 or www.metro.net = = = The Glendale Peace Vigil gathers 5-7 pm Fridays at Broadway & Brand. 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