Genocide

2022 - 4 - 4

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Image courtesy of "Armenian Weekly"

ANC-NY applauds Rep. Carolyn Maloney's leadership on Armenian ... (Armenian Weekly)

WASHINGTON, DC – The Armenian National Committee of New York praised Rep. Carolyn Maloney's (D-NY-12th district) most recent initiative promoting broader ...

She has always fostered close ties with her district’s Armenian American community, which includes St. Illuminator’s Armenian Church, the oldest Armenian church in New York City. As the co-chair of the Congressional Hellenic Caucus, she has led efforts to block US arms and aid to Turkey, condemned Turkey’s ongoing occupation of northern Cyprus and placed an international spotlight on Turkey’s human rights abuses. The bipartisan education measure, led by Rep. Maloney and Rep. Gus Bilirakis (R-FL), aims to provide the Library of Congress with $10 million over five years to work with partners to provide educational materials about the Armenian Genocide, the Ottoman Turkish government’s centrally planned and systematically executed campaign of extermination of Armenians, Greeks, Assyrians, Chaldeans, Syriacs, Arameans, Maronites and other Christians between 1915 and 1923. This legislation will also ensure that generations to come will learn about the Armenian Genocide – the first genocide of the modern century – one that has not received the exposure and awareness, which has led, no doubt, to the genocides that followed.

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Image courtesy of "The Jerusalem Post"

Israel should not fear Turkish in recognizing Armenian genocide (The Jerusalem Post)

MEMBERS OF the Armenian diaspora rally in front of the Turkish Embassy in Washington last year, after US President Joe Biden recognized that the 1915 massacres ...

The linking of Israel’s recognition of the Armenian Genocide to the recognition by the US on the same day, April 24, which is designated as the start of the Armenian Genocide, will also provide an additional layer of defense for Israel, since any retaliation against Israel will also take on a meaning of being an attack on the US, as well. One might say that it was the Turkish version of the American taboo of cussing the other guy’s mother – in the age when to say that to a good old American marine was an established one-way ticket for getting yourself slugged–in Turkey you went to jail if you talked of a genocide. HAPPILY, AUTHOR Berman nonetheless was of the opinion that Turkey likely would not take any steps against the US for its recognition, and that has proven to be the case. Is it so beyond our imagination as Israelis to be able to say to Turkey at this time, “We have every respect for you as an important country and are happy to work closely with you, but we owe our own culture the clear cut responsibility to identify with a people whose historical record – confirmed by an overwhelming number of scholars all over the world – shows that they were subject to governmental extermination. In Turkey, an easy one-way ticket to jail has been to bring up the subject of the Armenian Genocide prominently – although strangely there also grew a generation of brave intellectuals and artists who managed to get across the memory of the slaughter of the Armenian people and survived, though a good many of them had to go through painful legal trials of charges of insulting the government, and the ones who survived came at the expense of periods of being in jail. Clearly, our hearts and minds are deeply concerned with the murdering hells of war crimes or crimes against humanity – that in my professional language as a genocide scholar are one of the several subtypes of genocide – that Putin’s Russia is committing.

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