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It’s elementary: Turks committed genocide
9.12.2005
By Warren Tolman and Dikran Kaligian
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The recent lawsuit
challenging the teaching of the Armenian Genocide as
genocide purports to be a defense of First Amendment
rights. What it actually is, despite all
protestations to the contrary, is yet another
attempt by the Republic of Turkey to distort
history, this time in the curriculum of
Massachusetts public schools.
The Turkish government has spent millions of dollars
and the better part of 90 years denying that the
Ottoman Empire and the Republic of Turkey committed
genocide by murdering over 1.5 million Armenians
between 1915 and 1923. It has endowed chairs at
Princeton and Georgetown, and has convinced defense
contractors and other U.S. companies doing business
in Turkey to lobby Congress to defeat any bill
mentioning the Armenian Genocide.
Today, despite majority support in the U.S. House
and a 40-7 vote in the House International Relations
Committee, Speaker Dennis Hastert refuses to
schedule a vote on an Armenian Genocide resolution.
However, the House has already gone on record
calling the Turkish actions genocide in 1975, 1984
and 1996. The European Parliament and 15 other
countries have done the same.
Thirty-eight states have recognized the Armenian
Genocide. Because it has consistently lost in the
political arena, Turkey has opened up a new front in
the federal courts. This lawsuit was initiated by
the Assembly of Turkish American Associations, an
organization founded and funded by Turkey to act as
its proxy in this country. It has attacked a
curriculum guide prepared by the state Department of
Education after the Legislature unanimously voted
for a law requiring that cases of genocide and human
rights violations — including the Armenian Genocide,
the Great Hunger in Ireland, the slave trade and the
Holocaust — be taught.
This lawsuit attempts to create the impression of a
“controversy” among historians over the events of
1915. This controversy has been wholly concocted by
Turkey and its PR firms.
For decades, Turkey, despite having one of the
world’s worst human rights records (including
systematic torture and repression of Kurds) has used
its strategic and geographic position to try to
force other nations to accept its distorted version
of the history of 1915-1923.
Turkey is trying to gloss over the worst parts of
its record in order to gain acceptance to the
European Union. Because the European Parliament has
decided that it should not be admitted until it
accepts responsibility for the Armenian Genocide,
Turkey must resort to lawsuits and compromised
scholarship.
Before World War II, Hitler, when pressed on whether
he could pursue his plan for exterminating Jews,
rhetorically asked: “After all, who remembers the
Armenians?”
The education of our students is too important for
it to be distorted by a foreign government using
American courts to clean up its bloody history. Just
as we would not allow teaching by those who would
deny the Holocaust, we must not allow teaching by
those who would deny or somehow forget the genocide
of 1.5 million Armenians.
www.bostonherald.com
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