Dr. Bostom makes the cogent open and shut case for why Congress must right this historical wrong. Aristotle said A is A. To deny the abominaton of genocide, to rewrite history, is to give succor to the worst evildoers, past and present. Whitewash genocide? Get away with genocide then - get away with genocide now.
There is right. There is wrong. There is good. There is evil. The left's inability to distinguish between the two is, in and of itself, an evil.
America must light the way. Congress must do the right thing.
CONGRESS MUST RECOGNIZE THE ARMENIAN GENOCIDE Andrew Bostom, Americna Thinker
A combination of official diplomatic correspondence, and private memoirs -- most notably the diaries of Henry Morgenthau, the U.S. ambassador to Turkey from 1913 to 1916, an extended report by American consul Leslie Davis in Harput, Turkey, from 1915 to 1917, and the recently published United States Official Records on the Armenian Genocide, 1915-1917 -- provides lucid, often repellently detailed historical accounting of what the U.S. government knew regarding the Ottoman Empire and the Armenian genocide. These materials are perhaps the most salient examples of the evidence, as per the language of HR:/ SR:106, "documented in the United States record," which support the formal U.S. recognition of the Armenian genocide as proposed in the Congressional resolutions.The wartime reports from German and Austro-Hungarian officials, Turkey's World War I allies, as well as earlier British diplomatic reports dating back to 1890, confirm the independent U.S. evidence that the origins and evolution of the genocide had little to do with World War I "Armenian provocations." Contemporary accounts by European diplomats written from 1890 through the of World War I era, also demonstrate that these genocidal massacres were perpetrated in the context of a formal jihad waged against the Armenians because they sought the equal rights promised to them, but never granted, under various failed schemes to reform the discriminatory system of Ottoman Islamic Law ("Shari'a"). A widely disseminated 1915 Ottoman Fatwa entitled "Aljihad"(brought to the U.S. Consuls attention in Cairo), for example, clearly sanctioned religiously motivated jihad violence. Historian Johannes Lepsius' eyewitness accounts from Turkey documented the results of such invocations of jihad:"559 villages whose surviving inhabitants were converted to Islam with fire and sword; 568 churches thoroughly pillaged, destroyed and razed to the ground; of 282 Christian churches transformed into mosques; of 21 Protestant preachers and 170 Armenian priests who were, after enduring unspeakable tortures, murdered on their refusal to accept Islam." Lepsius concluded with this rhetorical question: "Is this a religious persecution or is it not?"And in his eloquent Wednesday 8/22/07 column "No Room to Deny Genocide" the Boston Globe's Jeff Jacoby emphasized the nexus between the jihad genocide of the Armenians, the contemporary depredations of jihad, and the dangers of denial:"And at a time when jihadist violence from Darfur to Ground Zero has spilled so much innocent blood, dissimulation about the jihad of 1915 [emphasis added] can only aid our enemies."
There is more, much more. Read it all.
Denial of genocide -- whether that of the Turks against the Armenians or the Nazis against the Jews -- is not an act of historical reinterpretation. Rather, it sows confusion by appearing to be engaged in a genuine scholarly effort. Those who deny genocide always dismiss the abundance of documents and testimony as contrived or coerced, or as forgeries and falsehoods. Free speech does not guarantee the deniers the right to be treated as the 'other' side of a legitimate debate when there is no credible other side"; nor does it guarantee the deniers space in the classroom or curriculum, or in any other forum. Genocide denial is an insidious form of intellectual and moral degradation... Professor Deborah Lipstadt
