Me too

As a Jew, I find the ongoing efforts by Mr. Foxman and the ADL to deny recognition of the Armenian genocide morally repugnant, ignorant, and particularly inappropriate for an organization geared to reducing, as opposed to abetting and fomenting Antisemitism, and other forms of irrational hatred. Andrew Bostom (read it all here.)

Time for an overthrow of Amercan Jewish lay leadership. They will lead us straight to the ovens.

UPDATE: Two regional members of ADL quit in protest to firing!

Former chairman of the Polaroid Corp., Stewart L. Cohen, and City Council member Mike Ross told the Globe yesterday they could no longer be part of an organization with national leaders who refused to acknowledge the Armenian genocide and fired regional director, Andrew H. Tarsy, on Friday for taking a position in support of Armenian-Americans.

If Foxman does not change his position and acknowledge the genocide, George Beilin, a past president of the North Shore Council of the B'nai B'rith Organization, called on the national leader to "resign immediately for the sake of the Jewish community in the United States and the world."

Who's ass are we kissing anyway?  More on this here.

Comments

[epaminondas]

Pam it's time for an outright blogexplosion on this one. Email campaign, the works.

Foxman has to go for the ADL to have a whisper of integrity ... and contact electronically is RIGHT HERE

[Timur]

Deny the Armenian genocide first and then denying the holocaust will be easy. Moslems are always trying to revise and erase the history of the lands they conquer.

[Winged Hussar 1683]

Quiz: who said "Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?"

(a) Kemal Ataturk
(b) Abraham Foxman
(c) Adolf Hitler
(d) Osama bin Laden
(e) Saddam Hussein

Many people probably think it is (b), Abraham Foxman, because of his efforts to downplay and whitewash the Armenian genocide. However, it was actually (c), Adolf Hitler, who cited the world's ignorance of the genocide to support his belief that he could get away with exterminating the Poles to make "living space" for his "Master Race." He probably applied the same rationale to Jews as well.

Maybe Andrew Tarsy should be ADL's new National Director. Foxman is, in my opinion, a political pimp who sells ADL's prestige, credibility, and good name the way a real pimp sells a woman's body.

Last year, Foxman & Co. whitewashed MoveOn.org's sponsorship of anti-Semitic hate speech, including a blood libel that said the Talmud commands Jews to hate and even kill non-Jews, at its Action Forum. ADL stood by this whitewash despite being given proof that MoveOn lied about not removing more than a tiny fraction of the hate speech. I can think of no other motive than to protect the left wing of the Democratic Party from the consequences of anti-Semitism (and, as it turned out, anti-Catholicism and 9/11 Denial as well).

The above pales in comparison to ADL's efforts to whitewash an actual genocide, but it shows that we should not be all that surprised.

[Rancher]

OT-

Did you hear what the Breck Girl said? Surprised you didn't post about it, you would not have been as gentle with him as I was.

http://dunellanoestachato.blogspot.com/2007/08/duh-is-it-government-run-system.html

[dervish]

"The three pillars of the Armenian claim to classify World War I deaths as genocide fail to substantiate the charge that the Young Turk regime intentionally organized the massacres. Other alleged evidence for a premeditated plan of annihilation fares no better.

Whether to apply the genocide label to the events that occurred almost one hundred years ago in the Ottoman Empire may be of minor consequence to many historians, but it remains of great political relevance. Both Armenian partisans and Turkish nationalists have staked claims and made their case by simplifying a complex historical reality and by ignoring crucial evidence that might yield a more nuanced picture. Professional scholars have based their positions on previous works, often unaware that these represented a bastardized interpretation of the original sources. With the political stakes high, both sides have sought to silence opponents and stymie a full debate. In one famous example, in 1995 a French court partially upheld a civil complaint brought by an Armenian group against eminent historian Bernard Lewis because they objected to a letter he had published in Le Monde on January 1, 1994, in which he had questioned the existence of a plan of extermination on the part of the Ottoman government.[55] Turkish leaders have applied diplomatic pressure and threats; the Armenian government has accused those who do not acknowledge that the massacres constituted genocide of being deniers who seek to appease the Turkish government. Some Turkish and Armenian historians have suggested recently that it is time to "step back from the was-it-genocide-or-not dialogue of the deaf, which only leads to mutual recrimination" and instead concentrate on empirically grounded historical research that seeks a common pool of firm knowledge.[56] Time will tell whether it will be possible to rescue history from nationalists who have plundered history to serve their own political ends."

http://www.meforum.org/article/748

It is unfair to equate the Armenian deaths at the hands of the Turks in WW1 to other genocides such as the Shoah or Rwanda or Sudan. The Armenians were an armed resistance group who threatened the Turks. The other mass murders were of non-armed, passive citizenry with the intention of destroting that ethnic group, ie a genocide.

Further while I rarely agree with Foxman especially when he expands his mission, which is to defend and advocate for the Jewish people, here his stance is consisitent with the ADL's mission. Turkey treated its Jews well during WW1. Turkey was one of the only countries to preserve its Jews in WW2. They gave Jews escaping the Nazis safe passage. Turkey has ties to Israel where few other Muslim countries do.

The Armenian/Turk dispute is not a Jewish one.