Signs are already emerging that Turkey’s entrance into the EU will not change Turkey as much as it will change Europe. And look: it was half a sentence. Someone in Turkey is paying very, very close attention to these matters. From Deutsche Presse Agentur (DPA), with thanks to Kemaste:
(dpa) – Pressure from Turkey has resulted in the removal of a reference to the Armenian genocide from a German school curriculum, reports said Wednesday.
The eastern German state of Brandenburg has eliminated half a sentence on the Armenians included in ninth and tenth grade history classes after a Turkish diplomat complained to state Prime Minister Matthias Platzeck, the newspaper Die Welt reported.
In a chapter entitled “War, Technology and Civilian Populations” the school book text said “for example, the genocide of the Armenians population of Anatolia.” That passage has now been removed from school textbooks, the newspaper said.
Platzeck met regularly with Turkish diplomats and was “steeled” against their influence, the newspaper quoted him as saying. The prime minister added that genocide was too important an issue to be dealt with in just half a sentence. “Brandenburg’s curriculum was the only one in Germany which up until now included a reference to the murder of the Armenians,” said Die Welt.
Most historians say that between 600,000 and 1.5 million Armenians were killed in 1915 and 1916 under the Ottoman Turks during World War I. The Turkish government, which denies that a genocide took place, speaks of 200,000 dead.
A Turkish embassy spokesman in Berlin declined to comment directly on the report, but noted the initiative had come from the Turkish consulate responsible for Berlin and Brandenburg – not from the embassy itself.
Here, from September 2000, is “‘Genocide? What genocide?’,” David Kupelian’s account of how the Armenian genocide affected his family. (Thanks again to Kemaste.) It begins:
When my father was three years old, he was sentenced to a brutal death, along with his mother and infant sister, by the Turkish government. Along with hundreds of thousands of other Armenians, they were earmarked to be herded into the Syrian desert where they would die of starvation, disease, or worse — torture and death at the hands of brutal soldiers or hordes of roving bandits.
Read it all. When I hear Islamic apologists speak of the “illustrious Ottoman Empire,” it is hard for me to take them seriously, knowing so many stories like Kupelian’s of exile and murder.