Note the lengths to which the Turks have gone to cover up this genocide. The slightest mention of it anywhere will irk the Turk. Well, come and get me, Recep. The whitewashing of what was done to the Armenians and Greeks is just one element of the larger and time-honored Islamic project of whitewashing history in general, which has been so successful that innumerable canards are now accepted as fact by people who have no particular axe to grind or interest in the subject, but are just repeating what they were taught: the Egyptians welcomed the Muslim Arab invaders, so odious was Byzantium’s yoke! The Crusades were acts of unprovoked aggression and slaughter of non-Christians! The Islamic empires were paragons of religious tolerance! There was no genocide of Armenians and Greeks!
From the Assyrian News Agency, with thanks to Nicolei:
The Turkish state’s elimination of its Armenian, Greek and Assyrian populations was part and parcel of the same effort to obliterate Turkey’s Christian minorities. All were perpetrated during the same time frame, by the same governments, and using the same methods – namely, massacres, labor camps and death marches under the guise of deportations.
New York State’s governor George Pataki and the Armenian National Committee have recently added their voices to a growing community of individuals and organizations of conscience that have recognized the genocide of Asia Minor’s Greeks by the modern Turkish state.
Now Greece, which has wrestled with its own turbulent history to evolve into a champion of democratic ideals, human rights and the rule of law, is poised to betray these very principles by denying the historical reality of a genocide that was perpetrated against its own people….
As noted by Professor Peter Balakian, prominent U.S. scholar and author of “Black Dog of Fate”, the driving force behind the renewed awareness of Turkey’s Greek holocaust transcends nationality and ideology: “this is not about ethnic conflict, Greek vs. Turk or Armenian vs. Turk, this is about universal moral issues and universal human rights issues . . . Clearly, denying genocide paves the way for future genocide, for it suggests to the world that governments can commit mass murder with impunity.”
This chilling postulate was already put into practice just twenty years after Turkey’s eradication of its Christian minorities. Eight days before unleashing his exterminationist campaign in Europe, on August 22, 1939 Hitler defended his orders “to kill without pity or mercy all men, women and children” by declaring “who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?”…
Hebrew University professor Stanley Cohen’s statement regarding the Turkish government’s aggressive campaign of denial vis-a-vis the Armenian Genocide applies equally to its denial of the genocide of Asia Minor’s Greeks:
“The nearest successful example [of ‘collective denial’] in the modern era is the 80 years of official denial by successive Turkish governments of the 1915-17 genocide against the Armenians in which some 1.5 million people lost their lives. This denial has been sustained by deliberate propaganda, lying and coverups, forging documents, suppression of archives, and bribing scholars. The West, especially the United States, has colluded by not referring to the massacres in the United Nations, ignoring memorial ceremonies, and surrendering to Turkish pressure in NATO and other strategic arenas of cooperation” (Law and Social Inquiry, Winter 1995).
According to a groundbreaking expose by The Chronicle of Higher Education, Microsoft’s electronic encyclopedia “Encarta” pressured contributing scholars Helen Fein, Executive Director of The Institute for The Study of Genocide, and Ronald Suny, a political scientist at the University of Chicago and the University of Michigan, to incorporate strategies of denial when referring to the Armenian Genocide because “the Turkish government had threatened to arrest local Microsoft officials and ban Microsoft products“. Any familiarity with Turkey’s record on free speech would demonstrate that these were not idle threats.
A Turkish writer for Encyclopedia Britannica was imprisoned for using the word “Armenia” in a map of ancient Anatolia.
Last year, Turkey imprisoned Assyrian priest Yusuf Akbulut for “telling reporters that his Christian minority had been the victim of genocide” (The New York Times, 12/12/00).
Ankara’s Public Prosecutor’s Office is now seeking a six-year prison term for Turkish human rights activist Akin Birdal for saying “everybody knows what was done to the Armenians” during a panel discussion in Germany. In 1998, Birdal survived multiple gunshot wounds to the chest and legs by two extremists linked to the Turkish military.
In October, Turkey successfully blackmailed the U.S. House of Representatives to withdraw a majority-supported resolution recognizing the Armenian Genocide by threatening economic, military and diplomatic sanctions.
Incredibly, in a not-so-veiled threat Ankara warned that Americans in Turkey would be in danger should the resolution pass, prompting Representative Frank Pallone (D-NJ) to remark “what kind of ally threatens American lives if it doesn’t get its way? With friends like that, who needs enemies.”…
Quite.