Dov Fischer: Turkey will not acknowledge Armenian Genocide

PanARMENIAN.Net - Turkey has been at the center of the now infamous flotilla incident involving a Hamas-connected Turkish “NGO” which attempted to run an Israeli naval blockade off the coast of Gaza. The flotilla was supported financially by Hamas and peopled primarily by their Turkish allies. It was purportedly seeking to transport 10,000 tons of humanitarian supplies to Gaza. But in fact, Israel supplies Gaza with 15,000 tons of food, medicines, and related humanitarian support every week. There seems to be more here than meets the eye, Rabbi Dov Fischer wrote in an article he titled “Talking Turkey”.

According to him, Turkey remains a prime transit route for Southwest Asian heroin into Western Europe. “International trafficking organizations that operate within the country, from Ankara to Istanbul and beyond, excel at evading narcotics blockades and interdicts. With all the focus on Turks sailing towards the Hamas seas, defying Israel’s determined effort to bar delivery of military weapons and material to the terrorist government that runs Gaza, one wonders how genteel Turkey’s own internal borders have been. Does her treatment of religious and ethnic minorities model Western humanitarian values? Consider Turkey’s treatment of her Armenian, Catholic, and Kurdish minorities,” Fischer writes.

He goes on saying that “Adolf Hitler, a personal friend and ally of Grand Mufti Haj Amin el-Husseini, the founder of modern-day Palestinian Arab nationalism, said in 1939: “Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?” Certainly not Istanbul. For nearly a century, Turkey steadfastly has refused to acknowledge their barbaric genocide between 1915-1918 of 1,500,000 Armenian men, women, and children. Turkey will not apologize or even acknowledge the genocide they perpetrated, assuring that one of the most heinous war crimes of the twentieth century festers unresolved. American President Theodore Roosevelt contemporaneously wrote in 1918: “The Armenian massacre was the greatest crime of the war, and the failure to act against Turkey is to condone it…The failure to deal radically with the Turkish horror means that all talk of guaranteeing the future peace of the world is mischievous nonsense.” British Prime Minister Winston Churchill said 8: “In 1915 the Turkish Government began and ruthlessly carried out the infamous general massacre and deportation of Armenians in Asia Minor…There is no reasonable doubt that this crime was planned and executed for political reasons.” In 1981, Ronald Reagan urged in a Presidential proclamation that the lessons of the Nazi Holocaust never be forgotten “like the genocide of the Armenians before it, and the genocide of the Cambodians which followed it.”

Besides, Fischer writes: “As for the country’s Catholics, Bishop Luigi Padovese, a Roman Catholic bishop, was stabbed to death in Turkey shortly before he was scheduled to depart for nearby Cyprus to meet with Pope Benedict XVI. Three years ago, three missionaries’ throats were cut out in central Turkey.”

“Under the Turkish Constitution, ethnic minorities were barred from expressing cultural distinctiveness in Turkey. In the 1990s, the Turkish government was spending some $8 billion annually deploying 300,000 troops in southeastern Turkey to suppress Kurdish nationalism. Now that the world has been talking Israel for the past week, slowly coming to understand more fully why Israel needs to protect her borders from Hamas state-sponsored terrorism in Gaza, it seems it’s time to talk Turkey,” Fischer concludes.