In Armenian Genocide resolution Turkey's chutzpah

PanARMENIAN.Net - "We are certainly not insensitive to the significance of Turkey's support of Israel. But the Turkish government's attempt to capitalize on that support by pressing the American Jewish community to oppose a Congressional resolution that condemns the Armenian Genocide by Turkey, which murdered a million and a half Armenians during World War I strikes us as being the height of chutzpah," Jewish press reported.



As The New York Sun reported, on February 5 the Turkish foreign minister met with representatives of several major Jewish groups and "made a hard sell" against House Resolution 106, which now has 176 co-sponsors. "The Turkish official reportedly appealed to the participants by noting - outrageously, we think - the uniqueness of the German genocide against the Jews. The Turks do not deny that between 1915 and 1917 they conducted a devastating military campaign against the Armenians and that thousands of Armenians were killed on forced marches," The New York Sun reported.



They claim, however, that the hapless Armenians were a fifth column, often armed and working on behalf of the Russian army in World War I.



Further, the newspaper quotes memories of U.S. Ambassador to Ottoman Empire, Henry Morgenthau, at the time. "I am confident that the whole history of the human race contains no such horrible episode as this. The orders for the deportations of the Armenian families in 1915 were merely giving a death warrant to a whole race," he wrote.



But we have no doubt that some would argue the Jewish community should oppose the resolution if only to preserve the aura of uniqueness surrounding the destruction of European Jewry in the Holocaust. And this, perhaps, was the point the Turkish foreign minister was trying to make in his presentation to Jewish leaders, The Jewish press reported.