THE ADL’S CURIOUS INDIFFERENCE TO THE ARMENIAN GENOCIDE
Thomas Lifson
American Thinker, AZ
dls_curious_indifference.html
Aug 16 2007
AT contributor Andrew G. Bostom examines the imbroglio over the
curious unwillingness of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) to condemn
the genocide perpetrated against Armenians by the Turks in the early
part of the last century, in an op-ed op-ed in the Providence Journal.
THE CAMPAIGN sponsored by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) to combat
bigotry and celebrate diversity ("No Place for Hate") has sparked
bitter resentment in Watertown, Mass., a Boston suburb whose 8,000
Armenian-Americans make up nearly 25 percent of the population. Local
Armenians do not object to the initiative, rather to the group behind
it, the ADL and its director, Abraham Foxman – whom they charge,
correctly, with denying the ugly established legacy of the World War
I era Armenian genocide.
Under the authoritarian Young Turk (Ittihadist) regime, the bulk of the
Armenian population from the territories of the Ottoman Empire – some
1 million to 1.5 million Armenians – were purged by violent and lethal
means, which reproduced the historic conditions of a classic Islamic
jihad: deportation, enslavement, forced conversion and massacre.
Mr. Foxman maintains that dismantling a program designed to fight
hatred simply because the ADL does not share what he refers to as the
"Armenians’ viewpoint" would be "bigoted." Moreover, Foxman and the
ADL, who have spoken out in recent times against ethnic cleansing of
Muslims in the Balkans and the genocide against the syncretist black
African Animist-Muslims in Darfur, are, in effect, oddly "neutral"
on the Armenian genocide: "We’re not party to this, and I don’t
understand why we need to be made party."
Foxman and the ADL have long worried more about America’s evangelicals
and the imaginary danger of The Passion of the Christ igniting
anti-Semitism than about the real perpetrators of genocide in
Armenia. Hitler reportedly remarked that the world would not care
about his genocide of the Jews, since it had not minded the Turks
doing the same to the Armenians.
One has to wonder at the priorities of Foxman and the ADL.