Letter to Editor of Deseret News: Recognizing the Armenian Genocide is the right decision

Deseret News

May 8 2021

By Readers' Forum May 8, 2021, 12:00pm MDT

By Jonathon Floyd

President Joe Biden took an incredibly important step by formally recognizing the Armenian genocide for what it was — the systemic slaughter of 600,000 to 1 million defenseless Ottoman Armenians between 1915 and 1917. He took this action with strong support from both sides of the aisle in Congress. Yet, there are some who have tried to make the case that the president made a mistake — that avoiding diplomatic tension with Turkey was more important than formally recognizing the Ottoman Empire’s despicable actions.

This viewpoint is disappointing. Is our international position so tenuous that we cannot afford to take a stance already accepted by most of the free world — that the Armenian genocide did, in fact, happen? We owe it to the Armenian diaspora, many of them ancestrally displaced because of the genocide, to refuse any longer to look the other way. We owe it to them to acknowledge that their ancestors, like the victims of the Holocaust or the Rwandan genocide, deserve justice. We must make it clear that the ideological descendants of the genocide’s perpetrators will no longer be allowed to quietly avoid facing the truth.

America has skeletons in its own closet — the ugly legacy of slavery, the Japanese internment camps of World War II, and others — but we as a society are working to move past them and provide closure for those whose lives continue to be impacted by their ripple effects. It is time to demand that Turkey’s government take the same steps toward rectifying the mistakes of the past.

Jonathon Floyd

Provo