THE ARMENIAN GENOCIDE DEBATE PITS MORAL VALUES AGAINST REALPOLITIK TIME TO TAKE SIDES?
By Tom Tugend, Contributing Editor
The Jewish Journal of greater L.A, CA
May 4 2007
Rabbis Harold Schulweis, left, and Edward Feinstein flank Armenian
Archbishop Hovnan Derderian at Valley Beth Shalom. Photo by Jeremy
Oberstein
The Turkish ambassador to the United States, Nabi Sensoy, dropped in at
The Jewish Journal a couple of weeks ago for an hourlong conversation
with its editors. Last Friday evening, Archbishop Hovnan Derderian
of the Armenian Church of North America stood on the bimah of Valley
Beth Shalom, hugged its rabbi and called the occasion a turning point
in Armenian-Jewish relations.
All the attention is flattering, but its underlying cause confronts
the Jewish community with choices that — perhaps oversimplified —
pits its moral values and sympathies against the realpolitik of
American and Israeli policymakers.
At the root of the split is a wound that has been festering since
1915, when Muslim Turkey and its Ottoman Empire were fighting Russia,
France and Britain during World War I. Charging that the Christian
Armenian minority in eastern Turkey was collaborating with the
invading Russians, Turkey deported, starved and brutalized much of
its Armenian population.
According to the Armenians, backed by predominant historical analysis,
between 1915 and 1923, Turkey killed 1.5 million Armenian civilians
in a planned genocide. Turkey maintains that some 300,000 Armenians
died, but that an equal number of Turks perished, and that both
sides were victims of chaotic wartime conditions, disease and famine,
not a predetermined extermination.
Turks refer to the wartime slaughter by the Arabic word mukapele,
which Sensoy translated during a phone interview as "mutual massacre."
Year after year, Armenian Americans have commemorated the beginning of
the slaughter by demanding that modern Turkey formally acknowledge
the persecutions and deaths of their ancestors as the Armenian
Genocide. Just as consistently, the Ankara government has refused.
This year, the inflammation of the old wound has intensified, marked
by the introduction of a congressional resolution that the U.S.
government officially recognize the killing of Armenians as a
genocide. Both on Capitol Hill and on the grass-roots level, the
strongest outside voices supporting the Armenian cause are those of
Jews, Los Angeles Jews at that, and the reasons seem obvious.
"How can we, the people decimated by the Holocaust, stand on the
sidelines?" asked Rabbi Harold Schulweis. "Perhaps if the world had
stood up against the first genocide of the 20th century against the
Armenians, the Holocaust might have been prevented.
"It is obscene for us, of all people, to quibble about definitions,"
said Schulweis, spiritual leader of Valley Beth Shalom in Encino and
long in the forefront of social and interfaith initiatives.
In 2004, Schulweis channeled his demand for action against world
genocides by founding Jewish World Watch, focusing first on the
ongoing massacres in Darfur. This year, the nonprofit was organized
well enough to expand its reach, sponsoring a joint commemoration of
"the 92nd anniversary of the Armenian Genocide" at Shulweis’ temple.
At a dinner preceding the Friday evening Shabbat service, Los Angeles
Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, Derderian and Janice Kamenir-Reznik,
president of Jewish World Watch, struck a common theme. Jews and
Armenians, two ancient peoples who have preserved their faiths and
cultures through long diasporas, must be as one in remembering both
their genocides and preventing such catastrophes in the future.
At the overflow dinner for 500, the majority Armenians, Rabbi Edward
M. Feinstein of the host synagogue noted other striking similarities
between the two ethnic groups.
"We both like to talk, loudly, we both like to eat and we both have
reverence for our churches and synagogues, even if we don’t attend
services," he said.
Derderian, a youthful-looking prelate at 49 and a striking figure
in a black robe and hood, pointed to some demographic similarities,
as well. There are some 450,000 Armenians in Los Angeles, compared to
550,000 Jews, he said, and as primate of his church’s Western Diocese,
encompassing 14 states, he leads a flock of 800,000.
During the Shabbat service attended by some 1,100 Jewish and
Armenian worshippers, Schulweis summarized his position, saying,
"Of genocides, we cannot say, ‘Mine is mine and yours is yours,’
because both are ours."
The combined choirs of Valley Beth Shalom and St. Peter Armenian
Church movingly concluded the evening with the singing of the Armenian
and Israeli national anthems, both expressing the longing for lost
homelands, followed by "America the Beautiful."
The Jewish and Armenian communities will come together again on May
15, when Jewish World Watch, now supported by 54 synagogues, will
honor two Armenian scholars and activists at Adat Ari El synagogue.
The honorees of the I Witness Award will be filmmaker Michael Hagopian
and UCLA professor Richard G. Hovannisian.
Jewish support for the Armenian grievances has not been unanimous.
Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Burbank), who represents a large Armenian
constituency and has introduced House Resolution 106 calling for U.S.
recognition of the 1915 genocide, has sent letters to four Jewish
organizations criticizing their positions.
The Jewish legislator admonished the American Jewish Committee (AJ
Committee), B’nai B’rith International, the Anti-Defamation League
and Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), which
had jointly transmitted to House leaders a letter from the organized
Jewish Community of Turkey.
In the letter, addressed to the AJCommittee, the Turkish Jewish leaders
expressed their concern that the Schiff resolution "has the clear
possibility of potentially endangering the interests of the United
States" by straining Turkey’s relations with Washington and Israel.
JINSA supported the letter’s view, while the Jewish Telegraphic
Agency quoted ADL National Director Abraham Foxman as stating that
"I don’t think congressional action will reconcile the issue. The
resolution takes a position, it comes to a judgment."
Foxman added that "the Turks and Armenians need to revisit their
past. The Jewish community shouldn’t be the arbiter of that history
nor should the U.S. Congress."
In his written response, Schiff took the action of the American
Jewish organizations as "tantamount to an implicit and inappropriate
endorsement of the position of the letter’s authors."
He added, "I cannot see how major Jewish American organizations can in
good conscience and in any way support efforts to deny the undeniable."
In a phone interview, Schiff reaffirmed his criticism of the Jewish
organizations and surmised that their opposition was influenced by
Israel, worried about harming its good relationship with Turkey.
"It would be a terrible mistake if the Israeli government became
involved in this matter," he said.
Schiff noted that his resolution, now under consideration by the House
Foreign Affairs Committee chaired by Rep. Tom Lantos (D-San Mateo),
is co-sponsored by 21 out of 30 Jewish representatives and by eight
out of 13 Jewish senators in a companion resolution. He acknowledged
that he is under considerable pressure by the Bush administration
and by former fellow legislators now working for the Turkish lobby,
which Schiff described as "one of the most powerful" in Washington.
The Turkish Embassy in Washington, D.C., has also joined directly
in the struggle for the hearts and minds of the American people in
general and American Jews in particular. It has cultivated close
relationships with Jewish leaders and has retained a well-connected
Jewish lobbyist to work with the Jewish media.
The embassy recently placed full-page ads in The New York Times
and Los Angeles Times outlining a proposal to Armenia to appoint
a joint commission of historians, with full access to national
archives, "to study the events of 1915 and share the findings with
the international public." In a phone call from his embassy, Sensoy
confirmed Turkey’s 2005 offer to Armenia for establishing a joint
commission and urged that the United States and other countries
participate in the investigation.
Citing the Turkish version of the 1915 events, Sensoy said that during
the Russian-Turkish battles of World War I, a large number of Armenians
supported the enemy, "and we had to relocate the Armenians in eastern
Turkey to Syria and Lebanon." The result, he said, was "a kind of
civil war," in which each side lost hundreds of thousands of lives.
"We are not saying we have all the truth, but we cannot accept
guilt for the worst of crimes without knowing what the truth is,"
Sensoy said.
Asked why Turkey could not put the whole problem behind it by issuing
an apology for deeds committed by a different regime at a different
time, Sensoy replied, "The Ottoman past is part of our glorious
history, and we cannot disassociate ourselves from the past."
On his special outreach to American Jews, Sensoy commented that "Jews
are in the best position to understand the problem. We also have the
best relations with Israel."
Drawing a parallel between Auschwitz and the disasters of 1915 "would
be a disservice" to the memory of the Holocaust, said Sensoy. "After
all, no Jews took up arms against the Germans and killed thousands
of them."
Caught somewhat uneasily in the middle is the small, unorganized
Turkish Jewish community of 100-200 residents of Los Angeles.
Dr. Moshe Arditi, vice chair of the pediatrics department at
Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, said he is pleased by "the recent
movement toward an opening up in Turkey." He pointed to a massive
rally by both Turks and Armenians in Istanbul to protest the murder
of a local Armenian journalist.
Arditi endorsed a "historical fact-finding study" of the 1915 events
that "could lead to dialogue between the parties."
But the joint commission proposal finds no resonance among critics of
Turkey. Derderian, who described himself as "a grandson of survivors,"
rejected any dialogue before Turkish recognition of the Armenian
Genocide.
Schiff commented that "there is no question among historians that
what happened was genocide. It’s like asking the Sudanese government
to judge what’s happening in Darfur."
Schulweis drew a different analogy, saying, "The proposal is similar
to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad calling a conference to
examine the truth of the Holocaust."
e/preview.php?id=17609
National Geographic TV on the Armenian Genocide.
Click the BIG ARROW.
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‘G enocide’ reporting rankles newsroom at Times
While the pending congressional resolution to officially designate
the 1915 mass killings of Armenians as the "Armenian Genocide" has
affected the Jewish community, it has also triggered an acrimonious
confrontation at the Los Angeles Times.
The tempest at the already storm-tossed Times, according to aggrieved
reporters, goes to the highly sensitive question of whether
a journalist can write an objective story on an emotional topic
affecting his own ethnic group.
In other words, can a Jewish reporter write a balanced article on
Holocaust denial, or a black reporter on racial discrimination?
As the current Times imbroglio shows, these are not abstract debating
points, especially in as diverse and multicultural a city as Los
Angeles.
Here is how the story developed, as mainly reported through internal
Times’ emails with some added commentary posted by former Times staffer
Kevin Roderick in his blog , a daily must-read for
journalists and media mavens.
In the middle of April, veteran Times reporter Mark Arax, of Armenian
descent, wrote an article on the pending congressional resolution,
focusing on how it had split the Jewish community into opposing sides.
In a highly unusual move, the story was killed by managing editor Doug
Frantz because he felt that Arax "had expressed personal views about
the topic in a public manner and therefore was not a disinterested
party."
The "personal view" cited by Frantz was apparently a letter sent in
2005 reminding Times management that the paper’s established policy
was to refer to the 1915 killings in the old Ottoman Empire as the
"Armenian Genocide."
The letter, which Frantz has described as a "petition," was signed by
six journalists — Arax and four other Armenian Americans and Henry
Weinstein, the paper’s respected legal correspondent, who is Jewish.
As anger about the article’s fate inside the newsroom and outside in
the Armenian community rose, top editor Jim O’Shea sent a memo to his
staff. He declared that Arax’s story had not been spiked but merely
held for additional reporting, and that he said he would never take
a reporter off a story on the basis of his ethnicity.
Also stoking the fire were charges that Frantz, who served as bureau
chief in Turkey for both the New York and Los Angeles Times, was
taking a pro-Turkish view on the Armenian question, a charge denied
by Frantz and his superiors.
At press time, Arax was demanding a public apology from Frantz.
Weinstein and Frantz declined to comment for this story.
Whatever the outcome of the Times conflict or the congressional
resolution, we are again reminded that the ethnic wounds of 60,
90 or 1,000 years ago rarely heal completely.
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