Jewish groups wrong to join push for `Armenian genocide’ resolution
The Jewish Standard (New Jersey)
October 12, 2007
By Jason Epstein
In a battle recently described as "pitting principle against
pragmatism," some in the American Jewish community have chosen a third
way to handle the longstanding and bitter dispute between Turks and
Armenians – "the path of least resistance."
I first understood the meaning of the term when working on Capitol
Hill in the early 1990s. An irate and borderline irrational letter
arrived from one of the congressman’s constituents and, instead of
informing the writer precisely how many steps he should take in order
to jump off the Santa Monica Pier, the preferable method was assuring
him that his representative would give his concerns "all due
consideration."
Jewish groups wrong to join push for `Armenian genocide’ resolution
In a battle recently described as "pitting principle against
pragmatism," some in the American Jewish community have chosen a third
way to handle the longstanding and bitter dispute between Turks and
Armenians – "the path of least resistance."
I first understood the meaning of the term when working on Capitol
Hill in the early 1990s. An irate and borderline irrational letter
arrived from one of the congressman’s constituents and, instead of
informing the writer precisely how many steps he should take in order
to jump off the Santa Monica Pier, the preferable method was assuring
him that his representative would give his concerns "all due
consideration."
That term resurfaced in my consciousness following August’s events
involving a group of Armenian-American activists and the
Anti-Defamation League’s regional director in New England. They
pressured him to oppose his national organization’s position against a
controversial congressional resolution that, if passed, would
recognize the tragic events during the chaotic final days of the
Ottoman Empire as "genocide" against Armenians; in response he
publicly repudiated the ADL policy.
The resulting firestorm led to an embarrassing crisis in
Turkish-Jewish relations and could ultimately threaten U.S.-Turkish
ties at a time when the American military relies heavily on Turkey for
its ongoing military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq.
The U.S. House of Representatives’ Foreign Affairs Committee was
expected to approve a resolution this week, over strenuous objections
from Turkey, which asserts that hundreds of thousands of Armenians
perished in intercommunal violence that also killed many Turkish
Muslims and not as a result of an Ottoman conspiracy to liquidate an
entire people.
For many years a radical segment of the otherwise honorable
Armenian-American community has bullied Jewish organizations,
synagogues, and politicians to endorse its view of what caused the
deaths of hundreds of thousands of Armenians during World War I.
Instead of pursuing a congressional resolution that, if passed, may
threaten the security of American service members, these
Armenian-American activists should invest more of their time in
beseeching the Armenian military to pull its soldiers out of territory
in Azerbaijan, an American ally. Doing so would allow Yerevan to stop
relying on Tehran and Moscow for regional support.
In lieu of pressuring Jews and the Israeli government to equate the
massacres of 1915 with the Holocaust, they ought to be urging the
Armenian government to unequivocally condemn Iranian President Mahmoud
Ahmedinejad’s denials that the Holocaust ever took place.
Their motives are at least twofold: to put the massacres on par with
the Holocaust and to label anyone who dares question whether the
events really did constitute genocide as a despicable "Holocaust
denier."
Never mind that a highly respected group of scholars, including but
not limited to Bernard Lewis, Andrew Mango, Norman Stone, Stanford
Shaw, Guenter Lewy, and Justin McCarthy, recognize that hundreds of
thousands of Armenians were killed during World War I but decline to
categorize the tragic events as genocide.
For example, Lewy, a professor emeritus of political science of the
University of Massachusetts and author of "The Armenian Massacres in
Ottoman Turkey: A Disputed Genocide," has argued that "major elements
of the decision-making process leading up to the annihilation of the
Jews of Europe can be reconstructed from events, court testimony, and
a rich store of authentic documents," but "barring the unlikely
discovery of sensational new documents," he says "it is safe to say
that no similar evidence exists for the tragic events of 1915-16."
What is so disturbing is that an increasing number of Jewish
organizations, in the face of pressure from Armenian-American
activists and in the absence of an effective Turkish-American counter
lobby, have chosen the path of least resistance and endorse the
disputed Armenian-American narrative. In the process, however, they
have trivialized the importance of centuries of Ottoman and Turkish
protection of Jews.
To be sure, other forces are also at work. Many left-wing Jewish
groups are already taking action against what many believe to be
ongoing genocidal violence in Darfur, rendering them easy allies for
those who have long sought recognition of their own claims of
genocide. In the process, these left-wing groups fail to acknowledge
the acute concerns of Turkey, a democratic nation of 70 million Muslim
inhabitants that Israel considers a close ally.
Alternatively, there is a loud minority of marginal voices on the
right who take an "all-Muslims-look-alike" approach in how they view
Islam. In their world there is no variance between a Turk, an Arab and
a Persian, and certainly little difference between an observant Muslim
and one who elects not to practice.
"Jewish leaders should refuse to be blackmailed by Muslim extremism,"
Steven Goldberg thundered in a recent opinion piece in The Jewish
Journal of Greater Los Angeles, completely unaware and/or indifferent
to the fact that secular Turks are perhaps even more outraged than
their religious brethren at being labeled "genocide deniers," as they
perceive the charge as an attack against the modern Turkish state’s
founder, Kemal Mustafa Ataturk.
Admittedly, national Jewish organizations are not without blame. Most
have tended to shy away from educating regional leaders or local
synagogues on the complexities of this topic; that the Jewish
community in Turkey is understandably offended by the facile
comparisons to the Holocaust; that Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip
Erdogan proposed in 2005 the creation of an independent commission of
scholars to review both sides’ claims (according to the Turkish
government the offer remains on the table); that Armenian-American
organizations need to call upon Armenia to rethink its close ties with
Iran and Russia.
Not surprisingly, the Armenian-American activists filled this vacuum
by skirting the New York and Washington headquarters of the ADL, B’nai
B’rith International, and the American Jewish Committee, and instead
targeted local Jewish communal leaders.
Jak Kahmi, a successful business executive in Istanbul and longtime
leader of the vibrant Turkish Jewish community, argued last month that
the "particular Jewish duty to protect historical truth" should lead
the Jewish community "not to silence scholarly argument by pretending
a consensus exists, nor to dilute the Holocaust with comparison to
events of a completely different nature, but to facilitate the
establishment of the historical truth in the first place."
Too bad that, for more and more Jewish officials, and particularly
those at the local level, the path of least resistance is far more
appealing.
Jason Epstein is a consultant based in Washington. He was an adviser
to the Turkish Embassy in Washington from 2002 to 2007.
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