Oz relented and said he would give up his formal ties with Turkey.
But prominent leaders of a minority group argue that his ties to Turkey demand further scrutiny as Oz, the celebrity physician who picked up the endorsement of former President Donald Trump, competes in the crowded Senate race.
Allies have rejected questions about Oz’s Turkish heritage as racist and as dog whistles. But some Armenian American leaders say Oz has failed to adequately answer questions about a 100-year-old dispute over the mass deportations and massacres of Armenians in the early 20th century Ottoman Empire, widely characterized as genocide, a description Turkey vigorously disputes.
“No one in this community will ever vote for Dr. Oz,” said Mark Momjian, a prominent Philadelphia attorney and the former chair of the Armenian Center at Columbia University. “We are convinced that he is part of a denial campaign when it comes to the Armenian genocide.”
At the root of their opposition to Oz is Turkey’s insistence that what happened during World War I wasn’t genocide. It asserts that the number of deaths has been inflated and that those who died were victims of civil war.
It isn’t unusual for foreign policy disputes to enter U.S. political races — for example, questions about China and Hong Kong or about Israel and the Palestinian territories have been fixtures in U.S. elections — but the race is emerging as the highest-profile example of the Old World fight’s being transmuted into American politics.
Momjian, who said all four of his grandparents were born in Turkey, said the issue isn’t about Oz’s ethnicity but his lack of public acknowledgment that Turkey committed genocide.
“We have what our president has called a genocide taking place in real time in Ukraine,” Momjian said. “Having a U.S. senator who denies the truth of the Armenian genocide should be very concerning to anyone who cares about human rights.”
Oz, who was born in Ohio to Turkish parents and holds dual U.S.-Turkish citizenship, has faced criticism from his rivals in the May 17 Republican primary and others about whether he has “dual loyalties” to Turkey.
Oz has dismissed the question as “reminiscent of slurs made in the past about Catholics and Jews,” noting that President John F. Kennedy faced baseless accusations that he would be secretly loyal to the pope, while Jewish politicians have sometimes been subjected to similar questions about Israel.
To Americans of Armenian descent, Oz is a famous Turkish American who has, over his long public career, seemed uncomfortable condemning an atrocity that is as important to them as the Holocaust is to Jews.
“For the better part of the last 100 years, we have been trying to wrestle the memory of the Armenian genocide out of Turkey’s grip,” said Aram Hamparian, the executive director of the Armenian National Committee of America. “So when somebody is running for office who is close to the leader of that country, who has served in the military of that country — that’s a three-alarm fire.”
It took a century for the U.S. government to officially recognize an Armenian genocide — an atrocity Turkey has long denied despite the consensus of scholars and official recognition from more than 30 countries.
Now, Armenian Americans worry that Turkey’s campaign to deny the slaughter of 800,000 to 1 million Armenians during World War I would have a powerful champion inside the U.S. government if Oz joins the Senate.
Asked for Oz’s view, campaign spokesperson Brittany Yanick said in a statement: “Dr. Mehmet Oz opposes genocide and the murder of innocent people in all forms.
“The evils of World War I should be commemorated,” Yanick continued. “Dr. Oz looks forward to those important discussions, as well as helping the three million people of Armenia today.”
His campaign’s response didn’t use the words “Armenian genocide.”
While the episode known as the Armenian genocide isn’t well known to most Americans, the Ottoman Empire’s systematic destruction of its Christian minorities starting in 1915 paved the way to create an ethno-nationialist Turkish state.