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On August 22, 1939, just days before the outbreak of World War II, Adolf Hitler met with his army generals. When he explained why he had decided to attack Poland, he assured them that the world would keep silent: "Who, after all, speaks today about the annihilation of the Armenians?," Hitler reasoned. This sentence has been quoted countless times as ostensible proof that the Armenian genocide served as a kind of "general rehearsal" for the annihilation of European Jewry. At the Holocaust Museum in Washington, these words are etched on one of the walls. Approximately 1.5 million Armenians were killed by the Turks during World War I. It was genocide; however, the quote attributed to Hitler is of dubious provenance. It originated with a well-known American journalist, Louis Lochner, an AP reporter in Nazi Germany and a Pulitzer Prize winner. Lochner reported on Hitler's speech in a book he published in 1942. After the war, Lochner gave a version of the speech to the American prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials. The prosecutor was not satisfied, because he didn't know the source of the speech, nor under what circumstances it was leaked to the reporter. He dispatched his people to search for the official version. It turned out that on that day, Hitler gave two speeches. The Americans managed to locate the official version of both; the line about the slaughter of the Armenians does not appear in either. The version Lochner got hold of was apparently a mix of the two. The prosecution in Nuremberg decided not to submit the reporter's version to the court, but did leak it to the press; the prosecutor apologized in court for the leak and claimed it occurred by mistake. At any rate, this is how the citation entered the heritage of the Armenian holocaust.Turkey, of course, denies that there was an Armenian genocide, and last week it recalled its ambassador from Washington after the House of Representatives' Foreign Affairs Committee approved a bill calling the massacre of the Armenians genocide. This is how history has the power to make history: Denial of the Armenian holocaust is anchored in Turkish misgivings about its identity as a modern nation-state. Although the Turks' position is therefore understandable, it must not be supported. Unfortunately, Israel has removed itself from the nations whose voice ought to be heard on all matters pertaining to the violation of human rights; its military and other interests in Turkey are even leading Israel to lend a hand to the concealment of the Armenian genocide. The Turks are putting the Jews, and Israel, at the center of this affair. Last week, the Turkish foreign minister came to Israel and called on it to stop the U.S. Congress from adopting the decision of the foreign affairs committee; after all, everyone knows the Jews control the world, and the U.S. Congress. Meanwhile, the Turks are also issuing threats: The Congressional decision could put the Jewish community in Turkey at risk. This galling threat is just as despicable as the denial of the Armenian genocide itself, and just goes to show why decent people need to demand that Turkey finally learn to look in the mirror. The Germans have done so; it was painful at first, but worth it in the end.To read more go to:
As in the days of Noah....
