What, you think there was an Armenian genocide?

[trud]

http://english.aljazeera.net/news/europe/2011/04/2011424511302575.html

"Barack Obama, the US president, has for the third straight year failed to brand the mass killings of Armenians by Ottoman Turks genocide despite repeatedly vowing while campaigning to get elected that he would do so.

Obama honoured Armenian victims - mostly Christians numbering 1.5 million - on the anniversary of their massacre in the World War I but only confined himself to using the Armenian name for the slaughter, Meds Yeghern, in paying tribute "to the memories of those who perished".

The president said the 1915 killings represent "one of the worst atrocities of the 20th century".

As a candidate in 2008, Obama said he would ensure "a principled commitment to commemorating and ending genocide". But since 2009, the president has declined to use "genocide" in the face of furious resistance from Turkey, a key NATO ally."

[Possumpoint]

1. Obama The President

Has in so many cases run smack into political reality that Obama the Candidate had yet to face. It appears to me that politics has won nearly every time over good intentions.

[trud]

2. What a concept

a President who lets right win over politics. I remember Presidents like that. I even thought Obama would be one of them.

Can you imagine if Obama skirted around the Holocaust?

[Hippo_Tron]

3. Really? I don't remember a whole lot of Presidents like that

[Teaser]

4. "a President who lets right win over politics. I remember Presidents like that"

name him.

[Igel]

5. If not for Armenian "agitprop" it would have been forgotten entirely.

What the Turks did to the Greeks has been, disposing of 2500 years of continuous Greek occupation of parts of Asia Minor.

Best to remember that the Turks are recent immigrants, and didn't play well with others (except in their own textboosk, where everybody loved doing whatever the righteous and just Turks wanted). The Kurds, there for a millennium or two BC; the Greeks, there since the Greek expansion before Homer, and wiping out Black Sea communities that were founded before Alexander the Great; the Armenians, there probably before the Kurds became their neighbors.

[ReggieVeggie]

6. and don't dare call it a holocaust

someone might be upset

[Keith Bee]

7. More Armenian-American PR people are needed

Tactless but true.

[tekisui]

8. Promise broken.

[bigmonkey]

9. I must be the only person bothered by the title of Cenk Ungyur's show.

As I understand it, the original "young Turks" were the ones who decided to "solve the Armenian problem." I could be wrong, but that's what I've read. So, the title of the show bothers me. But it upsets people to bring it up.

[dipsydoodle]

10. Same here.

The father of one my ex school friends , who's Armenian , was one of those who survived. I was told the stories in the late '50s.

It disgusts me that anyone doesn't recognise the genocide.

[mojowork_n]

12. If it's any consolation....

...the "Old" Turks, the Ottoman rulers in the last part of the 19th century and first decade of the 20th,
were notable for reviving persecution of Christians in every part of the Ottoman Empire, not just Armenia.

Sultan Abdul Hamid:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamidian_massacres

Along the eastern periphery, Armenians were the targeted Christian minority. As you can see from
following the preceding link, and also:

http://books.google.com/books?id=Oiby5dFZR58C&pg=PA38&lpg=PA38&dq=ottoman+oppression+christian+minority&source=bl&ots=RxC9cCD3GE&sig=-cE17UAqQaCw9ocT2-TCIK7ohag&hl=en&ei=av-2TZ29EKOB0QGQ8YXRDw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=7&ved=0CEMQ6AEwBg#v=onepage&q&f=false

("A Fragrance of Oppression: the Church and its Persecutors," Schlossberg and Olasky)

At the western end of the Ottoman yoke, public impalement (what Vlad learned from the Turks at
the last siege of Constantinople) was brought back and revived as a widespread, public means of
execution, punishment and repression.

In short, the "Les Jeunes Turcs" did NOT invent any of this, the policies of the Sultans (especially
Abdul Hamid) who preceded them set the tone. Established a base line.

[kskiska]

11. The genocide began way before 1915

My grandfather arrived in this country in 1909 from Armenia. Most of his family had been wiped out by the Turks, including his young wife. I have a pencil-written statement describing her death that my grandfather needed to marry my grandmother in the US. I grew up hearing passed down stories of the atrocities. Unfortunately, I never knew my grandfather, since he died in 1930 at the age of 35 when my mother was 7.