Israeli right shifts stance on Armenian genocide amid Turkey spat

Akiva Eldar

 

As long as I can remember, I've known that there was only one unique Holocaust in the history of humankind. We learned that the Armenians had suffered a “genocide” and that “a people’s massacre” had been perpetrated in Rwanda. We learned that Israel’s Arab citizens experienced a catastrophe, known in Arabic as the “Nakba,” when the state was established 70 years ago and they were uprooted from their homes. We were told that the use of the term “Shoah,” Hebrew for “Holocaust,” to characterize atrocities committed after World War II does a moral and historic injustice to the 6 million Jews exterminated by the Nazis.

From the KKK to Darfur, Reflecting on Evil as a Deliberate Act

Monica Uszerowicz

A new exhibition at the Jewish Museum of Florida-FIU, Evil: A Matter of Intent, examines the exigencies of cruelty — what it takes to create it and the methodology that allows it to exist. Evil is not, the artists here purport, something intrinsic to humanity, not by birth, anyway. Acts of evil are deliberate. Evil is a choice.

Before traveling here, this exhibition was previously at the Hebrew Union College Jewish Institute of Religion. There, it didn’t include the blood-red KKK King Kleagle robe, a kind of pièce de résistance for the Miami show. King Kleagles oversee a given geographic area of the Klan and are responsible for recruiting new Klansmen, and this particular robe, from the 1940s, comes at an unnerving time, on the heels of the white supremacist demonstrations in Charlottesville.

Of course there was an Armenian genocide: Why Benny Ziffer is just plain wrong

Daniel Baltman

 

Since the end of World War II, scholars have been trying to understand a recurrent historical phenomenon that has been appearing for thousands of years: What causes one group of Homo sapiens to attack another with utter murderousness and attempt to wipe it off the face of the earth?
Raphael Lemkin, the Polish-Jewish jurist who coined the definition for this phenomenon and made it an international crime that requires punishment, laid the foundation for the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide that was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 1948.

What Pius XII Learned From the Armenian Genocide

Deborah Castellano Lubov

 

Though historians contest it, Pius XII is still accused of failing to do enough to help the Jews during World War II. In particular, he is criticized for too much silence.

But well-known German historian Michael Hesemann says the Pope's decision to be guarded in protest was a result of what he'd learned some years before, when while working in the Vatican Secretariat of State and as nuncio, he was privy to the Vatican's information on the Armenian genocide and its attempts to stop it.

Protests from Pope Benedict XV and his diplomats only made the situation worse for the Armenians and that was history Pius XII didn't want to repeat, Hesemann explains.

In an interview with Zenit ahead of Pope Francis' Nov. 28-30 trip to Turkey, Hesemann analyzes this massacre, and gives insight into the parallels with the Holocaust and Pius XII's actions during the war.

The Politics of Genocide

Jonathan Kay

Spring is a season for black memories. April 24 marked the beginning of the Armenian Genocide in 1915. April 27 was Yom HaShoah, a day for Holocaust remembrance. The Rwandan Genocide, in which Hutu extremists slaughtered 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus, took place from April 7 to July 1994, a 100-day spasm of extermination that generated an average of 8,000 victims, or one whole Srebrenica massacre, every single day.

Turkey Must Accept the Truth about the Armenian Genocide

Jonathan Kay

Though almost a century has passed since the beginning of the Armenian Genocide on April 24, 1915, it is important that we continue to mark its occurrence — especially because there are still some in the world who imagine that this was not truly an epic crime against humanity, but merely an inhumane but unintended side effect of World War I.

Israel Has Moral Duty to Recognize Armenian Genocide

Akiva Eldar

At the Foreign Ministry in Jerusalem, the message of condolence issued by Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan to the Armenian people on April 23, the eve of the 99th anniversary of the Armenian genocide, was closely examined. What will Israel do now? Will it continue to fence-sit on the issue of recognizing the disaster that befell the Armenian people, caught between taking a moral stand and avoiding angering the Turks? If Erdogan can afford to change the Turkish attitude toward this sensitive issue, perhaps it’s time for Israel to adopt a clearer and more decisive stance.

What Our Words Mean: Towards the Vindication of Medz Yeghern

Vartan Matiossian

 



People do not bother to look for attitudes and terminology
which will assert their unique identities,
but rather opt for popular and widely current formulas.
–The Armenian Weekly, editorial (1981)¹

 

‘Shoah’ or ‘Holocaust’?

A crime against humanity may trigger a catastrophe for the victims, as exemplified by the obliteration of Jewish life throughout continental Europe during World War II. The close relationship between evil, calamity, and crime should be regarded as one of the logical reasons for the adoption of the word Shoah (Catastrophe) as the name of a catastrophic crime against humanity.

It is interesting to recall that when the term genocide had not yet been coined, the Armenian extermination that began in 1915 was called “administrative holocaust” by Winston Churchill (1929). According to journalist William Safire (1929-2009), it appears that Raphael Lemkin’s word “struck many as too clinical a description of what happened” in Nazi Germany, and therefore gradually yielded its place to holocaust to name the Jewish genocide.²

Pope Francis on the Armenian Genocide

In 2010 Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio, the newly-consecrated Pope Francis I, and Argentinean Rabbi Abraham Skorka, director of the Latinamerican Seminary for Rabbis, published a book entitled On Heaven and Earth (“Sobre el Cielo y la Tierra”) that has been issued in English translation by Random House (New York, 2013). The book is a conversation between the two religious leaders that addresses topics such as family, atheists, death, capitalism, and the Holocaust.

Sarkozy Asks Government to Re-Draft Genocide Denial Law

French President Nicolas Sarkozy asked the government to prepare a new law on criminalizing genocide denial. The call came less than an hour after the French Constitutional Council issued a statement on February 28, 2012, considering the bill penalizing the denial of genocides unconstitutional with the argument that it curbs freedom of speech.

The bill would have rendered punishable the denial of genocides France has officially recognized, like the Armenian Genocide. France already has a law in place penalizing Holocaust denial.

Turkey welcomed the ruling of the Constitutional Council. Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said the cabinet would meet to consider restarting contacts with France, which were frozen after the French parliament passed the bill on January 23, reported Reuters.

On February 1, Sarkozy vowed to redraft a law that criminalizes the denial of the Armenian Genocide, if the country’s highest judicial body finds an earlier version unconstitutional. While making the statement, Sarkozy reportedly criticized those in cabinet who had opposed the bill, saying they “did not see past the ends of their noses.”

He also said a rejection of the bill by the Constitutional Council could open the door to questioning a law that penalizes denial of the Holocaust.