An Interview with Dr. Jacobs on Genocide in the Ottoman Empire

George N. Shirinian

Dr. Steven Leonard Jacobs holds the Aaron Aronov Endowed Chair of Judaic Studies and is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Alabama-Tuscaloosa. An ordained rabbi, Professor Jacobs is a specialist on the Holocaust and Genocide, Biblical Studies, Jewish-Jewish Christian Relations, and is one of the foremost authorities on Raphael Lemkin (1900-1959), who coined the term “genocide” and devoted his life to the enactment of an international law on the punishment and prevention of genocide.

Among his numerous publications, Prof. Jacobs is the author of the chapter entitled, “Lemkin on Three Genocides: Comparing His Writings on the Armenian, Assyrian, and Greek Genocides,” in the recently published book, Genocide in the Ottoman Empire: Armenians, Assyrians, and Greeks 1913-1923, edited by George N. Shirinian (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2017, published in association with The Asia Minor and Pontos Hellenic Research Center and The Zoryan Institute).

Will Donald Trump have the guts to call the Armenian genocide what it was?

Robert Fisk

Well, it’s now Trump’s moment of masculinity. Will he – or will he not – have the guts to call the 1915 Armenian genocide a genocide? A small matter for a guy who’s shooting from the hip across the Muslim world, you may say. But he congratulated the Caliph Erdogan on winning his dictatorial referendum and I doubt that Trump has the courage to offend him this month by telling the truth about the slaughter of one and a half million Armenian Christians during the First World War.

After all, Bill Clinton didn’t call it a genocide. Nor did George Bush. Nor did Obama. They all promised they would before they were elected. But my guess is that Donald Trump will be as cowardly as them, bowing towards the sensitivities of Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his wretched generals, those of them who still have jobs after Erdogan’s post-attempted-coup purge of the last nine months.

On the Road of Denial You Only Find Darkness

Vartan Matiossian

 

The Australian Turkish Advocacy-Alliance (ATAA) is pretty busy these days doing what its American namesake, the Assembly of Turkish American Associations (ATAA), does: denying that Armenians were victims of genocide in the Ottoman Empire. To that end, it invited to Australia a rising star of the new generation of non-Turkish revisionists, a Ph.D. student called Tal Buenos, who addressed a group of parliamentarians at the New South Wales Parliament during lunch on November 24, 2014. (There is no such thing as a free lunch, they say, but the luncheon was hosted by the NSW Parliamentary Friends of Turkey, so they ate what they wanted: a warmed-up meal.)

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.

What I Choose It to Mean: On ‘Yeghern’ as the Armenian Translation of ‘Genocide’

Vartan Matiossian

 

“The term Yeghern, or Medz Yeghern, is the only word that really captures the essence of what happened in 1915. The survivors used that word. It is the only word that could really explain what happened in 1915. In a world without genocide denial, it would be the best word.”
–Khatchig Mouradian (2009)¹

 

‘Medz Yeghern’: the Proper Name of the Genocide

In the concluding installment of this study on the semantics, history, and politics of the phrase Medz Yeghern, it is crucial to underscore that the exhausting search for recognition should not block the use of the words that our ancestors have bequeathed us. It has been argued that recognition has been sufficiently ensured by two resolutions of the House of Representatives, 3 federal court rulings, 42 state declarations by legislation or proclamation, a sentence in a document filed in 1951 by the U.S. government to the International Court of Justice and another sentence in Ronald Reagan’s proclamation,² along with official declarations by 20 countries and statements of a host of scholars. “We don’t say that this is the end and the work of recognition has been done; simply, the emphasis should be put on reparation and the rights,” Giro Manoyan, the head of the ARF Bureau Armenian Cause office, declared recently.³

Armenians should not be obfuscated by denial, whether mainstream or from a lunatic fringe, which will probably be as lasting as affirmation. Another worrisome trend—misuse—should not obfuscate them either.

Raphael Lemkin and Samantha Power's Problem from Hell

Gabriel Sanders

Ten years ago, Samantha Power won a Pulitzer Prize for her book “A Problem From Hell,” a history of American inaction in the face of genocide. As she awaits Senate confirmation to be the country’s next ambassador to the United Nations (*), the book offers a glimpse into Power’s political philosophy — and a sense of whom she might want to emulate as America’s voice at the world body.             

The Father of Genocide

Outraged by the Ottomans' massacres of Armenians,

a young Polish lawyer pushed to have

the crime of genocide enshrined in law

 

 

Yascha Mounk

 

During World War I, Soghomon Tehlirian, an Armenian civilian, looked on helplessly as Ottoman troops shot his mother, raped his sisters and hacked his brother to death. Six years later, on a Berlin street, Tehlirian approached Talaat Pasha, a grand vizier of the Ottoman Empire who had coordinated the killing of Armenians. "This is for my mother," he told Pasha as he shot him dead.

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