Posted on 08/22/2007 5:46:38 AM PDT by SJackson
Now where might I get that idea?
“In the aftermath of the Six Day War and the flood of anti-Zionist Arab propaganda, ADL made Israel a top priority. ADL fortified American public support for Israel by initiating “Dateline Israel,” a series of radio broadcasts that gave Americans vivid images of Israel’s human dimensions.”
“ADL took on a new international mission in the aftermath of the Yom Kippur War of 1973. It intensified its ongoing Middle East interpretation program by negating Arab anti-Israel propaganda and keeping America informed of the facts concerning the Jewish State, the sole bastion of democracy in the Middle East.”
http://www.adl.org/ADLHistory/intro.asp
It's not the idea I disagreed with, rather the conclusion. Their mission is to confront antisemitism, discrimination and racism worldwide.
You cite two wars with genocidal intent. Since half the worlds Jews live in Israel, obviously they'll spend a great deal of time on Israel and criticizing the Arab world.
They also spend a great deal of time criticizing European states and on issues like Darfur, which has nothing to do with Israel, on issues like the topic of this thread which is harmful to Israel, and on issues like abortion, gun control, immigration and gay marriage which have nothing to do with either Israel or Jews or persecution.
Their position on the 67 and 73 wars and anti-Israel, most of which is antisemitic, propaganda strikes me as perfectly reasonable, and certainly doesn't make them an agent of a foreign power.
“I think the historical record shows the Turkish government showed considerable restraint”
The death marches were ordered by the Turkish government.
My grandmother was in one of those death marches, with her grandmother and thousands of other civilians, mostly women and children. She begged for water for her grandmother but was refused, and she watched her grandmother die of thirst before her eyes. The only reason she lived was because a Turk took “pity” upon her by making her one of his slaves.
My grandfather was put on a ship to America just in time to save his life by his family. His entire family, including his 9 brothers and sisters, cousins, uncles and aunts, grandparents — all noncombatant civilians — were all murdered by the Turkish government.
Now, that’s what you call “restraint.”
No matter how much denial is still going on to this day by Turkey and some others with an agenda, it was ethnic cleansing and genocide ORDERED by the Turkish government to rid the country of the Armenian “infidels.”
You are correct - Turkish troops had been harassing and murdering Armenians for some time before the laws passed in 1915.
The difference is that starting in 1915 murdering Armenians became a matter of official, instead of unofficial, state policy.
I would recommend reading the work of Guenter Lewy. He’s actually contributing some very good points about what we actually know of the events.
Lewy contends that large numbers of Armenians actively fought with the allies, and that Armenian revolutionaries worked to incite the Turkish regime to over-react and thereby bring in Western support.
No, the Irish and Cromwell is not the best analogy, but the purpose was to show the historical consequences of desperate struggles. When nations or regimes feel put up against it, things usually turn ugly for groups or cultures the regime views as suspect. Deportation and massacre are lamentable, but not without precedent.
Here is a good article by Guenter Lewy on the complex aftermath of the trials.
http://www.meforum.org/article/748
And an exchange between Lewy and Commentary readers on a very controversial article he wrote (I have the print edition in storage, and cannot link the article)
www.tallarmeniantale.com/Commentary_letters2.pdf
I have no love for the Ottoman regime or the Turks, and I loathe Islam as a religion, but I do not consider what occurred to be genocide (not that the word holds much meaning anyway as it gets applied to almost anything). I’m interested in the events that led to the deportation of most of the Armenian population. I don’t think any of the sincere historians who dispute the term genocide are very supportive of the actions of the Turkish regime, but they have tried to put the deportation in context of the events of the period.
The Armenians, too, have an agenda, and their “historians” are very unreliable. It will take decades to sort out the hash that has been made of these events.
Are you suggesting that the Turks attacked the Armenian revolutionaries, and that any civilian casualties were incidental to those attacks, that there were no actions taken against non-combatants? If so, it clearly wasn't genocide, though that flies in the face of history.
Meant to add, if not genocide, it was clearly mass murder.
“The Armenians, too, have an agenda”
Yes, they do. And their agenda is that the world acknowledge that it was indeed a genocide.
As far as “historians,” I have my facts from my own ancestors who were there and were the victims.
Saying the truth makes the head-choppers mad. Everything makes the head-choppers mad. Head-choppers have no place in civilized society.
I think most of the dissenting school of historians agree with you; it was mass murder. And I think some cultures/peoples are more inclined to commit mass murder than others (I would not want to live in Turkey as a non-Muslim during wartime). But the backdrop of the First World War has to be considered when evaluating the events that led to this mass murder; the Turks were not uniformly bad and the Armenians were not entirely victims.
Well, the trouble is that the Armenian “historians” have muddied the water so badly with exaggeration and omission that the very real suffering that Armenians endured is obscured in hysterics.
Historical accuracy is very inexact, but it is still a far step ahead of relying on anecdotal evidence only.
Much of the Armenian argument verges on bullying: you’d better agree with our claims or else we’ll smear you as a genocide apologist. Living here in LA, I run into this sort of belligerence pretty frequently.
He asked what it was while looking at It.
If history only recorded these words alone as his then you might have a point, the words were a rhetorical question given what the religious community were demanding to have happen, already appointed to have happen, as recorded in Psalms 22.
Isn’t that the same Henry Morgenthau who had a plan to starve half the German population to death after the war for revenge?
I’m saying that the lines between active combatants against the Turkish regime and civilians was horribly blurred, and that many Armenian revolutionaries are culpable in the chaos that ensued. By and large, there was suspicion and mistrust between the Turks and Armenians for decades before the Great War, and the War brought that mistrust to a head. By and large the Armenians did support the Allies and the Turks wanted them out as a result.
Before the planning of the final solution Hitler asked, “Who remembers the Armenians?”
His son authored the Morgenthau Plan for post-war Germany. It was US policy until late 1946, early 1947, and since half the German population didn’t starve it’s fair to say that wasn’t the intent. If the allies had wanted to starve half the German population, they could have.
I don’t understand what you are saying.
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