Worse than denial
My article on the Anti-Defamation League’s recent recognition of the Armenian Genocide appears in this month’s Armenian Observer in Los Angeles and Noah’s Ark in Yerevan. I’m pasting it below.
NEW YORK—There is something sad, even tragic in the Anti-Defamation League’s recent recognition of the Armenian Genocide. It has, I suppose, to do with the fact that the ADL’s August 21 statement had almost nothing to do with the Genocide. The statement was issued, in its own first words, “in light of the heated controversy” and “because of our concern for the unity of the Jewish population.”
Questionable motivations aside, the ADL deserves credit for eventually signing on to the truth. Even its continuing opposition to an Armenian Genocide resolution in Congress is not all rotten; good citizens are rightly skeptical of giving the legislature powers over reality. But the ADL objects to the resolution on altogether different grounds, saying that the bill is “a counterproductive diversion and will not foster reconciliation between Turks and Armenians.”
Having been pressured into the right side of history, the ADL apparently hasn’t caught the vital lesson: Reconciliation between nations is meaningless unless nations are first reconciled with the truth. And so, while the ADL statement addresses visions of unity, consensus, and reconciliation, the simple word truth is left unemployed.
Is truth just not important? Not important enough to defend, if we are to believe that ADL chairman Abraham J. Foxman never really denied the Genocide—to his own conscience. The Boston Globe reports that “Foxman said that for some time he has privately believed that the mass killings constituted a genocide, but thought that describing them as atrocities or massacres was enough.”
Captured in that monstrous word enough is the heart of the ADL’s defect: an adaptable morality that is ruled by politics, rather than a commitment to steady truth.
It is appropriate, then, that the ADL’s statement of Genocide recognition betrays no remorse whatsoever. No apologies are served to offended Armenians or to agitated angels of history. In fact, the only hint of apology leads to the Turkish state. “I hope that Turkey will understand,” Foxman writes, and “it is Turkey’s friends who urge….”
We finally see, encaged in these quotes, the beast to which the ADL has sacrificed its scruples. Turkey, according to the ADL, is “a key strategic ally and friend of the United States and a staunch friend of Israel….” Let us not explore the delicate logic of this dream; the ADL’s faith in Prime Minister Erdogan’s moderation cap, which upcoming nationalist winds will probably blow off, is a faith reason dares no answer.
What is more curious is that the ADL has forged an unrequited alliance with Turkish deniers, when history has offered it a reciprocal alliance with Armenians. The ADL would do well to notice, for example, the remarkable parallels between the Armenian and Jewish massacres. It is hardly irrelevant that Talat Pasha in World War I and Adolf Hitler in World War II executed their holocausts in precisely the same way.
Yet it is even more astonishing that the ADL hasn’t exposed and exploited the parallels between the genocidal Young Turks of 1915 and the genocidal Islamic jihadists of 2001. Both movements were carried by religious zeal and bannered by calls of “conversion or death.” It is precisely in their joint contemplation that the ADL can disrobe its greatest modern foe: Islamofascism.
The ADL, which was founded ironically in the year the Young Turks broke into power, will soon come to appreciate the practical force of these parallels. But by untangling its conscience and restoring the simple truth to the helm, it must first grasp their moral meaning.
Under fiery pressure and scrutiny, the ADL has adopted the right policy on Genocide recognition. Now, it must discover why it’s right. The problem isn’t, as some Armenian activists have urged, that the ADL hasn’t gone far enough in recognizing the Genocide through Congress. The real problem is that it hasn’t gone deep enough.
Until it does, the ADL’s current stance on the Armenian Genocide will be just as shallow—and contemptible—as the one it held two weeks ago.
Well said. There are several interesting issues raised by this situation. Why is the recognition by Jews and/or Jewish lobby groups considered so important? Why does the ADL consider Turkey to be such a good friend when the basis of that friendship appears to be blackmail? Why is it so hard for Turkey to say: “this was a genocide committed by a previous regime by people who are no longer alive but we are sorry”?