Jewish organizations have rediscovered the Armenian genocide, now that Turkey isn’t friends with Israel. It was different when Turkey was Israel’s buddy. And at Salon, Mark Arax, an Armenian-American who once worked for the LA Times, tells the story of how he sought to expose the Jewish denial of the Armenian genocide in the paper– and ended up losing his job. Note that he was told that as an Armenian, he could not tell the story. Imagine that standard applied to the New York Times on Israel coverage! (A standard the Times used to maintain, which has been attacked by Tom Friedman and David Margolick and others.)
I found my way to the equivocators and deniers who sat at the helms of the major American Jewish organizations. None was more blunt than Abraham Foxman, the head of the Anti-Defamation League in New York. The Armenian Genocide had become his own convenient cudgel to keep Turkey in line.
Foxman had just returned from a meeting with Turkish military and government leaders to discuss pressuring Congress, the State Department and President Bush to turn back the genocide resolution once again.
"Our focus is Israel," he explained. "If helping Turkey helps Israel, then that’s what we’re in the business of doing."
But such a bottom line would seem an uncomfortable place for a Jewish leader to be when the question was genocide.
"Was it genocide?" he said. "It was wartime. Things get messy."
He questioned whether a bill in Congress would help "reconcile" the differences between Turks and Armenians, as though the whole thing was a marital spat that needed some calming down…
[Arax prepares his story] The weekend came and went, but the story held. I called the editor and asked if there was a problem. He was sorry to say that the story had been killed — on a last-minute order from the managing editor.
“But why?” I asked.
"Your byline," he said.
"My byline?”
Then it hit me. Even as the paper was nominating one of my other stories for a Pulitzer Prize, on this story I was an Armenian.
The official explanation was a beauty. The managing editor said I was not an objective reporter because I had once signed a petition stating that the Armenian Genocide was a historical fact.
I had never signed such a petition. But if I had, how did this prove bias? Our own style book at the Times recognized the genocide as a historical fact.
"Would you tell a Jewish reporter that he couldn’t write about Holocaust denial because he believed the Holocaust was a fact?” I asked.
His answer was to reassign my story to a colleague in Washington who covered Congress. That this reporter was Jewish — and the story dealt with Jewish denial of the genocide — didn’t seem to faze the managing editor. The colleague, who may not have had a choice in the matter, proceeded to gut my story. By the time he was done, there was not a single mention of Jewish denial.
After an ugly public fight, I left the paper.
