Suffolk University Law School students have launched an online petition urging the school to withdraw its invitation to Abraham Foxman, the head of the Anti-Defamation League, to speak at their commencement and receive an honorary degree.
The students chiefly cite Foxman’s opposition to the United States’ recognition of the Armenian Genocide and offer backup here and here and here. The petition is said to have more than 750 signatures.
The story was featured on Law and Disorder radio Monday, with co-host Heidi Boghosian describing the slaughter of much of her family in a village under Ottoman rule in 1915. The petition then made the Boston Globe the next day. It has been endorsed by Jewish Voice for Peace, though Suffolk U. president James McCarthy has affirmed the honor for Foxman, who is retiring in 2015, in what the National Lawyers Guild–Suffolk branch calls a “measly response.” McCarthy:
“Mr. Foxman’s body of work is well deserving of recognition…It is our hope that Mr. Foxman’s personal story as a Holocaust survivor and attorney who has dedicated his life to public service will inspire our graduates as they embark on their professional careers.”
Boghosian, who is head of the National Lawyers Guild, posted a piece about Abraham Foxman as an Armenian Holocaust denier, laying out the argument in personal terms.
Foxman, the Anti-Defamation League director, drew harsh public criticism in 2007 for opposing a congressional resolution acknowledging the 1915 extermination of approximately 1.5 million Armenians. Since the 15th century, Armenians had been treated as second-class citizens under Ottoman rule. In honoring Foxman, Suffolk University sends a message that politics are more important than acknowledging crimes against humanity.
The denial of genocide is an integral, and final, part of the genocidal process, as Genocide Watch founder Gregory Stanton has written. Despite a well-documented body of eyewitness accounts and other evidence chronicling the 20th century’s very first genocide (scholar and lawyer Raphael Lemkin coined the word genocide in 1943 with the extermination of the Armenians in mind), the Turkish government continues to mount a campaign of denial through inaccurate scholarship, propaganda, aggressive lobbying, and even a law which forbids mention of the word genocide. In 2005, Nobel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk was prosecuted for “insulting Turkishness,” as was Armenian-Turkish journalist Hrant Dink who was subsequently assassinated in 2007 by a young Turkish nationalist. U.S. political and partisan allegiances with Turkey enable a range of repugnant human rights transgressions, old and new.
My grandmother Baidzar was born in Giresun, a village on the Black Sea, to parents who owned almond and filbert orchards and were active in working for protection of the Armenian minority. Baidzar remembered that men would come to their house in the middle of the night and have secret, whispered meetings upstairs, because it was against the law for minorities to assemble. The father of the poet Silva Gaboudegian was one of those men. Many years and many worlds later, an older cousin would tell my grandmother that those men were members of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation. Baidzar remembered her mother falling to her knees crying before two officers, a Turk and a German, who came to their home on horseback, begging them to spare her family. Baidzar later watched her parents and siblings being slaughtered before escaping to an orphanage and making a treacherous passage to the United States as a mail order bride.
Around the world, on April 15, just weeks before Suffolk’s commencement, and 99 years after the mass murders, families with stories just like my grandmother’s will mark the day of observance of the genocide. April 15 is widely considered to be the starting date of a systematic and well-documented plan to eliminate the Armenians. On that day in 1915, the Interior Minister of the Ottoman Empire, Talaat Pasha, ordered the arrest and hangings of Armenian intellectuals and community leaders in Constantinople. The killings were gruesome and included beheadings of groups of babies, dismemberments, mass burnings and drownings, use of toxic gas, lethal injections of morphine or with the blood of typhoid fever patients.
Although there has been much academic recognition of the Armenian genocide, this has rarely been followed by governmental recognition. Turkey swiftly condemned a U.S. Senate committee resolution adopted on April 10, 2014 by the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations labeling as genocide the massacre of Armenians by Ottoman forces and warned Congress against taking steps that would tarnish Turkish-American ties. Similar resolutions under past presidential administrations have also failed.
The Turkish people have been taught for decades that there was no genocide, with the result that most believe their country is being treated unfairly when genocide resolutions are raised. Continued failure to acknowledge the genocide in our history books is a disservice not only to survivors of the genocide, but also to those Turks who tried to stop it then and who face imprisonment today for publicly acknowledging the genocide.
Suffolk University should listen to its students. It has the chance to take a step forward in rectifying decades of injustice by reversing its decision to honor Abraham Foxman with an honorary law degree at its 2014 commencement. Tolerance of those who deny the Armenian genocide may be politically expedient, but it is nonetheless morally indefensible.
Boghosian was on Law & Disorder the other morning, relating this story, and co-host Michael Smith said:
The Jewish establishment personified by Abraham Foxman denies [the Armenian genocide]– why? Because in their ideology the Jewish genocide which followed the Armenian genocide has to be unique. Jews are the really sole victims. And they think if the Armenian genocide is recognized it will somehow undercut their moral authority in advocating for Jews and more broadly for the whole project of the Jewish settlement and colonization of Palestine, its displacement of the native Palestinians there and its ongoing oppression, really apartheid, in Palestine. Foxman is the leading voice in America for labelling people who criticize Israel as anti-Semites and if you’re Jewish like I am, and you criticize Israel, then you’re a self-hating Jew.
Smith relates Foxman’s position to the ADL’s ugly campaign in California, spying on those who supported the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa. Smith:
This is the man, this Holocaust denier with respect to Armenian genocide, this is the man that they’re going to honor at the university. It’s a disgrace, just like honoring Condoleezza Rice at Rutgers is a disgrace.
I agree completely. Foxman is a Holocaust denier, and anti-Muslim bigot (as shown by his siding with the Gellars of the world in telling Muslims where, in the US, they are “permitted” to build their houses of worship). He also is a nasty operator (as his overblown and over-the-top attacks during the whole “Passion of the Christ” affair show) and a bit of a pathetic clown (as the great film “Defamation” shows.) He has no business getting any honors from any decent organization.
Abe Foxman, genocide denier.
Be a wonderful “win” if he loses the honor. OTOH it would be a wonderful “win” if he keeps it and is met at Suffolk with a big negative demonstration. I don’t know how “ip close and personal” the Armenian genocide is for Armenians today, but hushing up the Jewish pogroms, apartheid, and grand exile of 1948 (does it rise to “genocide” and does it matter?) w.r.t. Palestine are enough reason for me to oppose any honor for this man.
Not just genocide denial of the Armenians. There’s a section in the film “Defamation”(2009) where Foxman pressures the Ukrainian government to play down/forget their own Holocaust(the ‘Holomdor’) because he fears this would take away the spotlight from the Jewish one.
Maybe Foxman was having a mini-stroke during the Darfur crisis, because he feared this would make the lessons of the Holocaust too universal.
The fact that a walking bigot like him was considered an authority of “anti-racism” for so long speaks volumes about the deep-seated cultural corruption of the United States and that of the West in general, at least in the past few decades.
The suppression of acknowledgment and recognition of the Armenian Genocide should be fought tooth and nail. “Who now remembers the Armenians?” – isn’t that a quote attributed to Hitler? Both that and the Holodomor should be far better known around the world.
As for Abe, how much criminality has been committed whilst he’s been an office holder and leader of the ADL? How much veracity is there to the potential ADL involvement in the Ukraine dodgy Jewish registration documents?