![(1923) Greek and Armenian refugee children from Anatolia standing outside one-story building, near Athens, Greece. Greece, 1923. [Photograph] Retrieved from the Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/2002709161/.](https://mondoweiss.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/refugeechildren-2-e1572547169878-580x466.png "Regarding the ‘Armenian Genocide Resolution,’ and Ilhan Omar’s response")
Everyone concerned is very proud that the House of Representatives finally, after over 100 years, passed a resolution (H.Res.296) recognizing the Genocide of the Armenians, Greeks, and Assyrians by Ottoman Turkey. It is definitely long overdue. However, although the resolution does include the Greeks and Assyrians, most news reports fail to mention that the Greeks and Assyrians suffered the same fate as the Armenians, and continue to call it “The Armenian Genocide Resolution,” and/or “The Armenian Genocide,” which misses a few major points.
To put Martin Niemöller’s poem in a new context, it should be pointed out that:
First they came for the Greeks of Eastern Thrace in 1913,
And no one stopped the slaughters.
Then they came for the Greeks in Western Asia Minor (Anatolia) in 1914,
And no one stopped the slaughters.
Then they came for the Assyrians in Eastern Anatolia in 1914,
And no one stopped the slaughters.
Then they came for the Armenians in 1915,
And no one stopped the slaughters.
Then they came for the Pontic Greeks in 1916,
And no one stopped the slaughters.
Then they exiled the remaining Assyrians
—who had arrived in Anatolia around 2,400 BC—
and the Greeks—who had arrived in Anatolia in 1200 BC
and the Armenians, who had arrived in Anatolia in 600 BC,
thus ending over four thousand years
of Assyrian, Greek, and Armenian presence in Anatolia.
Then they gave Anatolia to the Turks,
the perpetrators of the Genocides,
and descendants of the Turks
who had invaded Anatolia and
conquered Constantinople in 1453 AD,
almost 4,000 years after the arrival
of the Assyrians, Greeks, and Armenians.
Then they named Anatolia Turkey.
Total Assyrians slaughtered: 275,000, more than half their population.
Total Greeks slaughtered: 1.2 million
Total Armenians slaughtered: up to 1.5 million.
Totaling 3 Million Assyrian, Greek and Armenian victims of the Ottoman Genocide.
Yet few news reports bother to mention the Greek and Assyrian victims of this Genocide.
My mother, a Pontic Greek lived through that genocide. By age 12, she was the only known survivor of her family. It was an Armenian family who took my orphaned mother in and brought her to safety in Aleppo, Syria when the Armenian family fled Turkey. And it was the Armenian family who arranged my mother’s marriage to my father—an Assyrian who fled Turkey on pain of death in 1905, and came to America. My mother was only 15 when she married my father. My father was 45. My father brought my mother to America in 1925.
Memorialized in “Not Even My Name,” my mother’s story represents the story of millions of other Greeks, Assyrians, and Armenians who lived through that terrible genocide. They should not be dealt with as an afterthought by the press or by Congress. As Rep. Anna Eshoo’s reminds us, her Assyrian family lived through that genocide.
Lest we become complacent, we must remember all the victims of a genocide equally. This was a Genocide of the Christian minorities of the Ottoman Empire: Greeks, Assyrians, and Armenians.
If Ilhan Omar needs confirmation by genocide scholars, that the Greeks, Assyrians, and Armenians suffered Genocides at the hands of the Ottoman Turks, she should be directed to the 2007 Resolution of the International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS), which was affirmed by hundreds of the world’s leading genocide scholars. (View IAGS Resolution here)
Elie Wiesel describes denial as a “double killing,” as it also murders the memory of the crime. But he also reminds us that “To remain silent or indifferent is the greatest sin.”
Updated: November 1, 2019, 12 p.m.
Beautifully written and correct as to facts, except that the genocide, in its wider sense of an attempt to uproot peoples and erase even the trace of their existence, did not stop with the Ottomans — it did continue, and was completed in depth, under the Turkish Republic, founded and led by the continuators of the Ottoman Union and Progress genocidaire government.
Concluding with a quote by arch-genocidaire Elie Wiesel, posing as a whining victim, was not in the best taste, though.
@echinococcus
“Concluding with a quote by arch-genocidaire Elie Wiesel, posing as a whining victim, was not in the best taste, though.”
Well said!!
For the record regarding the late Elie Wiesel:
While he rightfully protested the desecration of Jewish graves anywhere in the world, he had nothing to say when the Arab cemetery at Deir Yassin was bulldozed along with hundreds of others throughout Palestine by Zionists. Nor did he publicly mention that from November 1947 to January 1949, he worked as a journalist for the Irgun newspaper, Zion in Kamf (Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, October/ November 1997) and was surely informed about the massive slaughter of defenseless Palestinians that occurred at Deir Yassin on 9 April 1948.
He consistently turned a blind eye to Zionist crimes committed against the indigenous Palestinians. Although their identities are common knowledge, he never pointed his finger at those responsible for the massacre at Deir Yassin, which used to exist only 1400 meters north of the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem.
___________________________________________________________
Also:
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2010/05/27/open-letter-elie-wiesel/
New York Review of Books, May 27, 2010
“An Open Letter to Elie Wiesel”
By Avner Inbar and Assaf Sharon
Excerpts:
“In a recent public letter to President Obama, Elie Wiesel urged the President not to ‘pressure’ Israel to cease settlement activity in Jerusalem.”
“According to Wiesel:
”‘For me, the Jew that I am, Jerusalem is above politics. It is mentioned more than six hundred times in Scripture—and not a single time in the Koran. Its presence in Jewish history is overwhelming…. To many theologians, it IS Jewish history…. It belongs to the Jewish people and is much more than a city, it is what binds one Jew to another in a way that remains hard to explain. When a Jew visits Jerusalem for the first time, it is not the first time; it is a homecoming…. Contrary to certain media reports, Jews, Christians and Muslims ARE allowed to build their homes anywhere in the city. The anguish over Jerusalem is not about real estate but about memory.’”
“The views expressed by Wiesel are not shared by a growing movement of Israelis who oppose the continued expansion of settlements and who have been protesting the eviction by the Israeli government of Palestinian residents of the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah. These Israelis have responded to Mr. Wiesel in the following letter. Among the one hundred signers are Israel Prize Laureates Avishai Margalit and Zeev Sternhell, former Knesset Speaker and Jewish Agency Chairman Avrum Burg, Professors David Shulman and Moshe Halbertal, former Knesset member Zehava Galan, and other Jerusalemites, many of whom are prominent intellectuals and academics.”
Signed: Avner Inbar and Assaf Sharon
“Dear Mr. Wiesel: ‘We write to you from Jerusalem to convey our frustration, even outrage, at your recently published letter on Jerusalem. We are Jewish Jerusalemites—residents by choice of a battered city, a city used and abused, ransacked time and again first by foreign conquerors and now by its own politicians. We cannot recognize our city in the sentimental abstraction you call by its name.’
“’We invite you to our city to view with your own eyes the catastrophic effects of the frenzy of construction. You will witness that, contrary to some media reports, Arabs are not allowed to build their homes anywhere in Jerusalem. You will see the gross inequality in allocation of municipal resources and services between east and west. We will take you to Sheikh Jarrah, where Palestinian families are being evicted from their homes to make room for a new Jewish neighborhood, and to Silwan, where dozens of houses face demolition because of the Jerusalem Municipality’s refusal to issue building permits to Palestinians.’”
Isaac Asimov had an interesting run in with Wiesel:
I publicly expressed my view on this only once, and in delicate circumstances. It was in May 1977. I was invited to a round-table discussion whose participants included Elie Wiesel, who survived the Holocaust and hasn’t spoken about anything else since. That day, he irritated me by claiming that you couldn’t trust academics, or technicians, because they had helped make possible the Holocaust. What a sweeping generalization that is! And precisely the kind of remark that antisemites might make: “I don’t trust Jews, because once, Jews crucified my Savior”.
I let the others argue for a moment while I brooded over my resentment; then, unable to contain myself any longer, I spoke up: “Mr. Wiesel, you’re wrong; the fact that a group of people has suffered appalling persecution does not mean it is inherently good and innocent. All that the persecution proves is that this group was in a position of weakness. If the Jews were in a position of strength, who knows if they wouldn’t become persecutors?”
To which Wiesel replied, very angrily: “Give me one example of the Jews persecuting anyone!”
Naturally, I was expecting this. “At the time of the Maccabees, in the second century BCE, John Hyrcanus of Judea conquered Edom and gave the Edomites the choice of conversion to Judaism, or death. Not being idiots, the Edomites converted, but afterwards they were still treated as inferiors because even though they had become Jews, they were still originally Edomites”.
Wiesel, even more upset, said: “There is no other example.”
“There is no other period in history where Jews have exercised power”, I replied. “The only time they had it, they behaved just like the others.”
That put an end to the discussion. I would add however that the audience was entirely on the side of Elie Wiesel.
https://lawrenceofcyberia.blogs.com/news/2010/03/asimov-on-antisemitism-and-wider-prejudice.html
I kind of liked concluding with Elie Wiesel. Does Mondoweiss do anything different than follow the dictates of “To remain silent or indifferent is the greatest sin.’
Thank you Thea for your commentary that includes not only the Armenians, but also Assyrians and Greeks that perished at the hands of the Young Turks. I am a scholar of Arab American studies, which includes historical antecedents as all the occupied of the Ottoman Empire. However, you omitted the people of Greater Syria, especially modern day Lebanon who starved to death during the Great Famine of Mount Lebanon (1915-1918) when there was a locust infestation in the fields of Lebanese peasants, which the Young Turks took advantage of and blocked the access to both the Allied Forces and the peasants themselves to consume any crops that had not all been decimated (reference Greg Orfalea’s “Before the Flames: A Quest for the History of Arab Americans”, and Albert Hourani’s and Nadim Shehadi’s, “The Lebanese and the World: 100 years of Emigration). Depending on what sources are cited, it is estimated that 150,000 to 300,000 Lebanese starved to death due to the Young Turks’ blockade to their crops. The Ottoman Empire was not exactly an efficient empire until the Young Turks took over to remedy what they perceived was the incomplete process of total Turkization of the ethnic groups living under the Ottoman Empire. Christian and Jewish minorities were not conscripted into the Turkish Empire as they were deemed “dhimmis” under the Ottoman Law. Christians were comprised mostly of the Maronite and Orthodox sects, of which my grandparents, who were “Antiochan (Orthodox) Christians, and were born in the far North villages of Lebanon, Amioun and Bishmezzine, respectively, and left Lebanon circa 1911 a few years before WWI began.
In my PhD program I took a class on Arab and Muslim women in Racialized America from an Egyptian-born anthropology professor, who refuted the Ottoman Turks’ persecution of their Christian subjects, and instead praised the Turkish millet system of religious plurality, dividing up all the sects of Christianity and Islam, and Judaism to practice freely their respective religions and to manage their own religious communities’ payment of taxes to the Ottoman Empire.
Muslims of Greater Syria also were oppressed by the Ottoman Empire, a few books chronicled the Ottomans’ harsh treatment of the Egyptian fellaheen. Notably, in 1916 Arab nationalists, Orthodox Christians and Muslim Syrians and Lebanese were executed by hanging by the Young Turks in Damascus and Beirut, the latter at Burj Square, which in later years became La Place des Martyrs. In the case of our family, who were Antiochan Orthodox, my father’s first cousin traced our genealogy to the Greeks, and later when I received the results from a DNA test, I discovered that my origins were not only from the Levant but also, Greek, Roman, and Persian. This all made sense as Lebanon was part of the southeastern corner of the Roman Empire, and earlier Persian and Macedonian Empires (parts of Ancient Greece).
Although my paternal grandfather died prematurely so I never would have had the opportunity to ask him about the Great Famine of Mount Lebanon, I never heard my paternal grandmother speak of the Great Famine. As Orfalea notes in his, Ameen Haddad, who was a friend of our family, recounted his experiences of the great famine, but lamentably many Lebanese declined as they put the ugly genocide and executions behind them, and forged ahead in their new country of emigration from Lebanon. Yet, the chilling quote of Enver Pasha on May 19, 2015 memorializes the planned genocide of the Armenians and Lebanese:
“The Ottoman Empire should be cleaned up of the Armenians and the Lebanese. We have destroyed the former by the sword, we shall destroy the latter through starvation”.
The title of the article includes the phrase ‘Omar’s response’ but that response has not been cited in full. Here is the statement issued by her office to CNN:
“I believe accountability for human rights violations — especially ethnic cleansing and genocide — is paramount. But accountability and recognition of genocide should not be used as cudgel in a political fight. It should be done based on academic consensus outside the push and pull of geopolitics. A true acknowledgment of historical crimes against humanity must include both the heinous genocides of the 20th century, along with earlier mass slaughters like the transatlantic slave trade and Native American genocide, which took the lives of hundreds of millions of indigenous people in this country. For this reason, I voted ‘present’ on final passage of H.Res. 296, the resolution Affirming the Unites States record on the Armenian Genocide.”
It is very hard to make sense of this statement. First, as Thea Halo notes, the views of historians on this issue come as close to consensus as it is reasonable to expect (hardly ever do scholars reach 100% consensus).
Second, geopolitical considerations are even more important to those who deny this genocide, who are usually concerned to maintain good relations with a military ally, than to those who recognize it, some of whom may be motivated by Islamophobia. This is true of the controversy over the issue not only in the US but also in Israel, which has refused to recognize the genocide solely for the sake of maintaining good relations with Turkey.
Third, the statement as it stands delegitimizes any statement about any particular genocide that does not simultaneously deal with all other genocides, as though recognition of one genocide implies denial of others. It would be surprising if Omar were consistently to maintain such an absurd stance. Therefore this argument has an ad hoc quality to it.
Omar’s stance exposes her to the suspicion that she is selectively unwilling to recognize genocide when the perpetrators are Moslem and the victims non-Moslem. In fact, such a suspicion would be unfounded, as she has publicly recognised the genocide in Darfur, Sudan. So it is probably a matter only of her limited knowledge of Ottoman history.