October 8 , 2007

Armenian Resolutions
A Continuum of Anti-Turkish Persecution on Capitol Hill

On Wednesday, October 10, 2007, the United States House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee (HFAC) will likely vote whether to send House Resolution 106, which considers the Armenian tragedy as genocide, to the full House for consideration.  The proceeding will take place at the Rayburn Building, Room 2172 at 1:30pm.  HFAC has not scheduled a hearing at the proceeding, which is unfortunate, because the resolution is rife with factual errors and misleading statements.

If H. Res. 106 passes HFAC and comes before Speaker Pelosi, she will have three options: (1) not to proceed to a floor vote and let the resolution fail for inaction; (2) proceed to a floor vote on the regular calendar, by which a full debate on all facets of the resolution likely would be permitted and under which a simple majority of votes would be required for passage; or (3) proceed to a floor vote under suspension of the rules, meaning that only issues she considers important might be debated, and under which a two-thirds majority vote would be required for passage.

To date, the United States legislature has passed five measures concerning the Ottoman Armenian experience, none of which characterized the Armenian case as genocide:

1- House Resolution 3540, June 12, 1996
2- House Joint Resolution 148, April 9, 1975
3- Senate Resolution 359, May 11, 1920
4- Congressional Act re Near East Relief, Inc., August 6, 1919
5- Senate Concurrent Resolution 12, February 9, 1916

It is noteworthy that the 1916, 1919, and 1920 legislative measures refer to providing assistance to the Armenians who were relocated from the eastern war zones.  The Ottoman Empire permitted this assistance in order to alleviate the hardship of the relocatees.  Unfortunately, Ottoman Muslims in eastern Anatolia were not included in U.S. relief efforts.  In eastern Anatolia alone, over 1.1 million Ottoman Muslims perished in the Armenian Revolt (1880-1915), and the same war-induced causes that affected Ottoman Armenians.

Importantly, four United States legislative measures that characterized the Armenian case as genocide failed:

History of Violence and Hate Crimes

Armenian resolutions alleging genocide came to America along with Armenian terrorism.  To date, Armenian terrorists have committed over 265 attacks, killing over 70 and seriously injuring over 700 innocent persons. Since the mid 1980s, Armenian public activists have directed their energy to killing scholarly debate and opinions that the challenge Armenian point of view by harassing and threatening the professional lives of scholars.

The ATAA has joined brave students, teachers and parents in a lawsuit against Massachusetts to stop the censorship of contra-genocide perspectives, and for good reason:  the majority of experts on the Ottoman Empire reject the Armenian allegation of genocide, such as Bernard Lewis, Guenther Lewy, Andrew Mango, Avigdor Levy Stanford Shaw, David Fromkin, Norman Stone, Edward Erickson, Heath Lowry, and Justin McCarthy, to list just a few notables.  Note the following critical observation by Professor Bernard Lewis:

[T]hat the massacre of the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire was the same as what happened to Jews in Nazi Germany is a downright falsehood.  What happened to the Armenians was the result of a massive Armenian armed rebellion against the Turks, which began even before war broke out, and continued on a larger scale.

But to make this a parallel with the holocaust in Germany, you would have to assume the Jews of Germany had been engaged in an armed rebellion against the German state, collaborating with the allies against Germany. That in the deportation order, the cities of Hamburg and Berlin were exempted, persons in the employment of the state were exempted, and the deportation only applied to the Jews of Germany proper, so that when they got to Poland they were welcomed and sheltered by the Polish Jews.  This seems to me a rather absurd parallel”.