Forsooth

Larry Derfner, a columnist for the Jerusalem Post, asks a rhetorical question you won’t find anywhere in the US media:

How long are Israel and its lobby in Washington going to go on living this ridiculous, transparent lie? How long are they going to hock the world about the Holocaust while acting as Turkey’s number two accomplice, number one being the White House, in denying the Armenian genocide?

He goes on to accurately describe the forces at play on the banks of the Potomac:

Again, Congress has demonstrated it won’t recognize that the Ottoman Empire, Turkey’s predecessor, deliberately wiped out about 1.5 million Armenians in 1915–17. Again, the president of the United States has scared Congress off with a big assist from the Anti-Defamation League and other American Jewish “defense” organizations. (Historically, the American Jewish Committee has led the Israel lobby’s effort to shut Congress up about the genocide and the Ottoman Empire’s culpability.)

As usual, we find more diversity of Jewish opinion in the Israeli press on not just this but every issue (the maltreatment of Palestinians, the Israel lobby, the Armenian genocide, etc.) than here in the land of the First Amendment.

Derfner goes on the parse the hard-nosed politics that Turkey’s American lobbyists have trumpeted at the highest possible tessitura in the Washington Post, with echoes answering back across the land—or at least on Capitol Hill, causing sponsors of H.Res. 106 to fall away like stunned moles. He parses the stated objections, then places them in a larger context—that old, boring dichotomy (my words, not his—my Weltschmerz, not his): the practical vs. the moral:

Security and economics are the primary concern of every nation, and Israel is part of the family of nations. But the thing is this: If Israel and the Israel lobby can pursue practical self-interest alone, they can’t insist that the rest of the world act like Righteous Gentiles.

They can’t go on intoning that “the world stood silent” during the Holocaust when they—the leaders of the Jewish world—act as front-line enforcers of silence on the Armenian genocide.

Derfner says that “Israel, along with its lobby in Washington, have always chosen realpolitik.” What he doesn’t say, but what everyone knows, is that this approach works. Or has worked. Continues to work. But, Derfner says, “[w]hat they may not know … is that by now the world sees through them.” He continues:

The world doesn’t take seriously what an Israeli leader or an American Jewish macher has to say about the Six Million, not when it sees that same Israeli leader and American Jewish macher shushing everyone over the murders of 1.5 million other innocents.

Thankfully, those politicians are not the only Jewish voices on the Armenian genocide, or on the Holocaust. There is also Wiesel, Lipstadt, Goldhagen, Bauer, Congressman Adam Schiff, Yossi Sarid and many, many others.

Either you value truth first, or you value power first. Every Jew, every person, makes the choice.

He might have added Israel Charny, Leo Kuper, and many others who have chosen the truth, but he makes the point better than I ever could. As for the American press and the choice its acolytes (“every person,” not just “every Jew”) continue to make, I won’t name names. I leave that to my well-informed, assiduous, good-hearted reader.