The Turkish prime minister said an odd thing when he was in Great Britain recently:

In my country there are 170,000 Armenians. Seventy thousand of them are citizens. We tolerate 100,000 more. So, what am I going to do tomorrow? If necessary I will tell the 100,000: OK, time to go back to your country. Why? They are not my citizens. I am not obliged to keep them in my country.

Apparently he’s miffed that foreign legislatures keep passing resolutions acknowledging the genocide and calling it by name. Yet this is the same prime minister who has been active in normalizing relations with Armenia, and who seems open to amending Turkey’s official position on the final days of the Ottoman Empire: “What is important is to look into the archives, the historical documents … if, as the result of this work, it turns—comes out that there is such a situation, we would then consider and question our history.” Leaving aside the fact that many disinterested parties have already looked into the archives and historical documents and found genocide, making this sound like the usual dodge, one can’t help but give greater weight to what he said in the same interview: “Characterizing the events of 1915 as genocide is not something that we can accept.” ‘Round and ’round he goes …

Meanwhile, a growing number of Turks are speaking out on the Armenian genocide—historians, novelists, and ordinary citizens:

On Saturday, while hundreds of thousands of Armenians climbed to the hilltop memorial in Yerevan, a Turkish human-rights group in Istanbul held its own event, mourning with them. In another part of town, a group of Kurdish mothers gathered in solidarity with Armenians, calling on Turkey to recognize the genocide. Their empathy was matched by bravery, as they could have been jailed or fined for any public mention of the genocide, banned under Turkish law.

It is the latest and boldest step by Turks choosing to break with their government’s silence. It followed an online petition entitled “I Apologize,” signed by nearly 30,000 people in Turkey last year. “My conscience does not accept the insensitivity showed to and the denial of the Great Catastrophe that the Armenians were subjected to in 1915,” the brief statement read. “I reject this injustice and for my share, I empathize with the feelings and pain of my Armenian brothers and sisters. I apologize to them.”

Perhaps in 2015, after the last Armenian survivor of the death marches will have surely passed away, the Turkish people will finally get this load off their collective backs by simply saying: Yes, some of our great-grandparents tried to pull off a genocide. It was wrong. And we renounce it. We condemn the attitude toward the Other that is capable of concocting such an atrocious plan as this genocidal government campaign against a portion of its own population. We are no longer that type of country. We apologize not only to Armenians, we apologize to Turks and others whom we, as a country, have hounded for daring to express their opinions on the matter. Contrary to what our leaders have said for decades, it is impossible to “offend Turkishness.” There is no such thing as “Turkishness.” Every citizen of Turkey is free to be himself or herself. Turks do not fear diversity—we celebrate it. Diversity is a resource, not a threat.

Such, I think, would be the cascading benefits of a simple admission of a historical truth.

Every year around this time I find myself asking myself two questions:

1. When is Turkey going to grow up?
2. When is the foreign policy establishment of the mighty United States of America going to stop letting itself get pushed around the schoolyard by some punks in Ankara?

They’re unlikely to be answered satisfactorily any time soon, but I’m not going to let that spoil the mood. And I’m not ready to consider them rhetorical questions.

In the meantime, here’s something nice Congress can do: it can reduce its annual aid to Turkey by exactly the amount Turkey spends on public relations in the United States. The American taxpayer is, in effect, paying for Ankara’s attempts to quash legislation and influence our own foreign policy.

Armenia

Back in August we heard about the incipient rapprochement between Armenia and Turkey that was to culminate in an imminent restoration of diplomatic relations. On October 10, after a last-minute dispute over wording was resolved with input (shall we say) from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the two countries signed a historic agreement to do just that, reopening borders that Turkey sealed in 1993 in solidarity with Azerbaijan in its conflict with Armenia over the territory of Nagorno-Karabagh. Although some elements in the Armenian diaspora expressed displeasure at the terms of the agreement, other major players fell in line behind it, as the New York Times reports:

Despite noisy street protests, some influential expatriate groups in the United States—including the Western and Eastern Dioceses of the Armenian Church, the Armenian General Benevolent Union, the Knights of Vartan and the Armenian Assembly of America—announced they would back the agreement, in a joint statement that was released Oct. 1.

While I’m sympathetic to those who are unhappy, I think the opinions of Armenians in Armenia trump the feelings of those abroad, and I doubt the pressure Armenia was subjected to caused it to perform a suicidal, or even self-destructive, act. But time, as it always does, will tell.

Bees

The mysterious and devastating decline in honeybee populations in this country (and abroad) was noted here back in May 2007. The evidence is mounting that pesticides are the primary culprit. Now there’s a shocker.

Bikes

Bad news from Paris: their bike-sharing system has run into a nasty patch of human nature in the form of stolen and vandalized equipment.

With 80 percent of the initial 20,600 bicycles stolen or damaged, the program’s organizers have had to hire several hundred people just to fix them. And along with the dent in the city-subsidized budget has been a blow to the Parisian psyche.

“The symbol of a fixed-up, eco-friendly city has become a new source for criminality,” Le Monde mourned in an editorial over the summer. “The Vélib’ was aimed at civilizing city travel. It has increased incivilities.”

The heavy, sandy-bronze Vélib’ bicycles are seen as an accoutrement of the “bobos,” or “bourgeois-bohèmes,” the trendy urban middle class, and they stir resentment and covetousness. They are often being vandalized in a socially divided Paris by resentful, angry or anarchic youth, the police and sociologists say.

I was downtown last night and saw a half-empty SmartBike rack—the bikes that were there seemed fine, and the fact that many were missing I took as a good sign. Whether DC will eventually share the French experience remains to be seen.

Facebook

Still tired of it.

Google

I revisited my street via Google Street View and, lo and behold, I am no longer there. The building under construction on the corner is much further along in the new views—in fact, I can pretty accurately date the shots from the state of the site. So it looks like the Googlemonster is a restless beast, continually revisiting everything it encounters in addition to going new places all the time. Just like the way it crawls the web, come to think of it.

Kindle

Too many people keep borrowing it. That’s not unexpected, since it belongs to my employer, and the borrowing has to do with the stated reason for buying it: to see if we should start publishing on that platform. The upshot (for me) is that it’s a great way to read stuff that flows, where you just flow along with it. It’s not so hot for text that is technical, encyclopedic, laden with graphics or tables, or choppy—i.e., built for browsing (like a newspaper or website), not for reading straight through (like a novel). Also not great for marking up and making notes, in my opinion. It’s still pleasant to read with it, but I suspect Kindle will be seeing serious competition in the years ahead, if it isn’t already, especially from devices with touchscreens and color.

Obama

A year ago at this time we were wondering who the next president of the United States would be. Although he’s only been president since January 20, this is as good a time as any to take stock of Barack Obama. On the plus side, he made a pretty decent Supreme Court nomination and got her confirmed; he initiated bilateral talks with Iran and has ratcheted down the rhetoric; he has scrapped the antiballistic system in Eastern Europe, leading to improved relations with Russia (and maybe leverage in our dealings with Iran); and he has done some heavy lifting in pursuit of true healthcare reform, which will likely pass in some form during this current session of Congress. On the negative side, he has done little to extract the US from Iraq, and even less to shut down Guantánamo; he has continued some of the previous administration’s abuse of executive privilege and government secrecy; and he has made only a half-hearted show of exposing and dealing with White House and Justice Department culpability in justifying and providing cover for torture by the CIA and the military. Still to be scored is his approach to Afghanistan—he is currently deliberating, and the hope arises he will ditch the simpleminded bellicosity displayed in his campaign and find a saner solution to that mess.

Addendum 2009.11.02: I knew I would forget something: a small additional plus for Obama, who “took advantage of a rare political moment to break through one of Washington’s most powerful lobbies and trim more weapons systems than any president had in decades.” What makes it small is this: “Now the question is whether Mr. Obama can sustain that push next year, when the midterm elections are likely to make Congress more resistant to further cuts and job losses.” And this: “Mr. Obama has said that he does not intend to reduce military spending while the nation is engaged in two wars.” We are no closer to discarding the notion that the US must be capable of fighting multiple strategic (i.e., nondefensive) wars simultaneously.

Addendum 2009.11.03: A significantly bigger, unvarnished plus: “Without fanfare, President Barack Obama has okayed a large cash infusion to help clean up the Great Lakes, quietly signing a bill that was years in the making and marks a rare bipartisan milestone.”

It is typical of this dysfunctional relationship that no date has been set for such relations to actually kick in, and none of the thorny issues dividing the two countries (the genocide, Nagorno-Karabagh, etc.) are close to being resolved. But it’s as if both sides have been reading B.F. Skinner and decided that they would start acting as if they could talk to one another; over time perhaps they would begin to feel as if they could talk and do even more with one another. By acting as if things were normal, normalcy would become a habit, with cycles of positive reinforcement, and trust could be established; difficult topics could be addressed calmly, and the faces of the present would replace the ghosts of the past.

Undoubtedly the thinking behind this joint action was more complex than this, the rationales more nuanced. One can only hope that the simple act itself will blossom and bear fruit, not just in Turkey and Armenia but in the diaspora as well.

Case in point: the Armenian genocide. (We’ll get to more “topical” issues involving Obama’s fine talk and wobbly walk in a subsequent post.) We can imagine why Obama merely alluded elliptically to the genocide while speaking to the Turkish parliament recently, and sidestepped a direct question at a photo op by saying his “views are on the record.” Maybe he thought it impolite to restate them in those venues. True, it would have given a tiny bit of encouragement to brave Turks who risk jail and worse for talking openly about it, but as the leader of a country with deep and twisty entanglements of mutual self-interest vis-à-vis Turkey, it was prudently ingratiating perhaps to keep mum about it while on Turkish soil.

On April 24, 2009, back in the USA, Obama chose to commemorate “one of the great atrocities of the 20th century,” in which “1.5 million Armenians [were] massacred or marched to their death in the final days of the Ottoman Empire.” He used an Armenian phrase—Meds Yeghern—in referring to it, and he called for “a full, frank and just acknowledgment of the facts.”

Obama seems to intend to imply that meds yeghern means “great atrocity.” The “great atrocity” is the continued Turkish denial that a genocide took place, and that an American president chooses to refer to it in Armenian rather than plain English. As Harut Sassounian writes in “Et tu, Obama? Letter from a Former Admirer”:

You may want to know that “Meds Yeghern” does not mean genocide; it means “Great Calamity.” Armenians used that term before the word “genocide” was coined by Raphael Lemkin in the 1940′s. “Genocide” in Armenian is “Tseghasbanoutyoun,” which is a much more precise term than “Meds Yeghern,” in case you decide to use it in the future.

Not only did your aides come up with the wrong Armenian word, but they failed to provide its English translation, so that non-Armenians could understand its meaning. What was, after all, the point of using an Armenian word in an English text? Did your staff run out of English euphemisms for genocide?

It just so happens meds yeghern fits nicely with the official Turkish position that the murder and death marches “just happened”—that a big war was going on and everyone suffered, Armenians and Turks alike. Sorry, a government-run genocide doesn’t just happen. And there can be no doubt, unless you have been paid off, that it did happen.

The ABC News blog Political Punch has collected some of Obama’s previous remarks on the genocide. Most compelling is his July 28, 2006, letter to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, protesting her decision to recall the US ambassador to Turkey for letting slip the G-word:

“That the invocation of a historical fact by a State Department employee could constitute an act of insubordination is deeply troubling,” then-Sen. Obama wrote. “When State Department instructions are such that an ambassador must engage in strained reasoning—or even an outright falsehood—that defies of common sense interpretation of events in order to follow orders, then it is time to revisit the State Department’s policy guidance on that issue.”

Obama told Secretary Rice that the “occurrence of the Armenian genocide in 1915 is not an ‘allegation,’ a ‘personal opinion,’ or a ‘point of view.’ Supported by an overwhelmingly amount of historical evidence, it is a widely documented fact.”

Well put.

Obama has had plenty more to say on the subject, often to audiences filled with Armenian Americans, who voted heavily for him in 2008. As reported by Political Punch:

Mr. Obama said that “America deserves a leader who speaks truthfully about the Armenian Genocide and responds forcefully to all genocides. I intend to be that president.”

In a January 2008 letter to the Armenian Reporter, Mr. Obama said he shared “with Armenian Americans—so many of whom are descended from genocide survivors—a principled commitment to commemorating and ending genocide. That starts with acknowledging the tragic instances of genocide in world history.”

Naturally, many Armenian Americans—and any person who thinks (1) words matter and (2) history not only matters, it isn’t even past—are disappointed. Others appear to be in shock: not a peep from my wife’s cousin in Colorado, an ardently voluble Obama supporter from the start. As for myself, I was never enchanted enough to be disenchanted. He’s an improvement—how much of an improvement remains to be seen.

The sound of crickets chirping from Yerevan after Obama’s statement on the 24th has led some to believe that his meds yeghern moment is part of a sophisticated bargaining strategy, as the US tries to broker an agreement between Armenia and Turkey that would normalize relations. Among other reasons, this is why I have put off commenting on this textbook example of how to go back on your word. And maybe the purported bargain will pay off. I tend to think it gives cover to the hardliners in Turkey and will not help heal the rift. But if it allows him to play hardball with Turkey in the background while playing patty-cake in public, it’s probably a small price to pay. The problem is, longstanding geopolitical thinking puts the ball and bat and bases (pun intended) and just about the whole playing field in Turkey’s hands, and Obama has shown no interest in slaying the beast of conventional wisdom in US foreign policy.

After all the excitement and anxiety of the presidential campaign, Barack Obama is off to a solid start. He has already disappointed some of his most ardent supporters in choosing Rick Warren to give the invocation at his inauguration. I sympathize with those who are angry at this apparent betrayal, but if this is the worst decision Obama makes in his presidency, we should all be very happy indeed.

What I want from Obama are three things: implementation of a two-state solution in Israel/Palestine; universal health care; and a reversal of the US policy of projecting its military might around the globe. He can have Howdy Doody give an invocation for all I care, if it offers the possibility of fruitful dialogue between progressives and puppets.

I’ll note in passing a story that has pretty much been ignored in the mainstream press: the sudden death of a person with a key role in the alternate (nongovernmental) e-mail system used by Karl Rove and other White House operatives to evade official archiving and other inconvenient things. The news knocked loose a memory of blogging by Thomas Nephew on the subject back in April 2007. And a chain of clicks led me to Larisa Alexandrovna, who intends to stay on the story, since the deceased had been a major source for an investigation she has been conducting.

But let’s end on a happy note, shall we? Back in September the president of Turkey, Abdullah Gül, paid a visit to Armenia to watch a soccer match. Although his route to the stadium was lined with protesters, Gül said he was pleased with the reception. This incipient thaw in relations between Armenia and Turkey is very welcome indeed.

Recently a petition has appeared on the web, initiated by a group of Turkish intellectuals, apologizing for the Armenian genocide (without actually using the word “genocide”). The petition reads: “My conscience does not accept the insensitivity showed to and the denial of the Great Catastrophe that the Ottoman Armenians were subjected to in 1915. I reject this injustice and for my share, I empathise with the feelings and pain of my Armenian brothers. I apologise to them.” Some Turks immediately took umbrage, and others probably made more of the petition than it could logically bear. It was as much about the Turkish government’s attempt to control debate as it was about the Armenian genocide per se. According to Hürriyet Daily News, Cengiz Aktar, widely considered the architect behind the petition, said the petition was not “a campaign about the genocide debate.”

“This is about private individuals, citizens, acting according to the voice of their conscience, and apologizing for the last 90 years this topic was not even discussed,” said Aktar, a Bahçeşehir University academic. Pointing out that the topic had always been a taboo, but still so far 13,500 signatories have broken it, he said. “It has never been discussed like this before. Next time it comes up, everybody should take into account the 13,500 people who feel this way.”

Providing an odd cherry on top of this delightful confection, a member of the Turkish parliament has declared that President Gül’s maternal grandmother is of Armenian descent (making him a “crypto-Armenian,” as a Turkish journalist sarcastically put it), and that’s why he’s “supporting the Armenians.” What makes this delicious to me is that the Turkish word gül (“rose”) is part of my wife’s name, along with the Turkish word for “white.” I guess that makes my Armenian “white rose” a crypto-Turk!

In Moscow cars with Armenian flags drove in a column around the Garden Ring Road, but were prevented from entering the street where the Turkish embassy is situated. “Because there was no permit for this demonstration, they were asked to remove the flags,” said a representative of the law enforcement agencies.

As reported by Lenta.ru, acknowledgment of the Armenian genocide is considered one of the conditions for Turkey’s entry into the European Union. This source says the “violent deaths” of approximately one million Armenians has already been acknowledged by the EU, the US, and Russia, but Turkey insists the violence was “mutual.”

While it may be true that the US is on record saying hundreds of thousands of Armenians perished in Ottoman Turkey between 1915 and 1917, it continues to balk, officially, at naming it a genocide. Under pressure from Turkey and its friends, the US government continues to profess that the deaths and deportations were something that “just happened” in the course of a world war, where just about everyone was doing bad things to everyone else, and were not the result of a government policy that was deliberate, longstanding, and well thought out.

The Turkish historian Taner Akçam will have none of that. In A Shameful Act and other works making extensive use of primary sources in Turkish, Akçam methodically reconstructs the rationale and methodology of the genocidal campaign waged by the Committee of Union and Progress, using both official and unofficial (party) channels. There is much in Akçam’s book to give pause to us living in the United States during the George W. Bush years. The Young Turks knew they were engaged in illegal activities, but they counted on succeeding, in which case they felt it didn’t matter what was legal and what was not. History is written by the winners. When it became clear that Turkey would lose the war and was facing possible extinction as a nation, it systematically destroyed evidence of its wrongdoing. But as Akçam points out, in well-established bureaucracies, it is virtually impossible to destroy all copies of important documents and all copies of documents that refer to (and often quote from) those documents. The CUP was in the habit of issuing orders publicly (to mollify the European powers, who had taken a keen interest in the ethnic minorities in Turkey), only to countermand them secretly. Akçam presents abundant evidence of this practice, which would make the absence of certain key documents in the Ottoman archives perfectly understandable.

I had the pleasure of hearing a talk by Taner Akçam this past January. He was the guest of honor at a memorial service and dinner on the first anniversary of the murder of the Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink in Istanbul. He is a small man, with round horned-rimmed glasses and a receding hairline—the quintessential academic. As he chatted with the Armenians at St. Mary’s Church in Washington, DC, smiling and clearly enjoying himself, it was hard to imagine that he has received death threats and has been harrassed for his research into the genocide.

Akçam was friends with Dink and devoted much of his talk to reminiscences. But during the question-and-answer period, he tried to offer a ray of hope to a young Armenian guy who wanted to befriend a Turkish guy and ran into a wall—he felt no progress is being made in improving relations with Turks and Turkey. Akçam said more and more frequently groups of Turkish students in the US are inviting him to speak to them—just them, not in an open public forum. They want to know what this fellow Turk has to say about the terrible events in their nation’s past, but they need to hear it in an uncharged atmosphere—as if it were a family problem that needs to be discussed in private first.

Akçam sees this as a positive development, and I do, too.

He understood how the young Armenian felt, but he asked that when he feels inclined to see all Turks as stubborn denialists, to think of “his friend Taner.” On this April 24, I’m thinking of Taner Akçam and hoping he is well.

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.

So—where was Hitchens? Can he really remain silent in the face of the campaign to kill the resolution, launched by the Turkish government and abetted by countless well-paid Americans of high (or formerly high) standing?

Today, at long last, Hitchens speaks. In true Hitchensian fashion, he gives us a good chunk of history, with Kurds, Jews, and Greek Cypriots added to Armenians in the pot where nothing ever melts. But he puts his finger in the self-inflicted wound that Turkey continues to keep from closing:

So, let us be clear on a few things. The European Union, to which Turkey has applied for membership with warm American support, has insisted on recognition of Kurdish language rights and political rights within Turkey. We can hardly ask for less. If the Turks wish to continue lying officially about what happened to the Armenians, then we cannot be expected to oblige them by doing the same (and should certainly resent and repudiate any threats against ourselves or our allies that would ensue from our Congress affirming the truth). Then there remains the question of Cyprus, where Turkey maintains an occupation force that has repeatedly been condemned by a thesaurus of U.N. resolutions ever since 1974. It is not our conduct that should be modified by Turkey’s arrogance; we do a favor to the democratization and modernization of that country by insisting that it get its troops out of Cyprus, pull its forces back from the border with Iraq, face the historic truth about Armenia, and in other ways cease to act as if the Ottoman system were still in operation.

Precisely.

I left these rambling comments at the Post:

It’s ironic that, given the amount of aid we send to Turkey (millions and millions of dollars), U.S. citizens are in effect subsidizing Turkish meddling in our own democratic processes. As for the objections of the former secretaries of state: these are the same “wise old men” who basically sat on their thumbs during the run-up to the Iraq invasion, the greatest foreign policy disaster of our time. They are so used to being blackmailed by Turkey, I think they might actually enjoy it by now. Putting the Armenian genocide in scare quotes—talking about it as if it is merely an “accusation”—is disgusting. The death marches and massacres happened; they were ordered by the central government of Turkey; they culminated decades of abuse against the Armenian population by the Turkish government. Year after year nonbinding resolutions are passed about the Holocaust, without a peep from the Post. Why? What makes them not “frivolous”? What makes them so special? Turkey needs to face its own past honestly (and the Post needs to stop enabling it to avoid that). It can’t help but lead to better things in the present.

Thomas Nephew rips the Post a new one—he has more patience (and a stronger stomach) than I do.

Addendum—8:30 pm: The Foreign Affairs Committee approved H.Res. 106 by a 27–21 bipartisan vote. The pressure is bound to increase as the measure heads to a vote by the full House. Slate has a nice roundup of blogger reaction to the Administration’s efforts to squelch the resolution. One link of particular interest goes to Joey Kurtzman’s post at Jewcy: “Denying the Armenian Genocide should be the last atrocity perpetrated by the ADL chief [Abe Foxman].” One of the comments (defending Foxman) notes that Israel’s only military airbase outside Israel is in … Turkey. However, the story is old (July). In August, the ADL decided to acknowledge the Armenian genocide as genocide (sort of). And, for good measure, here’s an article from October 2006 by the inestimable Robert Fisk.

Addendum: 2007.10.19: Finally, after letting the despicable Washington Post dominate the discussion for weeks with a steady stream of slipshod, slippery, and downright slimy op-eds and articles, the New York Times publishes a piece that makes the case for why American Jews need to support the Armenian genocide resolution—how it is a moral imperative for them, as victims of a genocide, to recognize genocide when it involves others, regardless of the short-term consequences, real or imagined.