Fresno’s Armenian community gets slapped in the face with subtle genocide denial | Opinion
It’s subtle. For those of us who combat the rewriting of the history of the Armenian Genocide, we know it when we see it. Sometimes it’s a vague statement that absolves the reader of responsibility for knowing the truth that he or she is or is not reading. Other times it’s understating the reality portrayed.
Eater LA, a SoCal restaurant periodical, recently covered the opening of an Armenian-Mexican fusion upstart in Silver Lake. The article featured 34-year-old owner Armen Manukyan, whose family’s journey began when his great-grandmother “departed” Armenia for Egypt.
It’s subtle. To get it, though, a bit of math is needed to determine how old a 34-year-old man’s great-grandmother would have been in 1915. For some of us, the math was simple, and a call to the restaurant confirmed the suspicion, and the understatement.
This woman was driven from her home during the execution of a plan to rid the Ottoman Turkish Empire entirely and permanently of its indigenous Christian Armenian population from their millennia-old homeland. The Turks were hardly subtle in their intentions. The New York Times ran scores of firsthand accounts of the extermination (departure) process.
That plan continues today with Turkey outsourcing the job to its lackey satellite state Azerbaijan, who proclaimed that Armenia’s older-than-Rome capital of Yerevan is Azeri land.
To the extent that Manukyan’s great-grandmother “departed,” she did so from the first genocide of the modern era, but this doesn’t answer the obvious question of why the subtle slight.
Yet imagine the story recounting a Jewish man, whose grandmother “departed” Germany. The outrage of such a glaring understatement would be felt instantly, and accusations and proclamations would fly: antisemite, never again. But this doesn’t answer the obvious question of why the Jewish experience trumps, to the point of irrelevance, the Armenian experience.
A recent New York Times article discussed Raphael Lemkin, the Jewish attorney and holocaust survivor who coined the word “genocide.” On CBS in 1949 he cited as its genesis that “it happened to the Armenians, and after the Armenians, Hitler took action.” Yet the Times (along with the United Nations) cites only the deaths during World War II as the genesis. The deliberate vagueness of the Times article creates confusion, and ultimately a consciously wrong understanding of history. It reduces “never again” to a meaningless sound bite, and justifiably invites accusations of anti-Armenian.
But anti-Armenianness isn’t really a “thing” as compared with anti-Semitism, even when the Armenian nation is justifiably concerned with the other victim’s modus operandi.
Israel has willingly aided Turkey’s multi-pronged scheme to evade genocide justice for decades. The U.S. State Department has been complicit in this con game. A Library of Congress interview with former diplomat Arma Jane Karaer, whose husband was a Turkish official, crowed that the State Department helped block Armenian genocide legislation. Her frankness as to why was outrageous: “the Jewish lobby … don’t particularly care to share the genocide label with other groups”.
This underscores the recklessness of the anti-Armenian camp and the harm that comes from pretending that the Armenian Genocide doesn’t exist, to wit: Israel, October 2023.
There are limits to profiting from assisting Turkey evade justice. There are limits to profiting from ego gratification. There are no limits to the depths one will sink to erase history. Yet no matter how hard one tries, the sequence of events on the timeline can never be changed.
It’s subtle, and it deserves a clear response: Armenians are not second-class victims, and the Armenian genocide is not a second-class crime. Vagueness and downplay serve no good purpose.
This story was originally published February 25, 2024 at 5:30 AM.