[ot] Holocaust denial: Jewish/ADL style

Subject:	[ot] Holocaust denial: Jewish/ADL style
Date:	Wed, 03 Feb 2010 19:03:12 GMT

Armeeeneeans strech trooth!
Veee vur onlee vons Holocausted!
Veee arrrr saveeors!
Palesteeneeans are terrroreeeests!
Zer eeez no Nakba!
Eez veeesheeos Nazeee-Arab propaganda!
Veee luv evereee one.
Jew-haters are crazeee liars!

What about the Ukranian Holodomor?

Ų
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http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/fisk/robert-fiskrsquos-world-israel-can-no-longer-ignore-the-existence-of-the-first-holocaust-1883686.html

Robert Fisk’s World: Israel can no longer ignore the existence of the
first Holocaust

Recognition of the Armenian genocide is a paramount moral and educational
act

Saturday, 30 January 2010

While Israelis commemorated the second Holocaust of the 20th century this
week, I was in the Gulbenkian library in Jerusalem, holding the printed
and handwritten records of the victims of the century's first Holocaust.
It was a strange sensation.

The Armenians were not participating in Israel's official ceremonies to
remember the six million Jewish dead, murdered by the Germans between 1939
and 1945, perhaps because Israel officially refuses to acknowledge that
Armenia's million and a half dead of 1915-1923 were victims of a Turkish
Holocaust. Israeli-Turkish diplomatic and military relations are more
important than genocide. Or were.

George Hintlian, historian and prominent member of Jerusalem's
2,000-strong Armenian community in Jerusalem, pointed out the posters a
few metres from the 1,500-year old Armenian monastery. They advertised
Armenia's 24 April commemorations. All but one had been defaced, torn from
the ancient walls or, in at least one case, spraypainted with graffiti in
Hebrew. "Maybe they don't like it that there was another genocide," George
told me. "These are things we can't explain." More than 70 members of
George's family were murdered in the butchery and death marches of 1915 –
when German officers witnessed the system of executions, rail-car
deportations to cholera camps and asphyxiation by smoke in caves – the
world's first "gas" chambers. One witness, the German vice-consul in
Erzurum, Max von Scheubner-Richter, ended up as one of Hitler's closest
friends and advisers. It's not as if there's no connection between the
first and second Holocausts.

But the times, they are a-changing. For ever since Turkey began shouting
about Israel's slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza a year ago, prominent
Israeli figures have suddenly rediscovered the Armenian genocide. Who are
the Turks to talk about mass murder? Has anyone forgotten 1915? For George
and his compatriots – there are in all 10,000 Armenians in Israel and the
occupied West Bank, 4,000 of them holding Israeli passports – they had
indeed been forgotten until the Gaza war. "In 1982, the Armenians were
left out of a Holocaust conference in Jerusalem," he said. "For three
decades, no documentary on the Armenian genocide could be shown on Israeli
television because it would offend the Turks. Then suddenly last year,
important Israelis demanded that a documentary be shown. Thirty Knesset
members supported us. We always had Yossi Sarid of Peace Now but now we've
got right-wing Israelis."

Maariv and Yediot Ahronot began to mention the Armenian genocide and
George Hintlian turned up on Israeli television with Danny Ayalon – the
foreign office minister who humiliated the Turkish ambassador by forcing
him to sit on a sofa below him – and Knesset speaker Reuven Rivlin who
said that Israel should commemorate the Armenian genocide "every year".
The Israeli press now calls the Armenian genocide a "Shoah" – the same
word all Israelis use for the Jewish Holocaust. As George put it with
withering accuracy: "We have been upgraded!!!"

This piece of brash hypocrisy has not gone unnoticed by Yossi Sarid who
has described how, a few months after Recep Tayyip Erdogan denounced the
Gaza war, "an important Israeli personality telephoned me and said the
following: 'Now you have to hit back at the Turks, to denounce them for
the crimes they committed against the Armenians You, Yossi, have the right
to do so...'" Sarid was appalled. "I was filled with revulsion and my soul
wanted to puke," he wrote in Haaretz. "The person who telephoned me was an
example of the ugly Israeli who had disgracefully been at the forefront of
those who denied the Armenian Holocaust." So now "new tunes" – Sarid's
phrase – are being heard in Jerusalem: "The Turks are the last ones who
have the right to teach us ethics."

The bright side to this anguished debate is that one of Israel's top
Holocaust experts bravely insisted – to the fury of then-foreign minister
(now president) Shimon Peres – that the Armenian massacres were
undoubtedly a genocide. Tens of thousands of Israelis have always believed
the same; several hundred are expected to turn up at the Armenian
commemoration on 24 April, and most Israelis refer to the Armenian
genocide as a "Shoah" rather than the tame "massacres" hitherto favoured
by the political elite.

Yet the most extraordinary irony of all occurred when the Armenian and
Turkish governments last year agreed to reopen diplomatic relations and
consign the Armenian Holocaust to a joint academic enquiry which would
decide "if" there had been a genocide. As Israeli Professor Yair Oron of
the Open University of Israel said, "I am afraid that countries will now
hesitate to recognise the (Armenian) genocide. They will say: 'Why should
we grant recognition if the Armenians yielded?' Recognition of the
Armenian genocide is a paramount moral and educational act. We in Israel
are obliged to recognise it." And American-Armenian UCLA Professor Richard
Hovannisian asked: "Would the Jewish people be willing to forgo the memory
of the Holocaust for the sake of good relations with Germany, if Germany
were to make that demand?" George Hintlian described the Armenian-Turkish
agreement – which in fact may not now be ratified by either side – as
"like an earthquake".

We walked together in the cold afternoon through the darkened interior of
the great Armenian monastery of Jerusalem with its icons and candles.
George opened a cabinet to reveal a hidden staircase up which priests
would creep for a secret week when invaders passed through Jerusalem. In
this dank, pious place, Ronald Henry Amhurst Storrs, governor of British
Mandate Jerusalem, would often sit to ponder what he called "the glory and
the misery of a people".

Miserable it has been for thousands of Armenians here. Up to 15,000 lived
in Palestine until 1948, many of them survivors of the first Holocaust.
But 10,000 of these Armenians shared the same fate as the Palestinian
Arabs, fleeing or driven from their homes by the army of the new Israeli
state. Most lost their businesses in Haifa and Jaffa, many of them seeking
refuge – for the second time – in Jerusalem. A few set out for Cyprus
where they were dispossessed for the third time by the 1974 Turkish
invasion. As George put it bleakly, "Today, 6,000 Armenians are residents
of Jerusalem and the West Bank. They cannot travel and they are counted as
Armenian Palestinians. For Israeli bureaucracy, they are Palestinians."

George himself is the son of Garbis Hintlian who, as a 17-year-old,
survived the death march from his home at Talas in Cappadocia. "We lost my
uncle – my grandfather was axed to death in front of him." After the 1918
armistice, he worked for the British, carrying files of evidence to the
initial (but quickly abandoned) Constantinople trials of Turkish war
criminals. To no avail.

And glory be, if the tables haven't changed again! Turkey and Israel have
made up and become good friends again. Yossi Sarid anticipated this. "Let
us assume that Turkey will renew its ties with Israel. Then what? What
then? Will we also renew our contribution to the denial of the Armenian
Holocaust?"

©independent.co.uk