Another Non-Published Letter

My letter that, yet again, did not get published in the NYTimes:


Your quote Greta Berlin of the Free Gaza Movement as saying, "This initiative is not going to stop” ("Israel Holds Hundreds Seized During Raid on Flotilla", June 1). Ms. Berlin was reported to be located "in Cyprus".

Could we know if that was in Turkish-occupied Cyprus? Will some of the next flotilla guerrillas come from Turkish-occupied Kurdistan although I doubt that any recruits would come from the progeny of Turkish-massacred Armenians.

No 'Genocide' For Armenia But We're Still "Illegitimate"

My residency in Shiloh is, a la Obama, "illegitimate" but he's afraid of Turkey:

Obama fails to call Armenian massacre a genocide

As a candidate, Barack Obama repeatedly promised to refer to the almost century-old massacre of Armenians in Turkey as a genocide. But since becoming president, Obama has twice passed up opportunities to do so.

In a statement Saturday, Obama called the deaths of 1.5 million Armenians during World War I "one of the worst atrocities" of the 20th century and "a devastating chapter" in history.

The statement, issued as Obama and first lady Michelle Obama spent a weekend getaway here in western North Carolina, marked the 95th anniversary of the start of the slaughter of Armenians by Ottoman Turks. The president called it "a devastating chapter in the history of the Armenian people."

Activists and officials from across the spectrum were quick to express disappointment.

Armenian National Committee of America Chairman Ken Hachikian voiced "sharp disappointment with the president's failure to properly condemn and commemorate the Armenian genocide."

Of course, with Obama now on Turkey's side, a classic pincer movement is in place.

This President is pro-Israel? You recall his use of illegitimate.

Yeah, sure, just like J Street.

Obama's New Critics: Armenian-Americans

Armenian-Americans were quick to voice their ire.

“In his remarks today in Ankara, President Obama missed a valuable opportunity to honor his public pledge to recognize the Armenian genocide,” Aram Hamparian, executive director of the Armenian National Committee of America, said in a statement.

Mr. Obama’s remarks, he said, fell “far short of the clear promise he made as a candidate that he would, as president, fully and unequivocally recognize this crime against humanity.”

During the Parliament speech, Mr. Obama did speak of the Armenia issue, saying, “History is often tragic, but unresolved, it can be a heavy weight.”

He said that the United States “still struggles with the legacies of slavery and segregation, the past treatment of Native Americans.”

Source


But, there's always Bob Dylan:

BF: What struck you about him?

BD: Well, a number of things. He’s got an interesting background. He’s like a fictional character, but he’s real. First off, his mother was a Kansas girl. Never lived in Kansas though, but with deep roots. You know, like Kansas bloody Kansas. John Brown the insurrectionist. Jesse James and Quantrill. Bushwhackers, Guerillas. Wizard of Oz Kansas. I think Barack has Jefferson Davis back there in his ancestry someplace. And then his father. An African intellectual. Bantu, Masai, Griot type heritage - cattle raiders, lion killers. I mean it’s just so incongruous that these two people would meet and fall in love. You kind of get past that though. And then you’re into his story. Like an odyssey except in reverse.

BF: In what way?

BD: First of all, Barack is born in Hawaii. Most of us think of Hawaii as paradise – so I guess you could say that he was born in paradise.

BF: And he was thrown out of the garden.

BD: Not exactly. His mom married some other guy named Lolo and then took Barack to Indonesia to live. Barack went to both a Muslim school and a Catholic school. His mom used to get up at 4:00 in the morning and teach him book lessons three hours before he even went to school. And then she would go to work. That tells you the type of woman she was. That’s just in the beginning of the story.

BF: What else did you find compelling about him?

BD: Well, mainly his take on things. His writing style hits you on more than one level. It makes you feel and think at the same time and that is hard to do. He says profoundly outrageous things. He’s looking at a shrunken head inside of a glass case in some museum with a bunch of other people and he’s wondering if any of these people realize that they could be looking at one of their ancestors.

BF: What in his book would make you think he’d be a good politician?

BD: Well nothing really. In some sense you would think being in the business of politics would be the last thing that this man would want to do. I think he had a job as an investment banker on Wall Street for a second - selling German bonds. But he probably could’ve done anything. If you read his book, you’ll know that the political world came to him. It was there to be had.

BF: Do you think he’ll make a good president?

BD: I have no idea. He’ll be the best president he can be. Most of those guys come into office with the best of intentions and leave as beaten men. Johnson would be a good example of that … Nixon, Clinton in a way, Truman, all the rest of them going back. You know, it’s like they all fly too close to the sun and get burned.

Fisking the Jews

I read this twice and the only conclusion I can come to is that Robert Fisk of the Independent is seeking to draw the reader's mind into assuming that just like there are claims that the German population, a mjority for sure, "knew" what was happening in terms of the Holocaust, then the Jewish soldiers in the German Army during World War I must have been aware of what was happening to the Armenians.

Indeed, there were Jews in the German army in the First World War – 12,000 of them were killed in action for the Fatherland – but hands up those readers who know that, even as the Germans were fighting for their lives in 1916, the authorities undertook a "Jew census" in the army after provocations from small anti-Semitic parties in Berlin.

On the eastern front, 92,451 Russian prisoners died in German captivity. "They are not to be given water at first," a 1914 German 8th Army order read. "While they are in the vicinity of the battlefield it is good for them to be in a broken physical condition." The Untermenschen idea was already there, it seems. At least 9 per cent of Germany's 158,000 soldiers in Russian camps, it should be added, also died.

Amid such a charnel house, the Ottoman genocide of one and a half million Armenians – still outrageously denied by Turkey, although it taught Hitler how to destroy the Jews of Europe less than three decades later – provides a terrible historical continuity.

Did those German-Jewish soldiers of the First World War have the slightest inkling of what was to come? They must have known of the German army's cruelty towards civilians, even if they could not then read the words of the angry, gas-blinded corporal from the Somme who asked after the armistice: "Did all this happen only so that a gang of wretched criminals could lay their hands on the Fatherland?"

But the Armenian genocide took place far from Europe and Fisk presents no data at all regarding whether if any Jewish German soldiers, if at all, were there at the time of the killings which, I may add, were done by Turkish soldiers.