Today, April 24, 2015, is the 100th anniversary of the beginning of the Armenian Genocide. During the next several years, about one and a half million Armenians were murdered by the Ottoman Empire: shot, worked to death, or marched into the Syrian desert to starve or die of thirst. An American official who was an eyewitness wrote home, “The whole country [is] one vast charnel house, or, more correctly speaking, slaughterhouse.” For most Americans, this seems like it happened a million years ago on another planet. But as with everything important about history, if you pay attention you’ll realize it was yesterday, two blocks away from where you live. In my case, I was named after my mother’s oldest brother, Jonathan; soon after he was born in 1928 my grandparents moved with him to Beirut, and because a new baby kept them busy, they hired a young woman as a maid. She was desperate: she was Armenian, and had walked over mountains and hundreds of miles to get to Lebanon, and was the only member of her family still alive. • • • So what happened is a historical fact, and it shouldn’t be difficult to get presidents and prime ministers to say, “Today we remember the Armenian Genocide.” But it’s almost impossible, especially in the U.S. — because Turkey has made Armenian Genocide denial part of its national identity, and we’re dependent on Turkey’s support for our broader mideast policies. During Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign, he explicitly promised that “as President I will recognize the Armenian Genocide.” Samantha Power, author of A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide and now Obama’s ambassador to the U.N., recorded a video urging Armenian Americans to support him because he would acknowledge the genocide: “I know [Obama] very well and he’s a person of incredible integrity. … He’s a true friend of the Armenian people, an acknowledger of the history … he’s a person who can actually be trusted.”

Obama’s commitment was quietly removed from his website sometime after December 2010, and this Armenian Remembrance Day, he broke his promise for the seventh year in a row. And Obama’s gone far beyond acts of omission. When the House Foreign Affairs Committee passed a resolution recognizing the genocide, Hillary Clinton, then secretary of state, said, “The Obama administration strongly opposes [this] and will work very hard to make sure it does not go to the House floor.” She and Obama were — with Nancy Pelosi’s assistance — successful. Likewise, Israel has long relied on an alliance with Turkey, and has always refused to acknowledge the Armenian Genocide. In 2001, the director of the Institute on the Holocaust and Genocide in Jerusalem stated that Shimon Peres had “entered into the range of actual denial of the Armenian Genocide, comparable to denials of the Holocaust.” This is not hyperbole. In fact, American and Israeli denial of the Armenian Genocide often uses exactly the same language as Iranian denial of the Holocaust. In 2006, then-Iranian president Ahmadinejad said what was needed was a “fact-finding commission” to straighten out what had actually happened to all the Jews and Roma during World War II. In 2007, Condoleezza Rice advocated “historical commissions” to determine where those Armenians had disappeared to in World War I. When confronted directly about what he personally believed happened, Ahmadinejad declared, “I’m not a historian.” What did Abe Foxman, head of the Anti-Defamation League, say when asked what he believed happened to Armenians? “I’m not a historian.”

Library of Congress