[NYTr] Fisk [Armenian] H olocaust denial in the White House

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

There's nothing like a 100-year-old case of genocide to get the juices
flowing... -NYTr]

sent by MichaelP

The Independent - Nov 10, 2007
http://news.independent.co.uk/fisk/article3146418.ece

Holocaust denial in the White House

The Turks say the Armenians died in a 'civil war', 
and Bush goes along with their lies

by Robert Fisk

How  are  the  mighty fallen! President George Bush, the crusader king
who would draw the sword  against  the forces of Darkness and Evil, he
who said there was only "them or us", who would carry on, he claimed,
an eternal conflict against "world terror" on our behalf; he  turns
out, well, to be a wimp. A clutch of Turkish generals and a
multimillion-dollar public  relations  campaign  on  behalf of Turkish
Holocaust deniers have transformed the lion  into  a  lamb. No, not
even a lamb - for this animal is, by its nature, a symbol of innocence
-  but  into  a household mouse, a little diminutive creature which,
seen from afar, can even be confused with a rat. Am I going too far? I
think not.

The  "story  so far" is familiar enough. In 1915, the Ottoman Turkish 
authorities carried out  the  systematic  genocide  of  one and a half 
million Christian Armenians. There are photographs, diplomatic reports, 
original Ottoman documentation, the process of an entire post-First
World War  Ottoman  trial,  Winston Churchill and Lloyd George and a
massive report  by the British Foreign Office in 1915 and 1916 to prove
that it is all true. Even movie  film is now emerging - real archive
footage taken by Western military cameramen in the  First  World War -
to show that the first Holocaust of the 20th century, perpetrated in
front of German officers who would later perfect its methods in their
extermination of six million Jews, was as real as its pitifully few
Armenian survivors still claim.

But the Turks won't let us say this. They have blackmailed the Western 
powers - including our  own  British Government, and now even the US -
to kowtow to their shameless denials. These  (and  I  weary  that we
must repeat them, because every news agency and government does  just
that through fear of Ankara's fury) include the canard that the
Armenians died in a "civil war", that they were anyway collaborating
with Turkey's Russian enemies, that fewer  Armenians  were  killed
than have been claimed, that as many Turkish Muslims were murdered as
Armenians.

And  now  President  Bush and the United States Congress have gone
along with these lies. There  was,  briefly,  a historic moment for
Bush to walk tall after the US House Foreign Relations Committee voted
last month to condemn the mass slaughter of Armenians as an act of
genocide.  Ancient Armenian-American survivors gathered at a House
panel to listen to the debate. But as soon as Turkey's fossilised
generals started to threaten Bush, I knew he would give in.

Listen,  first,  to  General  Yasar  Buyukanit,  chief of the Turkish 
armed forces, in an interview  with  the newspaper Milliyet. The
passage of the House resolution, he whinged, was  "sad  and
sorrowful"  in view of the "strong links" Turkey maintained with its
Nato partners.  And  if this resolution was passed by the full House of
Representatives, then "our military relations with the US would never
be as they were in the past... The US, in that respect, has shot itself
in the foot".

Now  listen to Mr Bush as he snaps to attention before the Turkish
general staff. "We all deeply regret the tragic suffering (sic) of the
Armenian people... But this resolution is not  the  right response to
these historic mass killings. Its passage would do great harm to  our
relations with a key ally in Nato and in the global war on terror." I
loved the last bit  about  the  "global war on terror". Nobody - save
for the Jews of Europe - has suffered  "terror"  more  than  the
benighted Armenians of Turkey in 1915. But that Nato should matter more
than the integrity of history - that Nato might one day prove to be so
important  that the Bushes of this world may have to equivocate over
the Jewish Holocaust to placate a militarily resurgent Germany -
beggars belief.

Among those men who should hold their heads in shame are those who
claim they are winning the  war  in  Iraq.  They include the
increasingly disoriented General David Petraeus, US commander  in
Iraq,  and  the increasingly  delusional  US  ambassador to Baghdad,
Ryan Crocker,  both of whom warned that full passage of the Armenian
genocide bill would "harm the  war effort in Iraq". And make no
mistake, there are big bucks behind this disgusting piece of Holocaust
denial.

Former  Representative Robert L Livingston, a Louisiana Republican, has 
already picked up $12m  from the Turks for his company, the Livingston 
Group, for two previously successful attempts  to  pervert  the  cause
of moral  justice  and smother genocide congressional resolutions.  He 
personally  escorted  Turkish  officials to Capitol Hill to threaten US 
congressmen. They got the point. If the resolution went ahead, Turkey 
would bar US access to  the  Incirlik  airbase  through  which passed
much of the 70 per cent of American air supplies to Iraq which transit
Turkey.

In  the  real  world, this is called blackmail - which was why Bush was 
bound to cave in. Defence  Secretary Robert Gates was even more 
pusillanimous - although he obviously cared nothing  for the details of 
history. Petraeus and Crocker, he said, "believe clearly that access
to the  airfields and to the roads and so on in Turkey would be very
much put at risk if this resolution passes...".

How  terrible an irony did Gates utter. For it is these very "roads and
so on" down which walked  the  hundreds  of  thousands  of Armenians on
their 1915 death marches. Many were forced  aboard cattle trains which
took them to their deaths. One of the railway lines on which  they
travelled  ran due  east of Adana - a great collection point for the
doomed Christians of  western  Armenia - and the first station on the
line was called Incirlik, the very same Incirlik which now houses the
huge airbase that Mr Bush is so frightened of losing.

Had  the genocide that Bush refuses to acknowledge not taken place - as 
the Turks claim - the  Americans  would  be  asking  the Armenians for 
permission to use Incirlik. There is still  alive  -  in  Sussex if
anyone cares to see her - an ageing Armenian survivor from that
region  who recalls the Ottoman Turkish gendarmes setting fire to a
pile of living Armenian  babies on the road close to Adana. These are
the same "roads and so on" that so concern the gutless Mr Gates.

But fear not. If Turkey has frightened the boots off Bush, he's still 
ready to rattle the cage  of  the  all-powerful Persians. People should
be interested in preventing Iran from acquiring  the  knowledge  to
make nuclear weapons if they're "interested in preventing World  War
Three", Bush has warned us. What piffle. Bush can't even summon up the
courage to tell the truth about World War One.

Who  would  have  thought  that the leader of the Western world - he
who would protect us against "world terror" - would turn out to be the
David Irving of the White House?