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Turkish Leader’s Selective Memory

Why we must remember the Armenians

by
Marc Tracy
March 19, 2010
Erdogan late last year.(Mark Wilson/Getty Images)
Erdogan late last year.(Mark Wilson/Getty Images)

The Armenian genocide slaughter whatever-it-was (it was a genocide) is a touchy subject for Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, as it is for many Turkish people. His button was pushed most recently by the U.S. House of Representatives’s passage of a resolution referring to the Armenian catastrophe of the early part of the 20th century as, for the first time, “genocide.” Most recently, Erdogan vowed that if such resolutions continued, he would deport 100,000 Armenians from his country. Specifically, these are those Armenians—the majority of Armenian residents of Turkey—who are not citizens, but rather visiting workers. (A status that, ironically enough, describes many Turkish people living in Germany and elsewhere.)

What dog do Jews specifically have in this fight? Leaving aside Erdogan’s penchant for making extremely questionable (to say the least) statements about Jews and particularly Israel, the histories of the Armenian genocide and the Jewish genocide—the Holocaust—are intertwined. Most famously, Hitler told his troops as they prepared to invade Poland, “Go, go kill without mercy. Who today remembers the extermination of the Armenians?”

In other words, if it is to be fully honored, the injunction to “Never Forget” must not apply to the Holocaust, or to the Jews, alone.

Marc Tracy is a staff writer at The New Republic, and was previously a staff writer at Tablet. He tweets @marcatracy.