Friday, March 05, 2010

Beck not satisfied with destruction of American history, also thinks that Armenian genocide denial is a laughing matter



What a hero of human rights Beck is ... I sure can see why he compares himself to such human rights champions like Ben Franklin, Thomas Paine, and MLK. He is so ignorant and stupid that I still marvel that someone as ignorant and stupid as he is has the influence that he does.

Deborah Lipstadt and Peter Balakian previously explained the importance of recognizing the crimes of the past

[I]t is equally crucial that historical denial of genocide be addressed in an uncompromising fashion. While historians are taught to be skeptical, it is absurd to be skeptical or neutral about events of the magnitude of the Armenian genocide and the Holocaust, which are attested to by reams of documents and material evidence as well as testimonies by victims, perpetrators and bystanders.

Neutrality or skepticism in the case of these two tragedies constitutes denial, which is the final stage of genocide in that it seeks to demonize the victims and rehabilitate the perpetrators.

The broad and international record on the Armenian genocide has been created by an international body of dispassionate scholarship for decades, and notably, affirmed by The International Association of Genocide Scholars in repeated statements that note that this history is not controversial anywhere in the world but in Turkey.

Raphael Lemkin, the noted legal scholar who lost 49 members of his family in the Holocaust, invented the concept of genocide, in part, on the basis of what happened to the Armenians in 1915.

The main actor here, however, is Turkey. It is time for Turkey to end its nine-decade campaign to erase the Armenian genocide. It is time to stop bullying and attempting to coerce states and organizations that engage history honestly. Such a campaign is immoral.

By passing the resolution (H.R. 106) before it, Congress must make it clear to Turkey that, even as we welcome its alliance with the United States in so many arenas, the time for this denial is over.

Turkey’s calls for a commission of historians to resolve this issue are disingenuous, especially for a country that has a law that makes it a crime to “insult Turkishness,” under which scholars and publishers who have spoken about the Armenian genocide have been prosecuted and even killed.
Also see here for a statement on Armenian genocide denial by a group of scholars.

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