By Manila Ryce
Published Friday, October 12th, 2007, 6:12 am
Stewart correctly recognizes the motive behind the denial of the Armenian Genocide by recent US presidents. Here’s a hint: it has nothing to do with history. Senior Armeniologist Aasif Mandvi joins Stewart to describe the deals other countries also have with the United States in order to downplay their most embarrassing atrocities. It’s also mentioned that Congress has never apologized for slavery or the long string of murderous campaigns in the Americas which were undoubtedly the most massive act of genocide ever to occur in history.
After it was clear that WMD’s were not going to be found in Iraq, the administration fell back on the rationale that Saddam had to be overthrown because he was a bad man who gassed his own people as their main argument. The fact that he had committed mass killings of around a couple thousand Kurds in the late 80’s with chemical weapons he obtained from Western sources, including George H.W. Bush, was now the selling point for the war. The administration freely omitted that last bit of information.
With this in mind, lets remember the first genocide of the 20th Century, when around 1.5 million Armenians were systematically killed by Ottoman Turkey from 1915 to 1917. While 22 other countries have acknowledged these events to be genocide, the US has still not officially recognized it as such for purely political reasons.
We’ve already killed up to an estimated one million people in Iraq (which is a kind of genocide in its own right), yet the Neocon logic for specifically being against the recognition of the Armenian Genocide is that in order to prevent more atrocities in Iraq, like those which occurred to the Kurds, we need to stay there by denying a greater atrocity which occurred to the Armenians. So in order to maintain this misguided occupation, we must continue to back Turkey on their immoral denial of reality. Hey, they’ve supported us in our own denial of reality for this long, it’s the least we can do. What a tangled web we weave.
Dandelion Salad 
Muslims Against Sharia commend House Democrats and Speaker Pelosi for pressing ahead with an Armenian genocide bill. Republican opposition to the bill is pure manifestation of moral relativism.
Muslims Against Sharia condemn Turkish government for refusing to acknowledge Armenian genocide and recalling its US ambassador as a response to the bill.
Source: AFP
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