Assyrians are pissy at Armenians for hogging genocide spotlight
The ancestors of Jewish-American community leader Mr. Abe Foxman’s Turkish buddies were a busy bunch. They slaughtered not only hordes of Armenians, but also hordes of other non-Muslim people, including Assyrians. Many surviving Armenians cleverly emigrated to America, a country that matters, while Assyrians for God knows what reason chose to turn my Old Country hometown into their diaspora capital, which was an unfortunate choice from a political standpoint since Sweden by and large doesn’t matter at all.
On Thursday, prodded by Armenian-American lobbying efforts, the U.S. House of Representative Committee on Foreign Affairs declared the anti-Armenian massacres in Turkey during the Great War (a.k.a. World War I) genocide. Apparently, the Committee decided to give Turkey/The Ottoman Empire a pass on the other anti-Christian massacres, perhaps in part because Armenian-Americans have given Assyrians and other non-Armenian Christian victims of Muslim Turkey’s murderous policies the cold shoulder. Many Assyrians are pissed and feel betrayed. Here are a couple of reader comments from Länstidningen i Södertälje, my old hometown’s daily newspaper:
“The Armenians deny the genocide against us Assyrians/Chaldeans/Syriacs and Pontic Greeks… They have never put our names on their monuments. They can go to Hell.”
“When we’re lobbying for the [genocide memorial] monument in Södertälje it’s a given that Armenians should be included [but Armenians] never mention us.”
Various Assyrian-Swedish notables welcomed the resolution but lamented that it focused only on the plight of Armenians, ignoring the fate of non-Armenian Christians at the hands of the Muslim Turks.
I don’t see how America benefits from Congress writing history pamphlets. At least some of the arguments advanced by Congressmen during the debate are borderline childish, like this one, by the bill’s sponsor, Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff:
[H]ow can we take effective action against the genocide in Darfur if we lack the will to condemn genocide whenever and wherever it occurs?
