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AAA Media Alert: Boston Globe:"Armenians get allies in genocide teac

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  • AAA Media Alert: Boston Globe:"Armenians get allies in genocide teac

    Armenian Assembly of America
    1140 19th Street, NW, Suite 600
    Washington, DC 20036
    Phone: 202-393-3434
    Fax: 202-638-4904
    Email: [email protected]
    Web: www.armenianassembly.org

    MEDIA ALERT
    FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
    April 20, 2006
    CONTACT: Karoon Panosyan
    Email: [email protected]

    RE: Boston Globe: "Armenians get allies in genocide teachings," Boston
    Herald: "Expert says slaughter fits bill, despite Turks' denial"

    The Armenian Assembly would like to call your attention to two articles
    below: the first published by the Boston Globe entitled, "Armenians get
    allies in genocide teachings, Group stands up against denial" and the
    second published in the Boston Herald entitled, "Expert says slaughter
    fits bill, despite Turks' denial." The articles include comments by
    Armenian Assembly Board of Trustees Member Anthony Barsamian and
    Armenian Assembly Executive Director Bryan Ardouny.

    The articles can also be accessed at the following links:

    Boston Globe:
    http://nl.newsbank.com/nl-search/we/Archives?p_ac tion=doc&p_docid=1111E3
    678F8D3F38&p_docnu m=1

    Boston Herald:
    http://news.bostonherald.com/international /view.bg?articleid=135744

    Boston Globe

    Armenians get allies in genocide teachings
    Group stands up 'against denial'

    By Yvonne Abraham, Globe Staff
    April 20, 2006

    Leading politicians and groups from a range of communities are joining
    with Armenians in their battle to ensure that the Armenians'
    early-20th-century history be taught as genocide.

    The Armenians are fighting a federal lawsuit that seeks to include
    opposing views of the genocide in teaching materials for Massachusetts
    high schools.

    A new group, called kNOw Genocide, includes the Jewish Community
    Relations Council, the Irish Immigration Center, the Massachusetts
    Council of Churches, Rwanda Outlook, and the Cambodian Mutual Assistance
    Association, among others. Standing with them will be Attorney General
    Thomas F. Reilly, Lieutenant Governor Kerry Healey -- both gubernatorial
    candidates -- and several state legislators.

    A rally tomorrow at the State House is expected to draw representatives
    from the diverse coalition, in a testament to the political clout that
    the Armenian community has in Massachusetts.

    "This allows our community, together with other communities, to stand
    together against denial," said Anthony Barsamian, a member of the
    Armenian Assembly of America board, based in Washington. "And those who
    try to deny genocide will be beaten back."

    The coalition is being launched at a time of considerable debate over
    events in Ottoman Turkey early last century. Several PBS stations were
    criticized this week for airing a documentary called "The Armenian
    Genocide" and declining to air an accompanying panel discussion that
    included scholars who have denied that a genocide took place.

    Those who believe that both views should be heard accused PBS stations,
    including Boston's WGBH, of bowing to pressure from Armenians and their
    supporters.

    Armenians and many historians have long maintained that the events of
    1915 in Ottoman Turkey -- in which more than 1 million Armenians were
    killed and many more were driven from their homes -- constituted
    genocide.

    In Massachusetts, home to about 30,000 Armenians, legislators
    established a day of remembrance for victims.

    But the Turkish government, and some historians, say what happened
    should not be described as genocide because the deaths were part of a
    civil war that resulted in the murder of innocent people on both sides.

    In the lawsuit, now pending at US District Court in Boston, a teacher
    and a student from Lincoln-Sudbury Regional High School, and the
    Assembly of Turkish American Associations, have demanded that the state
    Department of Education include dissenting views on the Armenian
    genocide in a curriculum guide on the topic.

    A draft of that guide originally included the dissenting views, but did
    not mandate that they be taught in Massachusetts schools. The plaintiffs
    say the removal violates freedom of speech.

    The attorney general, who is defending the state, argues that because
    the curriculum guide is a government document, it is not bound by free
    speech. Armenians and supporters say presenting opposing views of the
    1915 events is like denying the Holocaust.

    The struggle has drawn support from other groups who say they speak from
    their own painful histories of oppression.

    "As members of the Jewish community, we identify with the Armenian
    community in terms of the Armenian genocide, and it's important to fight
    denial," said Nancy Kaufman, executive director of the Jewish Community
    Relations Council of Greater Boston. "We thought this was a battle that
    had been won long ago."

    Harvey Silverglate, a lawyer representing the plaintiffs in the
    Department of Education suit, said his clients are not denying that a
    genocide took place. "We are not admitting it, we're not denying it,
    we're taking no position," he said. "We simply want to open up the
    avenues for honest debate and restore the censored articles to the
    Massachusetts curriculum."

    Boston Herald

    Expert says slaughter fits bill, despite Turks' denial

    By Kevin Rothstein
    Wednesday, April 19, 2006

    The Turkish government's fierce PR campaign to cast doubt on the
    Armenian genocide has spilled into the courts, Congress and even public
    television - but not into Harvard genocide expert Helen Fein's mind.

    "It is a genocide by all criteria of genocide," said Fein, director of
    the Institute for the Study of Genocide. "It's insulting and ridiculous
    to argue with these deniers."

    The Republic of Turkey has paid millions of dollars to Washington-based
    lobbying firm the Livingston Group, trying to battle a congressional
    human rights bill that would recognize the deaths of 1.5 million
    Armenians, at the hands of Turks, was genocide.

    "Given the fact that Turkey continues its denial campaign, it becomes
    that much more important for the U.S. and other countries to remember
    and reaffirm what happened so we cannot repeat the mistakes of the
    past," said Bryan Ardouny, head of the Armenian Assembly of America.

    The Turkish ambassador to the United States, Nabi Sensoy, yesterday
    blasted a PBS documentary, "The Armenian Genocide," that aired last
    night on WGBH-Boston as a "blatantly one-sided perspective of a tragic
    and unresolved period of world history." Many Turkish authorities argue
    that civil war, disease and famine, not genocide, contributed to the
    deaths of Armenians as well as Turks between 1915 and 1918.

    As the Ottoman Empire collapsed in the early 1900s, Turks embarked on a
    campaign of death and destruction against Armenians. The campaigns are
    substantiated, Fein said, by eyewitness accounts from Armenians,
    European missionaries and desperate missives from the U.S. ambassador,
    Henry Morgenthau. He cabled Washington on July 16, 1916, that only force
    would dissuade the Turks.

    Armenians observe the genocide each year on April 24.

    NR#2006-039
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