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SUFFOLK UNIVERSITY: PARTNER IN ARMENIAN GENOCIDE DENIAL?
By MassisPost
Updated: April 16, 2014
By Heidi Boghosian
Executive Director of the National Lawyer's Guild (NLG)
Students at Suffolk University Law School have launched an online
petition urging the school's president to withdraw its invitation to
Armenian genocide denier Abraham Foxman to speak at their commencement
and receive an honorary degree. Foxman, the Anti-Defamation
League director, drew harsh public criticism in 2007 for opposing
a congressional resolution acknowledging the 1915 extermination
of approximately 1.5 million Armenians. Since the 15th century,
Armenians had been treated as second-class citizens under Ottoman
rule. In honoring Foxman, Suffolk University sends a message that
politics are more important than acknowledging crimes against humanity.
The denial of genocide is an integral, and final, part of the genocidal
process, as Genocide Watch founder Gregory Stanton has written. Despite
a well-documented body of eyewitness accounts and other evidence
chronicling the 20th century's very first genocide (scholar and lawyer
Raphael Lemkin coined the word genocide in 1943 with the extermination
of the Armenians in mind), the Turkish government continues to mount
a campaign of denial through inaccurate scholarship, propaganda,
aggressive lobbying, and even a law which forbids mention of the word
genocide. In 2005, Nobel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk was prosecuted for
"insulting Turkishness," as was Armenian-Turkish journalist Hrant
Dink who was subsequently assassinated in 2007 by a young Turkish
nationalist. U.S. political and partisan allegiances with Turkey
enable a range of repugnant human rights transgressions, old and new.
My grandmother Baidzar was born in Giresun, a village on the Black Sea,
to parents who owned almond and filbert orchards and were active in
working for protection of the Armenian minority. Baidzar remembered
that men would come to their house in the middle of the night and
have secret, whispered meetings upstairs, because it was against
the law for minorities to assemble. The father of the poet Silva
Gaboudegian was one of those men. Many years and many worlds later,
an older cousin would tell my grandmother that those men were members
of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation. Baidzar remembered her mother
falling to her knees crying before two officers, a Turk and a German,
who came to their home on horseback, begging them to spare her family.
Baidzar later watched her parents and siblings being slaughtered
before escaping to an orphanage and making a treacherous passage to
the United States as a mail order bride.
Around the world, on April 15, just weeks before Suffolk's
commencement, and 99 years after the mass murders, families with
stories just like my grandmother's will mark the day of observance of
the genocide. April 15 is widely considered to be the starting date of
a systematic and well-documented plan to eliminate the Armenians. On
that day in 1915, the Interior Minister of the Ottoman Empire, Talaat
Pasha, ordered the arrest and hangings of Armenian intellectuals and
community leaders in Constantinople. The killings were gruesome and
included beheadings of groups of babies, dismemberments, mass burnings
and drownings, use of toxic gas, lethal injections of morphine or
with the blood of typhoid fever patients.
Although there has been much academic recognition of the Armenian
genocide, this has rarely been followed by governmental recognition.
Turkey swiftly condemned a U.S. Senate committee resolution adopted on
April 10, 2014 by the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations labeling
as genocide the massacre of Armenians by Ottoman forces and warned
Congress against taking steps that would tarnish Turkish-American
ties. Similar resolutions under past presidential administrations
have also failed.
The Turkish people have been taught for decades that there was no
genocide, with the result that most believe their country is being
treated unfairly when genocide resolutions are raised. Continued
failure to acknowledge the genocide in our history books is a
disservice not only to survivors of the genocide, but also to those
Turks who tried to stop it then and who face imprisonment today for
publicly acknowledging the genocide.
Suffolk University should listen to its students. It has the chance to
take a step forward in rectifying decades of injustice by reversing
its decision to honor Abraham Foxman with an honorary law degree
at its 2014 commencement. Tolerance of those who deny the Armenian
genocide may be politically expedient, but it is nonetheless morally
indefensible.
The NLG's syndicated radio program, Law & Disorder, will
address this issue on the air Monday, April 21, 2015. To
find out which stations near you will air the segment, visit:
http://lawanddisorder.org/stations/
To access the petition and/or letter to
Suffolk University President McCarthy, visit:
https://www.change.org/petitions/president-james-mccarthy-remove-adl-director-abe-foxman-as-suffolk-law-s-2014-commencement-speaker
Photo: "Staged footage from 'Ravished Armenia,' Aurora Mardiganian's
book/film about the Armenian Genocide.'
http://massispost.com/2014/04/suffolk-university-partner-in-armenian-genocide-denial/
By MassisPost
Updated: April 16, 2014
By Heidi Boghosian
Executive Director of the National Lawyer's Guild (NLG)
Students at Suffolk University Law School have launched an online
petition urging the school's president to withdraw its invitation to
Armenian genocide denier Abraham Foxman to speak at their commencement
and receive an honorary degree. Foxman, the Anti-Defamation
League director, drew harsh public criticism in 2007 for opposing
a congressional resolution acknowledging the 1915 extermination
of approximately 1.5 million Armenians. Since the 15th century,
Armenians had been treated as second-class citizens under Ottoman
rule. In honoring Foxman, Suffolk University sends a message that
politics are more important than acknowledging crimes against humanity.
The denial of genocide is an integral, and final, part of the genocidal
process, as Genocide Watch founder Gregory Stanton has written. Despite
a well-documented body of eyewitness accounts and other evidence
chronicling the 20th century's very first genocide (scholar and lawyer
Raphael Lemkin coined the word genocide in 1943 with the extermination
of the Armenians in mind), the Turkish government continues to mount
a campaign of denial through inaccurate scholarship, propaganda,
aggressive lobbying, and even a law which forbids mention of the word
genocide. In 2005, Nobel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk was prosecuted for
"insulting Turkishness," as was Armenian-Turkish journalist Hrant
Dink who was subsequently assassinated in 2007 by a young Turkish
nationalist. U.S. political and partisan allegiances with Turkey
enable a range of repugnant human rights transgressions, old and new.
My grandmother Baidzar was born in Giresun, a village on the Black Sea,
to parents who owned almond and filbert orchards and were active in
working for protection of the Armenian minority. Baidzar remembered
that men would come to their house in the middle of the night and
have secret, whispered meetings upstairs, because it was against
the law for minorities to assemble. The father of the poet Silva
Gaboudegian was one of those men. Many years and many worlds later,
an older cousin would tell my grandmother that those men were members
of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation. Baidzar remembered her mother
falling to her knees crying before two officers, a Turk and a German,
who came to their home on horseback, begging them to spare her family.
Baidzar later watched her parents and siblings being slaughtered
before escaping to an orphanage and making a treacherous passage to
the United States as a mail order bride.
Around the world, on April 15, just weeks before Suffolk's
commencement, and 99 years after the mass murders, families with
stories just like my grandmother's will mark the day of observance of
the genocide. April 15 is widely considered to be the starting date of
a systematic and well-documented plan to eliminate the Armenians. On
that day in 1915, the Interior Minister of the Ottoman Empire, Talaat
Pasha, ordered the arrest and hangings of Armenian intellectuals and
community leaders in Constantinople. The killings were gruesome and
included beheadings of groups of babies, dismemberments, mass burnings
and drownings, use of toxic gas, lethal injections of morphine or
with the blood of typhoid fever patients.
Although there has been much academic recognition of the Armenian
genocide, this has rarely been followed by governmental recognition.
Turkey swiftly condemned a U.S. Senate committee resolution adopted on
April 10, 2014 by the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations labeling
as genocide the massacre of Armenians by Ottoman forces and warned
Congress against taking steps that would tarnish Turkish-American
ties. Similar resolutions under past presidential administrations
have also failed.
The Turkish people have been taught for decades that there was no
genocide, with the result that most believe their country is being
treated unfairly when genocide resolutions are raised. Continued
failure to acknowledge the genocide in our history books is a
disservice not only to survivors of the genocide, but also to those
Turks who tried to stop it then and who face imprisonment today for
publicly acknowledging the genocide.
Suffolk University should listen to its students. It has the chance to
take a step forward in rectifying decades of injustice by reversing
its decision to honor Abraham Foxman with an honorary law degree
at its 2014 commencement. Tolerance of those who deny the Armenian
genocide may be politically expedient, but it is nonetheless morally
indefensible.
The NLG's syndicated radio program, Law & Disorder, will
address this issue on the air Monday, April 21, 2015. To
find out which stations near you will air the segment, visit:
http://lawanddisorder.org/stations/
To access the petition and/or letter to
Suffolk University President McCarthy, visit:
https://www.change.org/petitions/president-james-mccarthy-remove-adl-director-abe-foxman-as-suffolk-law-s-2014-commencement-speaker
Photo: "Staged footage from 'Ravished Armenia,' Aurora Mardiganian's
book/film about the Armenian Genocide.'
http://massispost.com/2014/04/suffolk-university-partner-in-armenian-genocide-denial/