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STEVE JOBS TOOK THE ARMENIAN GENOCIDE PERSONALLY
15:58, 23 Apr 2015
Siranush Ghazanchyan
Nina Strochlic
The Daily Beast
Friday is the date of the Apple Watch launch--but also the anniversary
of a terrible genocide that sent Steve Jobs' adoptive grandparents
fleeing to safety in America.
On Friday, wrists around the world will welcome the most anticipated
gadget since the iPad came to our fingertips five years ago. The Apple
Watch has stirred breathless speculation, imitation and excitement
long before its reveal last September. But the date chosen for its
release has caused a too-bizarre-to-be-true historic collision that
Apple's founder would likely never have allowed to happen.
One hundred years after Steve Jobs' adoptive family escaped the
Armenian genocide, the company he created is releasing its biggest
new product on the 100th anniversary of a mass killing that left 1.5
million dead at the hands of the Ottoman Empire.
And activists are worried that Apple's latest masterpiece will distract
an audience from an anniversary that they hope will finally force
the Turkish government--which has long refused to call the slaughter
a genocide--into accepting its bloody past.
Steve Jobs' birth parents weren't Armenian, but he was raised in the
shadow of that heritage by an adoptive mother whose family escaped the
killings for safety in America in the 1910s. And Jobs, though he never
spoke publicly about his ties, appeared to feel a deep connection with
his family's heritage and the historic bloodshed they experienced. He
even spoke conversational Armenian.
In 1955, Clara Hagopian and Paul Jobs, a young couple who spent
nearly a decade trying to have children of their own, adopted a
Syrian-American baby and named him Steve. Steve Jobs never met his
birth father and often spoke about the strong connection he shared
with his adoptive family. "They were my parents 1,000 percent," he
told Walter Isaacson for his 2013 biography. "[My biological parents]
were my sperm and egg bank. That's not harsh, it's just the way it was,
a sperm bank thing, nothing more."
Hagopian's mother, Victoria Artinian, was born in the port city of
Smyrna in the 1890s. Smyrna, an ancient biblical town and possible
birthplace of Homer, had enjoyed relative calm until the early 1920s.
Filled with diplomats and citizens of high social ranking, the world
was shocked when, in 1922, the city was pillaged and burned to the
ground. Images of fiery deaths and charred buildings was seared into
the historical imagination. Ernest Hemingway's In Our Time, which was
written three years later, begins with an ode to the fated town: "The
strange thing was, he said, how they screamed every night at midnight.
I do not know why they screamed at that time."
Artinian arrived in the United States on the Greek boat Megali Hellas
in 1919, and soon after met Louis Hagopian. He had made the same trip
seven years earlier, lucky to escape his hometown of Malatya. Mass
murders began there in the late 1800s and a few years after Hagopian
came to America, nearly the entire population of 20,000 Armenians
living in Malatya was wiped out.
"Anybody with family coming from those two places would have been
really branded by the genocide," says Peter Balakian, a humanities
and English professor at Colgate University and author of two books
on the Armenian Genocide.
As the newlyweds settled down briefly in Newark, New Jersey, tens of
thousands of genocide survivors were fleeing the killings and making
their way to the United States. A web of Armenian refugees had begun
to spread out across the world. They settled in major cities, from
Aleppo to Newark, which is where Victoria and Louis Hagopian had a
daughter named Clara in 1924.
A few years later the family moved to California. According to
the 1930 U.S. Census, Clara was raised by her mother and elderly
grandmother in San Francisco, where she met and married Paul Jobs,
a freshly decommissioned Coast Guard mechanic, in 1946.
The Armenian refugees were, for the most part, welcomed by Americans,
many of whom felt a shared Christian identity with the refugees and
were impressed by the newcomers' entrepreneurial spirit. Indeed,
the refugee cause was the most famous of its time.
"It's the largest NGO relief movement in U.S. history," Balakian says.
"The Armenians were really a celebrated minority group." Scholars
estimate that the American Committee for Relief in the Near East raised
the equivalent of $1.5 billion to assist the new refugees. And a film
about the genocide grossed a whooping $2 billion in today's currency.
Future president Herbert Hoover was put in charge of relief efforts
for Europe, and was particularly passionate about the Armenians'
plight. "Probably Armenia was known to the school child in 1919 only
a little less than England," Hoover wrote in his memoirs.
Not so much today. When Apple announced it would release its newest
product on April 24, leaders of the Armenian community were taken
by surprise. It seemed that the watch, which has spurred years of
breathless speculation, could easily overshadow news of the genocide
commemoration events. Apple did not respond to request for comment
for this article.
Jobs was viciously private and didn't make public his ancestry or
engage in the genocide classification debate that Turkey continues to
dig its heels into. The Armenian church in Cupertino said that despite
multiple invitations, Jobs never got in touch with the area's expat
community. But Jobs' feelings about the killings became apparent on a
tense standoff during a luxurious Turkish vacation, according to the
tour guide who led the visit, and who later blogged about the incident.
In 2007, Jobs and his family traveled around Turkey on a private
yacht tour and spent 10 days visiting the country's sites with guide
Asil Tuncer. It went smoothly until the last day, Tuncer told The
Daily Beast, when the group visited the Hagia Sophia. Once a Byzantine
church, it was later converted into a mosque during the Ottoman Empire,
and is now one of Istanbul's must-see tourist destinations.
"What happened to all those Christians, suddenly gone like that?"
Tuncer recalls Jobs asking him as they gazed at the minarets. Then,
he reframed the question: "You, Muslims, what did you do to so many
Christians? You subjected 1.5 million Armenians to genocide. Tell us,
how did it happen?"
Tuncer says he felt trapped, unsure whether to answer with his opinion
or evade an argument in the polite manner he was trained to use as
a guide.
"To expect from a Turkish guide to accept that [question], even if
true, it's not very good. For example, it's like if I come to U.S. and
ask, 'Tell me how, you killed the Indians?'" But he says Jobs insisted
he respond.
"First I said, 'Sir, maybe these are not good things to talk on
Istanbul tour. Let's have fun--this is your real purpose, to learn
about the buildings and history.' He said, 'No, no, no, I want to
hear your answer."
"I said, 'People kill each other, of course, this is a war, but it
is not deliberately genocide,'" he says he told him. "Then I tried
to be nice. So I did my best."
Tuncer says Jobs' face fell, and he looked "miserable." Earlier in the
trip Tuncer says Job had described Apple's vision for a tablet and
showed him the new laptops. But now his previously amiable demeanor
had changed.
Jobs cut the day short, deciding to return to the boat docked in
Istanbul's port, and not finish out the last day of the visit. "He
was not happy with my answer, and maybe he didn't feel very good
after. I can't exactly say. He didn't tell me. He just said I want
to go back to port." (Jobs' family has not publicly responded to
Tuncer's account of the tour.)
Tuncer, who now works for a tour company called Legendary Journeys,
says the goodbye was chilly when he put the Jobs family on their
plane home. "This person coming from the diaspora, I don't expect
he will say, 'Oh yes you are right, I am wrong,'" he says. "He was
disappointed in my answer."
"He didn't have Armenian blood himself, but because of his mother,
he felt a great pull and affinity toward the fact she was, for all
intents and purposes, a genocide survivor," says Phil Walotsky, the
spokesman for the Armenian Genocide Centennial Committee of America.
The Apple Watch release has rattled those who've spent months planning
for a commemoration they hope will finally bring about recognition
of the widespread killings by the Turkish government, which has
suppressed its ghost against a flood of international condemnation.
"Do we think Apple did this intentionally? Of course not," says
Walotsky. "If Steve was still around or if this was brought to their
attention earlier--I'm sure there were folks in leadership who knew
about Steve's background--would they have picked April 24? Probably
not."
But he doesn't blame Apple for the date overlap. The anniversary date
doesn't carry the same weight as other dates do, and hasn't sparked
any outcry as if the watch was being released on, say, Holocaust
Remembrance Day. "It doesn't have same stickiness in American psyche
as other dates do," says Walotsky.
Not everyone feels so benevolent. Benjamin Abtan, president of the
European Grassroots Antiracist Movement, is organizing a weekend
of events to commemorate the anniversary. "It cannot be by chance,"
he says of the Apple Watch release date. "It doesn't mean there as
an intention to overshadow the Armenian genocide, but for all people
who know even little about the Armenian genocide, they know it's a
very big day that everybody's been expecting for a long time. The
date is very symbolic of this trauma."
Abtan doesn't expect the watch's release will push out news of his
efforts to get the Turkish government to recognize the genocide,
but he's already been disappointed by the American media's coverage
of the tragedy.
Still, Walotsky says he considers it lucky that Apple decided not
to release the watch with its typical line-around-the-block shopping
frenzy. "In terms of being the second story that day, at least that
gives us a chance of having a little equal footing in terms of being
able to educate people about this and ensure the mainstream media is
reporting on this," he says.
Walotsky hopes that tomorrow, Apple will make an effort to pay tribute
to its founder's heritage and the strangely aligned anniversary. With
Tim Cook's advocacy around LGBT issues, and Apple's environmentally
conscious campaigns, he says it's not difficult to imagine the
image-conscious company paying tribute.
"Maybe in a strange way the launch of the watch brings more attention
to the anniversary," he says.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/04/23/apple-s-armenian-genocide-problem.html
http://www.armradio.am/en/2015/04/23/steve-jobs-took-the-armenian-genocide-personally/
15:58, 23 Apr 2015
Siranush Ghazanchyan
Nina Strochlic
The Daily Beast
Friday is the date of the Apple Watch launch--but also the anniversary
of a terrible genocide that sent Steve Jobs' adoptive grandparents
fleeing to safety in America.
On Friday, wrists around the world will welcome the most anticipated
gadget since the iPad came to our fingertips five years ago. The Apple
Watch has stirred breathless speculation, imitation and excitement
long before its reveal last September. But the date chosen for its
release has caused a too-bizarre-to-be-true historic collision that
Apple's founder would likely never have allowed to happen.
One hundred years after Steve Jobs' adoptive family escaped the
Armenian genocide, the company he created is releasing its biggest
new product on the 100th anniversary of a mass killing that left 1.5
million dead at the hands of the Ottoman Empire.
And activists are worried that Apple's latest masterpiece will distract
an audience from an anniversary that they hope will finally force
the Turkish government--which has long refused to call the slaughter
a genocide--into accepting its bloody past.
Steve Jobs' birth parents weren't Armenian, but he was raised in the
shadow of that heritage by an adoptive mother whose family escaped the
killings for safety in America in the 1910s. And Jobs, though he never
spoke publicly about his ties, appeared to feel a deep connection with
his family's heritage and the historic bloodshed they experienced. He
even spoke conversational Armenian.
In 1955, Clara Hagopian and Paul Jobs, a young couple who spent
nearly a decade trying to have children of their own, adopted a
Syrian-American baby and named him Steve. Steve Jobs never met his
birth father and often spoke about the strong connection he shared
with his adoptive family. "They were my parents 1,000 percent," he
told Walter Isaacson for his 2013 biography. "[My biological parents]
were my sperm and egg bank. That's not harsh, it's just the way it was,
a sperm bank thing, nothing more."
Hagopian's mother, Victoria Artinian, was born in the port city of
Smyrna in the 1890s. Smyrna, an ancient biblical town and possible
birthplace of Homer, had enjoyed relative calm until the early 1920s.
Filled with diplomats and citizens of high social ranking, the world
was shocked when, in 1922, the city was pillaged and burned to the
ground. Images of fiery deaths and charred buildings was seared into
the historical imagination. Ernest Hemingway's In Our Time, which was
written three years later, begins with an ode to the fated town: "The
strange thing was, he said, how they screamed every night at midnight.
I do not know why they screamed at that time."
Artinian arrived in the United States on the Greek boat Megali Hellas
in 1919, and soon after met Louis Hagopian. He had made the same trip
seven years earlier, lucky to escape his hometown of Malatya. Mass
murders began there in the late 1800s and a few years after Hagopian
came to America, nearly the entire population of 20,000 Armenians
living in Malatya was wiped out.
"Anybody with family coming from those two places would have been
really branded by the genocide," says Peter Balakian, a humanities
and English professor at Colgate University and author of two books
on the Armenian Genocide.
As the newlyweds settled down briefly in Newark, New Jersey, tens of
thousands of genocide survivors were fleeing the killings and making
their way to the United States. A web of Armenian refugees had begun
to spread out across the world. They settled in major cities, from
Aleppo to Newark, which is where Victoria and Louis Hagopian had a
daughter named Clara in 1924.
A few years later the family moved to California. According to
the 1930 U.S. Census, Clara was raised by her mother and elderly
grandmother in San Francisco, where she met and married Paul Jobs,
a freshly decommissioned Coast Guard mechanic, in 1946.
The Armenian refugees were, for the most part, welcomed by Americans,
many of whom felt a shared Christian identity with the refugees and
were impressed by the newcomers' entrepreneurial spirit. Indeed,
the refugee cause was the most famous of its time.
"It's the largest NGO relief movement in U.S. history," Balakian says.
"The Armenians were really a celebrated minority group." Scholars
estimate that the American Committee for Relief in the Near East raised
the equivalent of $1.5 billion to assist the new refugees. And a film
about the genocide grossed a whooping $2 billion in today's currency.
Future president Herbert Hoover was put in charge of relief efforts
for Europe, and was particularly passionate about the Armenians'
plight. "Probably Armenia was known to the school child in 1919 only
a little less than England," Hoover wrote in his memoirs.
Not so much today. When Apple announced it would release its newest
product on April 24, leaders of the Armenian community were taken
by surprise. It seemed that the watch, which has spurred years of
breathless speculation, could easily overshadow news of the genocide
commemoration events. Apple did not respond to request for comment
for this article.
Jobs was viciously private and didn't make public his ancestry or
engage in the genocide classification debate that Turkey continues to
dig its heels into. The Armenian church in Cupertino said that despite
multiple invitations, Jobs never got in touch with the area's expat
community. But Jobs' feelings about the killings became apparent on a
tense standoff during a luxurious Turkish vacation, according to the
tour guide who led the visit, and who later blogged about the incident.
In 2007, Jobs and his family traveled around Turkey on a private
yacht tour and spent 10 days visiting the country's sites with guide
Asil Tuncer. It went smoothly until the last day, Tuncer told The
Daily Beast, when the group visited the Hagia Sophia. Once a Byzantine
church, it was later converted into a mosque during the Ottoman Empire,
and is now one of Istanbul's must-see tourist destinations.
"What happened to all those Christians, suddenly gone like that?"
Tuncer recalls Jobs asking him as they gazed at the minarets. Then,
he reframed the question: "You, Muslims, what did you do to so many
Christians? You subjected 1.5 million Armenians to genocide. Tell us,
how did it happen?"
Tuncer says he felt trapped, unsure whether to answer with his opinion
or evade an argument in the polite manner he was trained to use as
a guide.
"To expect from a Turkish guide to accept that [question], even if
true, it's not very good. For example, it's like if I come to U.S. and
ask, 'Tell me how, you killed the Indians?'" But he says Jobs insisted
he respond.
"First I said, 'Sir, maybe these are not good things to talk on
Istanbul tour. Let's have fun--this is your real purpose, to learn
about the buildings and history.' He said, 'No, no, no, I want to
hear your answer."
"I said, 'People kill each other, of course, this is a war, but it
is not deliberately genocide,'" he says he told him. "Then I tried
to be nice. So I did my best."
Tuncer says Jobs' face fell, and he looked "miserable." Earlier in the
trip Tuncer says Job had described Apple's vision for a tablet and
showed him the new laptops. But now his previously amiable demeanor
had changed.
Jobs cut the day short, deciding to return to the boat docked in
Istanbul's port, and not finish out the last day of the visit. "He
was not happy with my answer, and maybe he didn't feel very good
after. I can't exactly say. He didn't tell me. He just said I want
to go back to port." (Jobs' family has not publicly responded to
Tuncer's account of the tour.)
Tuncer, who now works for a tour company called Legendary Journeys,
says the goodbye was chilly when he put the Jobs family on their
plane home. "This person coming from the diaspora, I don't expect
he will say, 'Oh yes you are right, I am wrong,'" he says. "He was
disappointed in my answer."
"He didn't have Armenian blood himself, but because of his mother,
he felt a great pull and affinity toward the fact she was, for all
intents and purposes, a genocide survivor," says Phil Walotsky, the
spokesman for the Armenian Genocide Centennial Committee of America.
The Apple Watch release has rattled those who've spent months planning
for a commemoration they hope will finally bring about recognition
of the widespread killings by the Turkish government, which has
suppressed its ghost against a flood of international condemnation.
"Do we think Apple did this intentionally? Of course not," says
Walotsky. "If Steve was still around or if this was brought to their
attention earlier--I'm sure there were folks in leadership who knew
about Steve's background--would they have picked April 24? Probably
not."
But he doesn't blame Apple for the date overlap. The anniversary date
doesn't carry the same weight as other dates do, and hasn't sparked
any outcry as if the watch was being released on, say, Holocaust
Remembrance Day. "It doesn't have same stickiness in American psyche
as other dates do," says Walotsky.
Not everyone feels so benevolent. Benjamin Abtan, president of the
European Grassroots Antiracist Movement, is organizing a weekend
of events to commemorate the anniversary. "It cannot be by chance,"
he says of the Apple Watch release date. "It doesn't mean there as
an intention to overshadow the Armenian genocide, but for all people
who know even little about the Armenian genocide, they know it's a
very big day that everybody's been expecting for a long time. The
date is very symbolic of this trauma."
Abtan doesn't expect the watch's release will push out news of his
efforts to get the Turkish government to recognize the genocide,
but he's already been disappointed by the American media's coverage
of the tragedy.
Still, Walotsky says he considers it lucky that Apple decided not
to release the watch with its typical line-around-the-block shopping
frenzy. "In terms of being the second story that day, at least that
gives us a chance of having a little equal footing in terms of being
able to educate people about this and ensure the mainstream media is
reporting on this," he says.
Walotsky hopes that tomorrow, Apple will make an effort to pay tribute
to its founder's heritage and the strangely aligned anniversary. With
Tim Cook's advocacy around LGBT issues, and Apple's environmentally
conscious campaigns, he says it's not difficult to imagine the
image-conscious company paying tribute.
"Maybe in a strange way the launch of the watch brings more attention
to the anniversary," he says.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/04/23/apple-s-armenian-genocide-problem.html
http://www.armradio.am/en/2015/04/23/steve-jobs-took-the-armenian-genocide-personally/