In an interview yesterday with the BBC, Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan sought to underscore just how seriously he views a recent vote by the US House Foreign Affairs Committee earlier this month, by threatening to expel some 100,000 Armenian workers from the nation in retaliation.
The House committee narrowly passed a resolution declaring the Ottoman era killing of Armenians “genocide,” leading Turkey to withdraw its ambassador and sending the issue for future consideration in the full House.
It is unclear how that vote and the Turkish PM’s threat are connected, except that they both involve Armenians somehow. Edrogan insisted that the Armenians are only allowed to remain in Turkey as a “display of our peaceful approach,” adding that “we have to get something in return.”
President Obama, who campaigned during the most recent election in favor of supporting the resolution, has completely changed his position, and now vows to do everything in his power to stop the measure from getting through the House of Representatives.
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Humanitarian ethnic cleansing, he may win Nobel prize for that, Turkey is an important member of Anglo-American Terrorist Organization!
It's more like a rational strategy. While the Armenian lobbyists keep pushing for this bill in the U.S, they'd better invest more time and money in their home countries.
A similar approach Obama could try against the Jewish lobby. Making them understand what is in the best interest for their own people versus what they believe it is. Perhaps questioning openly some of the funding and military cooperation.
Or perhaps the UN/US should consider calling their imposed Iraq embargo and following invasion genocide, based on civilian body count of 100,000's! Then they can perhaps judge about other nations genocides without looking too much of a hypocrite.
Bottom line: The United States has no moral authority to be yapping about something from a hundred years back. The US was mass murdering and mass graving native Americans in the era only a few years before that and has been cruise missile/drone bomb murdering and torturing in this current era.
Erdogan and his minions have in the past cited various figures for the number of Armenians from Armenia who currently work in Turkey. One day it's 30,000, the next day it's 100,000. The following study, however, says that there are only about 12,000 Armenian workers, and studies by Turkish Armenians themselves put the figure at no more than 5 to 6 thousand:
http://hyemedia.com/2009/12/08/12000-armenian-cit…
Mainstream media do not tell their readers that millions of indigenous (and I emphasize the word indigenous) Armenians (and Greeks and Assyrians) lived in what is known as "Turkey" long before the coming of the Turks from Central Asia and Mongolia. Turkey wiped them out and now claims that land as its own.
Even though the Armenian workers are not citizens of "Turkey," they have more of a historical and moral right to be living on that land, if that is what they wish, than Erdogan does.
It is disappointing that the mainstream media (is Antiwar really non-mainstream? Sometimes I wonder.) do not tell their readers the full, unvarnished truth about the history of genocides committed by Turkey. Please visit http://www.Armenian-genocide.org for more information.
I don't dispute what you say (much of Anatolia was inhabited by ethnic Greeks for many centuries before the Turks arrived). But why is America involving itself in this whole affair? I see no obvious American interest or good for America in it. This is just another ethnic lobby with an agenda hijacking America's national interests. One more sign of the pathology of American politics and how the melting pot is long broken….
So, in order to demonstrate that there was no Armenian genocide, they are going to expel Armenians? That sounds like a great plan to me. Kinda like saying there was no Holocaust and then expelling Jews, or the Native Americans had no atrocities committed against them therefore we should expel them too. What is the logic behind this? And why is everyone so upset over events that happened about a century ago? It's not like the people that did it are still alive.