Obama has once again capitulated to Erdogan and his Islamist Turkey and will not use the word ‘genocide’ on 100th anniversary of what we all know was in fact a genocide and massacre of the Christian Armenians:
CNN – President Barack Obama, wary of damaging relations with Turkey amid growing unrest in the Middle East, won’t use the 100th anniversary of the massacre of Armenians under the Ottoman Empire to declare the brutal episode a genocide.
Despite Obama’s campaign promise in 2008 to “recognize the Armenian Genocide” as president, the White House on Tuesday issued a carefully worded statement on a high-level administration meeting with Armenian groups that avoided using the term “genocide.”
An administration official said Obama, who will mark the centennial this Friday, would similarly avoid using the word. The term angers Ankara, which denies that Ottoman Turks carried out a genocide.
“We know and respect that there are some who are hoping to hear different language this year,” the official said. “We understand their perspective, even as we believe that the approach we have taken in previous years remains the right one — both for acknowledging the past, and for our ability to work with regional partners to save lives in the present.”
The news came as a disappointment to Armenian-American groups, who have lobbied the administration to use the word “genocide” to describe the systematic killing of more than 1 million ethnic Armenians in 1915.
“President Obama’s surrender to Turkey represents a national disgrace. It is, very simply, a betrayal of truth, a betrayal of trust,” said Ken Hachikian, the chairman of the Armenian National Committee of America.
Even some of Obama’s allies decried the decision. California Rep. Adam Schiff, the Democratic leader of the House Intelligence Committee, said he was “deeply disappointed” by the decision to avoid the word genocide.
“How long must the victims and their families wait before our nation has the courage to confront Turkey with the truth about the murderous past of the Ottoman Empire?” Schiff wrote in a statement. “If not this President, who spoke so eloquently and passionately about recognition in the past, whom? If not after one hundred years, when?”