Communicating Arts - Main Web Site"Turks fear a wave of compensation and property claims by Armenians if Ankara ever gives any ground on the issue," writes Gareth Jones for today's Reuters. [1]
I told you so ("Armenian Genocide: Revisiting the Sins of the Fathers"). [2]
This, and on behalf of a Christian entity, is exactly indicative of the the endless, retributive behavor that perpetuates the perception of "us vs. them" until the rest of us, whoever we are, just can't stand it.
In the wake of World War II and on into the late 1960's and 1970's my Jewish father vowed he would purchase nothing of German manufacture.
Brave words.
I would back him up, but I have the camera he purchased in the 1960's or so and wore around the world as a tourist later in his life--an Agfa "Selecta" stamped immistakably: "Made in Germany."
One may thank the German people and their post-WWII manufacturing for this picture:
You know that I know that we all know, as does the Turkish government and the Bush Administration, that the Democratic Congress's interest in the "Armenian Genocide Bill", which has been around for a while, so I have heard, coincides with the Democrat's interest in sabotaging the U.S. mission, diplomatic and military, in Iraq.
I am no more qualified than Congress is to make a call on what happened between Turks and Armenians in the Ottoman Empire some 92 years ago. The history, made available to historians without reservation by the Turkish government for some time now, seems to produce more in the way of discussion than conclusion as regards those events.
Where governments dare write history, that history must be always suspect.
How would you like to be Armenian today knowing that a bill intended to represent your interest has in fact been muddled into a foreign affairs debacle and thereby undermined as regards its merits separately?
1. Jones, Gareth. "U.S. genocide move reopens old wounds in Turkey." Reuters, October 16, 2007.
Correspondence and Permissions: James S. Oppenheim
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