The Ottoman government’s massacre of 1.5 million Armenians in the early 20th century was “unequivocally genocide,” the head of the Anti-Defamation League said in the group’s strongest position on the subject.
Jonathan Greenblatt, the civil rights group’s CEO since last July, also said in a May 13 blog post that the ADL will support U.S. recognition of the Armenian genocide — a move the group had resisted for many years.
Greenblatt, writing ahead of the ADL’s May 15-17 national leadership summit in Washington, D.C., tied the 1915 events to the Holocaust.
Saying he wanted to be “crystal clear,” Greenblatt wrote: “What happened in the Ottoman Empire to the Armenians beginning in 1915 was genocide. We believe that remembering and educating people about any genocide — Armenian, the Holocaust, Bosnia, Rwanda and others — is a necessary tool to prevent future tragedies.”
Greenblatt said the Jewish community’s experience regarding the Holocaust is relevant to the discussion, pointing out that at the end of World War II there was “widespread shame in the Western world at the realization that anti-Semitism was deeply embedded across cultures and countries and could produce such horror.”
He cautioned that the passage of time since the Holocaust has in some way eviscerated the sense of shame that has inhibited anti-Semitism and is allowing it to re-emerge in full force, which shows that “we must educate each generation about the tragedies of the past.”
“Silence is not an option,” he wrote.
Until August 2007, the ADL, under the leadership of then-national director Abraham Foxman, did not use the term “genocide” to describe the Armenian massacre. It reversed course after an internal debate went public and a grassroots campaign by Armenian American activists targeted the ADL.
Foxman has since used the term “Armenian genocide,” but for many years the ADL opposed formal recognition by Congress, citing concerns for the Turkish Jewish community and relationships among Turkey, Israel and the United States. The names “Ottoman Empire” and “Turkey” were often used interchangeably by the West until Turkey became the official name in the early 1920s.
New England’s ADL director, Robert Trestan, told the Boston Globe on May 15 that Greenblatt’s post was the “most unequivocal statement that we’ve ever issued.”
However, the statement does not go far enough, according to civil rights attorney Andrew Tarsy, the former New England ADL director whose dispute over the issue with the national leadership in 2007 led to his temporary ouster by Foxman.
Tarsy, whom Foxman later reinstated, told the Globe that the ADL ought to lead conversations about reparations for families.
“Everything that Holocaust reparations has represented should be on the table,” he said.
In recent years, a number of major Jewish groups have recognized the massacres as a genocide. — jta