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President Obama has broken another campaign promise by refusing to recognize the Armenian Genocide carried out by the Ottoman Turks in 1915.
Experts say it’s just the latest example of the president bowing to pressure from Islamic nations.
Lawmakers from both parties have called on Obama to fulfill his campaign pledge by attending a memorial in the Armenian capital of Yerevan April 24. The president has not responded.
While campaigning for president in 2008, Obama stated that “as president I will recognize the Armenian Genocide.”
Furthermore, he claimed: “America deserves a leader who speaks truthfully about the Armenian Genocide and responds forcefully to all genocides. I intend to be that president.”
But since taking office, Obama has consistently refused to use the word “genocide” to describe the attempted extermination of the Armenians.
Bestselling author and human rights activist Joel Richardson, author of ”The Islamic Antichrist: The Shocking Truth about the Real Nature of the Beast” and director of the explosive documentary “End Times Eyewitness: Israel, Islam, and the Unfolding Signs of the Messiah’s Return,” said the controversy amounts to cowardice in the face of growing Turkish militarism.
In an interview with WND, Richardson said the “refusal to openly acknowledge the well-established historical fact of the Armenian Genocide carried out by the Turks is a profound dereliction of our duty as humans, and a great dishonor to the millions of lives lost.”
Pope Francis infuriated Turkey Sunday by terming the slaughter 100 years ago of up to 1.5 million Armenians under the Ottoman Empire “the first genocide of the 20th century.”
The outraged Turkish government of Racep Tayyip Erdoğan immediately recalled its ambassador and accused the pontiff of fueling “hatred.”
The comments by Francis were delivered during a Mass at St. Peter’s Basilica commemorating what Armenians call “Metz Yegherr,” or the “Great Evil.”
The pope interpreted the “massacre” of the Armenian people in Christian terms, proclaiming “many innocent people died as confessors and martyrs for the name of Christ.”
Francis also paid tribute to the “Christian identity” of Armenia and observed the country was the “first among nations in the course of the centuries to embrace the Gospel of Christ.”
The Mass, which also celebrated the recognition of Armenian Saint Gregory of Narek as a “doctor of the church,” was widely attended by Armenian church leaders as well as Armenian President Serge Sarkisian.
Sarkisian hailed the pope’s comments and told the Associated Press, “The words of the leader of a church with 1 billion followers cannot but have a strong impact.”
Swift response
The Turkish government reacted swiftly by recalling its ambassador to the Holy See. Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu condemned the pope’s statements as “out of touch with both historical facts and legal basis” and “unacceptable.” He also charged the pope with fueling “hatred and animosity” through “unfounded allegations.”
But WND Managing Editor David Kupelian, who lost many family members in the Armenian Genocide, says the pope is “obviously correct in insisting that the systematic, purposeful extermination of over a million Christian Armenians by the Turks during the last century was a ‘genocide.’”
“Unlike post-WWII Germany, which fully acknowledged and took responsibility for Hitler’s Holocaust, the government of Turkey to this day, after 100 years, still denies any genocide ever took place,” Kupelian observed. “This despite thousands of eyewitness accounts, despite the over 24,000 documents compiled from the U.S. National Archives of State Department records from 1910 to 1929 detailing the extermination of the Armenians, and despite the New York Times’ over 194 articles from 1913 through 1922 outlining the hideous manner in which Armenians died in Turkey.”
He also pointed out the U.S. ambassador to the Ottoman Empire from 1913 to 1916, Henry Morgenthau, tried desperately to stop the slaughter.
Morgenthau stated in his published memoirs: “I am confident that the whole history of the human race contains no such horrible episode as this.”
Pastor Carl Gallups, author of the theological bestseller “Final Warning: Understanding the Trumpet Days of Revelation,” said the pope’s comments were hardly shocking considering Francis’s own history.
When he was cardinal in his homeland of Argentina, then Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio declared the deaths of the Armenians slaughtered by the Ottoman Empire in 1915 as the “gravest crime of Ottoman Turkey,” Gallups noted.
And Argentina is the home of a significant number of Armenians whose ancestors fled the Ottoman Empire just after World War I.
Gallups also noted Pope John Paul II made the same declaration in 2001 and Pope Francis has made similar statements before.
“Pope Francis stands squarely on the side of the historical facts in this case. The Armenian genocide is considered by historical scholars to be the first genocide of the 20th Century. It has been dubbed the second most studied case of mass extermination after the Holocaust.”
The Ottoman Empire’s extermination of “a 100-year-old Christian community in the region” is clearly genocide, Gallups said, “regardless of the Muslim dominated and politically correct narrative of the current Turkish leadership.”
‘Dangerous’ Turkey
Richardson also praised the pope’s courage in the face of what he called the increasingly dangerous Turkish leadership.
“While I am no fan of this particular pope, the world should be grateful that he has had the courage to make clear statements where President Obama and so many others have caved to fear and pressure from the increasingly bullying tactics of the Turkish government,” Richardson said.
“Turkey is increasingly becoming one of the most overt dictatorships in the earth. Very little of the world has awakened to the threat of the radical nationalism in Turkey led by President Erdoğan.”
Richardson said the West “must remember that the concept of confession and admission of guilt is largely a foreign concept within Islam.”
“Islamic practice has no such thing as the public confession of guilt,” he said. “In the West, even liberals who have no real appreciation for the Judeo-Christian foundations of Western culture recognize the importance of acknowledging guilt in the process of moving forward in order to avoid repeating the great sins of the past. But where there is no admission of guilt, we are most often doomed to repeat the sins of the past.”
He said the fact that Erdogan “is so profoundly angered by the simple acknowledgment of the Armenian genocide is a profoundly dangerous and portentous statement concerning what he is capable of carrying out in the future.”
“This is a man who is not afraid of throwing childlike temper tantrums in public and on the world stage. And when children throw temper tantrums, it is important that the adults of the world do not cave in to the manipulative pressure,” Richardson said.
“Now is the moment for the world to stand firm against the manipulative bullying tactics of the Turkish president. In the days ahead, we will see which nations in the world leaders are responsible adults, and who are the enablers.”
Obama breaks vow to recognize Armenian genocide
-NO AUTHOR-
Tue, 14 Apr 2015 01:22:57 GMT
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