Samantha Power’s breathtaking hypocrisy on Armenian Genocide – The Jerusalem Post

By Shmuley Boteach

© Photo: The Harvard Gazette

On October 29, after decades of putting realpolitik over principal, the House of Representatives voted 405-11 to recognize and denounce the Turkish genocide of the Armenians in 1915. The willingness to finally acknowledge the historical fact that the Turks killed as many as 1.5 million Armenians appears to be a reaction in part to the Turkish invasion of Syria and their possible intention to reenact its genocide against the Kurdish people.

The Senate and the president can make history by following suit.

Historically, the reason for silence was simply a matter of politics. The Turks become apoplectic anytime anyone recites the facts about the Ottoman policy of extermination – and countries that wish to have good relations with Turkey have been compelled to remain silent. This includes Israel, the United Kingdom and Australia. Since Turkey is a NATO ally, fellow members have been especially reluctant to risk angering the Turks; nevertheless, France, Belgium, Bulgaria, Canada, Greece, Lithuania, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal and Slovakia have all recognized the Armenian genocide in some way.

Only antisemites and kooks deny the Holocaust, but no country is worried about offending the Germans, because they acknowledge their responsibility for the murder of six million Jews. The Turks, however, deny that the killings were intentional, insist it occurred in the context of war, remind everyone that Turks were also killed, and maintain that the number of Armenians who were murdered is exaggerated. Historians, however, long ago concluded that the systematic massacres and forced deportation of Armenians committed by the Ottoman Empire from 1915 to 1923 constituted genocide. The facts of the mass killings are established as historical and are absolutely undeniable.

POLITICS, I understand – but rank hypocrisy is something different. Consider that one of two Democrats to vote “present” was Ilhan Omar, the Minnesota congresswoman who has distinguished herself primarily by her antisemitic remarks and vitriolic criticism of Israel. Omar’s explanation for her vote, intimating that there is no “academic consensus” about what happened, was denounced by Aram Hamparian, executive director of the Armenian National Committee of America who said that she “effectively denies the Armenian genocide” and has taken “a page from the Turkish Embassy’s denial playbook.”

Even more outrageous, however, was an op-ed in The New York Times by my friend Samantha Power, in which she said that the House vote, “is also a reminder of how important truth-telling is to American foreign policy, and how ultimately self-defeating it is for the United States to bend to autocratic pressure tactics, whether from Turkey or anywhere else.”

This is the same Samantha Power who condemned those who turned a blind eye to the slaughter of innocents in her 2002 Pulitzer-prize winning book, A Problem from Hell: America in the Age of Genocide, and then proceeded to do just that after joining the Obama administration. In 2014, she called allegations that Bashar Assad had used chlorine gas to murder Syrian men, women and children “unsubstantiated.” She said that the administration was examining diplomatic “modalities” to respond. The Wall Street Journal observed wryly: “Surely nothing terrifies brutal Arab tyrants more than diplomatic modalities.” Ultimately, president Barack Obama idly threatened Assad if he used chemical weapons again – and then did nothing.

Though candidate Obama pledged to do so, the Obama administration did not recognize the Armenian genocide during Powers’ four years as UN ambassador. Now that she is hawking a book and pontificating about human rights, she admits that the administration was “played a little bit” by Turkish leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

Power said during a recent podcast that Obama “always thought, ‘OK, I could feel good, I could meet a campaign promise and deliver for the Armenian Americans to whom I’ve made this promise. And then what? What if it sets back this thing [the diplomatic dialogue] that could be much more promising?’ I think he really believed that it could have that perverse effect, because he was told that by people who studied the region and knew the region.”

Did this champion of human rights protest? She doesn’t say. We do know she remained in the administration, though she had praised people who resigned in protest of past inaction.