By Catherine Womack,

For centuries the sacred khachkars of Djulfa stood tall along the banks of the River Aras — hulking and ornately carved 16th-century headstones, an army 10,000 strong, steadfastly guarding the world’s largest medieval Armenian cemetery. Earthquakes, war and vandalism diminished their ranks, but by the middle of the 20th century, thousands of khachkars still remained.

Today, however, not a single statuesque sandstone sculpture stands at Djulfa, in the remote Nakhichevan region of Azerbaijan. Despite a 2000 UNESCO order demanding their protection, evidence published in the art journal Hyperallergic this year indicated that the monuments were covertly and systematically demolished as part of an alleged Azerbaijani campaign to erase traces of indigenous Armenian culture in Nakhichevan.

The scope of the destruction is stunning: 89 medieval churches, 5,840 khachkars and 22,000 tombstones, the report said. The annihilation of cultural heritage dwarfs the more widely reported and condemned razing of sites by Islamic State in Syria and the Taliban in Afghanistan. Simon Maghakyan, 33, a co-author of the Hyperallergic article, described Azerbaijan’s alleged demolition of these sacred churches and monuments from 1997 to 2006 as “the worst cultural genocide of the 21st century.”

Late last month, inside a ballroom at the Pasadena Convention Center, Maghakyan presented the research behind the Hyperallergic article to attendees at the Armenian National Committee of America Western Region’s Grassroots Conference.

Aghayev said Azerbaijan is a country of “interfaith harmony and tolerance, and peaceful co-existence of Muslims, Christians and Jews.” Aghayev accused Armenia of destroying Azerbaijani cultural and religious monuments and desecrating Azerbaijani graveyards in Armenia. And he noted Maghakyan is a part-time paid community development coordinator for the Western Region of the Armenian National Committee of America, which he called a “radical Armenian lobby organization.”

On large screens Maghakyan showed slides of before and after photos, satellite images, Azerbaijani archival documents and video footage — proof, he said, of the Azerbaijani army’s destruction of Armenian sacred sites and artifacts.

Maghakyan, who identifies himself as a political science lecturer, activist and real estate agent based in Denver, said the exhaustive work he has done on the khachkars is a personal passion project.

Unlike Islamic State and the Taliban, who self-promoted their destruction of historical ruins and monuments, Azerbaijani officials deny that the Armenian cemeteries and churches in question ever existed. The Times asked the Azerbaijan Consulate in Los Angeles to respond to Maghakyan’s research, and the office provided a statement from Nasimi Aghayev, consul general of Azerbaijan to the Western United States, who called the destruction of the Djulfa khachkars “a figment of Armenia’s imagination.”

“It’s not a job, but it is my lifelong cause,” he said in a post-presentation interview. “I can never vacation from this. I tried, but it drove me nuts. If you believe in a cause, you have to pursue it or you’re not going to have an easy time falling asleep at night. I’m stuck with this until something happens.”

Southern California is home to the largest Armenian diaspora outside the former Soviet Union. According to U.S. census data, Los Angeles County is home to more than 200,000 people of Armenian descent. It is a community that pushed hard for the recent House resolution recognizing the genocide of an estimated 1.5 million Armenians by the Ottoman Empire, which is now modern-day Turkey, between 1915 and 1923.

Maghakyan’s talk drew a couple of hundred audience members listening intently, many taking notes.

“This is worse than what ISIS did,” Maghakyan told the audience. “How could the world ignore it? How did Azerbaijan get away with this? And if I do not tell this story, who will? I’d never forgive myself if the world never learned of the great sculptural genocide of our time.”

Azerbaijan’s denial is particularly painful to Armenians.

“I used to think that when Turkey denies the Armenian genocide, maybe it was mainly because the information is old, or some people really don’t believe it happened. But here we have photos, satellite images, video footage. Denial is not because they are unaware. They know what happened. So denial to me has become so much more sinister,” Maghakyan said.

Nakhichevan is an isolated, oblong region controlled by Azerbaijan but set apart from the rest of that country, surrounded by Armenia, Iran and Turkey. Historically Armenian territory, Nakhichevan today is populated primarily by Azerbaijani Turks. Maghakyan described it as the “North Korea of the former Soviet Union,” closely watched and tightly controlled. Djulfa in particular is difficult to access, situated along the militarized southern border between Nakhichevan and Iran.

As a boy growing up in the Armenian capital of Yerevan, Maghakyan often went with his father to visit sacred cultural sites like Armenian churches, medieval Jewish cemeteries and Azerbaijani mausoleums. Maghakyan remembers his father telling him about visiting the sacred Djulfa khachkars, stone monuments that his father said were sacred because they were built not simply to mark a grave, but to intercede with heaven on behalf of the souls resting beneath them.

The Maghakyan family immigrated to the United States when Simon was 16. Three years later, in 2005, Maghakyan was a college student living in Denver when he came across a Russian news agency report featuring video footage of Azerbaijani soldiers in Djulfa wielding sledgehammers, breaking up the khachkars and dumping the shattered monument in the Aras. (The video was taken by Nshan Topouzian, an Armenian bishop who lived across the border from Djulfa in Iran.)

Sarah Pickman, who co-authored the Hyperallergic article, came across Topouzian’s video footage around the same time. Now a PhD candidate in history at Yale, she was an archaeology student at the University of Chicago at the time and decided to publish a story on the destroyed Djulfa khachkars in Archaeology magazine.

Maghakyan connected with Pickman after reading her Archaeology article, and since then the two have worked together to gather and present eyewitness accounts, historical photographs and other evidence. In 2006 they raised money to buy before-and-after satellite images and produced a short documentary, “The New Tears of Araxes.” (Araxes is another spelling of Aras.)

Around 20 khachkars removed from Djulfa during the Soviet era are held in the collections of museums around the world, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. (The Met included a khachkar in the well-regarded “Armenia!” exhibition last year.) It’s a bittersweet reality, Maghakyan said, and an example of the conflict that often pops up between Western museums and indigenous peoples when art and religion collide.

Maghakyan is relentless, not only to spread the word about this cultural loss but also to do something about it. In 2015 he successfully got a replica khachkar installed on the grounds of the Colorado State Capitol, a monument honoring victims of all crimes against humanity. Currently he is lobbying the U.N. Security Council to investigate Azerbaijan’s actions in Nakhichevan.

His main goal, though, is simply to get the world to bear witness to an act of cultural erasure, he said.

In the last email Maghakyan received from Topouzian before he died at age 44 in 2010, the bishop wrote, “If we don’t keep speaking about this destruction, in 10 years it will be forgotten history.”

“I don’t know what drove him,” Maghakyan said. “I think there are certain people, when something bothers them and no one is doing anything about it, it’s like you have to. If you’re a witness to something, you may not say anything about it for a while, but that will eventually haunt you. For me, it’s like that. This gives me energy. This is my drug.”

Source: https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/story/2019-11-07/armenian-monuments-azerbaijan

The famous writer, winner of the Nobel Prize in literature, Orhan Pamuk, arrived at Sharjah International Book Fair and expressed his dissatisfaction with Erdogan’s policy, speaking also for the recognition of the Armenian Genocide, MK reported.

Pamuk’s political views and the persecution he suffered from local nationalists when he said in an interview that thirty thousand Kurds and one million Armenians were killed in Turkey were not ignored. The writer does not consider himself a brave man, but simply expresses what he thinks.

“You know, I live in that part of the world where many writers are imprisoned for their beliefs. So I’m a happy writer and telling the truth is all I can,” he said.

With these words the audience burst into applause. The Armenian Genocide of 1915 is the first genocide of the 20th century. Turkey rejects allegations of the mass extermination of more than one and a half million Armenians during the First World War and is extremely sensitive to criticism from the West on the issue of Armenian genocide.

By ADAM KLASFELD,

MANHATTAN (CN) – Some five years ago, Turkey’s soft power suddenly swelled in the United States as the country’s lobbyists and pro-government charities received millions in newfound funding.

That was the same year that leaked tapes appeared to show then-Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan instructing his son Bilal to dump massive amounts of money tied to a multibillion-dollar money-laundering scheme.

“Now, what I say is, you take everything that you have in the house out,” Erdoğan could be heard telling his son, in recordings quickly viewed by millions on YouTube and translated from Turkish by the now-shuttered Turkish newspaper, Zaman.

“What can I have on me, Dad,” Bilal replied in that transcript. “There is your money in the safe.”

Made public in early 2014, the tapes depicted Erdoğan fretting that Istanbul police conducted home raids on the top officials of his ruling Justice and Development Party and his then-ally Reza Zarrab, a gold trader charged with corrupting them. The Turkish government disputed its authenticity, but academic researchers doubted claims of doctoring.

Zarrab would implicate Erdoğan in a bribery-fueled conspiracy to violate U.S. sanctions against Iran three years later in a New York federal courtroom — a development Erdoğan tried to head off by lobbying intensely with reported help from President Donald Trump and his attorney, Rudy Giuliani.

Courthouse News studied the Justice Department’s foreign lobbying database to identify the five largest recipients of money linked to the Turkish government between 2014 and 2018: Amsterdam & Partners, Ballard Partners, Gephardt Group, Greenberg Traurig, and Mercury Public Affairs. The budgets of those five, including their subcontractors, more than quadrupled collectively during this time frame, from more than $1.7 million in 2014 to more than $7.3 million in 2018.

Gephardt Group, a longtime lobbyist for Turkey named for the Democratic congressman who founded it, cut ties with its government at the end of 2016. The new guard of registered Turkish agents that replaced Gephardt would be deeply tied to Trump and his associates.

Budgets of pro-Turkey charities linked to both Erdoğan and Trump also ballooned during this period.

Bilal Erdoğan, the son from the 2014 recordings, signed the incorporation papers of the U.S.-based charity Turken Foundation just a few months after audio of him and his father caused an uproar. Turkey’s main opposition party unearthed Turken’s IRS records showing that tie in a document request. Public records show that another of Erdogan’s children, Esra Albayrak, sat on Turken’s board.

As a tax-exempt 501(c)3 corporation, Turken does not have to disclose its donors, but it reported receiving a more than $24 million contribution the next fiscal year. Spending that money lavishly, the charity paid more than $17.5 million for the sites where it is building a 32-story skyscraper in midtown Manhattan, for use as Islamic student housing. It also bought legendary boxer Muhammad Ali’s farm in Michigan earlier this year for a reported $2.5 million.

Hacked emails published by WikiLeaks showed Bilal Erdoğan’s interest in a different midtown Manhattan property, valued at $25 million, that Trump Organization representative Elena Baronoff had been offering in 2013.

Known as Trump’s “Russian hand,” Baronoff died of leukemia two years later.

Turken did not reply to an email requesting comment.

Here is a breakdown of the top players in pro-Turkey lobbying and charity between 2014 and 2018.

Gephardt Gets Out
More than a decade ago in 2009, a ProPublica investigation found that the Turkish government’s lobbyists contacted members of Congress more often than those from any other country.

A year before that article, Turkey first signed its contract with former Missouri Representative Richard Gephardt. Turkey had been successful in projecting an image of Erdoğan as a bridge between political Islam and liberal democracy, but Erdoğan’s corruption scandal — and his response to it — stained that international goodwill starting in late 2013.

Once the leaked tapes of his son hit the internet, Erdoğan tried to ban Twitter and purge the prosecutors investigating him. Records that Gephardt disclosed under the Foreign Agents Registration Act show the firm spinning issues of “internet freedom” in Turkey with U.S. legislators and responding to the concerns of the House Foreign Affairs Committee about “The Future of Turkish Democracy.”

Amid Erdoğan’s autocratic rise, Gephardt Group hired five subcontractors to help manage Turkey’s bruised international image: Dickstein Shapiro LLP and LB International Solutions in 2014; Greenberg Traurig and Capitol Counsel in 2015; and longtime congressional staffer Brian Forni in 2016.

Gephardt could not be reached directly. The firm’s vice president, Greg Carnrick, did not respond to phone and email requests for comment.

Asked by phone to explain why the firm terminated its eight-year contract with the Turkish government, Janice O’Connell — one of Gephardt’s former lobbyists for Turkey — supplied a one-word answer.

“No,” O’Connell replied, abruptly hanging up the phone.

Some Gephardt subcontractors continued to work for Greenberg Traurig, a billion-dollar legal powerhouse that took over Turkey’s lobbying contract the same year Giuliani took on Zarrab as a client.

Giuliani’s Role Grows
In 2017, leading up to the Zarrab trial, the Turkish government ratcheted up its legal, diplomatic and lobbying offensive. Ditching the firm led by the Democratic Gephardt, the Turkish government signed on two firms connected to influential Republicans.

Ballard Partners, whom Politico dubbed the “Most Powerful Lobbyist in Trump’s Washington,” made more than $4 million on two contracts: nearly $2 million from the Turkish embassy and more than $2 million from Halkbank, the Turkish state-run bank indicted just this past fall in New York. For that sum, the firm dispatched a trio of agents deeply tied to Trump’s State Department, Treasury Department and White House.

The second firm, Greenberg Traurig, tilted slightly Republican in its political donations from 2016, but it had a partner with a direct line to Trump: Giuliani. The former New York City mayor shuttled between the White House and Turkey’s capital of Ankara to push for a prisoner swap that would have blocked damning testimony from Zarrab that accused Erdoğan of ordering billions of dollars in illicit trades through Halkbank.

Giuliani’s growing reputation as a shadow secretary of state for the Trump administration, in both Turkey and Ukraine, has alarmed Democrats on Capitol Hill. Seven senators signed a letter over a year ago that asked the Department of Justice to assess whether Giuliani has complied with registration requirements for foreign agents.

Senator Tammy Duckworth, one of the signers, is still waiting for the Justice Department to respond after following up on that inquiry last month.

“I’ve asked the Justice Department twice … and I have not gotten a reply from that,” Duckworth told Courthouse News in a phone interview. “So, I’m not quite sure how Mr. Giuliani, who’s neither been elected by the American people nor confirmed by the United States Senate is out there conducting what amounts to foreign policy on behalf of the president because he’s the president’s personal attorney.” Neither the Justice Department nor Giuliani responded to a requests for comment.

Duckworth also called it uncertain whether “Mr. Giuliani is also getting some personal gain from some of his actions, for example, in Turkey.”

Court documents show that Giuliani was paid directly by Zarrab, who admitted to the money-laundering scheme.

Greenberg Traurig and Giuliani cut ties in 2018 as the former mayor ramped up his work for Trump.

The firm’s shareholder Robert Mangas, who signed the Turkey lobbying contract, claims never to have spoken to Giuliani on any matter related to Turkey.

“Mr. Mangas and Mr. Giuliani never worked together on any matters related to Turkey, including the Zarrab case,” the firm’s managing director Jill Perry said.

Greenberg Traurig, whose donations have skewed Democratic in 2018, made inroads on both sides of the aisle in Congress. The firm’s most recent filing reported numerous emails and two meetings apiece with Republican Senator Lindsey Graham and the chief of staff for Representative Ilhan Omar, the only member of the Democratic Party not to vote to recognize the Armenian genocide or approve sanctions against Turkey. Omar’s office did not respond to a request for comment.

The firm raked in more than $5 million in fees and expenses from Turkey, paying nearly $2 million of that amount to subcontractors for the firms Capitol Counsel, Baker Donelson and LB International Solutions, whose president, Lydia Borland, helped a Turkish political action committee donate to U.S. politicians.

Enemies of Erdogan
During his clampdown on perceived opponents, Erdoğan went to war against his party’s former allies: followers of Fethullah Gülen, a Turkish-born cleric living in self-imposed exile in rural Pennsylvania. The main firm in charge of the Turkish government’s anti-Gülen offensive was Amsterdam & Partners, which hired at least 14 subcontractors, records show.

Those arrangements were properly disclosed under the Foreign Agents Registration Act. Federal prosecutors believe that the Turkish government nestled its way into murkier relationships with at least one Trump ally.

Trump’s former national security adviser Michael Flynn would admit that he concealed the Turkish government’s ties to his anti-Gülen blitz, a secret foreign influence initiative branded “The Truth Campaign.”

The Dutch company Inovo BV paid $600,000 to Flynn Intel Group under the contract, which included an Election Day op-ed under Flynn’s name in The Hill.

“The forces of radical Islam derive their ideology from radical clerics like Gülen, who is running a scam,” the editorial read. “We should not provide him safe haven.”

Flynn’s column compared Gülen to Iran’s mullahs and Osama bin Laden, and court papers would later show that Flynn’s Turkish proxies had written several passages. One of the alleged ghostwriters, Trump transition team member Bijan Kian, would later be convicted of unregistered foreign lobbying only to have that conviction overturned. Inovo’s founder Ekim Alptekin was also indicted but did not appear in court and is presumed to be living in Turkey.

The Wall Street Journal reported that Flynn discussed a plan with Turkish officials to “whisk” Gülen from his Pennsylvania home and back to Turkey outside the extradition process. Flynn denied that he tried to kidnap the cleric, but ex-CIA Director James Woolsey told the paper he witnessed the conversation.

Other Turkish-funded media offensives against Gülen were disclosed. Amsterdam & Partners, led by attorney Robert Amsterdam, made nearly $1.3 million in fees by vilifying Gülen for the Turkish government, and the firm paid more than a dozen subcontractors a nearly equivalent amount to assist in the task.

During a phone interview, Amsterdam denied that his crusade against Gülen was financially motivated.

“It’s more out of dedication to the cause than for profit,” the attorney remarked, adding he even “took a haircut” in that pursuit.

That cause has found multiple devotees in the Trump administration, including Giuliani, whom Bloomberg reported pushed to cut government grants to Gülen-affiliated schools across the United States.

“That’s got nothing to do with me,” Amsterdam said of Giuliani.

Amsterdam has been a vituperative critic of Gülen, echoing the Turkish government’s depiction of the cleric as a shadowy cultist behind the 2016 failed coup attempt against Erdoğan’s government.

Amsterdam even purchased an anti-Gülen billboard near his home in Saylorsburg, Pennsylvania. The billboard, which showed Gülen’s face next to the words “School Children at Risk,” had been intended to run on a highway in the village that the cleric calls home.

Amsterdam admitted to having paid for it but claimed that it never went up because of pressure from Gülen’s organization.

Alliance for Shared Values, an umbrella organization associated with Gülen’s movement, responded that they were “not aware,” but “not surprised,” that Amsterdam attempted to put that message near the cleric’s home.

“Through his agents, the Erdoğan government made several attempts to defame and harass Mr. Gülen and visitors to the retreat center where he lives,” the group’s executive director Alp Aslandogan said. “These efforts include organizing loud and profane protests, mailing defamatory fliers to neighbors, flying planes with defamatory signs and showing a defamatory film at a local theater.”

The Gülen movement, also known as Hizmet, the Turkish word for service, describes itself as a group dedicated to interfaith dialogue. The Obama administration rebuffed Turkish pressure to extradite Gülen, with former Vice President Joe Biden emphasizing the U.S. courts require due process and evidence of wrongdoing.

“Only a federal court can do that,” Biden said in August 2016. “Nobody else can do that. If the president were to take this into his own hands, what would happen would be he would be impeached for violating the separation of powers.”

Referring to the multimillion-dollar campaign against Gülen, Aslandogan added: “If the facts were on the Erdoğan government’s side, they would have spent far less and had even an ounce of success.”

Reaching out to major TV, radio and print outlets, Amsterdam’s subcontractor Stroud Communications helped tout his book titled “Empire of Deceit,” accusing Gülen-affiliated charter schools of fraud. The title inspired the parody website “Empire of the Deceit” by Amsterdam’s critics, quoting a Globe & Mail editorial that describes the Canadian attorney as a “legal gun-for-hire and a public relations svengali.”

Mercury Public Affairs, which made more than $87,000 from its contract with Amsterdam, later registered as a foreign agent for work with two Turkish clients directly. The firm made $1.6 million the year after announcing a major hire, Bryan Lanza, who served as Trump’s communications director on the presidential transition team.

Both times that Trump announced a troop withdrawal from Syria — moves in late 2018 and 2019 that stunned top U.S. security officials — Trump had just spoken on the phone with Erdoğan, and Mercury rushed to defense the decision.

Mercury, which has not responded to press inquiries, circulated an editorial by top Turkish diplomat Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu describing the United States’ longtime Kurdish allies as terrorists and another by Erdoğan, printed in The New York Times.

Business or Pleasure at Trump Hotel?
Having a new agent with deep ties in the Trump White House paid dividends for Mercury Public Affairs in taking on two major Turkish nonprofit groups as clients: Turkey-U.S. Business Council (TAIK) and the American Turkish Council (ATC).

Every year, both charities join forces to host a lavish U.S.-Turkish Conference that brings together powerful military, business and political figures from both countries to mingle and discuss the future of bilateral relations. The last two conferences took place at the Trump International Hotel in Washington.

TAIK’s current chairman Mehmet Ali Yalçındağ is Ivanka Trump’s former business partner for Trump Tower Istanbul. Alptekin, who was indicted in Flynn’s “Truth Campaign,” is a former chair.

Under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, Mercury had to disclose all of its contacts with government officials and media representatives. Lanza repeatedly called and emailed the Commerce Department’s Deputy Secretary Earl Comstock on behalf of TAIK in 2018.

The next year, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross would be one of the conference’s “Distinguished Guests,” posing in a photograph next to Yalcindag.

Turkish Coalition of America, which organizes the 109-member-strong “Turkey Caucus” of U.S. Congress members, struggled for cash for much of this past decade, reporting negative revenue in 2014 and 2016. In 2017, the charity reported $4.6 million in revenue, by far the largest in that decade, after receiving a large grant from the Turkish Cultural Foundation, another Washington-based charity.

The coalition’s president Lincoln McCurdy emphasized that the charity complies with nonprofit rules in service of its mission to promote public education.

“TCA’s limited lobbying efforts are fully independent and are neither coordinated with nor controlled by any other organization or lobbying campaign, including that of the government of Turkey,” McCurdy, a former consul for commercial affairs at the U.S. Consulate General in Istanbul, said in an email.

The lobbying expenditures reported by the group represent a small fraction of what it spends in total.

Turkish Heritage Organization, a new nonprofit that sprung up in 2015, burst quickly into prominence with more than $3 million in contributions over the course of three years.

When the House was still controlled by Republicans in 2017, its Committee of Foreign Affairs heard testimony from the organizations president, Ali Cinar,  about the supposed threat to Turkey’s democracy from Gülen and Kurdish militants, not its strongman leader, Erdoğan.

“There is no Turkish legislation that includes any provision that would lead to imprisonment of journalists on account of their journalistic work,” Cinar told Congress.

Under Turkey’s constitution, insulting the president is a crime, and Erdoğan’s government by then had become the world’s leading press jailer for two years running. It has held onto that record ever since.

Source: https://www.courthousenews.com/boom-times-for-turkeys-lobbyists-in-trumps-washington/?fbclid=IwAR3wZrx9lGmXOEP-SEPtyiquTlEQnrIBsbcOgv8UWOCyzAkELcSZU13p0ng

By Marlo Safi,

On Tuesday, a historic vote took place in the House on a simple resolution to recognize the Armenian Genocide of 1915, when Ottoman Turkey massacred 1.5 million Armenians and other Christian minorities in the Empire, including Assyrians and Greeks. For the descendants of victims of the Armenian genocide, congresswoman Ilhan Omar’s attempt to justify her “present” vote when H.R. 296 was on the House floor was not only inappropriate, but featured the common denial tactics used by deniers of the Armenian genocide. Omar was the only Democrat to not vote in favor of the resolution, which was bipartisan and included only 11 nay votes (all Republicans).

Omar’s office sent a statement to CNN explaining her vote:

I believe accountability for human rights violations — especially ethnic cleansing and genocide — is paramount. But accountability and recognition of genocide should not be used as cudgel in a political fight. It should be done based on academic consensus outside the push and pull of geopolitics. A true acknowledgment of historical crimes against humanity must include both  the heinous genocides of the 20th century, along with earlier mass slaughters like the transatlantic slave trade and Native American genocide, which took the lives of hundreds of millions of indigenous people in this country. For this reason, I voted ‘present’ on final passage of H.Res. 296, the resolution Affirming the Unites States record on the Armenian Genocide.

Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey’s president, has been relying on his country’s inclusion in the NATO alliance as leverage over the U.S. That alliance could become especially fraught if the U.S. were to affirm that the genocide was indeed a “genocide,” something we haven’t done since Ronald Reagan’s presidency. (Denial of the Armenian genocide is widespread in Turkey.) Omar’s relationship with Turkey and Erdogan — whom she met with in 2017 — is a legitimate subject of inquiry, especially following her “No” vote on sanctioning Turkey following its offensive against Kurdish forces (which took place on the same day as the Armenian genocide resolution). Her position on both House resolutions is significant given that the vote counts in both were bipartisan and overwhelming. 27

The mention of an “academic consensus” being necessary for recognition is perplexing, given the consensus among historians that the genocide is historical fact. To dispute the existence of this consensus is shameful and akin to denial. For Omar to invoke a “whataboutist” argument, as she does in mentioning Native Americans, similarly discounts the matter that she was expected to consider exclusively when the resolution was on the House floor. Genocide-denial tactics used by Turkey include attacking the motivations of the truth teller. Omar does the same thing by framing this bill as a political cudgel (which it’s not — H.Res. 296 was introduced in April). An acknowledgment of the Armenian genocide does not preclude an acknowledgment of any other genocides, and Omar could have voiced her opinion on the atrocities she cites after voting to recognize the one that her colleagues resoundingly voted in favor or formally recognizing.

Omar’s decision, as well as the decision of eleven Republicans to oppose the bill, fails to live up to the role of a witness of justice. There is no justice without recognition, and opposing measures that aim to affirm the U.S.’ stance as a protector of the persecuted is dishonorable. Victims of genocide die two deaths. Once at the hands of their persecutor, and again when the genocide is denied.