Do you know the difference between a Holocaust and a holocaust? The Armenians do.

Despite what some sub-editors might think, the genocide of 1.5m Armenian Christians in 1915 was not a holocaust. As reports
“Armenpress”, journalist Robert Fist stated this in his most recent article published in The Independent. As reports “Arrnenpress”, Fisk particularly
stated in his article:

“What‘s in a name? Let’s start with the Persian Gulf. Or the Arabian Gulf. Or just the Arab Gulf. I’m
indebted to reader (and surgeon) Ross Farhadieh for complaining to me last week about my use of “The
Gulf” – bland, dull and historically anaemic – in a column on Iran and its possible return to geopolitical
power in the Middle East. Historically, legally – and in the UN – Ross told me, it should be called the
Persian Gulf. It was Gamal Abdul Nasser‘s nationalism which renamed it the “Arabian Gulf”.

And Ross is right. And I think I know the background to this slippage in nomenclature. When I worked in
the Middle East forThe Times – long before Murdoch emasculated the paper – we found that whenever we
referr~d to the Persian Gulf, Arab states would refuse to let the paper go on sale in Dubai or Cairo. But
whenever we called it the Arabian Gulf, the paper was not allowed into Iran.

Other Great War events remain contentious, not least what I always refer to as the Armenian Holocaust
(with a capital “H”), the genocide of 1.5m Armenian Christians at the hands of the Turkish Ottoman
government in 1915. It was the first industrialised genocide of the last century – the second being the
Jewish Holocaust – and the two mass acts of slaughter had clear historical connections. The Turks
suffocated thousands of Armenians in caves – by blowing smoke from bonfires into the cavities where they
had imprisoned them in the Syrian desert – and thus created the first primitive gas chambers.

Armenian men were sometimes taken to their execution in railway goods wagons. And junior members of
the German Kaiser‘s army who were training the Turkish army at the time witnessed the genocide; more
importantly, some of the names of these Germans turned up less than a quarter of a century later as
members of Hitler’s Wehrmacht in the Ukraine and Belarus, where they were helping to organise the mass
killing of Jews. There’s no doubt where they learned how to do that.

Many years ago, therefore, I used the phrase “Armenian Holocaust” in The Independent. A sub–editor
immediately changed the capital H to a lower-case h. My phone did not stop ringing. Armenians were
outraged. Why did they not deserve a capital H, they demanded to know? Didn’t the Turks murder enough
Armenians to qualify them for a capital H? I wrote a long memorandum to my then editor; Simon Kelner;
explaining that it was racist–to make a distinction between two genocides; we could not base our definition
on the numerical difference between 1,500,000 and 6,000,000. Besides, Israelis (as opposed to the state
of Israel, which doesn‘t even regard the Armenian catastrophe as a genocide) refer to the Armenian
massacres as the Armenian Shoah – using the Hebrew word for Holocaust. Kelner later published my
memo as an article in The Independent – and it won the DC Watt journalism award.

But we newspaper folk have poor institutional memories. Earlier this month, I again referred to the
Armenian Holocaust – and a sub–editor; unfamiliar with the expression, innocently downgraded the poor
old Armenians again. He changed the capital H into h! My phone trilled once more. The same
unanswerable arguments. Didn‘t the Turks kill enough of us, my Armenian callers asked again? So of
course we sheepishly upgraded the Armenians on the website version of my report and returned to them
their capital H … ”