In the Obersalzberg Speech, a speech given by Adolf Hitler to Wehrmacht commanders at his Obersalzberg home on 22 August 1939, a week before the German invasion of Poland, Hitler asked: «Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?»
The Armenian Genocide is acknowledged to have been one of the first modern genocides, because scholars point to the organized manner in which the killings were carried out. It is the second-most-studied case of genocide after the Holocaust.
As a response to continuing denial by the Turkish state, many activists from Armenian Diaspora communities have pushed for formal recognition of the Armenian Genocide from various governments around the world. As of 2019, governments and parliaments of 32 countries, including the United States, Russia, and Germany have recognized the events as a genocide.
The term “genocide”, created in 1943, was coined by Raphael Lemkin who was directly influenced by the massacres of Armenians during World War I. Lemkin was moved specifically by the annihilation of the Armenians to define systematic and premeditated exterminations within legal parameters and to coin the word genocide in 1943.
In 1996, Professor Gregory Stanton proposed a formula that seeks to identify the different elements that ultimately lead to the crime of genocide. Surprisingly, genocide is not the final and ultimate stage of his ten stage formula. Denial of genocide is. Denial by the perpetrators, whether by words or by taking active steps to cover their acts.
Denial of the Armenian genocide can be compared to similar negationist historical revisionisms such as Holocaust denial and Nanking Massacre denial. The response to denial is punishment by an international tribunal or national courts. Hopefully Israel will soon join those countries thas has recognized the genocide.
Specially when knowing that Ottoman Jews and the Zionists supported the Armenian genocide’s ‘architect before the Holocaust. They praised the empire even during the slaughter of its minority population, a murder which Israel continues to gloss over today.
At the same time there is an indelible link between the Holocaust and the current situation of the Palestinian people; to deny this simple fact exposes a deep-seated flaw in Zionist ideology. On Holocaust Memorial Day, remember too that the Nakba is an indelible part of Israel’s history.