The Pope, the Kardashians and the Armenians

The Pope, the Kardashians and the Armenians

The Gist

The 100^th anniversary of the mass killings of ethnic Armenians in what was then the Ottoman Empire (Turkey is its modern day successor) is on April 24^th.  Sadly, many only heard of this important part of history because Kim Kardashian, her current husband, and her sister visited their ancestral homeland and laid a wreath at a memorial in Yereven this past week. Armenians (and, most recently, Pope Francis) calls the mass killing of 1.5 million of their people a genocide.  In 1915, at the height of the First World War, Armenian men, women, and children were rounded up and forced on death marches across the Iraqi desert without food or water. Turkey denies that there was a systematic effort to exterminate Armenians (this denial is one of the reasons Turkey has not been admitted into the European Union). The Turkish government has gone to great lengths to make sure the word ‘genocide’ is not associated with the deaths of Armenians during the war (on one occasion it used diplomatic pressure to force London’s Tate Gallery to remove the word genocide from an Armenian art exhibit). The leading Holocaust expert, Hebrew University’s Yehuda Bauer, disagrees saying the Armenian Genocide is the closest parallel to the Holocaust in history. Although President Obama promised to recognize the Armenian genocide during his 2008 presidential campaign, that has yet to happen (shockingly, politics seems to have gotten in the way). Armenians across the globe continue to push for recognition of one of the darkest periods of their history….and now you know the gist.