Holocaust denial in the White House

Robert Frisk's hard hitting piece:

The Turks say the Armenians died in a 'civil war', and Bush goes along with their lies


"How are the mighty fallen! President George Bush, the crusader king who would draw the sword against the forces of Darkness and Evil, he who said there was only "them or us", who would carry on, he claimed, an eternal conflict against "world terror" on our behalf; he turns out, well, to be a wimp. A clutch of Turkish generals and a multimillion-dollar public relations campaign on behalf of Turkish Holocaust deniers have transformed the lion into a lamb. No, not even a lamb – for this animal is, by its nature, a symbol of innocence – but into a household mouse, a little diminutive creature which, seen from afar, can even be confused with a rat. Am I going too far? I think not.

The "story so far" is familiar enough. In 1915, the Ottoman Turkish authorities carried out the systematic genocide of one and a half million Christian Armenians. There are photographs, diplomatic reports, original Ottoman documentation, the process of an entire post-First World War Ottoman trial, Winston Churchill and Lloyd George and a massive report by the British Foreign Office in 1915 and 1916 to prove that it is all true. Even movie film is now emerging – real archive footage taken by Western military cameramen in the First World War – to show that the first Holocaust of the 20th century, perpetrated in front of German officers who would later perfect its methods in their extermination of six million Jews, was as real as its pitifully few Armenian survivors still claim.
(...)
Now listen to Mr Bush as he snaps to attention before the Turkish general staff. "We all deeply regret the tragic suffering (sic) of the Armenian people... But this resolution is not the right response to these historic mass killings. Its passage would do great harm to our relations with a key ally in Nato and in the global war on terror." I loved the last bit about the "global war on terror". Nobody – save for the Jews of Europe – has suffered "terror" more than the benighted Armenians of Turkey in 1915. But that Nato should matter more than the integrity of history – that Nato might one day prove to be so important that the Bushes of this world may have to equivocate over the Jewish Holocaust to placate a militarily resurgent Germany – beggars belief."
http://news.independent.co.uk/fisk/article3146418.ece

etc. etc.

("Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?" - Adolf Hitler, before invading Poland)

I beg to differ, mate. There were still pogroms going on in Eastern Europe against my kin (Roma) as recently as ten years ago. Romania only stopped encouraging them because they wanted to get into the EU. In 1993 in Germany (Germany!), they were holding rallies against us. One woman actually said "We are not racist, we are just against gypsies". The Nazis killed two million of us and thought so little of it that they didn't even bother to keep proper records. Just visit Patrin or Google "Roma" and "persecution", there's more evidence than anyone could ever want.

In the end, of course, it's not a contest. There's no prizes for being the most persecuted minority group and no people anywhere should ever have to suffer like this. But I think it's pointless to hold any one atrocity as the worst, the most terrible blow. It's pointless and it's depressing because even though it doesn't mean to, it tells all other victims that they don't matter. No, I know that's not what the writers mean to say but that's how we hear it nonetheless, "what are you crying about, you're only number three". It speaks of a special coldness in humanity that we seem incapable of deploring all such atrocities without ranking them, without saying this one was worse than that one. The only minority that's never been persecuted is rich guys.

The irony is that the Jewish people I talk to, they don't do this. They don't say that their six million is more tragic, more hateful than our two million. They don't tell me that I, as a Briton and a Rom, have been less persecuted than they have. They just commiserate and sympathise.