By Ira Stoll, Special to the Sun | April 26, 2021
President Biden is being showered with congratulations for his statement recognizing the Armenian genocide. It’s bitterly ironic, because human rights abuses on similar scale unfolded while Mr. Biden was vice president and remain under way.
“Beginning on April 24, 1915, with the arrest of Armenian intellectuals and community leaders in Constantinople by Ottoman authorities, one and a half million Armenians were deported, massacred, or marched to their deaths in a campaign of extermination,” Mr. Biden said. “Let us renew our shared resolve to prevent future atrocities from occurring anywhere in the world.”
Said the speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, “our hearts are full of joy that President Biden has taken the historic step.” The Senate majority leader, Charles Schumer, tweeted, “This is a step I have long pushed for presidents to take: President Biden is our first president to formally recognize the Armenian genocide.”
Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, said, “Calling this atrocity what it was — genocide — is long overdue because we must recognize the horrors of the past if we hope to avoid repeating them in the future.”........
Somehow,
the greater the elapsed time between the genocide and the president
commemorating it, the more comfortable a topic it is. Mr. Biden’s
solicitude for the Armenians is touching, but it comes too late to make
much difference. The contemporary genocides and those potentially in the
making are the ones that merit urgent presidential preventative
attention — while there is an opportunity to affect the outcomes..................To Read More....
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