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Ilhan Omar is a dab hand at seeing imaginary genocides wherever it suits her, from Israel to Venezuela, to the US itself. She’s decidedly reluctant, though, to recognised the established historical fact of genocides committed by Muslims.
Rep. Ilhan Omar faced intense blowback Tuesday over he[r] vote on a resolution to recognize the Ottoman empire’s genocide against Armenians more than a century ago.
Omar, a progressive Democrat, was one of three lawmakers to vote “present” on the resolution, which recognized the deaths of 1.5 million Armenians at the hands of the Ottoman empire to be a genocide.
The resolution passed by a vote of 405-11, over an intense lobbying campaign from the Turkish government.
Not that the Democrats’ motives are exactly pure. Democrats and their supporters, such as the Young Turks’ Cenk Uygur, have long resisted acknowledging, or outright denied, the Armenian genocide. Until it became politically expedient to do so.
House Democrats pushed for the vote in part over escalating tensions over Turkish military strikes earlier this month against Syrian Kurds. Omar asserted that while she supports “accountability for human rights violations,” she did not want to support the genocide resolution being used “as cudgel in a political fight.”
As that great sage Daffy Duck once said, “Oh, ho-ho-ho, ‘tis to laugh”.
She also asserted that the question of whether to label the mass deaths, which occurred between 1915 and 1923, should be answered by “academic consensus outside the push and pull of geopolitics.”
pluralist.com/ilhan-omar-armenian-genocide-vote/
Yeah, about that…
There is very little debate among scholars in genocide studies—and agreement among many authorities in history, international relations and philosophy—that the events being commemorated on April 24 constituted genocide.
“There is a near consensus that the Armenian genocide was a genocide, or that genocide is the right word” among those who study the phenomenon for a living, says David Simon, a professor of political science at Yale University and co-director of its Genocide Studies Program.
newsweek.com/why-scholars-say-armenian-genocide-was-genocide-obama-wont-
