Node Of Evil - Fair And Balanced Reporting

Saturday, November 29, 2003

 
Ah, evil...(Robert Fisk):


It's all a matter of who your friends are. Take that little exhibition of "crimes against humanity" a year ago at the Imperial War Museum in London. Included is a section on the 1915 Armenian Holocaust, the genocide of one and a half million Armenians by the Ottoman Turks, which taught Hitler how to carry out the greatest genocide of the 20th century, the Holocaust of six million European Jews. But the exhibition included a disclaimer from the Turkish government, which still fraudulently claims that the Armenians were not murdered in a genocide carefully planned by the Turkish leaders of the time - which is the truth - but merely victims of chaos in First World War Turkey.

Andy Kevorkian, whose father's entire family was murdered by the Turks in 1915, wrote a letter to Robert Crawford, the museum's director general. Nowhere in the exhibition is there a disclaimer of the Jewish Holocaust by the right-wing historian David Irving or by neo-Nazis, Kevorkian complained. Nor should there be. But "for the IWM to bow to Turkish (or is it Foreign Office?) pressure to deny what the entire world accepts as the first genocide of the 20th century is an insult to the Armenians who survived... For the IWM to allow the Turks to say that this didn't happen is a travesty of justice and truth."

But the disclaimer wasn't removed. The New York Times, which originally broke the story, now spends its time casting doubt on the killings, calling them "alleged". Not long ago, the paper carried a well-known 1915 photograph, taken by a German, of a line of Armenian men being led away to execution. But The New York Times caption fraudulently stated that the Armenians were being "marched to prison [sic] by Turkish soldiers in 1915". What next? Is The New York Times going to carry photographs of Europe's doomed Jews being packed into cattle trains and claim they are en route to "resettlement camps"?

It's the same old problem. The steam loco in Tokyo and the disclaimer in the Imperial War Museum and the newspaper photo caption are lies to appease enemies who are now friends. Japan is a Western democracy. So Evil is ignored. Turkey is our secular ally, a democracy that wants to join the European Union. So Evil is ignored. But fear not. As the Americans try ever more desperately to escape from Iraq, the thugs and assassins will become the good guys again and the men of Evil in Iraq will be working for us. The occupation authorities have already admitted re-hiring some of Saddam's evil secret policemen to hunt down the evil Saddam.

Tricky stuff, Evil.


We'll be posting more in the next week or so -- one of our members got a new job and as such we've been waylaid working out commutes to beyond the Orange Curtain...


Andrew 8:07 PM : |

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