The director of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), Abraham Foxman, has stated that the World War I – era massacres of Armenians at the hands of Muslim Turks “were indeed tantamount to genocide.” Foxman's statement comes after weeks of turmoil and internal wrangling among pro-Jewish and Holocaust memorial organizations. Earlier this week, the ADL fired the New England regional director for making the same statements. Foxman, however, did not state his support for a pending U.S. congressional resolution that would call the Armenian atrocities a genocide.
The Ottoman government rounded up members of the Armenian elite beginning in April, 1915. Forced deportation of Armenians followed and a special unit known as the Teskilat-i Mahsusa, or Special Organization, had the mission to exterminate the Armenians. According to Vahakn Dadrian, a preeminent scholar on the Armenian genocide, The Special Organization's mission "was to deploy in remote areas of Turkey's interior and to ambush and destroy convoys of Armenian deportees [The Special Organization's] principal duty was the execution of the Armenian genocide." It is estimated that millions of Armenians died of starvation and disease during their forced deportation.
The media in the U.S. at the time, notably The New York Times, published several accounts of the atrocities and U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt called the massacre "the greatest crime of war." A Harvard professor of Armenian studies, James Russell, notes that the term genocide “was invented to describe what had happened to the Armenians in the first place.”
The ADL reversal comes after controversy among various similar groups in New England questioning the legitimacy of Holocaust memorial groups who do not recognize the Armenian massacres as genocide. Allegedly, 1.5 million of the Christian Armenian population died at the hands of the Muslim Turks between 1915 and 1923. The Assembly of Turkish American Associations notes that Turks also suffered during the war and official declarations of genocide would cause tensions in the delicate U.S. relationship with Turkey.
Turkey is viewed as a bastion of Western ideals in a hostile Middle East.
