ATAA: Another Distortion by the Anti-Turkish Armenian Lobby

The members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee (HFAC) approved amendments to a State Department Authorization bill that blatantly misrepresent Turkey’s record on religious freedom and preservation of religious legacy. We strongly oppose the language sneaked into the measure by Berman, known for championing controversial and racist Armenian causes, because it presents a partisan view held by those openly hostile to Turks, Turkish Americans, Turkey, and the Turkic realm. This language ignores the centuries long Ottoman/Turkish tolerance to all religions at a time when Jews were persecuted for their beliefs in Europe and found refuge and prosperity on Turkish soil. This language dismisses the constructive steps Turkey has taken to safeguard and expand religious freedom and to preserve places of worship belonging to Jews and Christians.

The President of ATAA, Mr. Ergun Kirlikovali had this to say about the developments:   “ Yesterday, the ill-advised Berman amendment passed 43-1, but stripped of all of its stealthy and virulent references to the alleged Armenian genocide. All those ‘whereas clauses’ loaded with hate towards Turks and reeked of vengeance were weeded out and only ‘resolved clauses’ were included. What was left was mostly general concepts like ‘Christian rights’ to ownership and religious rites with which most elected officials would agree. Please note that such amendments used to sail through, at least now we're putting up a fight and the anti-Turks are backing down. That’s the power of grassroots, or TABAN as we call it (Turkish American Broad Advocacy Network.)”

Mr. Kirlikovali continued: “ The Armenian lobby carefully worded H Res 306 to include loaded phrases like ‘intentional destruction’—an integral part of the definition of genocide--because they knew that Speaker Boehner would never let that perennial nuisance, the alleged Armenian Genocide resolution, come to the Floor, nor did he want the HFAC Chair Lehtinen to bring it up. The Armenian lobby then sneakily forced its way in through the back door by piggy-backing the genocide language onto H Res 306 and sprinkling it on top with it by some innocuous language about churches. After Ros Lehtinen, the chair of the HFAC cosponsored H Res 306 and withdrew her co-sponsorship, the Armenian lobby knew they could not even pass their disguised bogus genocide resolution (H Res 306), so they switched to ‘plan C’, which is attaching it to the State Department Authorization Bill. The biased language does not acknowledge progress made in Turkey but some conscientious debaters in committee pointed this out (such as Rohrbacher, Meeks, Poe, Burton, Duncan, and a few others.) That said, the authorization bill is widely believed not to become law.”