Response to Robert Fisk’s December 2, 1913 ZNet article: “Nearly A Century After The Armenian Genocide, These People Are Still Being Slaughtered In Syria”
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DonateResponse to Robert Fisk’s December 2, 1913 ZNet article: “Nearly A Century After The Armenian Genocide, These People Are Still Being Slaughtered In Syria”
ZNetwork is funded solely through the generosity of its readers.
DonateI have a Masters Degree in ESL from the State University of New Jersey, obtained in May, 1982, and also a BA in Religion from Temple University, philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA, obtained in January, 1974. In addition, I am a bilingual poet in English and Spanish and prose writer of short stories, essays, vignettes, and travelogues, having lived, taught EFL/ESL, and traveled in Latin America, South Asia, Southeast Asia, including having taught SL Composition and reading skills to non-native spakers in the Writing Program during the Fall Semester, 1983 at Temple University, and also having taught English and Spanish, ESL, Spanish, as a bilingual, ESL, and Foreign Language Substitute Teacher in the Philadelphia Public School system from September, 1984 till January, 1985. I'm also a member of International TESOL, the Chilean Society of Writers, and the Postcolonial Studies Association.
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It is a terrible tragedy that after almost a century in which a million-and-a-half Armenian Christians slaughtered in the first Holocaust of the 20th century, the deliberate, planned mass destruction of a people by the Ottoman Turks in 1915., the descendants of the Armenian Christian survivors who found sanctuary in the old Syrian lands have been forced to flee again – to Lebanon, to Europe, to America due to the present conflict which is now being fought throughout Syria , according to multi-awarded British journalist, Robert Fisk.. And ironically, he points out that now, almost unmentioned in the media, these ghastly killing fields have become the killing fields of a new war. He adds further that upon the bones of the dead Armenians, the Syrian conflict is being fought. What makes it even worse is that he mentions that the very church in which the bones of the murdered Armenians found their supposedly final resting place has been damaged, including having been desecrated, in the new war, although no one knows the culprits. Why isn’t enough being done to protect the ethnic Armenians and other civilians from these unspeakable brutalities. It is a crying shame, waiting to be rectified.
These were the the bones and skulls of Armenian genocide victims out of a hillside above the Khabur River, north of the Syrian city of Deir ez-Zour, in Syria., that Robert Fisk had dug up just over thirty years ago in which Armenian friends who were with him kindly took the remains and placed them in the crypt of the great Armenian church at Deir ez-Zour, which is dedicated to the memory of those Armenians who were killed – and yes, it is a shame upon the “modern” Turkish state which still denies this Holocaust – in that industrial mass murder.
He elaborated further that Bishop Armash Nalbandian of Damascus, who told him that while the church at Deir ez-Zour was indeed damaged, the shrine remained untouched. He added further that the Bishop said that the church itself was less important than the memory of the Armenian genocide – and it is this memory which might be destroyed ; and this would be very tragic and sorrowful. Fisk is right when he says that what the Armenian Bishop says is right.
He points out truly in a very powerful eloquent, morally compelling way that although the church – is not a very beautiful building, is nonetheless a witness, a memorial to the Holocaust of Armenians every bit as sacred as the Yad Vashem memorial to the victims of the Jewish Holocaust in Israel. And he adds further eloquently that although the Israeli state, with a shame equal to the Turks, claims that the Armenian genocide was not a genocide, Israelis themselves use the word Shoah – Holocaust – for the Armenian killings.
Moreover, Robert Fisk reveals the complicity of the Americans and the Gulf Sunni Arabs in this immoral war, so horrifying, by mentioning that in “Aleppo, an Armenian church has been vandalised by the Free Syrian Army, the ‘good’ rebels fighting Bashar al-Assad’s regime, funded and armed by the Americans as well as the Gulf Sunni Arabs.” And even worse , concerning religious and ethnic persecution of the Armenians, he adds that “in Raqqa, the only regional capital to be totally captured by the opposition in Syria, Salafist fighters trashed the Armenian Catholic Church of the Martyrs and set fire to its furnishings.” Apparently, history is beginning to repeat itself, regarding the ordeal and persecution of the Armenian. This is demonstrated even more by the fact that he states that “many hundreds of Turkish fighters, descendants of the same Turks who tried to destroy the Armenian race in 1915, have now joined the al-Qa’ida-affiliated fighters who attacked the Armenian church. The cross on top of the clock tower was destroyed, to be replaced by the flag of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant.” Thus, this is a glaring example of a point by a famous Spanish philosopher that history repeats itself when people and nations fail and refuse to learn from it.