👉 Courtesy: Breitbart News
✞ Armenian organizations were outraged by President Joe Biden’s Armenian Remembrance Day statement on Wednesday because he did not mention modern genocide against Armenian Christians of the Nagorno-Karabakh region completed this year by the conquering armies of Muslim Azerbaijan.
Some Armenian American leaders accused Biden of actively supporting the Azerbaijani conquest, while others said he used Armenian Remembrance Day as a convenient excuse to avoid mentioning it. Armenians and their supporters marched outside the White House on Wednesday to demand “justice” for both the 1915 and 2023 genocides:
Armenian Remembrance Day is commemorated on April 24 each year, the date considered by historians to mark the beginning of Meds Yeghern, the Armenian genocide perpetrated by the Ottoman Empire in 1915.
April 24 was the day Ottoman officials arrested hundreds of prominent Armenians and forced them into exile. Armenians living in Turkey had an uneasy relationship with the government, which feared they might launch a separatist movement. Angered by their humiliation at the hands of Christian armies in the First Balkan War of 1912-13, Turkish nationalists turned their fury against the Armenian Christian minority, coming to view the Armenians as a seditious population colluding with European powers to bring the Ottoman Empire down.
The exile of Armenian intellectuals was soon followed by a mass deportation of Armenians from Turkey – which degenerated from ethnic cleansing into genocide when Turkish troops began massacring the Armenian refugees and herding them into concentration camps. At least 1.5 million Armenians were killed, of an estimated 2 million living in the Ottoman Empire, and some historians believe the full death count was much higher. Amid the insane bloodletting of the First World War, the Armenian death march offered a chilling preview of the horrors to come in the Second World War.
On Armenian Remembrance Day 2024, Istanbul officials banned a ceremony to commemorate the genocide, having found the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic a convenient excuse to prohibit the ceremony from 2020 onward.
Biden, however, did use the word “genocide” in his statement on Armenian Remembrance Day in 2021. The political situation in Turkey had shifted somewhat by then, so Erdogan’s displeasure was much more muted than it was in 2019, although he did vow to “defend the truth against the lie of the so-called ‘Armenian genocide.’”
Biden referred to Meds Yeghern as “the Armenian genocide” again in his statement on Wednesday, saluted “the resilience of the Armenian people,” and said the Armenian diaspora has “strengthened the fabric of nations around the world.”
What made the statement controversial was that Biden had nothing to say about Azerbaijan’s brutal ethnic cleansing of Armenian Christians from Nagorno-Karabakh, a contested region that has sparked several clashes and one recent war between Azerbaijan and Armenia.
