Armenian Orphan Rug Photo Credit: Dr. Hagop Martin Deranian
Posted on 10/20/2014 5:30:01 PM PDT by SJackson
Armenian Orphan Rug Photo Credit: Dr. Hagop Martin Deranian
(JNS.org) After nearly a year of protests, the Obama administration has finally agreed to permit a rug connected to the Armenian genocide to be publicly displayed. The long ordeal of the Armenian Orphan Rug, held hostage to fears of angering Turkey, has finally ended.
Or has it?
The controversy began in the autumn of 2013, when the Smithsonian Institution announced it would hold an event featuring a new book, “President Calvin Coolidge and the Armenian Orphan Rug,” by Hagop Martin Deranian.
The 18-foot long rug was woven 1925 by 400 Armenian orphan girls living in exile in Lebanon. They were survivors of the Turkish slaughter of approximately 1 million Armenians. The girls sent the rug to President Calvin Coolidge as a gesture of appreciation for America’s assistance to survivors of the genocide. Coolidge pledged that it would have “a place of honor in the White House, where it will be a daily symbol of goodwill on earth.”
Instead, it has become a daily symbol of politics taking precedence over combating genocide.
The White House refused to loan the rug to the Smithsonian. Neither the White House nor the State Department would give an explanation as to why they were keeping the rug locked up. The only plausible explanation is pressure from the Turkish government, which to this day denies the genocide occurred.
As a presidential candidate in 2008, then-Senator Obama said, “America deserves a leader who speaks truthfully about the Armenian genocide.” Yet the statements that President Obama has issued each April on Armenian Remembrance Day have never included the G-word. Instead, he has used an Armenian expression—“Meds Yeghern,” meaning “the great calamity.” Fear of displeasing the Turks appears to be the only plausible motive for that rhetorical evasiveness.
Armenian-Americans are not the only ones who should be outraged. American Jews should be up in arms, too. Not only because of the sympathy that all victims of genocide naturally share—but also because if the White House can permit political considerations to take precedence over recognition of the Armenian genocide, there is a danger that memorialization of the Holocaust could one day suffer a similar fate.
Indeed, Adolf Hitler reportedly once assured his subordinates that their atrocities would not be remembered since “Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?”
Last week, after numerous protests, the Obama administration announced that it will permit the rug to be displayed for six days in November—kind of a week-long furlough from its imprisonment in a White House closet.
But there is a catch. A big one.
The rug will not be part of a display concerning the Armenian genocide. Instead, it is being mushed together with other foreign gifts to the White House, in a display called “Thank You to the United States: Three Gifts to Presidents in Gratitude for American Generosity Abroad.”
The genocide rug will be sandwiched in between a Sevres vase presented by France to the United States after World War One, and a piece of artwork called “Flowering Branches in Lucite” sent by Japan after the 2010 tsunami.
Grouping victims of genocide together with those who drowned in a tsunami or were left homeless by World War One disguises what happened to the Armenians. It blurs the distinction between something that was inevitable and something that was not. Weather-related disasters and damage caused by wars are inevitable. But the Armenian genocide was different: it was an act of mass murder, systematically planned and implemented by evil men driven by religious and ethnic hatred.
The Armenian Orphan Rug is a work of great beauty. But the point of displaying it is not for the sake of its aesthetic value. Its power is its message. Its significance is as a symbol. It is a reminder of the genocide that the Turks perpetrated against the Armenians. Six days in an exhibit about gifts to the White House is no victory. On the contrary—it is a defeat for everyone who cares about historical truth and everyone who seeks to learn the lessons of the past so that they will not be repeated.
If you’d like to be on or off, please FR mail me.
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Obama didn't stumble, he made a decision
>>They were survivors of the Turkish slaughter of approximately 1 million Armenians.<<
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Were they slaughtered by peaceful, moderate, militant or jihadist muzzies?
We have so many to choose from, I’m confused.
Sheesh, all you TV talking heads, have you ever thought of doing an in-depth research on this Armenian holocaust, or does it not fit in your muzzie-apologizing programs?
Gun Control followed by genocide.
0bama does not want any reminders of what took place, it might upset his serfs.
A million Armenians, and another million greeks and assyrians.
Go back even just a few years and you find more massacres, and roll the time machine forward even just a few years and you find more.
We’ve tended to compartmentalize all the various massacres and because of it we’ve failed to understand the nature of muslim jihadism. And this has blinded us to the nature of Islam itself.
Can’t have any disruption before the establishment of the Caliphate, don’t ya know!
‘These Turks took a pleasure in torturing children, too; cutting the unborn child from the mother’s womb, and tossing babies up in the air and catching them on the points of their bayonets before their mothers’ eyes. Doing it before the mothers’ eyes was what gave zest to the amusement. Here is another scene that I thought very interesting. Imagine a trembling mother with her baby in her arms, a circle of invading Turks around her. They’ve planned a diversion: they pet the baby, laugh to make it laugh. They succeed, the baby laughs. At that moment a Turk points a pistol four inches from the baby’s face. The baby laughs with glee, holds out its little hands to the pistol, and he pulls the trigger in the baby’s face and blows out its brains. Artistic, wasn’t it? By the way, Turks are particularly fond of sweet things, they say.’. - The Brothers Karamazov.
Maybe Obama will send an I-pod with his speeches on it to Yerevan.
I’m not without sympathy for the very real suffering of many individual Armenian people.
However, speaking as a Jew who was mistreated by Armenians when I lived for three years in Glendale, California (given hostile looks, called a “dirty Jew” by them, and finally terminated by an Armenian boss, I have to say that I don’t like the way most of them treated me on an individual basis...
and I fully intend that the rest of my life be a totally Armenian-free zone. I just won’t be giving any of them a chance to treat me crappily in the future.
Similar episodes take place in Franz Werfel’s THE FORTY DAYS OF MUSA DAGH, a novel inspired by Werfel’s visit to a Damascus carpet factory employing Armenian orphans.
That’s the way he does things. (sigh)
He also wrote “the Devils,” didn’t he? About the likes of Bill Ayers, of course,
Not friendly folk. The Middle east has always been full of unfriendly folks.
The Ottoman Empire Turks were experts at pitting one people against another. They incited-incentivized their Kurds to do lots of the Armenian murders, genocide, driving them out of Turkey.
Plus 300,000 or more Christian Greeks living in Turkey were also murdered in that era. Were given the Armenian treatment. Of course all this was an anti-Christian Jihad though it is never called so.
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http://www.aina.org/news/20140423133526.htm
Those Kurds who participated in the killings did so because of economic and geopolitical reasons, according to Taner Akcam, a historian at Clark University in the United States and one of the first Turkish academics to acknowledge and openly discuss the Armenian genocide.
“The Kurdish tribes were used by the Turkish government against the Armenians, because the Kurds claimed the same territorial area as the Armenians in eastern Anatolia. At the same time, the tribes wanted to gain economic advantages by killing Armenians,” Akcam told Rudaw.
The main responsibility for the massacres is blamed on the Ottoman State and its three leaders, Enver, Talat and Cemal Pasha.
From the 1890s the Ottoman Empire had “organized the Kurds against the Armenians under the so-called Hamidiye Regiment, which massacred the Armenians,” Akcam explained.
Thanks for your comment, and for not flaming me! I honestly can’t remember doing anything in particular to offend the Armenians, but nothing seemed to help the situation.
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