Foxman is wrong…again

Boston Globe recently editorialized “A Genocide Not to Be Denied”

Andy Bostom, author of “The Legacy of Jihad” (2005) and the forthcoming “The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism” (2007), and the author of Jews Under Turkish Rule, Part I and Continued took issue

Dear Editors,

According to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency (4/23/07, “Turks want genocide commission”), Mr. Foxman and the ADL are actively lobbying against the Armenian genocide recognition legislation in the Congress (HR 106) and the Senate (SR 106), including the presentation of letters from the dhimmi Jewish community of Turkey complemented by, “their own [i.e., the ADL’s] statement opposing the bill.” This morally bankrupt denial of the Armenian genocide abets the exploitation of beleaguered Turkish Jews—whose two main Istanbul synagogues were bombed in November, 2003 by indigenous Turkish jihadist groups—as dhmmi “lobbyists” for the government of Turkey.

Since 1950, both the Turkish press and Islamic literature have steadily increased their output of theological Islamic Antisemitism—founded upon core anti-Jewish motifs in the Koran, hadith, and sira. This theologically-based anti-Jewish animus grew steadily in stridency, and during the 1970s through 1990s, was melded into anti-Zionist and anti-Israel invective by Turkey ’s burgeoning fundamentalist Islamic movement.

The Armenian genocide denial “strategy” of Mr. Foxman and the ADL has “succeeded”, perversely, in further isolating Jews, while failing, abysmally, to alter a virulently Antisemitic Turkish religious (i.e., Islamic), and secular culture—the latter perhaps best exemplified by the wildly popular, and most expensive film ever made in Turkey, “Valley of the Wolves” (released February, 2006) which features an American Jewish doctor dismembering Iraqis supposedly murdered by American soldiers in order to harvest their organs for Jewish markets. Prime Minister Erdogan not only failed to condemn the film, he justified its production and popularity. This is the same Mr. Erdogan who in 1974, then serving as president of the Istanbul Youth Group of the Islamic fundamentalist National Salvation Party wrote, directed, and played the leading role in a theatrical play entitled Maskomya, staged throughout Turkey during the 1970s. Mas-Kom-Ya was a compound acronym for “Masons-Communists-Yahudi [Jews]”, and the play focused on the evil, conspiratorial nature of these three entities whose common denominator was Judaism.

As a Jew, I find the actions by Mr. Foxman and the ADL morally repugnant, ignorant, and particularly inappropriate for an organization geared to reducing, as opposed to abetting and fomenting further Antisemitism.