Imagine a besotted man who, after courting a woman for 30 years, hasn’t been able to get more intimate than a dry quick kiss (in 2007 to be exact) on the cheek from the object of his adoration. And then one day she phones and invites him to a fancy restaurant and to late night drink afterwards at her place. The naïve and grateful beau starts calling his friends to congratulate himself for his humiliatingly belated amorous triumph.
The metaphor is not perfect, but something close to the above occurred in mid-May when Jonathan Greenblatt, the CEO of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), stated through a blog that the Armenian massacres of 1915 were (ahem) genocide. Armenian spokesmen (the Armenian Assembly of America, the Armenian National Committee of America, an Armenian sheriff in Massachusetts, and several other “community leaders”) who had for years tried to persuade the ADL that there had been an Armenian Genocide, welcomed Greenblatt’s announcement without reservation. The Armenian supporters of the statement believed that the Armenian community had finally, after three decades, convinced the influential and supposedly anti-racism organization--which had fought US recognition of the Armenian Genocide tooth and nail--that Turkey had committed genocide against the Armenians.
....Read more >>
In “Tribes” (1992), Joel Kotkin wrote: “By the 1930s Armenians in the US were enjoying a standard of living that was not only higher than that for other immigrants but was higher than the standard of native white Americans as well.”
See More
Editorial, 19 May 2016
No comments:
Post a Comment