Omar Warns Recognizing Armenian Genocide Leads To Recognizing Holocaust, Israel, Jewish Rights

“Maybe one day when recognizing the Armenian Genocide doesn’t carry so many risks that put my antisemitic anti-Zionism in jeopardy, we can reconsider this question.”

Washington, October 31 – One of the few Congressional representatives not to vote in favor of a resolution recognizing the organized mass-killing of more than a million Armenian Christians by the Ottoman Empire during the First World War a century ago explained her decision not to join the vast majority of her colleagues by noting that recognition of that atrocity sets one in the direction of accepting other problematic phenomena as having existed, such as the mass-slaughter of Jews under Nazi rule and, the legitimacy of the State of Israel, and there being such a thing as Jewish rights of any sort.

Minnesota Democratic Congresswoman Ilhan Omar spoke following the vote by the House of Representatives to recognize the Genocide that began in 1914-15 and continued intermittently for several years, even as the Ottoman Empire disintegrated and a more secular Turkey took its place. The 435-member chamber voted 405-11 in favor of the resolution, with Omar the lone Democrat not to support it.

“I feel for the Armenians, I really do,” she insisted. “It’s just that this is not the time to engage in such measures, which open the door to all sorts of problems. I’m not just talking about our relations with Turkey, which of course does not accept there was a genocide. I mean the implications for other events. What’s next, recognizing that the Nazis and their collaborators killed millions of Jews in an organized fashion just a couple of decades later? That would in turn lead to a conclusion that some sort of refuge for Jews in their own sovereign homeland might be necessary, and we all know what such thinking means. It’s unthinkable.”

“Ultimately, we’d be forced to accept that Jews have rights just like Muslims,” she continued. “You can’t force me to accept something that goes against my upbringing, my culture. It’s coercion, and we have freedom of religion in this country, last I checked. So with all due respect to 1.5 million dead Armenians and to the rapes, pillaging, confiscations, death marches, and slavery to which the Ottomans subjected them, I’m sorry, this is a bridge too far. Maybe one day when recognizing the Armenian Genocide doesn’t carry so many risks that put my antisemitic anti-Zionism in jeopardy, we can reconsider this question. For now, though, I must continue to express my disappointment in my colleagues for not seeing the dangers inherent in their decision.”

Aides to the congresswoman disclosed that she had made several unsuccessful attempts to generate support for Congressional recognition of Israeli genocide against Palestinians. “For some reason they think a tenfold increase in population isn’t consistent with genocide,” lamented one. “That shows you how deeply Israeli interests have infiltrated and hypnotized the world.”

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