I don't see how the Anti-Defamation League, either the
national organization or its New England regional branch, can dig itself out of
the Armenian Genocide hole, into which it
falls further each day, unless it devises a more
principled position on a question that is central to this entire controversy:
“Who writes history?”
The beleaguered national organization’s leader, Abe
Foxman, never recovered from one crucial early misstep: adopting the position
that he “doesn't know” if the events that transpired during the fall
of the Ottoman Empire constitute a genocide. That was a completely
untenable position for Foxman to hold, given that the ADL continues to label the
ongoing conflict in the Sudan a genocide, when in truth it has no way of knowing if
that conflict can be labeled as such either.
It’s fine that the ADL wants to speak out on issues that
aren’t directly related to the Jewish people. But, when it made that decision
to branch out, it should have known better than to bandy about the G-word when
describing Darfur while simultaneously taking
an agnostic position on the unavoidable Armenian question. What the ADL should
have said that is that, ultimately, historical questions must be interpreted
and decided by scholars and by official bodies tasked with making legal
determinations (courts and U.N. agencies that deal with war crimes). This has
been my long-held view, and it is the basis for Griswold v. Driscoll, a 1st amendment test case I filed
in Massachusetts state court in 2004 (read
more here and here).
Unfortunately, the ADL would have a hard time adopting
such a commonsense position at this point. Much damage has been to done to its
credibility, and the decision to fire Andrew Tarsy, the regional director who
broke with the company line and voiced his personal opinion that there was an
Armenian Genocide, hasn’t helped much either. Nor, in fact, is the regional
ADL’s position – that there was in fact an Armenian Genocide committed by the
Ottoman Turks, and that anyone on the other side is a genocide denier – any
more tenable, since it is obvious that the regional office contradicted the
national office not on the basis of a close study of the historical evidence,
but on the basis of a sense that it would be amoral to deny the Armenians their
genocide.
Even Harvard Law professor Alan Dershowitz, paladin of
free speech and intellectual inquiry, opined in a co-authored (with Rachel
Kaprielian) op-ed in The Boston Globe that “the matter is not subject to
interpretation” – this, despite the fact that well-reputed scholars such as
Princeton’s Bernard Lewis and Louisville's Justin McCarthy disagree, and prominent University of
Massachusetts-Amherst historian Guenter Lewy has argued forcefully that the
available historical documentation is currently too spotty to justify too
rigidly-held a conclusion. If truly the Armenian Genocide is not a fit subject
for discussion, argument, scholarship, and disagreement, what is? Must all
historical decisions and interpretations be made on the basis of what is the
politically correct and seemingly moral position of the day, or are free minds
at liberty to inquire and discuss, rather than merely to parrot acceptable
positions?
It also doesn’t help that, in recent years, the ADL has
indulged in the huge mistake of insisting on certain litmus tests and dubbing
certain views “hate speech,” where anyone announcing a politically incorrect
view on certain hot-button social and political issues becomes a “hater.” Where
the words one uses, or chooses not to use, become litmus tests for determining
one’s essential decency and fitness to join the family of man, then we know
that substance has given way to style, free inquiry to tyranny. Further, the
ADL has insisted that it’s not enough to concede what the historical evidence
clearly shows – that the Nazis went out systematically exterminating Jews,
gypsies, homosexuals, and other discreet populations – but one must go further
and concede that the Holocaust is unique in history etc., or else be dubbed a
“Holocaust denier.” I have long thought
that ADL would eventually drive itself into a corner and suffer the slings and arrows
of its own manufacture. This seems to be playing out in front of our eyes on
the "Armenian Genocide" issue.