To reap twice-blessed rewards

[Gogor]

Ataturk's influence on "Jewish" life in Turkiye, a Personal View
Contributed by Roz Kohen Drohobyczer

I was born 11 years after Ataturk's death, in 1949 in Turkiye. His influence to this day remains meaningful, strong and nostalgic for the Jewish Community, just as it is for millions of citizens in my home country. I was raised in a typical middle class Jewish household in a Jewish neighborhood of Istanbul.

As far as I can remember, my parents spoke lovingly and positively, of Ataturk on every occasion: when politics went wrong " if Ataturk saw that happening… if Ataturk was around that would not have happened…. , Ataturk loved the Jews…", and even " some say Ataturk was Jewish…", were comments often heard. This later comment often came from the desire that my folks had, that someone like Ataturk, should have been one of their own, since they identified so much with his reforms.

My parents always mentioned how Ataturk honored certain successful Jews and bestowed upon them degrees of scien-tists. Two of those names I recall are Sami Gunzberg and Jak Namer. Sami Gunzberg was bestowed the degree of a den-tist and had served Ataturk as his personal dentist and Jak Namer was given the degree of an Astrologer.

Mom and dad also spoke of Ataturk as they spoke of a close friend. My father often reminded my mother of the day the two were swimming on the Florya beach where Ataturk had a small summer cabin. While the two were playfully swim-ming in the Marmara Sea, they had pushed away Ataturk's little rowboat and only noticed it was him when he smiled back at them and waived his hand. Our Hero was not only a leader, in all that he represented but he was modest and loved his people and enjoyed being among them.

We had picture albums of aunts and uncles and pictures taken on Ataturk's funeral. That day my mother recalls: "I cried for both of my fathers that I lost on the same year. My Mom and Dad had walked by his catafalque with the rest of the citizens of the country, who had come to say good-bye to the beloved leader.

In general I would say their attitude was a mixture of awe and love. Jews became equal citizens with the reforms that Ataturk brought, just as women did. As the whole country regained a new identity with more pride in themselves, so did the Jews. They became part of the revolution and were eager to accept the novelties. Basically, the turn to westernized values, probably felt closer to the Jews that to many other Turkish citizens. During the Ottoman period obviously Moslem women and men dressed more conservatively than Jewish ones. After the reforms everyone dressed more modern and Jewish population enjoyed this freedom. The novelties and progress Ataturk saw as the tools to progress were in harmony with the Jewish culture and gave Jews equal opportunities to advance. The new generation of Turkish Jews benefited greatly from the educational reforms.

Sephardic Jews in Turkey became part of a wider circle of professions, social life, politics and arts. They also regained identity by acquiring their Jewish surnames, a reform that was put in effect for all Turkish citizens. My parents' generation was given the opportunity to learn Turkish in educational institutions established by Ataturk. Yet Ataturk always admired people who spoke foreign languages and encouraged people to learn more than one language.

In the context of the historical events of the years 1915-1938 when Ataturks' influence took shape and his reforms were applied, while Jews were adjusting to those positive changes, let us not forget that many of the civilized countries were caught between the two World Wars. Jews in Europe were experiencing the holocaust, racism at its worse, poverty and prejudice.

That is why the Sephardim of Turkiye and the first generation of Ataturk's Republic have enjoyed and benefited from all the reforms and the westernization of the country and appreciate the Father he has been to them.

[Anonymouse]

I have seen how discussions go here and no thanks.

You weren't here before these newbies flooded the forums. There were actually discussions before. Try the search function as opposed to mindless copy and pasting.

[Gogor]

Most recently perhaps, Raphael Seligmann has gone on record stating that the Jews are "the Indians of Germany."

4 That this statement begs the question of identifying "Uncle Sam's willing executioners" seems, however, of minimal concern to the Jewish community in America and abroad. In fact, when the time comes to put the Shoah on the other foot and paral-lels are drawn between atrocities experienced by the American Indian population over a five-hundred-year period and those experienced by the Jewish population of Europe in the twelve-year reign of Nazi terror, the knowledge of self-described "Jewish Indians" recedes into the recesses of repressed memory. In a seditious reversal of national identity poli-tics, Lucy Dawidowicz charges those who would dare to compare with "a vicious anti-Americanism."

5 Rabbi Irving Greenberg, founder of the Holocaust Resource Center and first director of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Commission, has described the comparison of the Nazi Holocaust with other acts of genocide as "blasphemous."

6 In The Holocaust in American Life, Jewish historian Peter Novik describes the way in which any attempt to compare is dismissed as a "feloni-ous assault" on truth and memory.

7 In the pathological dynamic of genocidal histories, the perpetrator culture invariably turns its gaze to the horrors registered in the archives and accounts of the "other guys."

8 This is why Holocaust studies in the United States focus almost exclusively on the atrocity of Auschwitz, not of Wounded Knee or Sand Creek. Norman Finkelstein, in his discussion of the way images of the Holocaust have been manufactured to reap moral and economic benefits for members of the Jewish elite, states that the presence of the Holocaust Museum in Washington is "particularly incongruous in the absence of a museum commemorating crimes in the course of American history" and makes specific reference to the slave trade and genocide against the American Indians.

9 Peter Novik suggests that the Holocaust has be-come a sort of "civil religion" for American Jews who have lost touch with their own ethnic and religious identity, and asserts that "in the United States the Holocaust is explicitly used for the purpose of national self-congratulation: the Americanization of the Holocaust has involved using it to demonstrate the difference between the Old World and the New.

[Gogor]

Robert Fisk: The shocking pictures that Turkey is trying to stop us from seeing

Not content with denying the truth of the Armenian Holocaust of 1915, Turkish officials are now trying to undermine the veracity of the photographic evidence of the genocide that killed a million and a half Armenians during the First World War. Following a letter of complaint from the Turkish embassy in London this week, the Hulton Getty picture library has withdrawn three famous photographs of slaughtered Armenians from its website, preventing their use by the media.

One of the pictures - a now-famous image of an Armenian girl and two small children lying dead amid garbage at the height of the genocide - was taken by the German photographer Armin Wegner and has been regularly distributed by Hulton to newspapers for many years. But a letter from a Turkish embassy official in London - who signed his name only as "Korkmazhaktanir" - objected to the picture's caption, which stated that the dead were victims of the Turkish massacres. The dead, according to the Turkish official, had obviously only "starved" to death.

This extraordinary argument - which would presuppose that Jews starved to death by the Nazis in the Second World War could not be counted victims of the Jewish Holocaust - did not impress Hulton's general manager, Mathew Butson. "This picture was used recently by both The Independent and The Times and the key word the Turks objected to in our caption was 'massacred'," he says. "We always routinely examine such complaints and temporarily withdrew these images from our files. But we believe the information in our caption is correct.

"The argument that these Armenians weren't 'massacred' just because they were starved is not acceptable. The Turkish letter went on about how starving can't be part of a massacre, blah, blah, blah. I think that because of their application to join the EU, the Turks want to 'clean' their history - but this isn't the way to do it."

The Turkish government has been mounting an increasingly expensive lobbying campaign to deny the fact of the Armenian Holocaust, funding academic chairs at American universities - in which professors invariably questioned the details of the genocide - and threatening economic boycotts against European countries that acknowledge the Armenian massacres. When President Jacques Chirac last month publicly accepted the genocide as fact, Turkey cancelled arms and construction contracts with France worth millions of pounds.

Claiming that the Armenians died in "civil unrest" and that the Armenian population supported Turkey's First World War enemies, the present Turkish government has consistently denied eyewitness evidence at the time - including that of US diplomats and missionaries - that the genocide was organised and carried out on the specific orders of Ottoman Turkey's rulers. Planning his extermination of European Jewry in the 20th century's second Holocaust, Hitler asked his generals: "Who now remembers the Armenians?"

Turkey's embassies abroad have seized every opportunity to prove Hitler's question valid. The mass execution by firing squads of tens of thousands of Armenian men and the starvation, rape and killing of equal numbers of women and children during the mass deportations to the deserts in 1915 have no place in Turkish history books. And, so far as the Turks are concerned, no place in anyone else's history books.

During its research, however, Hulton concluded that it did not hold the copyright to the three photographs taken - at great personal risk - by Wegner in 1915 and 1916. Mr Butson now says that they belong to an Armenian historical archive in Germany, a fact confirmed by Tessa Hofmann of the Centre for Documantation and Information on Armenia in Berlin - who says that all three photographs were taken by Wegner and show victims of the Armenian genocide. "The rights to these photos are owned by the Schiller Literary National Archive in Marbach, here in Germany," she says.

"They hold items from the Wegner estate and gave us the rights to copies of photographs that relate to the Armenian genocide, courtesy of Wegner's second wife, who is still alive and now lives in Israel."

According to Mrs Hofmann, Wegner - although under strict Turkish instructions to take no pictures - photographed the dead Armenians during and after visits to Turkish concentration camps in the Syrian desert near Aleppo. "We cannot be sure the picture of the three bodies is of a mother and her two children - only that it is a girl and two children. But the pictures are perfectly genuine. In his diary, Armin records seeing all these bodies of starved Armenians around the camps and of taking their photograph. He wrote that many of the bodies had become 'petrified', stiff and unchanging after death."

Ironically, the first copy of the photograph of the three dead Armenians traced by The Independent comes from an American journal also called The Independent and was published on 18 October, 1915. The caption to the picture printed then states that "these victims of Turkish cruelty were driven out to suffer extremes of hunger and hardship in their wanderings through the desert where so many thousands like them also died. Shown here is a mother and her two children found in the desert." The accompanying article begins: "The most extensive, the most atrocious of religious massacres which the world has seen for centuries is now being perpetrated in Turkey..." In fact, it was not until the end of the First World War that the full extent of the Armenian Holocaust - up to a million and a half murdered by the Ottoman Turkish regime - became clear.

Mrs Hofmann says she is ready to give permission for newspapers to use the Wegner photographs of the genocide. (Her e-mail address is [email protected] and her centre is principally involved in the identification of Wegner's Armenian photographs).

It wasn't his intention, but Mr Korkmazhaktanir's letter to Hulton may have helped to disseminate this invaluable photographic evidence of the Armenian Holocaust even further.

[Gogor]

The Literary Digest, October 14, 1922, p. 50:

He was not even a Turk.. He was a Doenmeh (secret Jew)... He achieved the objective of not the Turks but of the Doen-mehs who slowly took over the Ottoman State by openly converting to and practicing Islam but secretly practicing their old religion.. . He was not a Turk, let alone 'Father of the Turks'... He was a Doenmeh who wore first a Muslim mask, then a Turkish mask.. A Spanish Jew by ancestry, an orthodox Moslem by birth and breeding, trained in a German war college, a patriot, a student of the campaigns of the world's great generals, including Napoleon, Grant and Lee - these are said to be a few outstanding characteristics in the personality of the new "Man on Horseback" who has appeared in the Near East. He is a real dictator, the correspondents testify, a man of the type which is at once the hope and fear of nations torn to pieces by unsuccessful wars. Unity and power have come back to Turkey largely through the will of Mustafa Kemal Pa-sha. ......

...... There was the pasha himself, tall, still young, good-looking, narrow-hipped, wide-shouldered, with gray, rather sad eyes that spoke eloquently of his Spanish-Jewish ancestry - for Kemal, like Enver Pasha, tho an orthodox Moslem, is de-scended from those Spanish-Jewish families that, given by Christianity the tolerant choice between death, conversion and exile, found asylum and happiness in the Sultan's domains - and with strong, high-veined hands, broad and flat across the wrist - the hands of an artist, a dreamer, yet, too, those of a doer, a man who knows how to clout his dreams into facts.

This was the origin of the most important group, numerically and historically, of Islamic Marranos. The faithful Mo-hemmedans call these hidden Jews "doenmehs", the renegades. ..... Over the years the 'doenmeh' movement became firmly established in Asia Minor. In the nineteenth century the sect was estimated to have twenty thousand members. Sa-lonika remained its main seat until that city became Greek in 1913.

[Gogor]

You weren't here before these newbies flooded the forums. There were actually discussions before. Try the search function as opposed to mindless copy and pasting.

I don't care about how it used to be once upon a time, I see how there are actual discussions now and I'm not interested in wasting my time writing things that are going to dssappear.

[Gogor]

Holocaust Marketing Exposed
The Sunday Times
NEWS REVIEW

A Jewish academic is afraid that rampant exploitation of the Holocaust is summoning up a new anti-semitism. It is hard not to agree, says Bryan Appleyard Stop, in the name of the Holocaust I sometimes think," writes the American academic Dr Norman Finkelstein (photo), "the worst thing that ever happened to the Nazi Holocaust was that American Jewry dis-covered it." The quotation comes from Finkelstein's explosive and bitterly angry book The Holocaust Industry, to be pub-lished here next month. It accuses those who exploit the Holocaust of telling lies, conniving in Israeli atrocities, and of naked greed. The pursuit of reparations from Swiss bankers and others is damned as "an outright extortion racket". The ruthless industrialisation of the Holocaust has encouraged the rebirth of anti-semitism in Europe and the United States. And, in conversation with me, he said the fascination with Holocaust memorials and museums - the latest being the per-manent exhibition at London's Imperial War Museum, opened by the Queen last week - was "a kind of circus". If any of this had been written or said by a non-Jew with no direct experience of the Holocaust, it would have been savaged as anti-semitism or, worse, Holocaust denial. But Finkelstein is a Jew - though non-observant - both of whose parent were survi-vors of the Warsaw ghetto and concentration camps. All the members of their families were wiped out by the Nazis. Even so, his views make him an outcast among the American Jewish establishment and define him, for many, as an enemy of Israel. So why has he done it? "I will not have," he shouts down the phone from New York, "the suffering of my parents used for any ulterior purpose, whether it be the prevention of the assimilation of Jews or the defence of Israel." Finkel-stein's father never spoke of his experience, but his mother spoke of little else. Yet, he recalls, even she was disgusted at the rise of the Holocaust industry in America. There were, he says, only 60,000 Jewish survivors of the camps and 20,000 of those died in the first week after liberation. Yet in the 1960s and 1970s many of his parents' friends started claiming to be survivors. Soon everybody was a victim of the great martyrdom. "I'm not exaggerating when I say that one out of three Jews you stop in the street in New York will claim to be a survivor. And, since 1993, the industry has been claiming that 10,000 survivors have been dying every month. That is completely impossible. It would mean that there were 8m survivors in 1945, but there were only 7m Jews in German-occupied Europe before the war." Finkelstein says the Holocaust industry was born at the time of the six-day war in June 1967 - before that both the Holocaust and Israel were scarcely mentioned in American public life. But it was not born, as many have said, out of fear for the survival of Israel; rather it sprang from American strategic interests. Israel became the American surrogate in the Middle East and the Holocaust was evoked mor-ally to justify the alliance. Israel became the defender of US values and, since America at that time was losing the Vietnam war, it was a more effective defender than America herself. The American Jewish elite embraced the cause of Israel and created the contemporary image of the Holocaust. Finkelstein highlights the power of this elite by pointing out that Jewish income is almost double that of non-Jews, 16 of the 40 wealthiest Americans are Jews, 40% of Nobel prizewinners in sci-ence and economics are Jewish, 20% of professors at main universities are Jewish, as are 40% of partners in law firms in New York and Washington. Led by campaigners such as Simon Wiesenthal and Elie Wiesel - Finkelstein claims the latter gets a minimum lecture fee of $25,000 plus chauffeured limousine - the industry insists on the unique nature of the atroc-ity. It can be compared, they say, to nothing else. Finkelstein - rightly, I believe - identifies this as the intellectual heart of the matter. Wiesel and others insist that the Holocaust stands outside history and rational discussion. The only final re-sponse is silent incomprehension. This position has become so extreme that any attempt to compare it with other episodes of human cruelty - Finkelstein mentions the deaths of 10m Africans in the Congo as a result of the Belgian ivory and rub-ber trade - is often met with accusations of anti-semitism and Holocaust denial. The result is that merica is dotted with Holocaust museums and memorials, but there is none for the many more victims of communism. There is not one even for the gypsies and the mentally and physically disabled who died under Nazism. Finkelstein says that a higher proportion of the gypsy population of Europe died than of the Jewish.

And, at his most scathing, Finkelstein points out that there are no memorials to the millions who died in the slave trade or in the genocidal campaign against the American Indians. The presence of the Holocaust Museum in Washington "is par-ticularly incongruous in the absence of a museum commemorating crimes in the course of American history".

"My parents would never have claimed that the Holocaust as unique," he says, "they would have said that it made them sympathetic to the suffering of other oppressed people."

The danger of the uniqueness argument is that it blinds us to the possibility of other forms of evil. People see the Holo-caust museums and memorials, they see the face of Hitler, and they think that that is what evil is like. The truth is that evil also wore the masks of Stalin, Lenin, Mao and Pol Pot. And, if we are convinced that evil must wear jackboots and a little moustache, we may not recognise it the next time round.

Finkelstein adds that the leaders of the Holocaust industry use the uniqueness argument to convince themselves of their own virtue. If this particular suffering and martyrdom were worse than any other for the victims - including indirect vic-tims such as contemporary Jews and the whole state of Israel - then who dare say a word against the moral stature of those who daily remind us?

So is he right? Well, in one key sense, he must be. THE HOLOCAUST CANNOT BE UNIQUE. Every starved, tortured and murdered person, of any race, has something in common with the victims of Auschwitz. The idea that one historical event is different from all others is plainly irrational. It is also dangerous because it silences discussion and analysis of the Holocaust, and when that happens we lose our ability to learn anything.

"THE CHALLENGE TODAY," writes Finkelstein, "IS TO ESTORE THE NAZI HOLOCAUST AS A RATIONAL SUBJECT OF INQUIRY ... The abnormality of the Nazi Holocaust springs not from the event itself but from the exploit-ive industry that has grown up around it ... The noblest gesture for those who perished is to preserve their memory, learn from their suffering and let them, finally, rest in peace."

But is he right that the Holocaust industry is entirely self-serving, corrupt and destructive? It is true that it has
produced absurd fantasists like Binjamin Wilkomirski, who have persuaded publishers and scholars of the truth of their fabricated tales of survival under the Nazis. Many of the claims of those who pursue reparations are plainly outrageous, and I do not doubt that the political ruthlessness with which many of these claims have been enforced is, as Finkelstein says, encouraging a new wave of anti-semitism.

But there is, in his book, a serious problem of tone. It is a rant, and Finkelstein is a man obsessed. Those who know noth-ing of these matters are likely to doubt the scholarship that underpins such savagely expressed conviction. They may also feel that there cannot be that much wrong with the desire to remember the 5.1m - Finkelstein's figure is typically fewer than the 6m claimed by others - who were unquestionably murdered by the Nazis. However questionable the intellectual climate that inspired it, the Imperial War Museum's exhibition is an impressively sombre experience that cannot be gain-said. It happened, and this is how it happened. It is a fair criticism to say that other awful things happened, and they should be remembered, but that does not in itself deny he legitimacy of the exhibition. Finkelstein would have been more persuasive if he had accepted that much of his opposition's case.

Nevertheless, his attack on the Holocaust industry could well have far-reaching effects. An acceptance of his broad case would, ultimately, weaken American support for Israel, as it
would undermine the sympathy created by the idea of the unique suffering of the Jews.

It might also, by removing the cultural adhesive of the Holocaust experience, accelerate the process of assimilation - the dilution of Jewish identity primarily by "marrying out" - which has already resulted in the "loss" of millions of diaspora Jews in the United States and elsewhere.

Finkelstein is not too concerned about either of these utcomes. He would like the Israeli case to be more rationally consid-ered and, though he acknowledges the ethnic loss involved in assimilation, he prefers the Martin Luther King position that people should come together irrespective of the colour of their skin, their race or their beliefs.

I'm not so sure. I like the Jews and I like Israel and I do not have to close my eyes to its shortcomings. If the Holocaust has become a brand name - which, I agree, it has - then that is a big problem. But there are some babies you really don't throw out with the bathwater, and Jewishness is one of them.

The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering, by Norman G Finkelstein.

[Gogor]

Interfaith “Brotherhood”

How genuine can the implications, inferences and innuendoes of the so-called "brotherhood" and "interfaith" movements be under these circumstances? These so-called movements are sweeping the nations like prairie fires. If the Talmud is the axis of the political, economic, cultural and social attitudes and activities of so-called or self-styled "Jews" participating in these two so-called movements, how genuine are the "oaths, vows or pledges" taken or given in connection with these two so-called movements by so-called or self-styled "Jews"? It would be a superlative gesture of "brotherhood" or of "inter-faith" if the National Conference of Christians and Jews succeeded in expunging from the Talmud all anti-Christ, anti-Christian, and anti-Christianity passages. At a cost of many millions of dollars the National Conference of Christians and Jews succeeded in expunging from the New Testament passages which so-called or self-styled "Jews" regarded as offen-sive to their faith. A great portion of the cost was supplied by so-called or self-styled "Jews". Christians might now supply funds to expunge from the Talmud passages offensive to the Christian faith. Otherwise the so-called "brotherhood" and "interfaith" movements are merely mockeries.

The National Conference of Christians and Jews might look into the millions of dollars being invested today by so-called or self-styled "Jews" to insure that the Talmud shall remain the axis of political, economic, cultural and social attitudes and activities of so- called or self-styled "Jews" today, and future generations. Violating the basic principle of "brother-hood" and "interfaith" so-called or self-styled "Jews" are spending millions of dollars each year to establish and equip quarters where the teachings of the Talmud can be indoctrinated into the minds of children from the time they are able to read and write.

[Gogor]

Jewish Lobby Pledges All-Out Support For Turkey and Azerbaijan in Congress

Harut Sassounian, California Courier On-Line

Representatives of the Jewish lobby made a public pledge last week to do everything in their power to help enact pro-Azeri and pro-Turkish legislation and counter Armenian and Greek initiatives in the U.S. Congress. This chilling disclo-sure was printed in the July 28 and 29 issues of the Turkish Daily News. Reporter Yasemin Dobra-Manco wrote a lengthy two-part article after speaking with Barry Jacobs, the assistant director of the American Jewish Committee and Daniel Mariaschin, the director of the B'nai B'rith International Center for Public Policy.

While it does not come as a surprise to us that several Jewish-American groups have been lobbying in favour of Turkey and Azerbaijan for some time, the remarks made by Jacobs and Mariaschin come close to a declaration of lobbying war against the interests of Armenia and Karabagh.

Mariaschin told the Turkish Daily News that there are a number of Jewish-American groups that have "U.S-Turkish and Turkish- Israeli relations high on their agenda." The article lists the following organisations as playing "an increasingly active role in the advocacy of Turkish positions on many issues in the United States: The American Jewish Committee, the American Jewish Congress, the Anti-Defamation League, B'nai B'rith, the Conference of Presidents of Major Ameri-can Jewish Organisations, and the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs."

Recently, both Jacobs and Mariaschin travelled to Istanbul and Ankara to explain "the unique role" their "organisations can play in the lobbying process in the United States." Even though Jacobs and a Jewish-American delegation also visited Armenia and Karabagh, in addition to Georgia, Azerbaijan and Turkey, we are not fooled by their show of seeming even-handedness. They had made a firm decision to support the Turks and the Azeris long before their "fact-finding" trip.

Mariaschin tries to explain to the Turkish readers why the lifting of the ban on aid to Azerbaijan "narrowly" failed in the Senate despite the support of "10 major American- Jewish organisations backing the effort."

He blames it on the "strong opposition by Armenian-American groups." But, fearing that the Turks may get disillusioned with a Jewish lobby that repeatedly fails to deliver the goods, Mariaschin promises that the "pressure to pass it will be continued during the next session of Congress."

Mariaschin discloses that "Jewish groups are now addressing an expanded agenda of issues," including support for the Baku- Ceyhan pipeline and Turkey's entry into the European Union. He expresses his regret that "the major humanitarian role Turkey played [in the Kosovo conflict] received little appreciation in the media."

In Part II of the article, Jacobs pledges that Jewish organisations will "take an active and vigorous role in being friends of Turkey in the United States.... We will champion to the best of our ability Turkish interests in the U.S. Congress. We will be Turkey's friends officially in Congress" and work to help get favourable legislation passed.
Trying to extract more from the Turks in return for Jewish support, Jacobs tells the newspaper that the Jewish groups' support for Turkey "has brought us into open conflict with Greek-Americans and Armenian-Americans. It has been wel-comed by the Turkish government, but we have paid a price. The price has been that we have the Greek and Armenian- Americans very angry at us."

Jacobs gives as an example the criticism that Jewish groups received following the placement of an ad in the New York Times and the International Herald Tribune to congratulate the Turkish Republic's 75th anniversary. Jacobs admits that many Jews who are members of his group questioned, "why are we supporting Turkey which has a terrible human rights record?"

In trying to minimise the failure of the Jewish groups to lift the ban on aid to Azerbaijan, he calls Section 907 "largely symbolic." He then contradicts himself by disclosing that because of Section 907, Israel's Overseas Development Program cannot send Israeli technicians to Azerbaijan, ,since the Program receives funds from the U.S. government.

Jacobs states that "it is unfair to single out Azerbaijan, a pro-western and pro-NATO country that has diplomatic relations with Israel." Acting as a mouthpiece for Baku, Jacobs says that Armenian forces with the backing of Russia, occupy 20 percent of Azerbaijani territory and have created 1 million in internally displaced persons.

Therefore, he explained, the organised American-Jewish community has come to the conclusion that it is wrong to further victimise Azerbaijan."

Ignoring the fact that Turkey has hired the best U.S. lobbying firms that money can buy, Jacobs says that the Turkish lobby in the United States is "very small, unorganised and almost non-existent, while Turks in general failed to understand the modern lobbying process." His implied message is: Ignorant and badly organised Turks desperately need Jewish help." Jacobs also conveniently fails to mention that the entire U.S. government, including the White House, the State and De-fence departments, has acted as a giant Turkish lobby for the past 50 years.

Speaking as if he were a Turkish agent, Jacobs makes the following shameless declaration: "We want to work with your Embassy in Washington, the Turkish-American community and Turkey's many friends and win our battles on Capitol Hill. We want the American people and our leaders to understand what Turkey and its citizens have accomplished. We want our media to accurately reflect Turkey's importance and achievements. We don't want those who are not friends of Turkey to have the means to use human rights or other issues against your interests."

Up until now, Armenians have treated these Jewish groups with kid gloves, hoping for an eventual reconciliation with them. After these strident remarks, it is clear that they have foreclosed any possibility of friendly relations with the Arme-nian community. There is no doubt in my mind that these Jewish groups, having gotten their marching orders from Israel, have made a firm and final decision to side with the tyrants of Turkey and the barbarians of Baku against the defenceless Armenians struggling for their survival.

To counter the combined threat from Turkey, Israel and Azerbaijan, Armenians will have no choice but to form an alli-ance with Palestinians, Kurds, Syrians, Iraqis, Iranians, Serbs, Greeks and Greek-Cypriots.

Rather than begging for mercy, it's time to fight back!

The need to keep an eye on events south of the border.

[Gogor]

JEWISH LOBBY SENDS A LETTER OF SUPPORT TO BUSH
The Jewish lobby in the US sent a letter to President Bush requesting the US Administration's support for Turkey in its efforts to resolve the economic crisis and in its relations with the IMF. The head of the American Jewish Community, Bruce Ramer, and director Shula Bahat said in the letter they appreciated Bush's personal support for Turkey. The letter stressed the development of Turkey's political and economic modernization is necessary for US strategic, political and economic interests in the region. /Milliyet/

http://www.byegm.gov.tr/YAYINLARIMIZ/CHR/ING2001/04/01x04x17.HTM

The following letter in support of Turkey was sent to President Bush by the American Jewish Committee's President, Bruce Ramer, and A/Exec Dir, Shula Bahat.
ATAA


The Honorable George W. Bush
The President
The White House
Washington, DC 20500

Dear Mr. President:

The American Jewish Committee wishes to add its voice to those of other friends of Turkey in expressing our support for that nation during the current period of its economic duress. We applaud the support and friendship you have personally expressed to Turkish officials, knowing the importance to America's strategic, political and economic interests in assisting Turkey's efforts to move decisively forward with its plan for political and economic modernization.

From our frequent visits to Turkey and consultations with its Government and citizens, we recognize that Turkey is build-ing modern democratic and financial institutions that will assure stability in the years ahead - and in so doing is advancing toward the goal of integrating with Europe - but that the act of building such institutions can be destabilizing in
itself. As an economic partner and one of Americas most steadfast allies, we believe Turkey merits our nation's support.

We urge you to continue the support your Administration is providing Ankara's efforts to reestablish a cooperative rela-tionship with the International Monetary Fund. As you prepare for your discussions with Turkish officials in the coming days, we wish you to know of our appreciation for the U.S.-Turkey partnership - and the ongoing and vital relationship between Turkey and Israel - as well as our support for the Turkish Governments efforts to stabilize its economy, and our endorsement of that nations aspiration to become a full member of the European Union.

With appreciation for your consideration of our views on these matters,
we are,

Very truly yours,
Bruce Ramer
Shula Bahat