Political Quotes

“over 104 years ago, the Ottoman Empire launched a systematic campaign to exterminate the Armenian population through killings, forced deportation, starvation, and other brutal means. Every year I join the Armenian community in honoring the memory of the victims who made invaluable contributions to sustain the Armenian people and preserve Armenian history and culture before their cruel, inhuman deaths. At the time of the genocide, U.S. diplomats who witnessed it knew that the tragedy they were seeing was an intentional choice. Henry Morgenthau, the then-U.S. Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, said that the Turkish Government's deportation order for the Armenians was ``a death warrant to a whole race.'' Those are his words. They are ``a death warrant to a whole race,'' and an aim which ``they made no particular attempt to conceal'' in their discussions with them. We know what to call such an intentional, highly organized effort to destroy a people on account of their identity alone: genocide. In other circumstances, no one questions this definition. U.S. foreign policy must reflect an honest accounting of human rights abuses, crimes against humanity, ethnic cleansing, and genocide. We cannot turn our backs on the Armenian victims of genocide nor on any victims of genocide anywhere or anytime it occurs. If we do, we only empower those who seek to use genocide as a weapon of war for their own malevolent purposes.…”