Anthony Weiner: “this month many of us pause to remember the Holocaust in Yom Hashoah commemorations. But on April 24, 1915, the first…”

“this month many of us pause to remember the Holocaust in Yom Hashoah commemorations. But on April 24, 1915, the first genocide of the 20th century began. The Ottoman Empire began rounding up a group of more than 250 Armenian intellectuals and civic leaders. Then soldiers of Armenian descent who were serving in the Turkish military were moved to labor camps and eventually murdered. Across Anatolia, Armenian leaders were arrested and killed. So, too, were the most powerless, children, women, and the elderly, all driven from their homes into the Syrian desert. These mass deportations were in fact slaughters. They were death marches. Soldiers themselves not only permitted the attacks on the deportees but participated in the killing and rapes. The inevitable end was thousands upon thousands dying of starvation or simply being worked to death, but sometimes these victims were the lucky ones. When the Turks deemed deportations impractical, the genocide took other vicious forms. In communities near the Black Sea, Armenians were forced onto boats, driven out into the middle of the ocean, and drowned. In the end, 1.5 million Armenians were killed in the genocide as the world stood by.”