Turkey’s holocaust denial, EU membership ambitions

David Cameron has voiced British government backing for Turkey’s plan to join the European Union. In this, he is supported by the United States, but opposed by France and Germany, who presumably fear more immigration by Muslims.
Reuters reported that, ‘Prime Minister David Cameron criticised opponents of Turkish membership as prejudiced. Cameron said Turkey would bring greater prosperity and political stability to the bloc thanks to its vast economic potential and growing influence in the Middle East. “This is something I feel very strongly, very passionately about,” Cameron said, “Together, I want us to pave the road from Ankara to Brussels,” he added.

Cameron described Turkey as a fast-growing economic power that would be increasingly important and said this was a huge opportunity for British businesses.

I, though, am totally opposed to Turkey joining the club but for a very different reason.
Wikipedia tells us that, “In 1915, as the Russian Caucasus Army continued to advance in eastern Anatolia with the help of Armenian volunteer units from the Caucasus region of the Russian Empire, and aided by some Ottoman Armenians, the Ottoman government decided to issue the Tehcir Law which started the deportation of the ethnic Armenians, particularly from the provinces close to the Ottoman-Russian front, resulting in what became known as the Armenian Genocide. Through forced marches and massacres, the Armenians living in eastern Anatolia were uprooted from their ancestral homelands and sent southwards to the Ottoman provinces in Syria and Mesopotamia. Estimates vary on how many Armenians perished during the Armenian Genocide but scholars give figures ranging from 300,000 (per the modern Turkish state), 600,000 (per the Western scholars) to up to 1.5 million (per the Armenians) .

“According to the Ottoman Archives, 517,955 Muslim civilians were massacred in this era by Armenian irregular units and Armenian revolutionary groups. The Republic of Turkey as well as modern Azerbaijan does not accept that the Ottoman authorities attempted to exterminate the Armenian people. After a long period of complete denial, currently, Turkey acknowledges that during World War I many Armenians died, but counters that Turks died as well, and claims that the number of Armenian victims has been inflated, and that massacres were committed by both sides as a result of inter-ethnic violence and the wider conflict of World War I.”

Contrast this with E.U. countries where Holocaust denial is a crime. Historians denying the Armenian and Jewish holocausts have been tried in Austria and France.

Yesterday in my pharmacy, I served one of my customers, an old man now approaching 90, who still has his tattoo from Auschwitz where over a million of his fellow Jews perished at the hands of the Nazis. Modern Germany has repented of this terrible genocide. Turkey denies hers and is not fit to be part of a European Union.

97% of Turkey is not even in the continent of Europe. It is an Asian country. But Turkey, like the U.K. is a client state of the U.S., and home to American military bases. Now you know why Cameron is following His Master’s Voice. Obama is calling the shots. Cameron is his poodle.

We are told that those who forget their history are condemned to repeat it. What of those who deny their history? Imperial powers have things in their history of which their modern descendents are ashamed. I hang my head in shame at British atrocities over centuries in our far-flung imperial domains. But where is Turkey’s expression of shame for the Armenian genocide? Let us hear it loud and clear before they ask to join our European club.