Jews who mindlessly follow this drumbeat do so for various reasons. Some are Holocaust-sensitive, and since the overwhelming propaganda has led them to believe the Armenians’ experience is also a genocide, they rush to support their “brothers-in-arms.” Others have an irrational fear that by not supporting the Armenians, the Holocaust will be questioned. Still others are motivated by the same racism that most other Westerners have toward Turks. Why, everyone knows the Turks are savages, and they must have been guilty.

Then there are those as Rep. Schiff, who are complete slimeballs, hungering for generous Armenian contributions, or fearful of Armenian activists’ relentless attacks.

This is why the honorable ones among us must scratch beneath the surface. There are plenty of Jews who know the truth, as well. Some, as the venerable historian, Bernard Lewis, have been accused as being David Irving types. Some have been smeared (Norman Itzkowitz, Alan Fisher) and have learned to stay away from the debate. Some were horribly harassed and even physically threatened, as Prof. Stanford Shaw, and their nerves got shot. Even Shimon Peres was branded as a liar, when he declared in 2001 that what the Armenians had gone through was a tragedy, but not a genocide.

But there are brave ones coming out of the woodwork, from time to time. A real scholar, Guenter Lewy, bent over backwards to be fair to Armenians; a Holocaust survivor to boot, Prof. Lewy could find no evidence. The book is called, “The Armenian Massacres in Ottoman Turkey: A Disputed Genocide.”

There is really no evidence to support a systematic extermination plan against the Armenians. The British sought desperately to find such evidence in their Nuremberg at WWI’s end (The Malta Tribunal, 1919-21), couldn’t find any, and released every imprisoned Ottoman.

People haven’t looked into anything besides the propaganda, because the propaganda is so overwhelming. (Google “Armenian genocide,” to get a taste.) But even when it is only the propaganda people are looking at, almost exclusively the “evidence” boils down to hearsay, as well as forgeries. Just because a bigot gives his opinion does not put such “evidence” into the factual category. This is why we must be reminded that courts of law reject hearsay.

When Armenians were in charge of parts of Eastern Anatolia with and without their Russian allies, they systematically exterminated those who were different, including Jews, in order to claim the majority they never had within these provinces, in addition to feelings of racial superiority that their fanatical leaders and the missionaries instilled in them. Internal Ottoman reports never meant to be publicized verify Armenians killed over half a million “Turks.” (Able-bodied Turks were off to war; the defenseless villagers were easy pickings, taking place over a time span of 1915-1919/20.)

Yes, The total “murdered” by Armenians (with some Russian help) equals the total of Armenians dead from all causes combined. (1.5 million was the entire pre-war population for Ottoman Armenians. That was the consensus of Western opinion of the period, e.g., the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica. Today’s worst propagandists agree one million survived. After the subtraction, we can see the total killed was half a million, mostly from non-murderous reasons such as famine and disease, the same as most of the 2.7 million other Ottomans who died. The ones we never hear about.)

That means many more “Turks” were “murdered” by Armenians than the other way around. This was the real systematic extermination policy of the war. We don’t hear about this other side of the coin. Why not? Because as the Jews were historically “The Other,” so were the Turks. The difference these days is Jews have political power, and Turks do not. It is still open season on the Turks, and they still don’t qualify as valuable human beings.

Jews should be especially wary about jumping on the “Armenian Genocide” bandwagon, because from the days of the Spanish Inquisition to WWII, the Turkish nation has been perhaps history’s greatest defender of Judaism, for pure-hearted reasons, unlike today’s greatest defender. (A WWII example: in France alone — there were other regions were Jews were saved as well, as with Rhodes — the Turkish ambassador saved 18,000. Schindler, by contrast, saved 1,000.)

That does not mean Jews should whitewash Turks; it does, however, mean that Jews had morally better make doubly sure the evidence against the Turks is ironclad.

What can be said regarding Mark Arax is that he is a Dashnak activist, and will do whatever he can to support the “Armenian Cause.” If that means driving a wedge between Armenians and Jews, so be it. Armenians have historically turned on their friends, once the friends did not go far enough for them (examples: the missionaries, and Woodrow Wilson). The question for any Jewish person, however, is how supportive of Jews have Armenians been? As mentioned, Ottoman Jews were along for the ride in the Armenians’ extermination campaign. During WWII, the great Armenian hero, Dro (who was a chief architect of the WWI campaign for innocent blood), joined Hitler. Tens of thousands of European Nazi-Armenians policed the occupied territories. Jews are welcome to visit the nearest Internet Armenian forum, and discover how closely Armenians hold their “Aryan” identity to heart. You get one guess as to which people these Armenian extremists vent their hatred upon the most, after the Turks.

A recent example is “Memorial sought for Mountain Jews” (May 6, 2007, Jewish Telegraphy Agency, http://www.jta.org/cgi-bin/iowa/breaking/101641.html): “The Jewish leaders cited research saying that some 3,000 Mountain Jews, along with tens of thousands of Azeris, were murdered in the region of Guba by Armenian bandits and nationalists — an incident marked March 31 by the Azeris as genocide.”

Another extermination policy conducted by Armenians occurred in 1919-20. “The Jewish Times” of June 21, 1990 wrote:

“An appropriate analogy with the Jewish Holocaust might be the systematic extermination of the entire Muslim population of the independent republic of Armenia which consisted of at least 30-40 percent of the population of that republic.”

There weren’t that many Jews in this episode (the victims were mostly Azeri Turks), but the unfortunate ones encountered had to be snuffed out as well. This is one reason why what is Armenia today is designated as 98% Armenian-pure, according to the CIA Fact Book. (When today’s “Armenia” was conquered in 1828 by Russia from Iran, there were almost no Armenians.) We received a taste of the Armenians’ ethnic cleansing practices in 1992 Karabakh, but the world quickly forgot, and the Armenians made up their stories, as usual; the Armenians must always be the designated victims, and are off the agenda of the hypocritical and dishonest genocide crowd.

People must learn to put their prejudices aside and take the time to conduct their own research.