Author Mark Arax has written an article in Salon that details allegations against the Los Angeles Times in killing a story on how the Israeli lobby was helping efforts to deny the Armenian genocide in exchange for Turkey’s support of Israel. Despite the focus on media issues on this blog, I am embarrassed to say that I was unaware of the controversy until this column.
While writing at the LA Times, Arax was a respected journalist nominated by the newspaper for a Pultizer Prize. He is also Armenian, which he insists should not matter, but it appears to have mattered to his editors.
He left the newspaper after a controversy over an article that he wrote on the connection between Israel and Turkey in fighting recognition of the genocide.
He is reporting in Salon how groups and leading Jewish figures have recently come out to recognize the genocide. He suggests that this change came when Turkey confronted Israel over the recent deaths on the aid ships to Gaza.
Arax recounts how he wrote an article on how the “Israel lobby in the U.S. has played a quiet but pivotal role in pressuring Congress, the State Department and successive presidents to defeat simple congressional resolutions commemorating the 1.5 million Armenian victims.”
This was in the spring of 2007 and resulted in the first story of his killed on the eve of publication in his 20-year journalistic career.
Turkey was the first Muslim country to recognize Israel and was viewed as a critical ally for Israel. Arax wrote the article on how the powerful Israeli lobby in Washington reinforced this relationship by blocking genocide recognition. He recounts an encounter with a Turkish diplomat who immediately asked if he was an Armenian. He allegedly questioned how there could have been genocide if Arax was standing in front of him, stating “So both of your grandfathers survived, huh?”
Notably, Arax was not the first to make this connection. He interviewed Yair Auron, a professor at the Open University of Israel who had authored the 2003 book “The Banality of Denial: Israel and the Armenian Genocide.”
He also interviewed Abraham Foxman, the head of the Anti-Defamation League in New York after he came from a meeting allegedly coordinating lobbying with Turkish officials. He quotes Foxman as saying “[o]ur focus is Israel. If helping Turkey helps Israel, then that’s what we’re in the business of doing. . . . Was it genocide? It was wartime. Things get messy.”
Arax says that his editors killed the story because of his Armenian background.
My editor in Washington was pleased. . . . The weekend came and went, but the story held . . .
“But why?” I asked.
“Your byline,” he said.
“My byline?”
Then it hit me. Even as the paper was nominating one of my other stories for a Pulitzer Prize, on this story I was an Armenian.
. . . The managing editor said I was not an objective reporter because I had once signed a petition stating that the Armenian Genocide was a historical fact.
I had never signed such a petition. But if I had, how did this prove bias? Our own style book at the Times recognized the genocide as a historical fact.
“Would you tell a Jewish reporter that he couldn’t write about Holocaust denial because he believed the Holocaust was a fact?” I asked.
His answer was to reassign my story to a colleague in Washington who covered Congress. That this reporter was Jewish — and the story dealt with Jewish denial of the genocide — didn’t seem to faze the managing editor. The colleague, who may not have had a choice in the matter, proceeded to gut my story. By the time he was done, there was not a single mention of Jewish denial.
It is a disturbing account. Arax says that a later internal probe found his article to be unbiased and that the managing editor was later forced out.
Source: Salon.
OK, now everyone can have a big group hug.
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Before I got sidetracked responding to comments, I was actually planning on posting that I thought the underlying analysis (Israeli supporters lobbying against recognizing the Armenian genocide because Turkey was an ally) was really interesting.
Does anyone know if they were couching their arguments in terms of realpolitik or were they arguing that it factually never happened?
B.I.L. :
What I am saying is that since I started coming here ( 4-6 months ago? – I am bad with time) I have seen quite a preponderance of posts on Israel, all of them in a negative light. Now, whether or not the articles and Prof. Turley’s commentary have been on the mark or not is open to debate. But it seems indisputable to me that the tenor of these postings by Prof Turley is not balanced. The topic of Israel comes up here often, uncharitably, and occasionally in gratuitous fashion.
Prof. Turley actually used the occasion of America’s debt crisis as on opportunity to single out its 200 million dollar expenditures ( as I pointed out at the time, that is 1/5000th of our debt) on Israel’s defense systems. After complaining about them a few days before!
Now, I like Prof. Turley. I actually recommended him, in a conversation with family last weekend, as a much better choice as a Supreme Court nominee than anyone Obama has put forward. But every day here reading his blog makes it more abundantly clear that he has a bug in his butt about Israel.
My comments were not directed at Gyges, but rather at FormerFederalNothing. Sorry if you felt I was addressing you, Gyges. 🙂
Gyges,
I wasn’t trying to make a point about Israel being a high number, I was just pointing out that an unrestricted google search doesn’t even provide a rough estimate and pointing you towards a somewhat better method. I provided all the numbers I did searches for — I thought it was self-evident that the United States would be way way way higher and that most stories dealing with the US would just list the name of the state or city, rather than include the phrase “united states,” and I didn’t bother to search for lots of countries that you did, including China and Mexico.
It is an interesting study to examine what countries, or subdivisions of countries, have been willing to recognize the Armenian “genocide” and the positions of those that have not. Some governments, like France, were forced by their parliaments to change national policy no matter what the fall-out with Turkey. Some countries, like Iran, have recognized the term “genocide” with respect to the death of the Armenians at the hands of Turks, because until recently they had other reasons to be against Turkey. In Iran’s case, they use the term “Armenian Genocide” because they oppose Turkey’s previouisly warm relationship with NATO and Israel and dislike the secularism of Turkish society. As Turkey’s government moves the country away from secularism and alliances with Israel and the US, it will be interesting to see whether Iran will adopt the Turkish view in order to nuture an Iranian-Turkish relationship. Some countries, like Israel and the UK — who have legitimate needs to nuture a friendly Turkish military — avoided the term “genocide” saying that such decisions are better left to historians than politicians. As long as Jerusalem thinks that Israeli-Turkish relations are salvageable, I doubt that they will allow the Armenian issue to push relations over the side.
What concerns me more is how indifferent Western cultures were to the genocides going on in the past couple of decades in the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, and th Darfur region of Sudan. It is one thing to refuse to apply a politically-infalmable term to a historical event, it is another thing to stand idly by while genocide is going on in 4th world countries. What really ranckles is that while Darfurians and Rwandans are raped, murdered, and more, all some governments can do is complain about fences in Israel.
The pattern I see is simply this:
The Prof picks stories about
1) Countries misbehaving (sparing no one)
2) Constitutionally related issues
3) Abuse of power issues
4) General Weirdness, Legal and otherwise
5) Animals
The frequency of their appearance seems to relate to who is in the news at the moment and a certain small segment are backfill for items he may have missed being a very busy guy.
As far as accusations go? Ginger, you threw the first stone in suggesting somehow the Prof was untoward in his treatment of the Israeli government. I submit that if the Israeli government hadn’t been shooting itself in the foot so much internationally, perhaps they wouldn’t be getting any attention. And never forget, being against their hawkish government is not the equivalent of being Anti-Israel or anti-Semitic. Just like hating the abuses of the Bush (and now Obama) Administrations isn’t the same thing as being Anti-American.
James,
and I quote: “Well, let’s see if we can’t get a rough comparison about how much he talks about different countries.” Rough being an important part of that statement.
Interestingly enough, you seemed to have left off all the countries I originally listed that have higher numbers in your search. In fact, they have significantly higher numbers; The U.S. and China numbers are both over double Israel’s, and Iraq a couple hundred more.
Gyges,
Well it’s clear from those numbers that JT must hate America worst of all with a 20% variance over the English! That would of course explain why he’s an internationally respected US Constitutional scholar. He hates us so much he values teaching the very core of our legal system above other, possibly more lucrative, endeavors. Now that’s commitment! And given the rest of those numbers and the Mrs. JT’s Jewish heritage, perhaps she should be concerned he’s having an affair with a Mexican Chinese Brit ex-pat from Canada! Or perhaps a Chinese Canadian raised by Mexicans and living in England. I can see the tabloids now.
Was that sarcastic enough?
I’m a little off my A game today.
Ginger,
Stimulus – response. It’s a key diagnostic. As are patterns. There are no patterns suggesting Gyges is a moron. Quite the opposite actually.
Timeliness. Truth or the revelation of obfuscation of the truth has no time limit.
FFN,
I went to that group’s alerts page and see nothing about Turley’s blog. That seems like an inappropriate accusation to make without doing a little research.
Gyges,
The numbers you cite don’t really mean anything. If you’re trying to tell how much he talks about a given country, a good first step would be to restrict the search to just this website. E.g. searching google for “Israel site:jonathanturley.org”
Israel 616
England 581
Canada 531
Iran 524
France 330
Those numbers don’t mean much either because they include comments and links to other stories that show up on the same page, but it’s closer to the search I think you intended.
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For my own part, I have noticed quite a few stories critical of Israel recently, but Israel has also been in the news frequently in the past few months.
Blouise,
Not especially, -phobe meaning fear. Mis- meaning hate. While it’s generally true we fear what we hate, I have yet to hear of JT being reduced to a quivering mass of jello at the thought of having to eat some fish and chips.
Well. “Gingerbaker” used a lot of words in his/her first post. (S)he talked about a lot of stuff.
None of them had anything to do with whether it is true or false that this collaboration of denial existed and is currently either over or on a hiatus until Turkey does something differently.
Personally, I’d be very interested to know if the so-called “Christian Zionist” community was actively involved in this. On one hand, many or most Armenians would describe themselves as Christian, and evangelicals/fundamentalists may see Armenia as a potential market to expand into. On the other hand, most Armenian Christians are of the variety that not would be acceptable to US fundamentalists, and the fundamentalists’ apocryphal fantasies about the “end times” and the role of Israel in those fantasies may outweigh the other interests.
Many people who want lasting peace and security for the people of Israel are very frustrated by the “shooting self in foot” activities (like this genocide denial or the poor handling of the Gaza relief flotilla) that pro-Israel reactionaries and right-wingers engage in. Maybe international support for Israel, no matter what stupid things are said and done in it’s name, has an un-ending, overwhelming supply of unconditional political capital to draw upon. But if that supply starts dwindling, then Israel will be much better off the sooner it switches to being smart, restrained and honest whenever possible. (Note that fundamentalist Christianity in the US has its historic peaks and troughs. We are at or probably past one of those peaks. Over the coming decades the Glen Beck-style support for Israel will wane as the religious fervor dies down. That’s one source of irrational, unconditional support for Israel in the US political environment that is going away…)
misangloist = anglophobe
Ginger,
I don’t see you protesting nearly as much when the frequent stories about Britain, Iran, China, Canada, , etc. pop up.
This is twice now you’ve made the complaint that the Professor is unfairly bashing Israel. Without offering one shred of proof that he unfairly targets Israel. Well, let’s see if we can’t get a rough comparison about how much he talks about different countries.
A Google search for:
Israel and Jonathan Turley; 50,800 results
England and Jonathan Turley; 62,600 results
Canada and Jonathan Turley; 54,500 results
United States and Jonathan Turley: 78,200 results
China and Jonathan Turley; 55,900 results
Iran and Jonathan Turley; 36,600 results
Mexico and Jonathan Turley; 66,000 results
France and Jonathan Turley; 46,600 results
Iraq and Jonathan Turley; 48,200 results
Afghanistan and Jonathan Turley; 37,600 results
Well now, if anything JT’s a misangloist
That’s quite an accusation. Do you have any evidence that I am ‘propagandist” or are you just pretending to be a moron?
And I see that the “pro-Israel” propagandists have arrived in the comments! Thanks to the magic of computer software!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megaphone_desktop_tool
There is actually a history of Israeli/Jewish downplaying of other genocides (the Armenian in particular) — see Norman Finkelstein’s “The Holocaust Industry.”
Turkey does have a terrible human rights record, most recently with the Kurds. I always wonder if countries bashing each other for each’s terrible human rights record actually helps any of the people being oppressed. Surely it is easy fodder for each country’s respective politicians, but does it do any good for the oppressed? I’m still undecided…
Another example: China and the US’s yearly war of words on human rights:
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english2010/china/2010-03/12/c_13208219.htm
How refreshing to come here and find another disinterested thread on Israel, when it seems that most blogs, news sources, and commentaries around the world are consumed with other international issues.
And it took some careful digging to come up with this 8 day-old story by a disgruntled reporter, as it was out-shadowed at Salon itself by the 3 day-old story:
But I guess the hard-breaking story by Mr Arax is of more contemporary interest, being as it is an account of of an article written three years ago about an alleged decades-long conspiracy, so …. sorry, I guess it wasn’t of contemporary interest.
Oh dear. I see it was not late-breaking either, as the story about the Pro-Israel letter is nearly one week more recent.
So, why is the article by Mr Arax of interest to the readers of this blog? Oh yes, it must be just the latest episode of a string of many such stories about the Armenian genocide. Surely that’s it. Yeah, that’s the ticket.
Nal,
You are sly. But do not forget that Armenia is held to be the “Birth Place” of Christianity…
If the price is right, would Israel help those who deny the Jewish Holocaust?
Congress and the State Department have also treaded lightly on the Armenian genocide for decades, worrying about offending a NATO ally. Now that Turkey’s Prime Minister wants the country more aligned with radical Islamic states, all bets are off.