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Opinion: Bush remembers ‘mass killings,’ not genocide

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President Bush has done it again -- commemorate the genocide of around 1.5 million Armenians nearly a century ago without offending the Turkish government by avoiding the word ‘genocide.’ Click here to read Bush’s complete statement; here’s an excerpt:

On this day of remembrance, we honor the memory of the victims of one of the greatest tragedies of the 20th century, the mass killings and forced exile of as many as 1.5 million Armenians at the end of the Ottoman Empire. I join the Armenian community in America and around the world in commemorating this tragedy and mourning the loss of so many innocent lives.

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Bush later implores Turkey and Armenia to normalize relations and praises those who ‘support joint efforts for an open examination of the past in search of a shared understanding of these tragic events.’ But an overwhelming consensus of historians already has a clear understanding of what went on between 1915 and 1917: that the mass deportations, forced marches with no food or water and senseless massacres were nothing more than a genocide of Armenians by the Young Turk government of the moribund Ottoman Empire. Bush’s call for an ‘open examination’ is nothing more than a nod to Turkey’s rigid (and incorrect) position that whether the events of 1915 - 1917 constitute a genocide is an open question. It isn’t.

Matt Welch, a former editor at The Times’ opinion pages, wrote about Bush’s mealy-mouthed genocide statements last year; click here to read his Op-Ed.

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