President Chirac is frightened of the very subject, refusing even to condemn the slaughter when he last visited Beirut, where the grandchildren of the victims live in their tens of thousands. And we let them get away with it. The six million Jews who were murdered by the Nazis must always have a place in our history, our memory, our fears. Turkey is our friend. Turkey might one day join the European Union.
Turkey is an ally of Israel.
History, of course, is a hard taskmaster, veined with inconvenient facts and corrupted heroes as well as the massacre of innocents. The Armenian community in Turkey had its Allied sympathisers when the Ottoman army was fighting the British and French in the First World War, and Armenians also fought in the tsarist Russian army against Turkey. But the proof of genocide is intact. Within weeks of their victory over the Allies at the Dardanelles in 1915, they fell upon the Armenians. Near the Turkish village of Mus, hundreds of men were lined up on bridges and shot into the rivers, Serb-style.