As the memorial day for the Nazi genocide against the Jews was proclaimed by Mr Blair this week, there was not a single reference to the slaughter of one and a half million Armenian Christians by the Ottoman Turks in 1915. Mr Blair did not mention it. 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.