Letter: Turkey should own up to own holocaust

Friday, April 13, 2007 | 7:11 a.m.

Someone has to take issue with Thomas P.M. Barnett's argument for inviting Turkey into the European Union ("Religious tolerance is first step to beating extremism," April 9), so I will volunteer.

Barnett makes a good argument in his commentary for Turkey's admission: loyal participant of NATO, strong economy and, most impressively, a population that is 99 percent Muslim but, for the most part, secularized. Those are the good points. However, Barnett completely avoids the fact that the country he refers to as religiously tolerant refuses to this day to deny that it is responsible, in any significant way, for the 20th century's first holocaust, the murder and annihilation of millions of Christian Armenians and Greeks from 1854 through World War I.

Looked at another way, what would be the voice of the European Union and the free world if Germany today insisted that the Nazi holocaust was largely a fiction? Despite voluminous evidence, including the testimony of U.S. ambassador to Turkey at the time, Henry Morgenthau, as well as numerous missionaries, the Turkish government denies involvement and has made it a crime to speak out against government policy on the issue.

Turkey should become a member of the European Union, but it should adopt a healthy dose of social honesty and integrity first.

John H. Esperian, Las Vegas