Abstention on Armenian genocide vote vexes supporters of U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar
John Parker-Der Boghossian spent Tuesday afternoon closely watching C-SPAN and Twitter with anticipation as the U.S. House considered a historic resolution recognizing the Armenian Genocide of a century ago. When he saw a “present” vote pop up on the screen, he was perplexed.
“Who votes ‘present’ on a genocide resolution?” he thought. Minutes later, the St. Anthony resident learned that the vote was cast by his own congresswoman, U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar. Shock and anger set in.
“I don’t understand how morally, when asked to affirm or deny, that you would vote ‘present,’ ” said Parker-Der Boghossian, whose mother’s family escaped death during the systematic murders and expulsions that affected some 1.5 million Armenians, a Christian minority within what was the Muslim-majority Ottoman Empire, with most of the violence taking place in modern-day Turkey. “I don’t know morally how you do that.”
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Omar’s decision to abstain and the subsequent explanation she gave has triggered another round of intense criticism for the freshman Democrat, in Minnesota and across the nation. Many members of the Twin Cities Armenian community expressed shock and deep dismay.
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Omar said in a statement Tuesday that while she believes accountability is “paramount” for human rights abuses, including genocide, such acknowledgments should not be “used as cudgel in a political fight.” She pointed to the slave trade and genocide of American Indians as examples of atrocities that receive too little recognition. She later defended her vote on Twitter, reiterating that she acknowledges the World War I-era Armenian genocide and that her concern was “not with the substance of this resolution.”
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http://www.startribune.com/abstention-on-armenian-genocide-vexes-omar-supporters/564138312/
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Ilhan Omar’s commitment to principle is one of her great strengths, but declining to recognize the Armenian genocide is an unforced error.
Omar acknowledges that the Armenian genocide was, in fact, a genocide. She wanted to point out that our foreign policy is driven by politics rather than principle and that she’d like to change that. But the “present” vote alone didn’t communicate that well, and the statement her office put out only further muddied the water. A line about relying on “academic consensus” was misinterpreted to imply that Omar doesn’t think there was consensus about the genocide. She does, and told me over the phone (after initial publication of this piece) that she was not questioning the academic consensus on the genocide, but rather that she wants recognition of genocide to be based on that consensus, not politics. What’s more, the statement seemed to say that we can’t talk about one genocide—of the Armenians in this case—without also discussing other genocides such as those of indigenous Americans or the violence of North American slavery.
She voted “present” to make a statement against a foreign policy of convenience. I’m sure she didn’t want to derail the conversation around the truth of the Armenian genocide or to cause pain to Armenians still searching for justice and recognition. Yet she did both. She’s seeking to make a better politics, but the jury is still out whether she can succeed without alienating people who would otherwise support her.
