Thursday, August 09, 2007

Unsaid Word Speaks Volumes

Guess what word is missing from the letter to the editor in yesterday's Boston Globe by Anti-Defamation League New England Regional director Andrew Tarsy and Regional chairman James Rudolph?

Give up? It's "Genocide".

Not to belabor a point I made earlier this month, but if I had been accused of Holocaust Denial by the ADL and then came back and said "many groups have experienced horrific atrocities" as a way of explaining myself, I'm not sure that anyone would find that answer satisfactory. I'm sure that Tarsy was surprised by the controversy, but he keeps digging himself and his organization deeper into it with each statement he makes to the local paper. It would have gone a long way toward quieting the uproar if he had simply used the word "genocide" to describe what happened to the Armenians under the Ottoman Empire instead of dancing around it with "massacre" and "suffering".