Opposition
The bill has been opposed by the Republic of Turkey, as well as the administration of former U.S. President George W. Bush. US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice urged US lawmakers to drop the resolution. She said: "I continue to believe that the passage of the ... Armenian genocide resolution would severely harm our relationships with Turkey". While a candidate, U.S. President Barack Obama stated that he "stood with the Armenian American community in calling for Turkey's acknowledgment of the Armenian Genocide", but his Secretary of State Hillary Clinton assured Turkey that the White House opposes the resolution.
Eight former US secretaries of state, both Republican and Democrat, signed a petition calling for refraining from passing this resolution.
Gregory Meeks, a Democrat representative from New York in the United States House Committee on Foreign Affairs, voted against the resolution, arguing that Congress should focus on the failings of U.S. history, such as slavery or the killings of Native Americans, before it starts condemning the histories of other countries. He said, "We have failed to do what we're asking other people to do ... We have got to clean up our own house."
Zbigniew Brzezinski, a former U.S. national security adviser, stated in an interview to CNN:
As far as a resolution is concerned, I never realized that the House of Representatives was some sort of an academy of learning that passes judgment on historical events. History's full of terrible crimes, and there is no doubt that many Armenians were massacred in World War I. But whether the House of Representatives should be passing resolutions whether that should be classified as genocide or a huge massacre is I don't think any of its business. It has nothing to do with passing laws, how to run the United States. That's where the constitution created the House of Representatives for.
Columnist Charles Krauthammer expressed a similar view, stating "unequivocally" that the Armenian genocide happened, but "unequivocally" that "the U.S. House of Representatives be expressing itself on this now". Krauthammer also reports that
Even Mesrob Mutafyan, patriarch of the Armenian community in Turkey, has stated that his community is opposed to the resolution, correctly calling it the result of domestic American politics.
Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter also stated in an interview to CNN: "I think if I was in Congress I would not vote for it."
The resolution also received negative reactions in mass media. Richmond Times-Dispatch columnist expressed his surprise that “a Congress that has historically lacked the spine or heart to tackle the nation's ugliest legacies in a meaningful way is censuring Turkey”. The newspaper quotes Robert J. Miller, a professor at Lewis & Clark Law School in Portland, Ore., who called it "unbelievable" that Congress is pointing fingers elsewhere while ignoring a U.S. history of black enslavement and the destruction and displacement of Indians.
Read more about this topic: United States Resolution On Armenian Genocide
Famous quotes containing the word opposition:
“It is useless to check the vain dunce who has caught the mania of scribbling, whether prose or poetry, canzonets or criticisms,—let such a one go on till the disease exhausts itself. Opposition like water, thrown on burning oil, but increases the evil, because a person of weak judgment will seldom listen to reason, but become obstinate under reproof.”
—Sarah Josepha Buell Hale 1788–1879, U.S. novelist, poet and women’s magazine editor. American Ladies Magazine, pp. 36-40 (December 1828)
“At times it seems that the media have become the mainstream culture in children’s lives. Parents have become the alternative. Americans once expected parents to raise their children in accordance with the dominant cultural messages. Today they are expected to raise their children in opposition to it.”
—Ellen Goodman (20th century)