Is this just an Armenian issue?

Absolutely not.

This is a human rights issue. Acknowledgment is the right of all people who have suffered genocide.

In a letter to the Newton Human Rights Commission, Prof. Henry Theriault wrote:

“Genocide denial is not a legitimate dispute about history, but an intentional campaign to falsify the historical record. Its goal is not simply to exonerate the perpetrators of the crime. It is a renewed attack on the victim group. Through it, deniers identify themselves with the perpetrators of the violence to hound survivors and their progeny through time, so that they can never escape the genocide that they survived. As one of the world’s foremost scholars of genocide and denial, Israel Charny of Hebrew University, has put it, genocide denial is a renewed assault on the humanity of the victim group, a celebration of the genocide that mocks the sensibilities of the victims and reasserts the power of the perpetrators over them, including even the history written about them. It conveys the clear message that what happened was justified and demonstrates to victims the impunity of the perpetrators not only to escape responsibility for what they did but, through future agents, to commit genocide again if they so choose.”

Genocide resolutions help to bring awareness of genocide and its prevention to the public and international community.

Writing in Haaretz, Israeli columnist and former education minister Yossi Sarid declared, “Denying another nation’s Holocaust is no less ugly than denying ours. It is also dangerous. Today’s denial is tomorrow’s Holocaust … If the world had risen up in protest against the genocide of the … Armenians, the Holocaust of the Jews might also have been averted. This is not a mere assumption … A week before invading Poland, Hitler addressed his officers (August 24, 1939): ‘I have ordered my Death-Head Formation to kill mercilessly and without compassion men, women and children of Polish derivation and language. Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?’”

On September 11, 2007, in a statement on Newton’s decision to stop participating in the ADL’s NPFH program, Mayor David B. Cohen wrote:

“The recognition of the Armenian Genocide is an important step along the path of freedom and justice, and crucial in combating other genocides now and in the future.”