On the eve of World War I, an estimated two million Armenians lived in the Ottoman Empire. Well over a million were deported and hundreds of thousands were simply killed.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
The Jews were gassed. Armenians were killed in every conceivable way... So the Holocaust doesn't interest me, see? They've had a lot of publicity, but they didn't suffer as much.
One could reasonably argue that the Turkish pogrom against the Armenians during World War I qualifies as a crime against humanity, as does the United States' ethnic cleansing of Native Americans.
In 1911, Turkey established gun control. From 1915 to 1917, 1.5 million Armenians, unable to defend themselves, were exterminated.
But I am Armenian and I understand what it is to lose a country and lose a family and have massacres and genocides and everything against my people.
The reality is that most of North America knows next to nothing of the 20th century's first genocide - the systematic slaughter of 1.5 million Armenians in the First World War.
The Armenian Genocide is such a controversial and very sensitive issue because the Turkish and Armenian people disagree about the facts of what actually happened. I know how strongly Armenians feel about the Genocide, and how it's never been recognised. At the same time, I do not hold today's generation of people accountable.
I bow down in memory of the victims, and I come to tell my Armenian friends that we will never forget the tragedies that your people has endured.
I'm half-Armenian. Even though my grandparents did not discuss the genocide, and my father - like many sons and daughters of immigrants - wanted to be as 'American' as possible, I was always aware of it. How could I not be?
It's time to recognise the Armenian Genocide.
But at the beginning, our definition of the genocide was what happened to Armenia in 1917 or 1919, it's happened to the Jew in Europe, and we were not realizing - In our point of view, they have not the tools to do a genocide.