The Bush administration’s response to Congress’s passage of a resolution defining the 1915 massacre of over one million Armenians as ‘genocide’ is reminiscent of the comments made recently by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in regards to the genocide of six million Jews at the hands of Nazi Germany.

Reuters reports that administration officials urged Congress not to pass the resolution, warning that it threatens to undermine US-Turkey relations, critical to American interests in the region (and particularly in Iraq, where another ethnic conflict has erupted despite America’s denial). And yet America wastes little time in attacking Ahmadinejad for denying the Nazi Holocaust during WWII.

Giving justice to the families of Armenian victims of what noted journalist Robert Fisk calls the “first holocaust” is a step towards redeeming the bloody and unresolved history of the 20th Century, a century that laid the foundations for our own turbulent era.

The connections in fact go much deeper. In “The Great War for Civilization,” Fisk writes of the close ties between Nazi military leaders and Ottoman generals then in the process of working out what they referred to as the “Armenian question.” Tactics included the organized rape and slaughter of women and children, starvation, and the carrying off of would be victims via train, loved ones whose whereabouts to this day are unknown.

Acknowledging the killing of Armenians by Ottoman forces during WWI as genocide sends a clear message that perpetrators of such acts will be condemned. Failure to do so extenuates past injustices and opens the door to similar crimes today – such as in Darfur.

It is a double-standard that further implicates America’s government as one that, while preaching the value of human rights to others, fails to live up to these standards when they conflict with U.S. interests. – Peter Schurmann