Under Fire, ADL Flips on Armenian Genocide

Andrew Tarsy

New York
In a dramatic reversal, the Anti-Defamation League's national director has issued a statement describing the massacres perpetrated by the Ottoman Empire against the Armenians as "tantamount to genocide."

The ADL and its national director, Abraham Foxman, have faced mounting criticism in recent weeks for refusing to use the genocide label and for firing Andrew Tarsy, the head of the organization's Boston office, who publicly challenged that policy.

Tarsy's dismissal sparked a furious backlash from local community leaders -- including critical statements from prominent Boston Jews, a "community statement" calling for the ADL to change its position, and the resignation of two members of the ADL's regional board.

But in a statement issued Tuesday, the ADL said, "We have never negated but have always described the painful events of 1915-1918 perpetrated by the Ottoman Empire against the Armenians as massacres and atrocities. On reflection, we have come to share the view of Henry Morgenthau, Sr. that the consequences of those actions were indeed tantamount to genocide. If the word genocide had existed then, they would have called it genocide," the statement said.

When asked in a Boston Globe interview last month if he believed what happened to the Armenians was genocide, Foxman was quoted as saying: "I don't know." Critics argued that Foxman's remark portrayed the issue as open to debate, with some calling it genocide denial.

ADL insists the change stems from its concern for Jewish unity at a moment of great peril for communities around the world.

"I was just disheartened by how the Jewish community was being torn apart," Foxman said Tuesday as he traveled to Boston to meet with community leaders.

In recent days, ADL has faced a budding rebellion on the part of the organization's Boston leadership, which adopted two resolutions on the issue last week, one expressing confidence in Tarsy and the other supporting legislation in Congress acknowledging the Armenian genocide.

Two prominent members of the ADL's regional board -- former chairman of the Polaroid Corp., Stewart Cohen, and Boston City Council member Mike Ross -- reportedly resigned in protest over the issue.

The ADL has been under fire since the Armenian community in Watertown, Mass., one of the country's largest, began agitating to have the town rescind its participation in "No Place for Hate," a popular anti-bigotry program the ADL sponsors. On Aug. 14, the Town Council unanimously voted to end its relationship with the program, and other Massachusetts communities were reported to be considering similar moves.

Watertown's Armenian community was piqued by the ADL's longtime refusal to support the congressional legislation, which is vigorously opposed by Turkey, Israel's closest Muslim ally.

Despite the shift on the genocide question, Foxman says he still does not support the legislative measure, which he described in his Tuesday statement as "a counterproductive diversion" that could threaten the Turkish Jewish community and "the important multilateral position between Turkey, Israel and the United States."

That position is exceedingly unpopular in Boston, where a large Armenian population has developed close ties with the Jewish community. The Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Boston, the Combined Jewish Philanthropies, the David Project and eight other groups signed on to a "community statement" Monday urging the ADL to reconsider its position.

"I think what Andy Tarsy did was to express the morally correct position, speaking not only as a leader of the ADL but as a Jew whose history in the last century was formed by a Holocaust," Steven Grossman, a former chairman of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and the Democratic National Committee, said.