Rep. Ilhan Omar is drawing fire for basically abstaining on a House vote taken to formally acknowledge, for the first time in more than a century, the genocide of some 1.5 million Armenians in what is today the nation of Turkey.
Omar—the progressive Democrat and one of the collective of politically aligned freshman members of the House known as “the Squad”—angered advocates for the Armenian community when she voted “present,”rather than “yes,” as the House voted 405-11 Tuesday in favor of a resolution recognizing the Armenian atrocity, NBC News reports:
Omar’s “votes and actions … do not represent the best of American or Muslim values,” Van Krikorian, of the Armenian Assembly of America, told NBC of the Minnesota congresswoman, who is Muslim. “Innocent people were and are being slaughtered, and there is a universal need to defend the victims of genocide and ethnic cleansing, not to stand with or defer to the murderers.”
The atrocities committed in 1915 against the Armenians in what was then known as the Ottoman Empire have long been a source of anger and pain, but until Tuesday, the U.S. had avoided commenting on the matter, not wanting to anger its Turkish ally, according to the New York Times.
But with growing bipartisan anger against Turkey for its recent treatment of the Syrian Kurds after Donald Trump abruptly decided to pull U.S. troops out of Syria, had the House wanting to make a statement, as the Times explains:
“Recent attacks by the Turkish military against the Kurdish people are a stark reminder of the danger in our own time,” [House] Speaker Nancy Pelosi [said before the vote].
[…]
“Too often, tragically, the truth of the staggering crime has been denied,” she said. “Today, let us clearly state the facts on the floor of this House to be etched forever into the Congressional Record: The barbarism committed against the Armenian people was a genocide.”
Turkey, which denies that what happened was genocide, categorizing the deaths as the result of civil war, took to Twitter to express its displeasure at the House vote.
“This shameful decision of those exploiting history in politics is null & void for our Government & people,” Turkey’s foreign minister, Mevlut Cavusoglu, wrote, according to the Times.
