Washington (CNN)This
week is the 100th anniversary of what many historians acknowledge as
the Armenian genocide -- the Turkish massacre of an estimated 1.5
million Armenians
And it's also
the seventh year in a row President Barack Obama has broken his promise
to use the word "genocide" to describe the atrocity.
It's a moral position taken by Pope Francis, actor George Clooney and even by the Kardashians.
On
the 2008 campaign trail, Obama promised to use the word "genocide" to
describe the 1915 massacre by Turks of Armenians -- a pledge he made
when seeking Armenian-American votes.
Back
then, he held up his willingness to call it a "genocide" as an example
of why he was the kind of truth-telling candidate the nation needed.
In
2006, after the U.S. Ambassador to Armenia was asked to resign for
using the term Armenian genocide, then-Sen. Obama hammered the Bush
administration for not taking a stand.
"The
Armenian genocide is not an allegation, a personal opinion, or a point
of view, but rather a widely documented fact supported by an
overwhelming body of historical evidence," he said.
But that was then.
And
now, as was the case with Bush, Obama regards Turkey -- the only Muslim
majority country in NATO -- as a more crucial ally than Armenia. Turkey
has the second-largest military in NATO, behind only the U.S., and is a
crucial ally when it comes to Syria, ISIS, Iran and other Middle East
issues.
And Turkey denies this history.
"We cannot define what happened in 1915 as a genocide," Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu told CNN on Tuesday.
In
her Pulitzer Prize-winning book about genocide, Obama's current
Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power hammered U.S. policy
makers for not acknowledging or acting to stop such atrocities.
"No
U.S. president has ever made genocide prevention a priority, and no
U.S. president has ever suffered politically for his indifference to its
occurrence. It is thus no coincidence that genocide rages on," she
wrote.
CNNpolitics
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