There Was No Armenian Genocide

Peloni:  As I noted in my earlier preface on Israeli governmental recognition of the Armenian Genocide, it is better described as ‘ethnic cleansing’, which is altogether different from what the word ‘genocide’ portends.

By Sha’i ben-Tekoa

Armenian Genocide Female Orphans. Photo by K. Polis : Published by M. Hovakimean, 1920. – Babel.hathitrust.org, Public Domain, Wikipedia

Although Raphael Lemkin, a Polish Jew who escaped to America in 1939, lost 49 family members in the Holocaust, invented the word genocide in 1944, and cited the fate of Armenians in 1915 at the hands of the barbaric Turks as an example of genocide, he was wrong about that, and on 28 June when the GOI (Government of Israel) joined the hostile gentile world by admitting that the Armenians were targeted for genocide too, that was another mistake.

In recent years, the word genocide has been horribly distorted and cheapened. For example, in May 2025, Donald Trump hosted at the White House families of white South African farmers whose pater familias had been murdered by black South Africans to steal their farm. There had been some 129 terrible murderers like this over the past few years that Trump called “genocide.”

As both Christianity and Islam claim to be the real Judaism; as today’s so-called “Palestinians” claim to be the authentic indigenous people of the Bible’s Promised Land, so the concept of genocide – initially uniquely associated to the national crucifixion of the Jews — has been pilfered and perverted. Today, millions of people believe that the Jews are now the ones committing genocide against the allegedly innocent and allegedly archaic “Palestinian” people (when there is nothing Palestinian about them.)

President Obama appointed Ireland-born Samantha Power to be ambassadress for the U.S. in the U.N. after she wrote a book deflating the Holocaust as something unique to the Jews. She reported on six terrible episodes of hysterical human cruelty and mass killing as examples of genocide when they were not. Genocide is not a synonym for massacre.

Anti-Jews are most uncomfortable with the misunderstood Jewish concept of “The Chosen People,” and if genocide is unique to the Jewish people, that is evidence they are a people apart, and types like Samantha Power are uncomfortable with that.

Belief in the Jews as divinely chosen is an impossible-to-prove religious belief; take it or leave it. But what cannot be denied is the facticity of the Jews as most certainly the world’s chosen people if not by the Almighty than by other men for a special fate of cruelty, hatred and abuse.

There are no more ardent examples of this kind of Jewish chosenness than what it has done to the minds of Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, Steve Bannon, Jeremy Corbyn, Hassan Piker and every lunatic Jew-hater active today. They believe the most outlandish and ignorant lies about Jews, a fate unique to this people. What other religious community is the target of such contumely, a word the dictionary defines as “insolent, arrogant rudeness, or a contemptuous and humiliating insult.” Today’s Jew-haters are positively obsessed with sneering at Jews for their allegedly evil ways that never, as always, have any truth to them.

Samantha Power wrote up these six massacres but none them fit the sense of Lemkin’s invented word. He seems to have used either the Greek “genos” meaning “family, clan, tribe, race, stock, kin,” a variety of groups; or more likely used the Latin “gens” meaning specifically “nation.” Then he attached the common suffix “-cide” meaning killing.

In this sense, Lemkin’s, genocide means the utter extermination of a nation, but that is not what happened to the Armenians in 1915. It was truly a mass horror in which the Muslims murdered 1.5 individual million Armenian human beings who suffered as much as their fellow human beings the Jews in their Holocaust. Jews have no monopoly on individual human suffering.

But what happened to these Armenians was simply not an attempt to murder every Armenian on the planet so there would be no longer any Armenians in the world in the future speaking their language, enjoying their cuisine, attending Armenian Apostolic Churches.

The subsequent German genocide of the Jews in the 20th century was the eighth attempt in history to exterminate the entirety of this people. Nazism’s maniacs chanted “Heute Deutschland, Morgen Die Ganze Welt,” dreaming of world conquest, and in every conquered country they would find all the Jews and kill them, so that in the future, there would be no more individual Jews and certainly no more Jewish nation practicing the Jewish religion.

That is very different from what the savage Muslims did to their brutalized Armenian victims. The Turks wanted the land east of the Turkish heartland on which millions of Armenians were living, and as barbarians, they had no humane scruples against doing everything to drive them off that land – rape, torture, the whole menu of cruelty Muslims are very good at.

But that was still not part of a crusade (or should we say crescentade?) to find and murder every Armenian on the planet because the Muslims thought the Armenians were a threat to the existence of Turkey, as Hitler believed the Jews wanted to destroy and take over Germany and really the whole world.

That was the goal of the Nazis; to find all the Jews on the planet and kill them, so that in the future there would be no more Jews at all.

Nazi propaganda portrayed this people as swarming, disease-ridden rats. Hitler likened them to gigantic microbes capable of imitating the appearance and behavior of human beings. Hitler thought he was saving not only Germany but Die Ganze Welt.

But long before Der Fuehrer wanted to exterminate the entire Jewish people, Pharaoh in Egypt did too. His was the first genocidal plan in Jewish history. The Patriarch Jacob had come into Egypt with a party of 70 family members. More than a century later, they had grown to over a million Hebrews, which frightened Pharaoh. They were far more fertile than his own people, for Egyptians were as sexually grotesque as the Greeks and Romans.

The Hebrews were also talented and intelligent, and he rightly feared them taking over the country.

His strategy: As a way to reduce their birth rate, he would burden them with hard labor, wear out the men so they had no strength for relations with their wives. But when that did not work out, he called for all male Jewish baby boys to be drowned in the Nile. This was the first attempted genocide.

Then came the Assyrians who kidnapped ten of the twelve tribes, likely thinking this would kill off the Israelites.

Then came the Babylonians who destroyed the Temple thinking the Jews would lose their religion and therefore their identity, as they carried off many of their leaders to Babylon.

Then there were the Persians who wanted to kill all the Jews in their vast empire of 127 countries; then came the Greeks who wanted to kill off the Jews via assimilation; and the second war with Rome ended with the great dispersion and Rome’s changing the name of Judea — that they themselves had used for two centuries — to Palaestina, and changing Jerusalem to Aelia Capitolina in an effort to expunge even the memory of Jews from history.

The Czarist Russians kidnapped Jewish boys into the army for terms of 25 years, keeping them away from Jewish life; then the Communist Russians were determined to exterminate all religions as the opiate of the masses.

So, Israel does itself no favor by calling the Armenian horror genocide that contributes to the further corruption of this word. There is no evidence the Turks wanted to kill all the Armenians in the world, and therefore their cruelty was not genocide.

Only Jews are targets for that.

PHANTOM NATION: Inventing the “Palestinians” as the Obstacle to Peace is available at Amazon.com in hard cover or a Kindle ebook. His podcasts can be heard on www.phantom-nation.com and www.israelnewstalkradio.com