Obama's BFF Erdogan's Government Preventing Smithsonian Institution From Displaying Armenian Genocide-era Artwork?

Overwhelming proof and info can be seen here.

Obama's BFF Erdogan's Government Preventing Smithsonian Institution From Displaying Armenian Genocide-era Artwork?HT: AINA.

Turkey has reportedly pressured the Obama Administration into forcing the Smithsonian Institution to cancel an official display of the historic Genocide-era "Armenian Orphan Rug." The ANCA is deeply troubled that foreign interference, from Ankara, appears to be preventing the Smithsonian from displaying this historic Genocide-era artwork.

"We hope and expect that our government will, as a matter of principle, reject foreign efforts to censor how Americans view a truly pivotal chapter in the history of America's emergence in the early 20th Century - notably during the Armenian Genocide - as an international humanitarian power," said ANCA Executive Director Aram Hamparian. "Any barriers to the display of the Armenian Orphan Rug should be removed, and this important piece of artwork made available to the American public."

In an article in The Washington Post, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Philip Kennicott says: "If you can read a carpet's cues, the plants and animals depicted on the rug may represent the Garden of Eden, which is about as far removed as possible from the rug's origins in the horrific events of 1915, when the fracturing and senescent Ottoman Empire began a murderous campaign against its Armenian population. Between 1 million and 1.5 million people were killed or died of starvation, and others were uprooted from their homes in what has been termed the first modern and systematic genocide. Many were left orphans, including the more than 100,000 children who were assisted by the U.S.-sponsored Near East Relief organization, which helped relocate and protect the girls who wove the "orphan rug." It was made in the town of Ghazir, now in Lebanon, as thanks for the United States' assistance during the genocide."

"There was hope that the carpet, which has been in storage for almost 20 years, might be displayed Dec. 16 as part of a Smithsonian event that would include a book launch for Hagop Martin Deranian's "President Calvin Coolidge and the Armenian Orphan Rug."

But on Sept. 12, the Smithsonian scholar who helped organize the event canceled it, citing the White House's decision not to loan the carpet. In a letter to two Armenian American organizations, Paul Michael Taylor, director of the institution's Asian cultural history program, had no explanation for the White House's refusal to allow the rug to be seen and said that efforts by the U.S. ambassador to Armenia, John A. Heffern, to intervene had also been unavailing," Kennicott says in the article titled "Armenian 'Orphan Rug' is in White House Storage, as Unseen as Genocide is Neglected."

"Although Taylor, Heffern and the White House curator, William G. Allman, had discussed during a January meeting the possibility of an event that might include the rug, it became clear that the rug wasn't going to emerge from deep hiding.

This week I spoke again with the White House curator asking if there was any indication of when a loan might be possible again but he has none," wrote Taylor in the letter. Efforts to contact Heffern through the embassy in the Armenian capital of Yerevan were unsuccessful, and the State Department referred all questions to the White House.

Last week, the White House issued a statement: "The Ghazir rug is a reminder of the close relationship between the peoples of Armenia and the United States. We regret that it is not possible to loan it out at this time."

That leaves the rug, and the sponsors of the event, in limbo, a familiar place for Armenians.

Neither Ara Ghazarians of the Armenian Cultural Foundation nor Levon Der Bedrossian of the Armenian Rugs Society can be sure if the event they had helped plan was canceled for the usual political reason: fear of negative reaction from Turkey, which has resolutely resisted labeling the events at the end of the Ottoman Empire a genocide. But both suspect it might have been."

Hamparian says the president has had "a very negative reception across the board in the Armenian world, and that includes both Democrats and Republicans." The principal emotion is profound disappointment. 

As a candidate, and senator, Obama spoke eloquently about the Armenian genocide, risking the ire of Turkey and Turkish organizations. But since taking office, says Hamparian, Obama has avoided the word, making more general statements about Armenian suffering. Critics of his silence point to the geopolitical importance of Turkey in a region made only more complex by the Arab Spring and a brutal civil war in Syria.

A still frame from the 1919 documentary film Auction of Souls, which portrayed eye witnessed events from the Armenian Genocide, including crucified Christian girls.

Documentation about the Armenian genocide in 1915 which Turkey denies down to the present day.

The documentation is based on reports of, amongst others, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Berlin, the American National Archives, the Library of Congress and archives in France, Denmark, Sweden, Armenia, Russia and Turkey.

These documents, hidden for a long time in order not to harm Turkey, leave absolutely no room for doubt about the reality of the Armenian genocide.

Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan's most memorable quotes on Genocide:

"It is not possible for those who belong to the Muslim faith to carry out genocide." Source

"We did not commit a crime, therefore we do not need to apologise." - on the Armenian genocide. Source 

"If their historians have claims our historians also have claims,"

Armenian Genocide denial

Some countries, including Argentina, Armenia, Slovakia,^[118] Slovenia, Switzerland^[118] and Uruguay have adopted laws that punish genocide denial. In October 2006, the French National Assembly, despite the opposition of foreign minister Philippe Douste-Blazy,^[119] passed a bill which if approved by the Senate and signed into law, will make Armenian Genocide denial a crime.^[120] On October 7, 2011 French President Nicolas Sarkozy said that Turkey's refusal to recognize the genocide would force France to make such denials a criminal offense.^[121][122] On December 22, 2011, the lower house of the French legislature approved a bill making it a crime (punishable by a year in prison and a fine of 45,000 euros) to publicly deny as genocide the killing of Armenians by troops of Turkey's former Ottoman Empire.^[123] On January 23, 2012, the French Senate adopted the law, which criminalizes the denial of genocides, including the Armenian Genocide in France.^[124] However, on February 28, 2012, the Constitutional Council of France invalidated the law, stating, among other things, that it curbs freedom of speech.^[125] After that the French President Sarkozy has called on his cabinet to draft new legislation to punish those who deny that the mass killing of Armenians by Ottoman troops is a genocide.^[126]

Issues regarding deniers

The first person convicted in a court of law for denying the Armenian genocide is Turkish politician Doğu Perinçek, found guilty of racial discrimination by a Swiss district court in Lausanne in March 2007. Perinçek appealed the verdict. After the court's decision, he said, "I defend my right to freedom of expression." "I have not denied genocide because there was no genocide," he argued. Ferai Tinç, a foreign affairs columnist with Turkey's Hürriyet newspaper, added, "we find these type of [penal] articles against freedom of opinion dangerous because we are struggling in our country to achieve freedom of thought."^[127] In December 2007, the Swiss Federal Court confirmed the sentence given to Perinçek.^[128]
In October, 2008 the Swiss court ruled that three Turks were guilty of racial discrimination after having claimed that the Armenian Genocide was an "international lie." The European representative of the Party of Turkish Workers, Ali Mercan, was sentenced to pay a fine of 4,500 Swiss francs ($3,900), two others were ordered to pay 3,600 Swiss francs.^[129] In October 2010, the Swiss Federal Court confirmed the verdict.^[130]
In November 1993 American historian Bernard Lewis said in an interview that calling the massacres committed by the Turks in 1915 a genocide was just "the Armenian version of this history".^[131] In a 1995 civil proceeding a French court censured his remarks as a denial of the Armenian Genocide and fined him one franc, as well as ordering the publication of the judgment at Lewis' cost in Le Monde.^[132] The court ruled that while Lewis has the right to his views, they did damage to a third party and that "it is only by hiding elements which go against his thesis that the defendant was able to state that there was no 'serious proof' of the Armenian Genocide; consequently, he failed in his duties of objectivity and prudence by expressing himself without qualification on such a sensitive subject".^[132]