Wednesday, February 28, 2007

History lesson

[from the Turkish daily Hurriyet]

“If we had all been able to say, ‘We are all Jewish’, there would have been no Hitler”

Speaking at a conference about coming to term with the past, Aleida Assman of Konstanz University in Germany said that the lessons and spirit of Hrant Dink, the Turkish-Armenian journalist who was felled by a sniper’s bullet last month, lived on.

“We still hear his voice, and aim for his beliefs to continue to exist,” she told attendees at the “From the Burden of the Past to Societal Peace and Democracy” international conference at Bilgi University in Istanbul.

Drawing attention to the “We are all Armenian” slogan carried by those attending Hrant Dink’s funeral in Istanbul, Assman said that “synagogues, homes and goods belonging to the Jewish minority were ransacked in Germany in 1938. If we had been able to say, “We are all Jewish,” would Hitler have been able to do this?”

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