The Chairmen of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the House Foreign Affairs Committee - the two powerful Congressional panels with oversight over U.S. foreign policy - joined with their colleagues on the evening of April 24th on Capitol Hill in rallying bipartisan support for a truthful and just resolution of the Armenian Genocide, reported the Armenian National Committee of America (ANCA).

In moving remarks, Chairman Menendez stressed that there should not be any verbal equivocation when dealing with genocide: "So let’s be perfectly clear, there is no other word for it; there is no euphemism; there is no avoiding it; there are no excuses.  As part of this commemoration we must fully commit ourselves to acknowledging the fundamental truth that what happened from 1915-1923 was by definition a blatant act of genocide - an acknowledgement that must come from Turkey, and it must come from our own government."

Chairman Royce reviewed how Ottoman Turkish authorities made no effort, at the time of the Genocide, to hide their intent to destroy the Armenian people: “The events that we remember today, that commenced 98 years ago is not only still today – shocking – the genocide, or as Hitler said the annihilation. [. . .] An attempt to annihilate an entire race, in which the American Ambassador Henry Morgenthau was present at the time – an observer – and said that these deportations were an attempt to annihilate a race and that those who gave the orders understood it.  And that far from trying to conceal it, they shared with him, what indeed would be the outcome.”