It is a historical fact that since around 1915 the Ottoman Empire has exterminated hundreds of thousands of innocent Armenians. This was part of an ethnic cleansing program and the desire of Turkish Muslim leaders to get rid of Christian Armenians, said Professor Alan Dershowitz in his Newsweek article. 

There is some disagreement about the exact number of Armenians killed, ranging from about 600,000 to twice that number.  There is also some debate about the causes of this atrocity, especially about the role of World War I. But no honest person can dispute the basic facts: namely, the Ottoman authorities decided to exterminate and/or expel the Armenians, and this was implemented mainly by the military, he noted.

According to him, They did this by threats, extortion and bribery. These tactics worked for many years. Hitler reportedly used the Armenian genocide in 1939 as an excuse to assure the German people that the world would not react to his planned genocide against the Jews.

Ken Burns' recent documentary on the Holocaust suggests that Hitler was probably right. Between 1939 and 1945, six million Jews--babies, children, women, old people, men in the prime of life--were murdered in gas chambers, shootings, and pogroms orchestrated by the Nazis, involving local Ukrainians, Poles, Hungarians, Latvians, Lithuanians, Estonians, and others. Although memorials were built after the end to commemorate this unimaginable tragedy while it was taking place, most of the world, including the United States, Canada, and Great Britain, did worse than if they had done nothing: they deliberately and deliberately closed their doors to Jews trying to escape Nazi barbarism.

In some respects Hitler won at least one of the two wars he started in 1939. He lost the war of conquest and Germanic expansion, but he won the war on the Jews. He said he would kill the Jews of Europe and Germany would become richer and more powerful. Both of these predictions came true. He killed two-thirds of the Jews of Europe, and after the war and the Marshall Plan, Germany became the richest and most powerful country in Europe.

Would all this have happened if the Turkish government had been held accountable for the genocide it committed against the Armenian people? We will never know the answer to this haunting question. But we do know that the world's response to genocides has been weak at best. Turkey paid little or no price for its massacres. Nor did Germany, despite its avarice and minimal economic reparations.

In Germany, relatively few high-ranking Nazi officials were prosecuted and convicted. Several were executed. Many of the prisoners were soon released by the American high commissioner in Germany, an anti-Semite named John McCloy, who loved Germany as much as he disliked the Jews. Most of those released went through a whitewashing called denazification.

After the Holocaust was exposed after World War II, the world promised, "Never again." But since then we have seen mass murder, including genocide, over and over and over again. The international community condemns the perpetrators and sympathizes with the victims, but does almost nothing to prevent these massacres.

The Armenian genocide was not the first time in human history that massacres have been committed against an ethnic or religious group. Khmelnitsky's massacre in 1648 in Ukraine was not only not condemned but extolled. His statue survives near the center of Kiev. The Kiev government awarded several Ukrainian Nazi leaders directly involved in the Holocaust.

Any tyrant contemplating the future of genocide now will look back on this sordid history and conclude that the international community will do little or nothing to prevent or even punish those who commit such atrocities. The United Nations has devoted more time to condemning Israel for its carefully planned defensive wars than it has to condemning the unjustifiable massacres in Africa and Asia.

Anyone who denies the Armenian Genocide should be counted among the deniers along with those who deny the Holocaust. All genocide deniers increase the likelihood of future genocides.