Community Commentary:

The current Turkish government claims that Armenian deaths were the result of civil war, as in the Turks against the Armenians. Right, guys? Talk about insulting your audience’s intelligence!

And then there are those who say you can’t call the Armenian Massacre “genocide” because the word didn’t exist until 1943 (never mind that law professor Raphael Lemkin said he coined the term with the Armenian experience in mind).

That semantic sleight of hand is worthy of the people who write ballot propositions. Whatever you call it, Adolf Hitler said that he could exterminate the Jews because nobody remembered the Armenians. Don’t expect the American government to make any serious attempts to get the current Turkish government to admit or address the Armenian Genocide. It’s not just because of whatever strategic value Turkey has as a NATO ally.

If our government leaned seriously on Turkey, they’d have to admit that the historical policy toward the American Indians, from the Trail of Tears to the whole “the only good one’s a dead one” attitude was genocidal by definition — even if we didn’t have a convenient word to describe it before 1943.

And that’s not likely to happen in anybody’s lifetime.

 RAYE A. RHOADS is a Glendale resident.