Part of the Series
Struggle and Solidarity: Writing Toward Palestinian Liberation
New York City Mayor Eric Adams is facing a sweeping indictment on federal corruption charges accusing him of taking bribes, committing fraud and soliciting illegal foreign campaign donations. The charges, which involve a long-running conspiracy with Turkish officials, allege that Adams accepted lavish gifts and campaign contributions in exchange for political favors, including fast-tracked approvals for a Turkish consulate in Manhattan and other benefits that served Turkish government interests.
But let’s be clear: While media outlets run wall-to-wall coverage about Adams pressuring the fire department to approve a Turkish consulate that wasn’t up to code, they have given little attention to one of his most egregious and immoral actions: Adams’s alleged promise to remain silent about Turkey’s genocide of Armenians.
For me, this issue is neither obscure nor distant: As someone of both African American and Armenian heritage, I experience the violence and betrayal of Adams’s decision to paper over this genocide as visceral and immediate.
The federal indictment against Adams states:
On April 21, 2022, the Turkish official messaged the Adams staffer, noting that Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day was approaching, and repeatedly asked the Adams staffer for assurances that Adams would not make any statement about the Armenian Genocide…. The Adams staffer confirmed that Adams would not make a statement about the Armenian Genocide. Adams did not make such a statement.
This isn’t an abstract issue for me. My great-grandfather on my mother’s side, Ardash Hagopian, was out of the country when the Armenian genocide — known as the Medz Yeghern, an Armenian phrase meaning “Great Catastrophe” — began in 1915. When he returned, he discovered that most of his family had been massacred. On April 24, 1915, Armenian intellectuals were arrested in what is now called Red Sunday, marking the start of the systematic extermination of Armenians by the Ottoman Empire, the predecessor of modern-day Turkey.
The Ottoman government carried out widespread deportations and mass killings that ultimately took the lives of an estimated 1.5 million Armenians. Many Armenians were forced into death marches through the Syrian desert without food, water or shelter. Thousands died of starvation, exhaustion or exposure, while others were brutally executed. Women and children were also often subjected to horrific violence, including rape and abduction, and men were either killed or sent to labor camps. The goal was to erase the Armenian presence from the empire entirely. In their book, Survivors: An Oral History of the Armenian Genocide, Donald E. Miller and Lorna Touryan Miller document one survivor recalling:
When we were going to the village, the road on both sides was filled with dead bodies. I have seen with my own eyes thousands of dead bodies.… It was so bad that it began to stink everywhere, so that they [the Turks] gathered up all the corpses and burned them by pouring kerosene on them.
As a Black Armenian, I find Adams’s genocide denial to be a particularly profound betrayal. My ancestors on my father’s side survived the Maafa — a Swahili word meaning “Great Disaster,” which refers to the genocide of the trans-Atlantic slave trade that caused the deaths of millions of Africans.
As New York City’s second Black mayor, Adams surely understands the weight of historical atrocities like slavery, making it especially painful to see him use his power and authority to deny the genocide of another people.
The denial of the Armenian genocide has not only erased the historical suffering of Armenians, but it has also contributed to their ongoing plight — as the recent ethnic cleansing of Armenians from the Republic of Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabakh) demonstrates.
In the fall of 2023, Azerbaijan killed hundreds of Armenians in Artsakh and forcibly displaced 120,000, nearly the entire Armenian population of the Republic — an action made possible in part by military aid from Israel. This mass killing was only registered as a blip in U.S. news despite the scale of the violence.
It’s troubling that just months before this tragic displacement, a former New York City mayoral aide involved in Adams’s administration got a free trip to Azerbaijan, funded by its government. This aide, whose home was raided by federal agents, had direct ties to the Azerbaijani and Turkish governments. The close relationship between Adams’s administration and these foreign governments raises serious questions about how his broader alliances appear to prioritize strategic interests over Armenians’ human rights.
As contemptable as Adams’s genocide denial is, it hardly makes him unique. In fact, it places him squarely within a long U.S. tradition that began with the nation’s efforts to erase its own culpability in the killing of millions of Indigenous and African people. In addition, it took the U.S. over a century to officially recognize the Armenian genocide, finally doing so in 2021 — long after many other nations had made the acknowledgment. The delay wasn’t due to a lack of historical evidence but rather due to the U.S.’s strategic alliance with Turkey, a key player in the oil-rich Middle East.
The denial of the Armenian genocide has not only erased the historical suffering of Armenians, but it has also contributed to their ongoing plight.
Turkish lobbying groups have played an aggressive role in influencing U.S. policy to deny or downplay the Armenian genocide. As Julien Zarifian wrote in The United States and the Armenian Genocide: History, Memory, Politics, “Modern Turkish lobbying has been led mostly by two organizations: The Turkish Coalition of America (TCA) and the Assembly of Turkish American Associations (ATAA)…. Overall, this diverse and often well-coordinated Turkish lobbying … played a significant role in nonrecognition of the Armenian Genocide by the United States.”
These and other lobbying groups have spent millions of dollars to pressure politicians to support Turkish interests and build campaigns to ensure the official narrative remains one of denial — and they were so effective because the U.S. already had a strategic interest in using Turkey to help protect its geostrategic interests, including access to oil.
This pattern of erasure extends well beyond the Armenian genocide. In the U.S. today, we are witnessing a similar campaign to erase or distort the truth about Black history and the histories of other people of color by attacking what the right wing has inaccurately labeled critical race theory. Astoundingly, these laws, which seek to restrict honest education on the history of systemic racism in the U.S., now affect nearly half of all public school students. In 2023 — not in 1823 or 1923 — the Florida State Board of Education imposed state standards asserting slavery was of “personal benefit” to Black people. Policy makers around the country have banned thousands of books dealing with issues of race, gender and sexuality, further limiting students’ access to a full and honest account of history — and the American Library Association reports that the number of banned books is at an all-time high. Teachers who refuse to lie to children and are teaching the truth about the history of racism in the U.S. are increasingly under attack. There has been a particularly intense targeting of educators who allow classroom discussion of Israel’s current genocide in Gaza.
Today, alongside Turkey, Israel remains one of the few countries that continue to deny the Armenian genocide. The bitter irony of Israel’s refusal to recognize the Armenian genocide is that this atrocity was the very precedent Adolf Hitler cited when planning the Holocaust, which resulted in the murder of some 6 million Jewish people. In a chilling speech to his military commanders before the invasion of Poland in 1939, Hitler infamously remarked, “Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?” Hitler’s statement should remind us that the world’s failure to hold perpetrators accountable for the Armenian genocide emboldened the Nazi regime to carry out its own genocidal atrocities against Jewish people. Given this history, Israel’s continued denial of the Armenian genocide is especially troubling.
Adams’s silence on the Armenian genocide mirrors his refusal to condemn Israel’s genocide in Gaza or call for a ceasefire. Instead, Adams has voiced unwavering support for Israel, even as human rights organizations, international bodies, and over 800 scholars and genocide experts warn that Israel’s military actions in Gaza — including mass killings, bombing schools and the destruction of civilian infrastructure — meet the legal threshold for genocide under international law. “We have an unbreakable bond, New York and Israel, and we’re going to continue to build on that,” Adams once said. “And I am blessed to continue to do so as the mayor.”
In May, a WhatsApp chat between several billionaires and business titans — including former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz; Dell founder and CEO Michael Dell; and Joshua Kushner, brother of Jared Kushner — was leaked, showing they pressured Adams to crack down on pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia University. Students had occupied Hamilton Hall and renamed it Hind’s Hall in honor of Hind Rajab, a 6-year-old Palestinian girl who was viciously killed by Israeli military forces in Gaza earlier that year. A member of the WhatsApp group informed The Washington Post that he had contributed $2,100, the maximum allowable amount under the law, to Adams that month.
As reported by The Washington Post, “Four days after chat members held the video call with Adams, student protesters occupied a campus building and Columbia’s president invited police back to campus to clear the building. Officers removed and arrested dozens of protesters, pushing, striking and dragging students in the process.”
Adams’s cracking down on students protesting the genocide in Gaza — in accordance with billionaire Zionists’ wishes — and accepting money from Turkey to deny the Armenian genocide demonstrate a disturbing willingness to prioritize political and financial alliances over human rights and historical truths.
The federal indictment against Adams reveals just how far the efforts to hide inconvenient truths can go. In March 2019, an Adams staffer was exchanging text messages with him about a potential trip to Turkey when the staffer instructed, “Please delete all messages you send me,” according to the indictment. Adams casually responded, “Always do,” the indictment says. This act of erasing evidence mirrors his broader comfort with concealing uncomfortable truths — whether it’s political corruption or denying genocides and historical atrocities when it serves his interests. This casual attitude toward erasing records is a microcosm of the larger attempts to erase or deny histories that people find uncomfortable.
Judith Herman, the renowned psychiatrist and trauma expert, writes in her book Trauma and Recovery, “The ordinary response to atrocities is to banish them from consciousness. Certain violations of the social compact are too terrible to utter aloud: this is the meaning of the word unspeakable.”
Herman’s insight helps explain why societies often deny or downplay genocide and other atrocities. The sheer horror of these events makes them difficult to confront, but Herman also recognizes the danger of such denial. She continues: “Atrocities, however, refuse to be buried. Equally as powerful as the desire to deny atrocities is the conviction that denial does not work.”
Today, alongside Turkey, Israel remains one of the few countries that continue to deny the Armenian genocide.
The history of the Armenian genocide, the Holocaust, the genocide against Native Americans, the trans-Atlantic slave trade and the ongoing violence in Gaza are all connected by a common thread of disremembering history and the refusal to confront uncomfortable truths. While Adams’s reckless acceptance of bribes might make headlines, his denial of the Armenian genocide and the genocide in Gaza — his most significant moral crimes — are not unusual positions among U.S. politicians. These officials, at the behest of billionaires, are eager to deny genocides abroad because they fear that the spotlight on those atrocities could swivel around and shine bright on the U.S.’s brutal legacy of displacement, ethnic cleansing and genocide.
Zabel Yesayan, a writer, activist and organizer in the Alliance Universelle des Femmes pour la Paix par l’Education (International Alliance of Women for Peace Through Education), was the only woman on the list of Armenian intellectuals targeted for arrest and deportation by the Ottoman government when the genocide started; yet she managed to escape to Bulgaria and survive. In her book titled, In the Ruins — which documents the devastation she witnessed when thousands of Armenians were killed by Ottoman forces in 1909 in the Adana region of modern-day Turkey, which was a prelude to the Armenian genocide — Yesayan writes, “It is essential … that all of us see our bleeding country in its true colours, that we learn to take a hard, courageous look at it.”
As Yesayan told us, it is essential that we see. We must remember. We must speak the truth. And we must hold accountable those who seek to bury the past in order to avoid reckoning with the present. While it’s Eric Adams who faces indictment, the truth is the entire political system should be indicted — for banning honest history from schools in the U.S. and for bombing schools in Gaza.
It is only by confronting these truths that we can break the cycle of violence and denial, and begin the work of healing and justice.