Ahhhnold enrages Turks with genocide comments

[Bluebear]

ANKARA, Turkey -- A Turkish group uniting hundreds of businesses and organizations demanded Tuesday that Arnold Schwarzenegger's movies be banned from Turkish television to protest the California governor's use of the term "genocide' to describe the massacre of Armenians by Turks during World War I.

Schwarzenegger declared April 24 a "Day of Remembrance of the Armenian Genocide.' California has one of the largest populations of diaspora Armenians.

Other California governors have issued annual proclamations referring to the killings as a genocide, but last week Schwarzenegger also signed legislation to permanently mark the day.

Margita Thompson, Schwarzenegger's spokeswoman, said the governor's proclamation speaks for itself. The boycott of his movies was a freedom of expression and his office was not going to comment on it, she said.

http://www.presstelegram.com/Stories/0,1413,204~21474~2837453,00.html

[Kerrytravelers]

1. He's just going for the Armenian vote. There is a very large CA Amren. pop

[rniel]

2. That picture looks like

Maria Shriver has a pair of plyers applied to his lower anatomy.

[MisterP]

17. he looks like a putrefying corpse!

[enki23]

3. woah...

i *knew* somebody'd come out with another tolkein movie. love the new orc design. what's this one gonna be, silmarillion?

[Don Claybrook]

4. Of all the idiotic things he has said

...I don't think this is one of them. Why is this Turkish group protesting Schwarzenegger's comments? Would they feel morally superior if they could call it mass murder instead of genocide?

[Bluebear]

8. Indeed.

The comments I have read question why a California governor is involving himself in this and given he refused to repudiate Waldheim etc etc etc.

[eissa]

5. Good for Arnold

I'm serious, too. I didn't vote for him and never liked him, but he was right on in using the proper term "genocide" in referring to the atrocities committed against the Armenians (and Assyrians and Pontic Greeks) by the Turks. This gesture is way overdue.

[Dutch]

6. Arnold is 100% in the right here

Good for him- the groups attacking him are contemptable.

[Inland]

7. Even a broken clock is right twice a day.

Genocide is the right word.

[Fenris]

9. Wow, he's right about something.

[pnorman]

10. Ahnold is every bit the opportunististic hypocrite

that we all know him to be. But the term "genocide" is perfectly correct. Here's a related DU thread: http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=102x1426039

By knee-jerk rejection of ANYTHING he says, we may end up by looking like idiots, and Ahnold will be smelling like a rose.

pnorman

[Bluebear]

13. I'm not kneejerk rejecting it

News presented without comment. People are asking though why he wouldn't repudiate Waldheim and a bunch o' Nazis though.

[Cuban_Liberal]

11. Ahhhnold is absolutely right, for a change.

'Genocide' is indeed the proper description.

[kenny blankenship]

12. pot meet kettle.

--Jah, jah dee problem mit dem Turks is all their indiscriminate killings!

(Somehow it just seems well, odd, coming from a guy who's the son of a Nazi Brownshirt stormtrooper and who has made his mint on movies with mass killing in them to be criticizing another ethnicity for genocide.)

[Megami Kitsune]

14. good reason to keep Turkiye out of the EU

Turkey wonders why most Europeans do not want it in the EU. They say its Islamophobia (more persecution of 'people of faith' by those intolerant of intolerance), but the societal and politcal immaturity in Turksish inability to admit the crimes of the past is more than enough to keep them out of a progressive and fragile politcal experiment.

[Dutch]

15. Tend to agree- would they have let Germany in

if their government denied the holocaust?

[eissa]

16. Absolutely agree

I haven't forgotten what happened to my grandparents and in-laws, and my husband and I have already passed those stories on to our children. Unless Turkey -- and any other country that engages in such horrific behavior -- admits to what it has done, they and others are doomed to repeat it:

"I have issued the command — and I'll have anybody who utters but one word of criticism executed by a firing squad — that our war aim does not consist in reaching certain lines, but in the physical destruction of the enemy. Accordingly, I have placed my death-head formations in readiness — for the present only in the East — with orders to them to send to death mercilessly and without compassion, men, women, and children of Polish derivation and language. Only thus shall we gain the living space (Lebensraum) which we need. Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?"

Adolf Hitler

[Kerrytravelers]

18. I will certainly conceed that Turkey did committ genocide against Armenia.

And, in the capacity of governor, he is right to call them on it and make an official notice of such event.

My only distrust is in Ah-nald himself. He is really doing poorly in the poll numbers. There is a large Armenian population in CA. I just made a connection without any facts to back me up. However, if this was such an important issue, why didn't he do it before? His poll numbers were higher then.

I am being a bit cyncial, aren't I?