Robert Fisk about George Bush: Turkey transformed the lion into a lamb

“How are the mighty fallen! President George Bush, the crusader king who would draw the sword against the forces of Darkness and Evil, he who said there was only "them or us", who would carry on, he claimed, an eternal conflict against "world terror" on our behalf; he turns out, well, to be a wimp. A clutch of Turkish generals and a multimillion-dollar public relations campaign on behalf of Turkish Holocaust deniers have transformed the lion into a lamb. No, not even a lamb for this animal is, by its nature, a symbol of innocence but into a household mouse, a little diminutive creature which, seen from afar, can even be confused with a rat. Am I going too far? I think not,” renowned British journalist Robert Fisk writes in The Independent. “The "story so far" is familiar enough. In 1915, the Ottoman Turkish authorities carried out the systematic genocide of one and a half million Christian Armenians. There are photographs, diplomatic reports, original Ottoman documentation, the process of an entire post-First World War Ottoman trial, Winston Churchill and Lloyd George and a massive report by the British Foreign Office in 1915 and 1916 to prove that it is all true. Even movie film is now emerging, real archive footage taken by Western military cameramen in the First World War, to show that the first Holocaust of the 20th century, perpetrated in front of German officers who would later perfect its methods in their extermination of six million Jews, was as real as its pitifully few Armenian survivors still claim,” he continues.“But the Turks won’t let us say this. They have blackmailed the Western powers, including our own British Government, and now even the U.S., to kowtow to their shameless denials. These (and I weary that we must repeat them, because every news agency and government does just that through fear of Ankara’s fury) include the canard that the Armenians died in a "civil war", that they were anyway collaborating with Turkey’s Russian enemies, that fewer Armenians were killed than have been claimed, that as many Turkish Muslims were murdered as Armenians.”“Former Representative Robert L Livingston, a Louisiana Republican, has already picked up $12m from the Turks for his company, the Livingston Group, for two previously successful attempts to pervert the cause of moral justice and smother genocide congressional resolutions. He personally escorted Turkish officials to Capitol Hill to threaten U.S. congressmen.” “Who would have thought that the leader of the Western world, he who would protect us against "world terror", would turn out to be the David Irving of the White House?” he resumes.David John Cawdell Irving is an English writer specializing in the military history of World War II. Irving’s status as a historian has been widely discredited as a result of controversy arising from his Holocaust denial and misrepresentation of historical evidence.