Humanity and Tolerance: #Save Kessab Campaign

This last week, there has been a storm of articles about another massacre that is taking place against the Christian Armenians in the historic town of Kessab in Syria. People on Facebook, Twitter, Blogs, and other social media have cried out against the atrocities committed by the Muslims against the Christian Armenians, while a few are downplaying the actual occurrence as being an uprising that happened to drive the Armenians out of Kessab. Non -Armenians may wonder why this has even made the news. There are many reasons why it is important to stop the atrocities that have occurred and are continuing to occur in Syria and Kessab against the Armenians. The most important reason is that we need to live in a world that is civil and humane. One that is tolerant to the beliefs of everyone.

Several years ago, I had lunch with a Turkish woman who was an elementary school teacher in Turkey. I asked her why Turkey does not recognize and apologize for the 1915 Genocide of the Armenians, just like Germany had for the Jewish Holocaust. Her answer was pretty blunt. She claimed that there was no Genocide and that the Turkish history books had not recorded it as having occurred during the Ottoman Empire. Reasoning with her was impossible. How can history be so easily erased when there are so many Armenians that lived through and recounted the torture and massacre of an entire race? So many countries, such as France, have recognized the Armenian Genocide of 1915, and, yet, this school teacher refused to admit that it had ever existed.

In Kessab, an entire town fled and many Armenians were tortured and killed for being Christian. When will our society become tolerant of all kinds of people, whether it be racial, religious, or those with disabilities? We are all one in the same. No one person is better than another. We all need to live in unison. This world was meant for all to enjoy, not just a segregated few. Many have fought for the equality of people, such Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Nelson Mandela. As a society, we must take it a step further and strive for the equality of all men and women regardless of their race, religion, disability, or anything. We need to become one as a community and stop any genocide from ever occurring again… anywhere.