U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committe Passes Armenian Genocide Resolution

I'll never forget this day! How monumental is this? Sitting in California unable to watch the House Foreign Affairs Committee meeting I had my father calling me from Armenia to provide periodic updates since he was able to watch the session live. I can't even begin to express how I'm feeling right now, I'm happy, proud, relieved, ecstatic, encouraged, hopeful.....Finally, our efforts weren't in vain. Finally, a president didn't succeed in shooting this resolution down. I must say that as a Clinton supporter I was disappointed in him, but I expected it from Bush and it feels SO GOOD seeing his efforts to stop this resolution from passing fail. I want to find the 27 members of the committee who voted and shake their hands. I want to thank them for not buying into the threats Turkey made and for not allowing themselves or their ethics to be bought by the Turkish lobby, for not bending over and being Turkey's puppets.

The resolution will now go on to a full house vote. Here is the official ANCA press release about today's events. http://www.anca.org/press_releases/press_releases.php?prid=1312

Turkey spent so much money in their efforts to get this resolution to NOT pass. They lobbied their little Turkish hearts out and threw out threat after threat to no avail. They have been threatening to close the Turkish/Iraqi border to the U.S. I keep telling everyone that these are all empty threats. Turkey can not afford to lose the U.S. as an ally therefore their empty threats shouldn't have been taken seriously and I'm glad our politicians called their bluff!

Turkey's threats will prove to be detrimental to their public image. Their threats just go to show that they weren't allowing their NATO ally to use the border because it was the right thing to do, they were only doing so only to later use their cooperation as a political bargaining tool. This just shows their true colors. Turkey will probably use this Genocide resolution passage as an excuse to shew out the U.S. from the region so they can deal with their Kurdish issue the same way they dealt with their Armenian issue back in 1915, but I don't think that will be feasible with so much public attention on them now.

It's going to be VERY interesting to see how this all plays out. Will Turkey close the border? Will Turkey take advantage of this situation and attempt to cleanse Norther Iraq of Kurds? Will the Resolution pass when it goes to a full house vote?

Politics..... gotta love it!