April 24 marks the 100th anniversary of a genocide of which few people are aware, and President Obama would rather be overlooked.

It is the anniversary of the Armenian genocide where about 1.5 million Armenians, along with some Greeks and Assyrians, were annihilated by the Turks. If their story is unfamiliar to you, it was unfamiliar to me as well until a few years ago, when a dear friend — Armenian on her mother’s side — introduced me to it. Her grandparents had emigrated to the United States after fleeing the holocaust in Armenia. She commemorates Armenian Remembrance Day on April 24, and, like many other Armenian-Americans, the wounds of that horrendous time run deep, just as with Jews who remember their Holocaust of decades later.

https://youtu.be/zt52dcrFO4A

The tale is achingly familiar to anyone following the rise of ISIS in the Middle East. In 1914 the Turkish Ottoman Empire, allied with Germany in World War I, sought to establish a Muslim caliphate across southern Europe to Asia. Standing in the way were the Christian Armenians, many of whom were living as a prosperous minority in Turkey. On the night of April 24, 1915, about 250 Armenian intellectuals were arrested by the Turks, with 2000 later arrested. They were tortured and slaughtered. Their women and children were driven in the desert to perish, either at the hands of the Turks or by starvation.