The authoritative American publication The Washington Post has addressed the public use of the term “Armenian Genocide” by White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany during her press briefing on 6 July. McEnany had stated that a monument to the Armenian Genocide had been vandalised in the United States.
The publication notes that the term uttered by the press secretary is significant in that the US government has for decades refused to recognise the events that took place at the beginning of the 20th century.
“Trump’s close ally, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, would presumably not be pleased about that,” wrote the article’s author, Aaron Blake, stressing that alongside the denialist policy the United States has pursued for decades on the Armenian Genocide, the White House, though unintentionally, invoked the term “genocide.”
The author observed that in the course of condemning the actions of protesters defiling monuments across the country, the White House press secretary called the Armenian Genocide memorial by its “proper name.”
The article also states that the White House press secretary’s words “created an awkward situation for the current administration, which, like its predecessors, has conspicuously avoided the use of the term ‘genocide.'”
The author recalls that the United States has for many years refused to recognise the Armenian Genocide because of its strategic alliance with Turkey in the Middle East.
Quoting Republican Senator Lindsey Graham’s words that “recognition of the genocide is politically very dangerous,” the author noted that “the White House will surely insist that McEnany was simply calling the monument by its name,” yet this incident was nonetheless momentous, since for many years the use of that term from official White House lips had been forbidden.
