Day: November 25, 2013

PanARMENIAN.Net – John Alexander, the Liberal Member for Bennelong, and Michelle Rowland, the Labor Member for Greenway, have both risen in Australia’s Federal Parliament to speak against visiting Armenian Genocide denier, Professor Justin McCarthy.

McCarthy, who is a well funded denier of the Armenian Genocide, earlier this week had two planned events in Sydney and Melbourne cancelled on the grounds of his unwelcome denialist views.

McCarthy spoke in a room at Parliament House on Thursday, Nov 21, at an event attended by reportedly only “two or three politicians” after the Armenian National Committee of Australia (ANC Australia) wrote to all Members of Parliament and Senators about McCarthy’s denialist views. Among the attending politicians were Laurie Ferguson and Mehmet Tillem, who had helped organize the event.

While this event took place, on the same day, MPs Alexander and Rowland made addresses in the national Parliament, unequivocally confirming the historical reality of the Armenian Genocide to a far greater audience of politicians, media and members of the public.

Alexander said: “… revisionist Justin McCarthy has used parliamentary facilities to promote his well-documented views questioning the systematic slaughter of Armenians, Assyrians and Pontian Greeks from 1915 to 1923.”

“The International Association of Genocide Scholars has discredited McCarthy’s work as selective and grossly distorting history. ANZAC soldiers verify the Genocide as an irrefutable historical fact through their eyewitness accounts. Denial of this Genocide is an attack on those who perished, those who survived, and their descendants.”

He added: “This institution should never again be used to express doubt over the scope of suffering experienced by the victims of a historical atrocity nor to justify these actions as merely part of a civil war.”

Rowland, adding her voice, said: “I can also understand the heightened frustration that many Australian-Armenians feel on this matter because of the venue at which this event is scheduled to take place.”

“My views on this are well known. I have joined in the past with members of parliament and community leaders from all sides of the political spectrum including the members for Berowra and Bennelong, and the New South Wales Liberal Minister Gladys Berejiklian, to recognize the Armenian Genocide…”

“Australian POWs recorded the marches, the massacres and the complete destruction of Armenian churches, villages and city quarters. ANZAC servicemen also rescued survivors across the Middle East. Today I acknowledge the tragic events of 1915 and affirm my commitment to never forget what happened to the Armenian people who were effectively eliminated from the homeland they had occupied for nearly 3,000 years.”

She added: “This week I noted a humanitarian plea to assist people in the Philippines who were the victims of natural disaster, and I want to end this speech by noting that Australia’s first major international humanitarian relief effort was in fact to help Armenian orphans from the genocide.”

ANC Australia extended their appreciation to Alexander and Rowland for bringing to light that Armenian Genocide denial, like Holocaust denial, is unacceptable.

Executive Director Vache Kahramanian said: “Mr Alexander and Ms Rowland are champions of human rights and champions of just recognition of the Armenian Genocide. We once again appreciate their support.”

Meanwhile, to ensure the support against Armenian Genocide denialism is truly bi-partisan, Greens spokesman on multiculturalism Richard Di Natale told the Sydney Morning Herald that the event should not have been held in Parliament.

“Justin McCarthy is a rallying point for those who deny the Armenian Genocide,” the Senator said. “The Australian Parliament should not be providing Professor McCarthy with a platform because that just lends legitimacy those views. To deny the fact that genocide occurred is to disrespect those people who lost their lives and to cause further pain for those who lost loved ones.”

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In April of 1915 tens of thousands of Armenian men were rounded up and shot. Hundreds of thousands of women, old men and children were deported south across the mountains to Cilicia and Syria. On April 15 the Armenians appealed to the German Ambassador in Constantinople for formal German protection. This was rejected by Berlin on the grounds that it would offend the Turkish Government. By April 19 more than 50,000 Armenians had been murdered in the Van province.

Within nine months, more than 600,000 Armenians were massacred. Of the deported during that same period, more than 400,000 perished of the brutalities and privations of the southward march into Mesopotamia. By September more than a million Armenians were the victims of what later became known as the Armenian Genocide! A further 200,000 were forcibly converted to Islam to give Armenia a new Turkish sense of identity and strip the Armenian people of their past as the first Christian state in the world.

1914-1920

Aptly named Temple of the Skulls, it was the presence of two niches containing human heads that gave archaeologists the first clue the new discovery from the 14th Century AD was something special.

Set into the west and north walls, each niche also held four femurs stuccoed to the walls around the skulls.

One of the ceramic figurines found in the Temple of Skulls. Photo INAH. Source: Supplied

But it was the red paint that was a giveaway: The position around the mouth resembled images of the god Mictlantecuhtli as found in one of the Codex Borgia  one of the few remaining texts to survive from the pre-Columbus Central American civilisation.

One of the skulls set among femur bones in the walls of the Temple of the Skulls, under excavation in the Tehuacan, Puebla, archaeological site of Mexico. Picture: Instituto Nacional de Antropologa e Historia Source: Supplied

Two ceramic heads and an effigy of the god itself were found on top of the temple mound  along with more than 300 bones. These were the remains of human sacrifices.

The archaeological dig at the Tehuacan, Puebla, site continues. Only 10 per cent of the 116ha city has been uncovered so far.

Archaeologist Ramon Lopez Valenzuela, in the Temple of Skulls. Photo INAH. Source: Supplied

The city was conquered by the Aztecs in 1456, after which the population moved into the surrounding hills and lowlands.

Meanwhile, a monumental stone sculpture to the goddess Citlalicue – a creator goddess whose name means skirt of the stars – also has been uncovered at the foot of another nearby temple, the Templo Mayor.

One of the skulls set among femur bones in the walls of the Temple of the Skulls, under excavation in the Tehuacan, Puebla, archaeological site of Mexico. Picture: Instituto Nacional de Antropologa e Historia Source: Supplied

Page 56 of the Codex Borgia is one of the very few depictions of the ancient Central-Mexican god of death, Mictlantecuhtli. Source: Supplied

Italian archbishop Rino Fisichella holds a box purportedly containing the ashes of St Peter before a ceremony of Solemnity of Our Lord Jesus Christ the King at St Peter’s square. Source: AFP

The nine pieces of bone sat nestled like rings in a jewel box inside a bronze display case on the side of the altar during a Mass commemorating the end of the Vatican’s yearlong celebration of the Christian faith. It was the first time they had ever been exhibited in public.

Pope Francis prayed before the fragments at the start of Sunday’s service and then clutched the case in his arms for several minutes after his homily.

No pope has ever definitively declared the fragments to belong to the Apostle Peter, but Pope Paul VI in 1968 said fragments found in the necropolis under St Peter’s Basilica were “identified in a way that we can consider convincing”.

Some archaeologists dispute the finding.

But last week, a top Vatican official, Archbishop Rino Fisichella, said it almost doesn’t matter if archaeologists one day definitively determine that the bones aren’t Peter’s, saying Christians have prayed at Peter’s tomb for two millennia and will continue to, regardless.

“It’s not as if pilgrims who go to the altar (of Peter’s tomb) think that in that moment in which they profess their faith that below them are the relics of Peter, or of another or another still,” he told reporters. “They go there to profess the faith.”

Pope Francis blesses what are said to be some of the remains of St Peter during a ceremony at the Vatican.

The relics were discovered during excavations begun under St Peter’s Basilica in the years following the 1939 death of Pope Pius XI, who had asked to be buried in the grottoes where dozens of popes are buried, according to the 2012 book by veteran Vatican correspondent Bruno Bartoloni, “The Ears of the Vatican.”

During the excavations, archaeologists discovered a funerary monument with a casket built in honor of Peter and an engraving in Greek that read “Petros eni”, or “Peter is here”.

The scholar of Greek antiquities, Margherita Guarducci, who had deciphered the engraving continued to investigate and learned that one of the basilica workers had been given the remains found inside the casket and stored them in a shoe box kept in a cupboard. She reported her findings to Paul VI who later proclaimed that there was a “convincing” argument that the bones belonged to Peter.

Top Vatican Jesuits and other archaeologists strongly denied the claim, but had little recourse.

“No Pope had ever permitted an exhaustive study, partly because a 1000-year-old curse attested by secret and apocalyptic documents, threatened anyone who disturbed the peace of Peter’s tomb with the worst possible misfortune,” Bartoloni wrote.

The Vatican newspaper, l’Osservatore Romano, published excerpts of the book last year, giving his account a degree of official sanction.

In 1971, Paul VI was given an urn containing the relics, which were kept inside the private papal chapel inside the Apostolic Palace and exhibited for the pope’s private veneration each June 29, for the feast of Saints Peter and Paul. Sunday marked the first time they were shown in public.