Obama inconsistent about Armenians

Thank you for the factual information in your article "Armenian victims honored" [News, April 24]. However, President Barack Obama's actions as president are in direct contradiction to his previous position as a senator.

The victims this time are the small number of survivors of the Armenian massacres by the Ottoman Empire in 1915, when as many as 1.5 million people were massacred and driven on hunger marches to "cleanse" the country. The world found acts of state annihilation so horrendous that the word genocide was introduced to define the practice.

As a U.S. senator, Obama was emphatic in asserting the need to acknowledge the Armenian genocide, going so far as to ask Turkish President Abdullah Gul to reconsider the country's denial of historic facts.

Yet at this year's ceremony, President Obama in deference to the Turkish campaign of denial or hoping perhaps to deflect the savagery of Turkish actions, chose to ignore the "genocide" verdict of the International Association of Genocide Scholars and instead substituted the word "killings." So much for true convictions.

Lynn Kazarian, South Setauket