Today, people around the world are remembering the 100th anniversary of the Armenian genocide.  Some, like the American president, are unable to use the word “genocide,” because they are afraid to offend the Turkish government.

But where does this path of denial and fear take us?

In 1915, the Ottoman Empire’s government committed an atrocity against humanity. They committed a systematic extermination of a minority Armenian subjects inside their historic homeland, which is now in modern-day Turkey. History shows that 1.5 million Armenian civilians were killed during this genocide, which most agreeing that the genocide began on April 24, 1915. Men were massacred or forced into labor to death, and other Armenian women, children, elderly and sick were forced into death marches into the Syrian desert. The Armenian people were mostly Christians. The Armenians had been oppressed by the Ottoman empire for their minority faith. As History.com reports, the Ottoman Empire “permitted religious minorities like the Armenians to maintain some autonomy, but they also subjected Armenians, who they viewed as ‘infidels,’ to unequal and unjust treatment.” The Armenian genocide included other indigenous and Christian ethnic groups such as the Assyrians and the Ottoman Greeks, which received the same treatment.

But 100 years later, we cannot state that over a million Christians were put to death. Why? Why can’t Turkey apologize? Why?

Can you imagine a world where Germany was in denial for the Holocaust? Can you imagine a world where people really didn’t want to point out the Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany murdered 6 million Jews, because we didn’t want to upset Germany? And when we talked it about, we said some “people” were killed, not Jews? And we had publications in our media that debated using the “H-word”, like Newsweek trivializes Genocide today by calling it the “G-word”?

Can you imagine a world where the United States was in denial of its responsibility for the slavery of African-Americans? Can you imagine no shame, no responsibility, no accountability for such crimes? And when we did talk about slavery it was just for some “people” whose identity group we wouldn’t identify? Can you imagine people stating we fought a Civil War and well, we won’t talk about one of the major reasons for its cause, because after all, we wouldn’t want to upset southern states or those states where slaves had been held?

Justice and peace will not be achieved by denial. We cannot move forward in human rights and not face the mistake of our past and try to change them. The only to find justice and peace is to face both, and make amends.

Today around the world, ironically on the 100th anniversary of the Armenian genocide, we see religious minorities targeted for oppression and extinction. Just as Armenian Christians were marched into the Syrian desert to die, Syrian Christians are being kidnapped and oppressed, Egyptian Christians are being lined up on the shores of Libya to have their throats slit, Kenya Christians are being killed, Christian churches and nuns are being attacked in India, Nigerian Christians are being killed and their churches destroyed, Communist China is arresting Christian pastors, and destroying their churches…

… and in Pakistan? We see wave after wave of attacks on Pakistan Christians, bombing their churches, shooting their churches, attacking Christian schools, oppressing and imprisoning them for “blasphemy,” burning Christians to death by mobs… and even little children being burned to death for their Christian faith.   (Our strategy for this is not to hold Pakistan responsible for change, but to give them more money and weapons.)

It doesn’t stop in the Middle East or Asia. We learn this week of a terrorist plot against French churches. In the Mediterranean sea outside Italy, Christians were drowned for praying. In Italian counter terror operations today, we learn of a plot to attack the Vatican.

You have don’t to be an Armenian to know the Armenian genocide was wrong and we need to remember it. You don’t have to be Jewish or one of the other groups targeted by the Nazis to condemn the Holocaust. You don’t have to be an African-American to know that slavery in America was wrong and must never be forgotten.

And you don’t have to be a Christian to see the ongoing, continuing genocide against Christians around the world is a CRIME against humanity.

The silence and denial – whether it is on the Armenian genocide – or other genocides – does not help humanity to move forward.

We need to face the mistakes that humanity has made, and find a way to use our communities to say – whenever and wherever our universal human rights are defiled and defied…

NEVER AGAIN.