White House Press Secretary Refers to ‘Armenian Genocide Memorial’ in Briefing

“We may be witnessing, in this one-off statement, the first steps toward an all-of-government recognition of the Armenian Genocide,” said ANCA’s Aram Hamparian

White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany referred to the “Armenian Genocide Memorial” during her daily briefing on Monday when discussing implications of removing monuments around the country in response to the social justice movement that has dominated national discourse since the May 25 killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis by police officers that has sparked the nationwide Black Lives Matter movement.

“There seems to be zero understanding of history when you’re defacing the statue of Matthias Baldwin and John Whittier and Ulysses S. Grant,” said McEnany in response to a reporter’s query about an explanation for President Trump saying over the weekend that many of the problems the United States is currently facing stem from “extreme indoctrination and bias in the education system.”

“There seems to be a lack of understanding and historical knowledge when the Armenian genocide memorial, remembering victims of all crimes against humanity, including slavery, is vandalized,” said McEnany in an apparent reference to the recent defacing of the Armenian Genocide memorial in Colorado, which is on the grounds of the state’s capitol and was vandalized along with other monuments there during last month’s social justice protests.

“There seems to be a lack of understanding of history when the first responders sculpture is damaged, when the Polish war hero statue, the World War I Memorial, the Lincoln Memorial, the World War II Memorial, and absolutely the Robert Gould Shaw and the 54th regiment Washington Memorial that honored African American soldiers who fought valiantly in the Civil War was damaged in Boston,” contended McEnany. “We need to have a better historical understanding.”

“We may be witnessing, in this one-off statement, the first steps toward an all-of-government recognition of the Armenian Genocide – the clear consequence of last year’s near-unanimous passage of H.Res.296 and S.Res.150,” said Armenian National Committee of America Executive Director Aram Hamparian.

“Our success in navigating adoption of these two landmark measures cemented the broad-based, bipartisan consensus among Democrats and Republicans, in the House and Senate and among 49 of our 50 U.S. states that Turkey does not deserve and will not get a veto over U.S. policy on the Armenian Genocide.”