The Capital Times · Madison, Wisconsin · 19 May 2021
CP-2021-001
If we’re against genocide we should look at Palestine
John Costello, McFarland
Transcribed from the clipping
“Dear Editor: Following the President’s official recognition of the Armenian genocide, John Nichols shared that it was something ‘he waited his entire life to hear’ because Biden ‘put America on the right side of history’ when he recognized the truth.
I confess I didn’t even know about it for much of my life, and honestly, issues over 100 years old don’t usually hit me in the gut. But I can still empathize when I think about a somewhat similar obsession of my own.
Or rather I could if the president were to use similar language about it, because as Nichols puts it, ‘the language of denial is so insidious.’ America has denied the true nature of this issue for so long, generations have grown old, ignorant of truths so important to grasp, that our democracy is imperiled, in good measure due to their absence.
We’ve spent those generations held hostage morally, ethically and politically, to a set of false narratives that render us unable to resolve issues which can only be resolved if we follow the truth. But our minds have been kept in the dark.
Nichols cites Raphael Lemkin as the originator of the term genocide, so it seems appropriate to quote him: ‘More often (genocide) refers to a coordinated plan aimed at destruction of the essential foundations of the life of national groups so that these groups wither and die like plants that have suffered a blight.’
A creeping genocide, that beguiles with phony agreements and poison-pill peace-plans designed to fail but provide plausible deniability of the obvious goal of conquest. I wonder if a president will tell the truth about the erasing of Palestine before it’s gone. He still could. This isn’t history yet.
These are current events and America can still find itself on the right side of history.”
Context added by this archive
A letter arguing the word by going back to the man who coined it, and printed between a letter about Wisconsin’s wolf hunt and one about commuter trains.
Cite this clipping
"If we’re against genocide we should look at Palestine," The Capital Times, 19 May 2021, p. 1. Covering Palestine archive, CP-2021-001. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-2021-001
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Last updated 2 November 2026
This record is part of Covering Palestine, an archive of American newspaper clippings about Palestinians, 1724 to 2023. Researched and assembled by Maria Robles.
The clipping belongs to the newspaper that printed it, or to the news agency that supplied the copy. It is reproduced here for research, criticism and commentary. A city here is where the newspaper was published, not where the story came from, and on most records it was taken from the masthead.
Something wrong here, or something you know about this clipping? The archive is still being built and corrections are wanted: maria@rozumstudio.com, quoting CP-2021-001.
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