Letter: Hopes against history repeating

If killing millions is not genocide, then let’s destroy all dictionaries by dumping them like tea in the ocean.

Riding in a tour bus and sailing on a boat through the historic city of Boston I could not stop from thinking — what if history repeated itself?

One hundred years ago a huge part of my family was massacred by the soldiers of the Ottoman empire (now Turkey). My paternal grandmother was the only survivor of her family. They did not use trains to ship victims to gas chambers; it would have been too expensive. They forced them to walk and killed the weak along the way. More than a million Christian Armenians, Assyrians and Greeks were killed between the years 1915 and 1918.

One hundred years later, millions of Christians are being forced out of their homes, many of them brutally slaughtered by Islamic State. One of my cousins was kidnapped, my family is scattered in Sweden, Scotland, New Jersey and Holland, to name few. The rest of them are in Syria waiting and hoping they will escape the knife.

Part of our history is well preserved in beautiful Boston. My dream is that a small olive tree could be planted next to the holocaust memorial by President Obama.

Maybe next year, because as far as many are concerned, the Armenian Genocide of 1915 never happened.

Joseph Hadaya
Burbank