For his sins ...
Mark Arax, a fine writer of Armenian descent from Fresno, tried to tell Los Angeles about the truth about the Armenian genocide. The announcement of his departure from the Los Angeles Times, his article unpublished, comes as Israel plans its invasion of the Gaza Strip to wipe out Hamas, the democratically elected Palestinian government. Hollywood and AIPAC notwithstanding, we welcome him back to the Valley and we hope he will write a similar article on the genocide against the Assyrians, so many of their descendants residing in Turlock.
The Valley is an unusual place, full of dark immigrant tales. Is there any coherent history of the Azores, for another example? What is the real history of Mexican states like Jalisco, Michoacan and Guanajuato, in their relationships to the Valley, for another example? We could go on. We could talk about African-Americans from the deep South who came to the Valley to work in these fields. We could talk about the Dust Bowlers, and the many, many other people who came here to work, to save, to build, to flourish and raise their families. We could talk about the people still coming today to work and save and build in this place.
We honor writers like Arax, who try to tell the painful, difficult truths of the Valley. That his most truthful articles were not published by the LA Times is unimportant. It is a newspaper that cannot tell the truth about the Mideast, water or development -- regardless who owns it on any given Thursday.
Bill Hatch
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6-19-07
Reporter Arax leaves L.A. Times...Diana Marcum
http://www.fresnobee.com/263/story/63185.html
Fresno journalist Mark Arax has left the Los Angeles Times, ending a public dispute about the paper's decision not to publish a story he wrote about the Armenian genocide. According to Arax's attorney, Warren Paboojian, Arax and the Times reached a settlement to forestall a lawsuit alleging defamation and discrimination. In his 14 years writing about the San Joaquin Valley for the Times, Arax told the stories of migrant farmworker children who became track stars, black sharecroppers who came to the San Joaquin Valley during the Dust Bowl and abuses inside a Corcoran prison. "I tried to cover the Valley as a foreign beat, write about it as some other world for the paper's readers, because the Valley is another world: It's geographically exiled and a third world in its own right with great poverty and pockets of concentrated wealth," Arax said Monday. Jim Tucker, who taught journalism at Fresno State for 39 years, said Arax's departure from the Times is a blow for the San Joaquin Valley. "He was a voice about things that happened here -- a voice that reached a national audience,"..."Because of his closeness to this place, he wrote stories no one else could see or write. Now, strangely enough, his departure is precipitated by having such a closeness to a story."
The Great War for Civilization, Robert Fisk, Chapter 10, The First Holoacaust:
The hill of Margada is steep and littered iwth volcanic stones, a place of piercing bright light and shodows high above the eastern Syrian desert. It is cold on the summit and the winter rains have cut fissures into themud between the rocks, brown canyons of earth that creep down to the base of the hill. Far below, the waters of the Habur slink between grey, treeless banks, twisting through dark sand dunes, a river of black secrets. You do not need to know what happened at Margada to find something evil in this place. Like the forest of eastern Poland, the hill of Margada is a place of eradicated momory, although the local Syrian police constable, a man of bright cheeks and generous moustache, has heard that something t errible happened here long before he was born...Eveyr few inches of mud would reveal a femur, a skull, a set of teeth, fibula and sockets, squeezed together, as tightly packed as they had been on the day they died in the terror of 1915, roped togeheter to drown in their thousands.
Exposed to the air, the bones became soft and claylike and flaked away in our hands, the last mortal remains of an entire race of people disappearing as swiflty as their Turkish oppressors would have wished us to forget them. As many of 50,000 Armenians were murdered in this little killing field, and it took a minute or two before Ellsen and I fully comprehended that we were standing in a mass grave. For Margada and the Syrian desert around it -- like thousands of villages in what was Turkish Armenia--are the Auschwitz of the Armenian people, the place of the world's first, forgotten, Holocaust.