THE REASONS WHY CHUCK HAGEL WOULD MAKE A BAD DEFENSE SECRETARY

Democrat senator Chuck Hagel has a dreadful stance on Israel, and he's also got a bad position on the subject of the 1915 Armenian genocide by the Ottoman Islamic empire in Turkey. A member of an Armenian lobbying group said the following, and look carefully at some of the things Hagel said too:

"We remain troubled by former Senator Hagel’s acceptance of Ankara’s gag-rule on American honesty about the Armenian Genocide – the still unpunished crime against a Christian nation that continues to define Turkey’s present-day policies toward Armenia and much of the region,” ANCA Executive Director Aram Hamparian said in an emailed statement.

Hagel has opposed official U.S. government recognition of the genocide, and has declined to say whether he believes the massacre of more than 1 million Armenians beginning in 1915 was in fact a genocide.

“What happened in 1915 happened in 1915. As one United States Senator, I think the better way to deal with this is to leave it open to historians and others to decide what happened and why,” then-Senator Hagel told a group of Armenian reporters during a trip to the country in 2005.

“The fact is that this region needs to move forward,” Hagel added. “We need to find a lasting, just peace between Turkey and Armenia and the other nations of this region. I am not sure that by going back and dealing with that in some way that causes one side or the other to be put in difficult spot, helps move the peace process forward.”

ANCA objected to the argument that official U.S. recognition of the genocide would hinder peace between Turkey and Armenia.

Sound familiar? It's just like the language used by those who think peace between Israel and the so-called palestinians is more important than anything else and don't want to recognize that the Islamists were the ones who started the hostility. The Armenian movements who find that moral equivalence offensive are right to be angry about it, just like we should be for say, how Morrocan Islamists treated Jews in past centuries.

Hagel should not be a defense secretary, nor should he be a secretary of state or even an agricultural secretary; I think he'd be awful in a job like that too.