By David Boyajian
Approximately one hundred Turks, a half dozen Armenian Americans, and a dozen members of the Armenian Youth Federation’s (AYF) Greater Boston Chapter attended the opening of a Turkish-language book collection at Cary Memorial Public Library in Lexington, Mass. on the evening of December 10, 2018.
Ceylan Özen Erişen, Turkey’s Consul General in Boston, was the main speaker.
A Lexington police officer, an apparently Federal “special agent”, and presumably Turkish security guards attended in plainclothes.
The AYF distributed flyers outside about the Armenian Genocide of 1915–23. The flyer, which juxtaposed a “1915” Turkish fez and moustache with a “1939” Hitler hairstyle and moustache, stated, “By Condemning the Previous, We Could have Prevented the Following.”
Over 100 books in the Turkish language were “donated” by a local “Turkish Library Group” to the library’s growing “World Language Collections.” Other languages include Bengali, French, Hindi, Italian, Korean, and Tamil. There is no Armenian section.