Not often we get to write about Kim Kardashian taking a worthy political stance, but we’ll jump at the opportunity, and so today we have jumped. But first, some context.
On April 20, the prestigious Wall Street Journal ran what at first seems an innocuous ad featuring a giant peace sign and a statement saying “truth” equals “peace.” It seems harmless, until you discover that the ad was paid for by “factcheckarmenia.com,” a website dedicated to denying the truth behind the Armenian Genocide. The short of the genocide is that somewhere around 1 to 1.5 million Armenians were murdered by the Turkish — then Ottoman — government. FactCheck Armenia is a part of Turkic Platform, which is an organization that has attempted to clean up Turkey’s history by further denying the acts of the 1915 atrocity, going so far as to blame the Armenians for their own death, as you can see in the quotes in the ad below.
As one would expect, the general response to the ad was not stellar, but it wasn’t until this week that any true, popular criticism was waged against the ad, because this week is when Kim Kardashian finally spoke up on her blog — which is behind a paywall. Kardashian writes,
“The ad was paid for by Turkic Platform. I won’t list the group’s website, as I don’t want to give them the traffic, but basically they say that not as many people died as historians say, and that the Armenians were to blame. For the Wall Street Journal to publish something like this is reckless, upsetting and dangerous. It’s one thing when a shitty tabloid profits from a made-up scandal, but for a trusted publication like WSJ to profit from genocide — it’s shameful and unacceptable. Why is it that every time we take one step forward, we take two steps back?”
She also responded to WSJ‘s comment to Gawker, which justified the ad by saying it was merely “provocative.” Kim said, very pointedly, “Advocating the denial of a genocide by the country responsible for it—that’s not publishing a ‘provocative viewpoint,’ that’s spreading lies.”
This sounds a lot like the argument/response to Tribeca’s recent anti-vaccination film, which was first painted by the festival as “divisive” but was then pulled from the lineup when they realized that, oh, it was disseminating untruths.
For those of you who don’t keep up with the Kardashians, the family has not shied away from its Armenian heritage, and in 2015 Kim and Khloe took a trip to visit the country’s prime minister, Hovik Abrahamyan.