At the end of this Article, read Steve Jobs reaction to Turkish government from the mouth of a tour-guide in Istanbul.
The Daily
Beast: Steve Jobs took Armenian Genocide personally
April 23,
2015
Nina Strochlic, a reporter
and researcher for The Daily Beast wrote
a piece on the coinciding date of the Armenian Genocide centennial and the
release of the new Apple product. She speculates that maybe Apple will make an
effort to pay tribute to its founder’s Armenian heritage and thus commemorate
the centennial. The article reads:
“On Friday, wrists around
the world will welcome the most anticipated gadget since the iPad came to our
fingertips five years ago. The Apple Watch has stirred breathless speculation,
imitation and excitement long before its reveal last September. But the date
chosen for its release has caused a too-bizarre-to-be-true historic collision
that Apple’s founder would likely never have allowed to happen.
One hundred years after
Steve Jobs’ adoptive family escaped the Armenian Genocide, the company he
created is releasing its biggest new product on the 100th anniversary of a mass
killing that left 1.5 million dead at the hands of the Ottoman Empire.
And activists are worried
that Apple’s latest masterpiece will distract an audience from an anniversary
that they hope will finally force the Turkish government—which has long refused
to call the slaughter a genocide—into accepting its bloody past.
Steve Jobs’ birth parents
weren’t Armenian, but he was raised in the shadow of that heritage by an adoptive
mother whose family escaped the killings for safety in America in the 1910s.
And Jobs, though he never spoke publicly about his ties, appeared to feel a
deep connection with his family’s heritage and the historic bloodshed they
experienced. He even spoke conversational Armenian.
Jobs, though he never
spoke publicly about his ties, appeared to feel a deep connection with his
family’s heritage. He even spoke conversational Armenian.
In 1955, Clara Hagopian
and Paul Jobs, a young couple who spent nearly a decade trying to have children
of their own, adopted a Syrian-American baby and named him Steve. Steve Jobs
never met his birth father and often spoke about the strong connection he
shared with his adoptive family. “They were my parents 1,000 percent,” he told
Walter Isaacson for his 2013 biography. “[My biological parents] were my sperm
and egg bank. That’s not harsh, it’s just the way it was, a sperm bank thing,
nothing more.”
Hagopian’s mother,
Victoria Artinian, was born in the port city of Smyrna in the 1890s. Smyrna, an
ancient biblical town and possible birthplace of Homer, had enjoyed relative
calm until the early 1920s. Filled with diplomats and citizens of high social
ranking, the world was shocked when, in 1922, the city was pillaged and burned
to the ground. Images of fiery deaths and charred buildings was seared into the
historical imagination. Ernest Hemingway’s In Our Time, which was written three
years later, begins with an ode to the fated town: “The strange thing was, he
said, how they screamed every night at midnight. I do not know why they
screamed at that time.”
Artinian arrived in the
United States on the Greek boat Megali Hellas in 1919, and soon after met Louis
Hagopian. He had made the same trip seven years earlier, lucky to escape his
hometown of Malatya. Mass murders began there in the late 1800s and a few years
after Hagopian came to America, nearly the entire population of 20,000
Armenians living in Malatya was wiped out.
“Anybody with family
coming from those two places would have been really branded by the genocide,”
says Peter Balakian, a humanities and English professor at Colgate University
and author of two books on the Armenian Genocide.
As the newlyweds settled
down briefly in Newark, New Jersey, tens of thousands of genocide survivors
were fleeing the killings and making their way to the United States. A web of
Armenian refugees had begun to spread out across the world. They settled in
major cities, from Aleppo to Newark, which is where Victoria and Louis Hagopian
had a daughter named Clara in 1924.
A few years later the
family moved to California. According to the 1930 U.S. Census, Clara was raised
by her mother and elderly grandmother in San Francisco, where she met and
married Paul Jobs, a freshly decommissioned Coast Guard mechanic, in 1946.
The Armenian refugees
were, for the most part, welcomed by Americans, many of whom felt a shared
Christian identity with the refugees and were impressed by the newcomers’
entrepreneurial spirit. Indeed, the refugee cause was the most famous of its
time.
“It’s the largest NGO
relief movement in U.S. history,” Balakian says. “The Armenians were really a
celebrated minority group.” Scholars estimate that the American Committee for
Relief in the Near East raised the equivalent of $1.5 billion to assist the new
refugees. And a film about the genocide grossed a whooping $2 billion in
today’s currency.
Future president Herbert
Hoover was put in charge of relief efforts for Europe, and was particularly
passionate about the Armenians’ plight. “Probably Armenia was known to the
school child in 1919 only a little less than England,” Hoover wrote in his
memoirs.
Not so much today. When
Apple announced it would release its newest product on April 24, leaders of the
Armenian community were taken by surprise. It seemed that the watch, which has
spurred years of breathless speculation, could easily overshadow news of the
genocide commemoration events. Apple did not respond to request for comment for
this article.
Jobs was viciously private
and didn’t make public his ancestry or engage in the genocide classification
debate that Turkey continues to dig its heels into. The Armenian church in
Cupertino said that despite multiple invitations, Jobs never got in touch with
the area’s expat community. But Jobs’ feelings about the killings became
apparent on a tense standoff during a luxurious Turkish vacation, according to
the tour guide who led the visit, and who later blogged about the incident.
In 2007, Jobs and his
family traveled around Turkey on a private yacht tour and spent 10 days
visiting the country’s sites with guide Asil Tuncer. It went smoothly until the
last day, Tuncer told The Daily Beast, when the group visited the Hagia Sophia.
Once a Byzantine church, it was later converted into a mosque during the
Ottoman Empire, and is now one of Istanbul’s must-see tourist destinations.
“What happened to all
those Christians, suddenly gone like that?” Tuncer recalls Jobs asking him as
they gazed at the minarets. Then, he reframed the question: “You, Muslims, what
did you do to so many Christians? You subjected 1.5 million Armenians to
genocide. Tell us, how did it happen?”
Tuncer says he felt
trapped, unsure whether to answer with his opinion or evade an argument in the
polite manner he was trained to use as a guide.
“To expect from a Turkish
guide to accept that [question], even if true, it’s not very good. For example,
it’s like if I come to U.S. and ask, ‘Tell me how, you killed the Indians?’”
But he says Jobs insisted he respond.
“First I said, ‘Sir, maybe
these are not good things to talk on Istanbul tour. Let’s have fun—this is your
real purpose, to learn about the buildings and history.’ He said, ‘No, no, no,
I want to hear your answer.”
“I said, ‘People kill each
other, of course, this is a war, but it is not deliberately genocide,’” he says
he told him. “Then I tried to be nice. So I did my best.”
Tuncer says Jobs’ face
fell, and he looked “miserable.” Earlier in the trip Tuncer says Job had
described Apple’s vision for a tablet and showed him the new laptops. But now
his previously amiable demeanor had changed.
Jobs cut the day short,
deciding to return to the boat docked in Istanbul’s port, and not finish out
the last day of the visit. “He was not happy with my answer, and maybe he
didn’t feel very good after. I can’t exactly say. He didn’t tell me. He just
said I want to go back to port.” (Jobs’ family has not publicly responded to
Tuncer’s account of the tour.)
Tuncer, who now works for
a tour company called Legendary Journeys, says the goodbye was chilly when he
put the Jobs family on their plane home. “This person coming from the diaspora,
I don’t expect he will say, ‘Oh yes you are right, I am wrong,’” he says. “He
was disappointed in my answer.”
“He didn’t have Armenian
blood himself, but because of his mother, he felt a great pull and affinity
toward the fact she was, for all intents and purposes, a genocide survivor,”
says Phil Walotsky, the spokesman for the Armenian Genocide Centennial
Committee of America.
The Apple Watch release
has rattled those who’ve spent months planning for a commemoration they hope
will finally bring about recognition of the widespread killings by the Turkish
government, which has suppressed its ghost against a flood of international
condemnation.
“Do we think Apple did
this intentionally? Of course not,” says Walotsky. “If Steve was still around
or if this was brought to their attention earlier—I’m sure there were folks in
leadership who knew about Steve’s background—would they have picked April 24?
Probably not.”
But he doesn’t blame Apple
for the date overlap. The anniversary date doesn’t carry the same weight as
other dates do, and hasn’t sparked any outcry as if the watch was being
released on, say, Holocaust Remembrance Day. “It doesn’t have same stickiness
in American psyche as other dates do,” says Walotsky.
Not everyone feels so
benevolent. Benjamin Abtan, president of the European Grassroots Antiracist
Movement, is organizing a weekend of events to commemorate the anniversary. “It
cannot be by chance,” he says of the Apple Watch release date. “It doesn’t mean
there as an intention to overshadow the Armenian Genocide, but for all people
who know even little about the Armenian Genocide, they know it’s a very big day
that everybody’s been expecting for a long time. The date is very symbolic of
this trauma.”
Abtan doesn’t expect the
watch’s release will push out news of his efforts to get the Turkish government
to recognize the Genocide, but he’s already been disappointed by the American
media’s coverage of the tragedy.
Still, Walotsky says he
considers it lucky that Apple decided not to release the watch with its typical
line-around-the-block shopping frenzy. “In terms of being the second story that
day, at least that gives us a chance of having a little equal footing in terms
of being able to educate people about this and ensure the mainstream media is
reporting on this,” he says.
Walotsky hopes that
tomorrow, Apple will make an effort to pay tribute to its founder’s heritage
and the strangely aligned anniversary. With Tim Cook’s advocacy around LGBT
issues, and Apple’s environmentally conscious campaigns, he says it’s not
difficult to imagine the image-conscious company paying tribute.
“Maybe in a strange way
the launch of the watch brings more attention to the anniversary,” he says.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
From a previous post on my blog:
When Steve Jobs passed away on October 5, 2011 there was a lot of discussion within the Armenian community, questioning why there was hardly any mention that Jobs’ adoptive mother was an Armenian and that he was raised by an Armenian woman.
I was personally quite surprised a few years ago as I was reading his bio on Wikipedia and learned it. I asked my son who was and is a staunch follower of Jobs and even he didn’t know about the fact, at the time.
The following is an account told by a Turkish tour guide, when Steve Jobs visited Turkey on a luxury Boat from the shores of the Mediterranean Sea to Istanbul where the journey was going to end.
The following article is taken from http://www.armenian-history.com/
"What Turkish tour guide Asil Tuncer said, with respect to Apple Inc.’s founder, the late Steve Jobs’ visit to Turkey, caused great uproar in the country. The guide claimed that Jobs considered the Turks as enemies, and he did not even shake hands when bidding farewell to the tour guide.
Tuncer noted that when they had approached the Hagia Sophia, in Istanbul, and he had told that it was a church at first but then it was turned into a mosque with minarets, Steve Jobs had asked: “You, Muslims, what did you do to so many Christians? You subjected 1.5 million Armenians to genocide. Tell us, how did it happen?” And the Turkish tour guide’s denials further infuriated Steve Jobs, who left Turkey one day early.
 |
| Hagia Sofia mosque in Istanbul |
Note: In Steve Jobs’ biographical book written by Walter Isaacson, there is only a short paragraph saying that after the Armenian Genocide, his stepmother, Clara Hagopian, had emigrated from Malatya, Turkey.
I am intrigued that no media reported on the fact that Steve Jobs' had roots in Armenian culture. A few years ago I was in San Francisco for an Armenia women's. It was a week after Steve Jobs had died. I met an administrator from Yerevan Magazine, (an Armenian magazine) she told me that they had scheduled an interview with Steve Jobs, the very day he passed away. Maybe this reflects a characteristic of Armenians: “Known to be late…” LOL... The legendary founder of Apple Inc. lost his battle to cancer on October 5 of 2011 at the age of 56.
Here is a paragraph taken from the story told by the tour guide in Turk-glish:
“Jobs Hagia Sophia was the place where most want to see and wonder. We started the tour. Saw that we had yet to happen and eagerly asked the minarets of the Hagia Sophia. In return, I, while the former church converted to a mosque after the conquest, in the south-east corner of a brick minaret was added to the transaction told. Then the questions started to come straight to me: “This is what happened to the Christians?”, “You millions of Muslims in non Muslim, what have you done?” etc.. You open my mouth, “the genocide of Armenians seized 1.5 million. You tell us. How did it happen?” were asked the question, and this was the last straw.”
You can read more about Steve Jobs in my earlier posts. HERE is the link to a previous musing on Steve Jobs,
http://beyondthebluedomes.blogspot.com/2011/11/musing-on-death-of-steve-jobs.html
