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When the German parliament recently adopted a motion labeling as “genocide” the mass murder of more than a million Armenian Christians by the Ottoman Turks a century ago, the Turkish government reacted the way it usually does: It threw a tantrum, Boson Globe writes.

As the newspaper notes, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey’s autocratic president, warned that the vote will have “serious repercussions” for German-Turkish relations. The country’s new prime minister, Binali Yildirim, declared truculently that Turkey’s conscience is clear and that “no incident . . . will force us to bow our heads.” And Turkey’s foreign and justice ministers crudely suggested that Germany was trying to minimize its own genocidal crimes by maligning Turkish history.

“Germany wasn’t minimizing anything. The resolution to which Turkey reacted with such sputtering fury acknowledged “the German Reich’s complicity in the events” of 1916-17, when Germany was a key ally of the Ottoman Empire. And it contained six explicit references to the Holocaust. Germany’s government never whitewashes the Nazi genocide; that is why its condemnation of Turkey’s century-old extermination of the Armenians carries noteworthy moral force,” Boston Globe writes.

Concerning the tension in German-Turkish relations lately due to the Bundestag vote and the migration deal, the newspaper writes that the last thing Angela Merkel, the German chancellor needs is an embittered Erdogan. However, historical truth about the genocide was too important to sacrifice on the altar of appeasement.

“The US government ought to emulate Germany’s example. No American president has been willing to apply the “G-word” to Turkey’s attempt to annihilate the Armenians. Yet Washington has known the truth for a century. In July 1915, the US ambassador to Turkey, Henry Morgenthau, cabled that “race murder” was underway — a “systematic attempt to uproot peaceful Armenian populations and . . . to bring destruction and destitution upon them.” Morgenthau is long gone; so is the Ottoman regime. The facts of the Armenian genocide, however, are unchanged. Turkey’s official denial is an ongoing affront to the memory of the massacred Armenians. More than that, it is a grotesque disfigurement of Turkey’s own image on the world stage. It is long past time the Turks dealt honestly with their history, and for nations that consider themselves Turkey’s allies — like the United States — to stop subordinating truth to political expedience,” Boston Globe writes.