“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,” Nina Strochlic reports for The Daily Beast. “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’s adoptive family escaped the Armenian Genocide, the company he created is releasing its biggest new product on the centennial of a mass killing that left 1.5 million dead at the hands of the Ottoman Empire,” Strochlic reports. “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’s 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,” Strochlic reports. “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.”
“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,” Strochlic reports. “‘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,” Strochlic reports. “‘To expect from a Turkish guide to accept that , 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.”
Much more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Tragic.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews readers too numerous to mention individually for the heads up.]