Yesterday, at a commemorative event at the Holocaust Museum here in Washington, President Obama announced a new initiative -- the creation of a committee to be named the "Atrocities Prevention Board." This group is supposed to build on the president's 2011 directive to prevent and stop genocide and other mass atrocities. As Mark noted below, today, Obama's resolve will be put to an immediate test, because it's Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day. Will the president or his new committee dare to speak up? This is the fourth chance Obama has had as president to acknowledge this other holocaust. As a presidential candidate, he excoriated the Bush administration for failing to speak up about the Armenian genocide, yet his administration has also remained silent. Some 1.5 million Armenians are estimated to have been slaughtered in Turkey as Ottoman rule collapsed between 1915 and 1923. About 750,000 Arameans or Assyrians and 350,000 Pontic Greeks are also thought to have perished during this period. (For an unforgettable account of the ordeal of this last group, whose story is not generally well known, read Thea Halo's Not Even My Name.) These Christian populations were victimized under a radically secular movement of "Young Turks" that had risen up and set in motion a "Turkification" program which shaped in no small part Atat

Nina Shea is the director of Hudson Institute's Center for Religious Freedom and a former commissioner on the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom.