No chance in hell Obama would piss off his Islamist allies in Turkey.

Via ABC News:

One day after paying a solemn visit to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, President Barack Obamaon Tuesday called the mass killings of Armenians at the hands of the Ottoman Turks in 1915 “one of the worst atrocities of the 20th century” but again broke a 2008 campaign promise to label the tragedy “genocide.”

“We honor the memory of the 1.5 million Armenians who were brutally massacred or marched to their deaths in the waning days of the Ottoman Empire,” Obama said in a written statement on Armenian Remembrance Day.

“A full, frank, and just acknowledgement of the facts is in all of our interests. Moving forward with the future cannot be done without reckoning with the facts of the past,” Obama said in a implicit appeal for vital American ally Turkey to move closer to recognizing the massacre.

Turkey, a NATO member, fiercely disputes the genocide charge, and has warned that formal U.S. steps to use the term will hamper relations. Turkey’s Ambassador to Washington Namik Tan sharply criticized a similar statement from Obama in 2011, taking to Twitter to denounce it as inaccurate, flawed, and one-sided.

The issue is also a powerful one for Armenian Americans. “The Armenian Reporter” news site has repeatedly and forcefully condemned what it mockingly calls “amnesia” on the part of Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who as senators co-sponsored a resolution calling for the use of the term “genocide” when discussing the tragedy.

On Oct. 2, 2008, the paper published a letter from then-candidate Obama in which he trumpeted “my firmly held conviction that the Armenian Genocide is not an allegation, a personal opinion, or a point of view, but rather a widely documented fact supported by an overwhelming body of historical evidence.”