Kim Kardashian
Jon Kopaloff/FilmMagic
  • President Joe Biden called the mass killings of Armenians by the Ottoman Empire genocide Saturday.
  • He became the first US president to use the term to describe the early 20th century killings.
  • Kim Kardashian West and her sister Khloe Kardashian, who are Armenian-American, thanked Biden.
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Members of America's most famous reality TV family thanked President Joe Biden on Saturday for formally recognizing the mass killings of hundreds of thousands of Armenians in the early 1900s as genocide.

Kim Kardashian West, whose father, Rob Kardashian, was Armenian-American, thanked Biden on a statement shared on Twitter.

"After more than a century of fighting for truth and acknowledgment, today the Armenian people received the recognition we have all been hoping and praying for," Kardashian West said. "I'm so proud of my heritage, proud of the Armenian communities and grateful to President Biden for granting every Armenian this day, and this truth."

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"I will continue to honor and remember those we lost every year on this day, but now with the hope that after recognizing the genocide we will never again allow atrocities of the past to be repeated," she added. "Thank you President Biden for your courage to speak the truths other chose not to."

Kardashian West's sister, Khloe Kardashian, also thanked the president in an Instagram story post.

"Thank you for honoring the stories, the pain, suffering and loss of the Armenian people," she wrote.

In 2015, Kardashian West urged, to no avail, then-president Barack Obama to acknowledge the killings as genocide in an essay for Time.

With the announcement on Saturday, which was Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day, Biden became the first US president to use the term genocide in regards to the killings of Armenians by the Ottoman Empire, which began in 1915.

Previous administrations had avoided the term to prevent souring relations with Turkey, an heir of the empire.

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