- Nashuan Couple Among Top Political Donors By ANDREW WOLFE, Nashua Telegraph
- Armenian Genocide: Millions Killed And Forgotten Ahmed Aziz, The Express Tribune
- Twain's Whiskey/Water Quote Appears Greatly Exaggerated By Michael Doyle, Miami Herald, McClatchy Newspapers
Nashuan Couple Among Top Political Donors By ANDREW WOLFE Staff Writer
NASHUA – A Nashua couple ranks among America’s most generous political donors, but they don’t dabble in New Hampshire politics.
Yalcin and Serpil Ayasli gave more money to politicians and political action groups than anyone else in the country during the 2008 election cycle, according to the nonpartisan Center For Responsive Politics. Their beneficence hasn’t slowed much since, apparently funded by a steady sale of stock in the integrated circuits company that Yalcin Ayasli founded.
The Ayaslis and their children gave $277,800 to various candidates and political action committees for the 2010 election cycle, the center reported, including $30,400 each to the National Republican Committee. The couple’s $249,600 in donations ranked them 12th in the country on the center’s list of top individual donors last year.
Their $424,050 in contributions in 2008 – when they were the nation’s top individual contributors -- were evenly split between Democratic and Republican candidates, according to the center’s website, www.opensecrets.org.
While the Ayaslis’ donations have tipped toward Republicans recently, a closer look suggests their giving has nothing to do with partisan politics, but rather is aimed toward advancing Turkish-American relations and the interests and image of Turkey in the United States.
Most recently, Yalcin Ayasli and groups he supports helped lead the countercharge against bringing the Armenian Genocide Resolution to a vote during the closing days of the 111th Congress.
A spokesman for Ayasli’s foundation, the Turkish Coalition of America, Phil Elwood, has been seeking to arrange an interview for The Telegraph with Yalcin Ayasli for several weeks, but has yet to propose a date.
From Turkey to Nashua
The Ayaslis emigrated from Turkey to the United States in 1979, and moved to Nashua from Lexington, Mass., in 2006, public records show, buying a condo at 75 Hawthorne Village Road in the exclusive, gated community of Sky Meadow.
The couple and two of their children, Bahar and Orham, are registered to vote in Nashua, city records show. Their home address also serves as the U.S. contact address for Good Foods and Nar Gourmet, a company Yalcin Ayasli founded that sells gourmet olive oil and other traditional Turkish condiments.
The Ayaslis’ background is more high tech, however. Yalcin and Serpil Ayasli each has close connections with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where Yalcin Ayasli earned his master’s and doctorate degrees in electrical engineering.
According to MIT, Serpil Ayasli was a postdoctoral fellow in the university’s physics department from 1979-82, and worked for 23 years in MIT’s super-secret, federally funded Lincoln Labs (“chartered to apply advanced technology to problems of national security,” the Labs’ website states) before retiring in 2005.
One of their three children is also an MIT graduate.
A former Raytheon engineer, Yalcin Ayasli founded and made his fortune in Hittite Microwave Corp., a global integrated-circuits company based in Chelmsford, Mass. Ayasli started Hittite Microwave as a one-man shop in 1985, doing contract work for the military, according to a company brochure.
The Hittites were a Bronze Age culture that ruled Anatolia (a region that includes Turkey) for centuries, sometimes warring with the Egyptians. Hittite Microwave uses a Hittite royal emblem for its logo.
The company makes integrated circuits and other electronic components used in automotive, communications, military and space industries, including components used in fuses for bombs and missiles, according to a 2007 presentation by Yalcin Ayasli titled “Technical Infrastructure of Turkish Defense Industry,” which he gave at the annual Turkish American Business Council conference.
Hittite reported $163 million in sales in 2009, with a $46 million net profit, and recently reported sales of $64.2 million in the third quarter of 2010, according to annual and quarterly reports. The company was valued at $1.3 billion in 2007, according to Ayasli.
Although headquartered in Chelmsford, Mass., Hittite Microwave has facilities around the world, and more than half of its revenue comes from sales outside the U.S., the company reports.
In 2006, Hittite was fined $221,250 by the federal Department of Commerce Bureau of Industry Security for exporting regulated, military or space-grade electronics to Russia, China and Latvia in 2000 and 2001 without an export license, and in one case after making a false statement on the shipping declaration.
The bureau is charged with ensuring that companies don’t sell sensitive military hardware to hostile countries, and can impose administrative and criminal penalties.
Federal Securities and Exchange Commission filings show that Yalcin Ayasli has been selling Hittite stock on a near daily basis for several years, slowly but surely divesting himself from the company he founded.
In October 2006, not long after he retired, Yalcin Ayasli still owned more than 11 million shares of Hittite Microwave, roughly one-third of the company. Around that time, the company’s total worth was more than $1 billion, according to his own estimates. By the end of 2009, however, Ayasli owned 3.4 million shares, just over 11 percent of the company’s common stock, SEC filings show.
Ayasli was selling his stock steadily, SEC records show. During the first 10 days of October, for example, Ayasli sold 67,000 shares of Hittite in seven transactions, fetching from $47.72 per share on Oct. 1 to $49.36 per share on Oct. 7, more than $3 million worth of stock in just 10 days, SEC records show.
His sales continued at a similar pace through November, although the price inched upward, topping $50 a share. (Hittite shares have since climbed past $60 a share, SEC filings show).
As of Nov. 22, Ayasli owned 2,066,886 shares of Hittite, less than 7 percent of the company’s 30,813,000 outstanding shares (at the end of the third quarter, Sept. 30, according to its quarterly report). Because he is no longer a director and owns less than 10 percent of the company, Ayasli isn’t required by SEC rules to report further sales of Hittite stock.
Ayasli Children LLC owned another 8.6 percent of Hittite, or about 2.6 million shares, as of Dec. 31, 2009.
Advancing his aims
The Ayaslis’ political donations are small change compared with Yalcin Ayasli’s funding of organizations that promote Turkish culture, Turkey’s interests in the United States and close relations between the two countries.
In 2007, Yalcin Ayasli founded the Turkish Coalition of America, donating nearly $30 million worth of Hittite Microwave stock as seed money to that group, IRS records show. Ayasli serves as chairman of the TCA, which is devoted to promoting Turkish-American relations.
According to its website, the group is the third-largest sponsor of congressional travel, spending $545,710 to send five members of Congress and 80 staffers to Turkey since May 2009.
Yalcin Ayasli also was a founding trustee of the Turkish Cultural Foundation, of Washington, D.C., according to a biography posted by the Turkish American Scientists and Scholars Association. According to IRS records, that group’s revenue from gifts and donations jumped from around $38,000 in 2004 to $4.6 million in 2005 and $13.6 million in 2006, although the group’s IRS Form 990 doesn’t specify the source of the donations.
According to its website, the Turkish Cultural Foundation’s aims include “promoting and preserving Turkish culture and heritage worldwide, through original programs and cooperation with like minded organizations,” and supporting education in Turkey and research relating to Turkey.
The Turkish Cultural Foundation and Turkish Coalition of America share an office suite at 1025 Connecticut Ave. in Washington with the Turkish American Legal Defense Fund and the Turkish Coalition USA Political Action Committee.
Donations to the Turkish Coalition of America and the Turkish Cultural Foundation are tax-exempt, as they’re registered as public charities.
In contrast to the TCA and TCF, the Turkish Coalition USA Political Action Committee gives money directly to politicians and their campaigns. Donations to a PAC aren’t tax-exempt, and are regulated by the Federal Election Commission. The Turkish Coalition PAC aims to tap at least 10,000 Turkish-Americans to support politicians who favor Turkey and close U.S.-Turkish relations.
“Turkey plays a central role in enhancing U.S. national security interests and this decades-old partnership has served the interests of both nations well,” the group’s website states.
“It is a time-tested alliance which needs to be strengthened and protected not only for the benefit of both nations, but also for the world.”
Turkish-American relations
The Ayaslis’ activism has placed them in the midst of an ongoing clash between the Turkish and Armenian communities in the United States over the Armenian Genocide.
Armenian-Americans generally back an effort to have the U.S. Congress officially recognize that the mass killings and deportations of Armenians by Ottoman Turkish forces during World War I was genocide.
Most scholars agree it was genocide, and it’s illegal to claim otherwise in France and Switzerland. The Turkish government and many Turks contend that Armenian accounts of more than 1 million killed are exaggerated, and the Turkish government and many Turkish-Americans oppose the resolution.
Introduced in 2007, the Affirmation of the United States Record on the Armenian Genocide Resolution “calls upon the President to ensure that U.S. foreign policy reflects appropriate understanding and sensitivity concerning issues related to human rights, ethnic cleansing, and genocide documented in the U.S. record relating to the Armenian Genocide and the consequences of the failure to realize a just resolution and in the President’s annual message commemorating the Armenian Genocide to characterize the systematic and deliberate annihilation of 1.5 million Armenians as genocide, and to recall the proud history of U.S. intervention in opposition to the Armenian Genocide,” the bill’s summary states.
America’s relations with Turkey have become especially delicate during the Iraq War, and Turkey sees the resolution as an affront.
The Obama administration has opposed a vote on the resolution, reversing a campaign pledge, but a House committee recommended a vote last year, and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi strongly supported it. Rumors of a vote swirled during the final days of Congress, but it never came to pass.
The Ayaslis’ foundations have been active in opposing the resolution and efforts to put it to a vote, and also in litigation surrounding it.
A congresswoman the Ayaslis have supported since 2008, Jeanne Schmidt, R-Ohio, a member of the Turkish Caucaus, recently sued an opponent, David Kirkorian, an Armenian-American who had accused her of taking “blood money” from the “Turkish lobby.”
Schmidt argued her opponent had suggested she took money from a foreign government, which would be illegal under U.S. campaign law. She had taken some $30,000 in contributions from Turkish-American sources, including several thousands from the Ayaslis, and she was a vocal opponent of the resolution.
Schmidt won re-election in 2008, and later filed false advertising charges against Kirkorian with the Ohio Elections Commission, and sued him for libel. She won the Elections Commission case and the libel suit remains pending.
Schmidt was represented in the Ohio Elections case by Bruce Fein, a lawyer with the Turkish American Defense Fund, who shares an office with the Ayaslis’ nonprofits. Kirkorian has since charged that Schmidt improperly accepted Fein’s services as a donation.
The Ohio case became particularly noteworthy when Sibel Emmonds, a former FBI translator, testified about allegations of bribery and espionage by Turkish-American lobby groups – including the American Turkish Council, a group formerly headed by the same man who now heads Ayasli’s Turkish Coalition of America and related PAC, Lincoln McCurdy.
Edmonds alleged that certain current and former members of Congress had supplied classified information to Turkish and Israeli agents in the months after Sept. 11, 2001, and that some of the money passed through Turkish-American lobby groups actually comes directly from Turkey.
Edmonds never mentioned the Ayaslis, however, and she specified that her knowledge of Turkish lobby groups predates the founding of their Turkish Coalition of America.
Little spent in NH
The Ayaslis’ political donations follow the same general pattern as their charitable giving: They support politicians who support Turkey and Turkish-American relations.
In the 2006, 2008 and 2010 elections, the Ayaslis and their three children gave at least $732,800 in reportable political contributions, according to the Center’s website, opensecrets.org.
Their largest donations -- the annual $30,400 maximum for donations to parties – have gone to the National Republican Congressional Committee, followed by donations of $20,000 and up to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.
The Ayaslis and their children also have given the maximum $5,000 annual contributions to the Turkish Coalition USA PAC and Turkish American Heritage PAC.
Most of the politicians the Ayaslis support are members of the Caucus on U.S. Turkish Relations & Turkish Americans, known informally as the Turkish Caucus, a “bipartisan platform for members of Congress” who focus on U.S.-Turkish relations.
Only political junkies would recognize many of their names, which include Dan Burton, R-Indiana; Rush Holt, D-New Jersey; Virginia Foxx, R-North Carolina; Stephen Cohen, D-Tennessee; Brad Miller, D-North Carolina; and Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, R-Florida.
The Ayaslis also have supported politicians who are Turkish-American, such as Oz Bengur, a Maryland Democrat. The Ayaslis gave Bengur’s campaign a total of $12,600 when he was running for Congress in 2006 and 2007. No information was readily available on whether they’ve supported his current bid for the Maryland House of Delegates.
In all that time, the recipients of the Ayaslis’ largesse have included only one New Hampshire politician: Katrina Swett, of Bow, who dropped out of the 2008 Senate race to back former Gov. Jeanne Shaheen. The Ayaslis also had supported Swett’s father, the late California Congressman Tom Lantos.
Andrew Wolfe can be reached at 594-6410 or awolfe@nashuatelegraph.com.
© 2009, Telegraph Publishing Company, Nashua, New Hampshire
Comments
Arsen_Shirvanyan [Moderator] 20 hours ago
This article quite clearly depicts a vital factor in the politics of Ayaslis family: they do not associate with politics , but go beyond it. They particularly donate to those, who vehemently deny the genocide of Armenians. I really liked this article and the thorough research of the author.
As far as the comments are concerned I'll only speak of participant- Kirlikovali-'s. This human being is perhaps one of the most aggressive people that I've ever seen. To add to this, his agenda is composed of bashing and discriminating against Armenians (don't try to deny this Kirlikovali- your website says it all). It is quite unfortunate that I can't put a video here of you in El Camino college yelling and screaming at Dr. Marashlian, while security officers are standing close to you, scared that you might do something. I'm not even speaking about your speech at the California Assembly, where the chairman openly laughs at your face for your rather abnormal, psychophatic behavior.
Maxime Gauin [Moderator] 39 minutes ago in reply to Arsen_Shirvanyan
Dr. Marashlian... Oh yes! This man who said, in the middle of 1980's — after the bloody bombings of Ankara (9 tourists killed, including one American) and Orly (8 tourists killed, including another American) —, that Armenian terrorists are “the patriots who have been waiting for 70 years” (“The California Courrier”, February 7, 1985). Despite his earlier support to terrorism, Dr. Marashlian was invited in the congress of Turkish Historical Society in 1990, gave a speech, said his happyness of Turkish courtesy ( http://www.glendale.edu/marashlian/webs/lectureinankara1990.htm ), but says today that he is absolutely against a commission of historians to study the tragedy of First World War...
It would be more than strange if the president of California Assembly did not receive political donation from Murad Topalian, in charge of political fundraising in Armenian National Committee of America. Mr. Topalian was arrested in 1999, then sentenced in 2001 for illegal storing of war weapons and explosives, linked to a terrorist group...
Kirlikovali [Moderator] 2 days ago
If one cherishes values like fairness, objectivity, truth, and honesty, then one should really use the term “Turkish-Armenian conflict”. Asking one “Do you accept or deny Armenian Genocide” shows anti-Turkish bias. The question should be re-phrased “What is your stand on the Turkish-Armenian conflict?”
Turks believe it was an inter communal warfare mostly fought by Turkish and Armenian irregulars, a civil war which is engineered, provoked, and waged by the Armenian revolutionaries, with active support from Russia, England, France, and others, all eyeing the vast territories of the collapsing Ottoman Empire, against a backdrop of a raging world war.
Armenians, on the other hand, totally ignoring Armenian agitation, raids, rebellions, treason, territorial demands, and Turkish victims killed by Armenians, unfairly and deceptively claim that it was a one way genocide.
Turks promote formation of a joint committee of historians to study all the relevant archives and then come to a conclusion which Turkey will support; Armenians, ot the other hand, fret any shining of light onto history. The latter are comfortable with their falsified narrative.
Kirlikovali [Moderator] 2 days ago
Armenians routinely misrepresent to unsuspecting public the Turkish-Armenian conflict as settled history of genocide, whereas the truth is far from being settled, let alone called genocide. When we ask for equal time, Armenians come back with “What is there to respond? There is nothing to debate.” Only those who are not confident about their facts and figures are terrified by open debate, as they know their distortions and tall tales will be exposed. Only those extremists will argue that their case has only one side, and only their stories are the truth. It is up to decent people to stand up to the “opinion thugs” so that both, sides of any controversy may be heard. After that, let the public come to its own decision. Propaganda and political pressure are not meant to replace scholarship, as Armenian falsifiers and their fellow Turk haters attempt to do so frequently here and elsewhere.
Stephen D. Clark [Moderator] 4 days ago
Look, what's a little genocide between friends? Turks may have been mean to Armenians, but Americans were none too paternal to native Americans. We kinda bombed the bejeezus outa' Japanese civilians, too. Who's in a position to judge?
David Davidian [Moderator] 4 days ago
Ergun Kirlikovali praises Yalcin and Serpil Ayasli as, “... a remarkable couple! They have achieved the American dream and more...”. One must then ask if achieving the American dream also includes Ayasli's Hittite Microwave being fined almost a quarter million dollars for six violations of US export laws by selling sensitive electronics to Russia, China and Latvia, and by making false statements to the US Government, etc. See: Nashua Telegraph pdf attachment “Copy of Hittite Microwave export violations settlement”. One might wonder what enemy weapon systems these radar components are now part of.
Ergun Kirlikovali, president-elect of the Assembly of Turkish American Associations (ATAA), who would have us conclude that violating US export laws is part of a fine example of American entrepreneurship, also expects his readers to accept his justification for the Turkish genocide of the Armenians. Making false statements seems rampant in some circles.
Maxime Gauin [Moderator] 2 days ago in reply to David Davidian
What did Hittit Microwave is insignificant vis-à-vis what did the terrorists Murad Topalian (president of Armenian National Committee of America from 1991 to 1999, currently in charge of fundraising for politicians) and Vicken Hovsepian (member of World Bureaud of Armenian Revolutionary Federation, which controls ANCA), both sentenced to jail by US justice.
Cindy [Moderator] 5 days ago
From the late 19th century up to 1923 and later, Turkey committed genocide against the indigenous people - Christians - who lived there long before the Turks arrived from Central Asia and Mongolia.
"Turkey" is now virtually devoid of Christians, and yet Turkey cries "boo hoo" because it can't join the EU which it claims, falsely, is a Christian club.
But let's assume that the mainly EU does want to keep out unqualified Turkey. Can you blame the EU? Why would a mainly Christian organization wish to have as a member a country like Turkey where Christians, in essence, no longer exist?
Oh, poor Turkey. It is always the victim. Boo hoo. You know, so what that it committed genocide against Assyrians, Greeks, and Armenians? What, can't you forget a little indiscretion like that and just let Turkey join any organization it wants?
So what if Turkey is a major human rights violator? So what if it represses Kurdish identity?
Gee, so Turkey's not perfect. What's the big deal? Turkey is now the greatest country in the solar system, don't we all know that? It has "zero problems with neighbors". Except for the 5 countries of Armenia, Iran, Cyprus, Israel, and Greece. Gee, what's the big deal? 5 is almost zero, isn't it?
art94086 [Moderator] 5 days ago
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armenian_Genocide
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armenian_Genocide_denial
David Davidian [Moderator] 6 days ago
The International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS) has clearly recognized the Turkish extermination of the Armenians as genocide. see: http://www.genocidescholars.org/images/IAGS_Resolution_1997_on_the_Armenian_Genocide.pdf One can always find a handful of deniers be it the genocide of Armenians or European Jews.
Interestingly enough, Raphael Lemkin, the lawyer who coined the term genocide, stated, "I became interested in genocide because it happened to the Armenians; and after the Armenians got a very rough deal at the Versailles Conference because their criminals were guilty of genocide and were not punished." in a 1949 CBS TV interview with Quincy Howe.
Official rejection of genocide by the Turkish state is multifaceted. The creation mythos of the Republic of Turkey would be unmasked, but moreover, monetary reparations and land claims would certainly follow.
Ergun Kirlikovali [Moderator] 6 days ago in reply to David Davidian
Genocide scholars is the invention of Zorian Instuitute, a nototriously anti-Turkish Armenian lobby organization. Most are not even historians. Among them retired psychiatrists, actvitists, sociologists, anyone but a genocide scholar. The only one who could pass as one is paid by the Armenian lobby. The University of the Minnesota legal counsel revealed, upon inquiry by Turkish Americans, that one genocide scholar was indeed paid by Cafesjian Foundation, and again, Zoryan Institute. I think you get the picture... It's that age-old, time-tested Armenian con at work here (see http://www.ethocide.com/ for more on this.)
JohnS [Moderator] 4 days ago in reply to Ergun Kirlikovali
We seem to have a Twiddle Dee and Twieedle Dum in Ergun and Maxime.
One says "Genocide Scholars are the invention of Zorian Institute", what does this mean? where is the conspiracy proof that this is an Armenian invention, to what end? created by Armenians to merely "insult the poor Turks"? prove what you say Ergun, or join the ranks of liars.
The other says Israel Charney is self-proclaimed specialist in genocide, and that he is "only" a psychologist. There is a great ignorance on your part (intentional or otherwise) that in genocide studies, Psychology as well as Sociology are fundamental disciplines in analyzing root causes of terrific and horrendous historical events. In fact, the History faculties of major universities concider such disciplines as a must in studying Genocide, much more than the Political Science discipline. Such is the case with Montreal's both McGill and Concordia universities.
Both Dee and Dum forget that Israel Charny was good enough for the Jewish academics in Israel for him to be the executive director of the Holocaust and Genocide Institute…in Israel.
In return they praise Guenter Lewy. And what might you ask are his credentials? He has Political Science degree from University of Massachusetts… Dee and Dum consider him the ultimate authority on genocide. He has written about the Armenian massacres….concluding it was not a genocide (thus the affection shown towards him by Turks) although he does say upwards of 600 000
Armenians were brutally killed…never mind that, Turks are happy because this "Historian" says it was not a genocide! This historian comes to this grandiose conclusion admittedly not having studied Turkish archives (can't speak Turkish), German archives (Can't read German), left Germany when he was berry young) Armenian archives (can't speak Armenian) or Russian archives (can't speak Russian). His work on the Armenia Case was so flimsy that he was refused 11 crucial peer-reviews before finding one publisher who agreed to publish his works.
Gentleman, enough, you have proven your true intentions here, now with all respect…dismiss yourselves.
(Edited by author 4 days ago)
Maxime Gauin [Moderator] 4 days ago in reply to JohnS
Psychology does not teach how to use archival material, and that is why Mr. Charny is, according of his proper statement in Istanbul, 2006, totally unable to say what are the original sources to be used for Armenian issue, even in English. On the other hand, the difference between political scientists who deal with past events and historians is slim.
Guenter Lewy is fluent in German, and used extensively both German archives and printed sources for his book “The Armenian Massacres in Ottoman Turkey”. Those who have read this book know. You, no.
Prof. Lewy used collections of Ottoman documents translated into English; it is already far better than the majority of authors who support “genocide” claims: not only they cannot read Ottoman Turkish, but they are not interested by translated documents. V. N. Dadrian and Taner Akçam, sociologists who are supposed to read Ottoman Turkish, are famous for their deliberate mistranslation — not only from Ottoman Turkish, but also from German and Modern Turkish.
Kirlikovali [Moderator] 4 days ago in reply to JohnS
Typical Armenian mumbo-jumbo. Anything to confuse and deceive people. Careful reading will reveal that what I write does not contradict any of what Maxime wrotes. Thretired psychologist I am talking about is no other than Charny. I did not want to dignify the self-proclaimed geno-scholar by naming his name. But Maxime, being the meticulous researcher he is, wrote his name openly.
Geno-scholars are a shameful invention of the tricky Armenian lobby, spearheaded by Zoryan Institue. Just log into their site and click on geno-scholars. Even the most novice reader will realize what a racket the Armenians are running. (Check the BOD of the group. If you still do not wake up, read their accounst and compare with Dadrian's. Shall I draw a picture for you?)
To see the photos of "poor, starving Armenian" revolutionaries armed to the teeth who killed more than half a million Muslims, mostly Turk, with Russian made Mosin weapons, go to : http://www.ethocide.com/ .
In order to make the long discredited political claims of Armenian genocide stick, Armenian propaganda, agitation, terror, raids, revolts, treason, territorial conflicts and the Muslim, mostly Turkish victims resulting from them, are all swept under the rug by thgese, so called "geno scholars"... What a shame!
Welcome to "social construction of reality" defining reality through social interactions, not objective realities. Such dramaturgical approaches and ethnomethodology, unfortunately shape perceptions, feelings and behaviors.
It is time Armenian stopped hiding behind long ciscredited hearsay and falshoods and come clean with Armenian hate crimes and Armenian war crimes.
Maxime Gauin [Moderator] 4 days ago in reply to Ergun Kirlikovali
Israeli Charny, former president of IAGS, is indeed a psychologist, specialist of marriage and divorce; he proclaimed himself “specialist in genocides”. He was invited to the contradictory international symposium in Istanbul University, in 2006. When a Turkish woman asked to him what are, in his view, the most important original sources, at least in English, for Armenian issue, Mr. Charny answered that he has just no idea of that.
The current boss of “genocide studies” in Minnesota University is one of my compatriots. He is a professor of literature, not history. He published nothing about Turkey or Ottoman Empire. Anyway, he believes in “Armenian genocide” allegation.
Both V. N. Dadrian and Taner Akçam are sociologists, without degrees in history. Their methods are frequently, not to say almost systematically, a pure denial of scholar ethic. http://www.tc-america.org/Erman%20Sahin-Review%20Article.pdf http://armenians-1915.blogspot.com/2010/03/3023-review-essay-armenian-question-by.html http://www.tallarmeniantale.com/dadrian-book-review.htm
Maxime Gauin [Moderator] 6 days ago in reply to David Davidian
The so-called IAGS has very few credibility. As pointed Prof. Guenter Lewy (a real scholar, who made a real work on Armenian issue, and also a survivor of Kristalnacht): “I am less than impressed by the unanimous vote of the International Association of Genocide Scholars that the Armenian case ‘was one of the major genocides of the modern era.’ The great majority of these self-proclaimed experts on Ottoman history have never set foot in an archive or done any other original research on the subject in question.” https://www.commentarymagazine.com/viewarticle.cfm/genocide--11140?page=2
Prof. Lewy was winner against the defamators who accused him to be a Turkish agent; they were forced to publish a retraction statement on their Web site, and in “The New York Review of Books”; and also to pay a monetary compensation.
R. Lemkin coined the word “genocide” in a book entitled “Axis Rule in Occupied Europe”, published in 1944, and which contains no reference to Armenians. Lemkin supported later the “genocide” label (without provoking any particular support among Armenians, actually), but at that time, he had changed his definition of the word “genocide”; that is why, in 1948, the definition adopted by UN was not the text of Lemkin, but another.
The issue of monetary compensation was settled for Armenians of Russia/USSR by the Gümrü and Kars treaties; for Armenians of France, UK, Greece and Arab lands by the Lausanne treaty. These agreements included a full amnesty and a complete renunciation to any claims. For Armenian Americans, the issue was fixed by an US-Turkish agreement; all the claims made by Armenians were rejected by US civil servants, as one can check in reading the full text of their conclusions: http://armenians-1915.blogspot.com/2009/12/2983-free-ebook-american-turkish-claims.html
Seicheprey [Moderator] 5 days ago in reply to Maxime Gauin
Let us all leave it at this: no one has clean hands here, not the government of Turkey for the murders of Armenians, nor Armenians for the murders of Turkish nationals here and abroad. At the turn of the twentieth century a great many Greeks, Armenians, and Turks left their homes to leave the violence and hatred behind. America is still a new country, one which should have no room for old world hatreds.
JohnS [Moderator] 6 days ago
You write: "Most recently, Yalcin Ayasli and groups he supports helped lead the countercharge against bringing the Armenian Genocide Resolution to a vote during the closing days of the 111th Congress."
And this is supposed to portray Mr. Yalcin Ayasli as someone who should be proud of his deeds? This is a person who works with organizations, such as the Turkish Coalition of America, to achieve one aim and one aim only: to work towards the continual denial of the Armenian Genocide.
People like Mr. Ayasli should be ashamed of bringing their intolerance and hatred to their new home, the USA. One who negates the historical fact of the butchery of the Armenian nation deserve no standing in any social stratum, and no amount of money, whether his own or funnelled through the Turkish government, should be tolerated by Americans to be used towards denying the systematically planned and executed genocide of Armenians in 1915.
Is there anyone who could take pride in working towards the denial of the Holocaust?
Maxime Gauin [Moderator] 6 days ago in reply to JohnS
Those who are bringing intolerance and hatred are the Armenian nationalists who call “heroes” the Armenian terrorists, including the racist murderer Hampig Sassounian, sentenced to life for the assassination of Kemal Arikan, Turkish general consul in Los Angeles. A very interesting file about this crime and its glorification by big Armenian American associations is available online, in two parts: http://www.ataa.org/reference/ATAA_Statement_in_Opposition_of_Parole.pdf http://www.ataa.org/reference/Supporting_Documents_Hampig_Sassounian.pdf
Mourad Topalian, who was political director (1975-1979) and president (1991-1999) of Armenian National Committee of America (ANCA), the main Armenian American umbrella, was sentenced in 2001 to 37 months of jail for illegal storing of war weapons and explosives, linked to a terrorist group. Mr. Topalian came back among the leaders of ANCA after the end of this sentence. Vicken Hovsepian, the supreme leader, in USA, of Armenian Revolutionary Federation (which controls ANCA), was sentenced to 6 years of prison in 1984 for an attempt of bombing against Turkish consulate of Philadelphia. Many Armenian Americans gave money for their justice costs, exactly like for the racist murderer Hampig Sassounian.
Fanatic Armenians assaulted Turks and friends of Turks in USA at least until 2000: http://www.ataa.org/reference/topalian/VIS4_Incki_Affidavit.pdf
http://www.ataa.org/reference/topalian/VIS5_Atrek_Affidavit.pdf
http://www.ataa.org/reference/topalian/VIS3_Kaslan_Affidavit.pdf
I escaped myself to an assault in France only in threatening to sue for physical violence. In 2000, a lecture by Prof. Gilles Veinstein was cancelled because an attack of Armenian nationalists.
JohnS [Moderator] 6 days ago in reply to Maxime Gauin
Ha! pot calling the kettle black!! Some Armenian activists might be extremists. Turkey, on the other hand, has institutionalized anti-Armenian hatred to such a degree that the word "Armenian" equals a swear word. President Gül actually had to sue those who called him of having Armenian blood to clear his name from that "shame". Ogun Samast, the Turkish killer of the innocent Armenian editor of a newspaper was surrounded by those who arrested him to have their pictures taken with the newest national hero.
I'm sorry to hear about your own story of being threatened but there are extremists in every society. In the case of Armenians, they do not even approach the deadly notoriety of what is called the "Deep State" killers in Turkey, who enjoy the protection of top level political circles.
Maxime Gauin [Moderator] 5 days ago in reply to JohnS
After the murder of Hrant Dink (a former ultraleftist activist, by the way), there were huge demonstrations in Turkey against political violence; all the main political parties expressed their solidarity with Turkish Armenians. There are Armenians among the main Turkish political parties, including MHP, rightist nationalist. The first Armenian MP was elected in Turkish National Assembly, Berch Keresteciyan, as early as 1935; he was a friend of Kemal Atatürk.
After the murder of Turkish general consuls in LA (Mehmet Baydar and his deputy in 1973, Kemal Arikan in 1982), main Armenian American associations supported the murderers (Gourgen Yanikian in 1973, Hampig Sassounian in 1982), paid their justice costs, organized demonstrations of support. As far as 2000, “The Armenian Mirror-Spectator”, surely not the most extremist Armenian American newspaper, published an editorial justifying the assassination of Turkish diplomats by ASALA and JCAG/ARA.
The situation is by no means limited to USA. In France, the co-chairmen of Coordination Council of France's Armenian associations are Jean-Marc Ara Toranian, former spokesman of terrorist group ASALA, and Mourad Papazian, who was in the 1980's the most vitriolic supporter of another terrorist group, JCAG/ARA. Max Hrair Kilndjian, sentenced in 1982 as an accessory in the attempt of murder against Turkish ambassador in Switzerland, and the four ASALA terrorists who assaulted Turkish consulate of Paris, killing a security agent and wounding seriously the consul, were considered as heroes by the main France's Armenian associations. Charles Aznavour, among many others, helped the so-called “Committee of support to the Armenian political prisoners”, i.e. the group which paid the justice costs of ASALA terrorists, and explained that Armenian terrorism was wonderful.
Richard G. Hovannisian (one of the main authors supporting the "Armenian genocide" allegation) sent a written statement for the Kilndjian trial; the three main French authors defending the "Armenian genocide" label in France were witnesses for Max Hrair Kilndjian, the four ASALA terrorists mentioned above, and for Mardiros Jamgotchian, assassin of Mehmet Yergüz, secretary of Turkish consul in Geneva.
A challenge to finish: JohnS, can you give to us the name of ONE big Armenian association, in North America, Western Europe, Australia or Lebanon, which called criminals the Armenian terrorists, and did never justify their crimes?
Random Armenian [Moderator] 3 days ago in reply to Maxime Gauin
Maxime, what exactly is your point? Yes there were 100,000 people demonstrating in support of Hrant Dink. You could also mention that Armenian who was part of the linguistic commission to revamp the Turkish language and alphabet. You could even mention stories of the survivors of the genocide that describe Turks saving Armenians. None of this changes that fact that racism and nationalism is institutionalized in Turkey. Did you miss the pictures of the Turkish Gendarmerie with Hrant Dink's assassin being treated like a hero? Or that Dink's murder trial has dragged on for four years and the killer may go free because of laws on underage defendants. Or the nationalist organization that was behind the assassination? Or the history of harassment and bloodshed against not just the non-Muslim but the Muslim minorities such as the Alevis and Kurds under the Turkish Republic? You talk of defending truth but you're acting in a very partisan manner. You should be critical of nationalism and hate in every group. But you're biased in this subject and it shows through.
Maxime Gauin [Moderator] 2 days ago in reply to Random Armenian
Random Armenian, you failed to demonstrate “that racism and nationalism is institutionalized in Turkey”. Turkish citizens are equal. The fact that few gendarmes condone Hrant Dink's assassination has nothing to do with any official policy. The complexity of Dink affair and the problems of Turkish justice have, also, nothing to do with any racism. Hrant Dink's murderer was arrested quickly after the crime. The majority of Armenian terrorists who killed Turks in Western countries were never arrested, including the assassins of Ohran Gündüz, honorary consul in Boston, killed on May 5, 1982, after another attempt, which failed. US police failed to protect him, then to find his murderers. In France, Armenian terrorists killed an ambassador and his driver (1975), three counselors in two attacks (1979, 1981); no one was arrested for that. The four ASALA terrorists who assaulted the Turkish general consulate in Paris, killing a guard and seriously wounding the consul, were sentenced to only 7 years of prison, and released after 6 years. A crowd of Armenian was in the tribunal room, to threat the jury and magistrates.
More recently, in 2007, the Greek terrorist who killed Haluk Sipahioglu, deputy chief of mission at the Turkish embassy in Athens, was released after only five years in jail. http://www.lactuel.be/detail.php?id=2045&lang=3&lang=2
Random Armenian [Moderator] 1 day ago in reply to Maxime Gauin
Wow. Are you serious? The Kurdish language was outlawed in Turkey. Does that even make sense? There are still issues regarding the broadcasting of the Kurdish language. There does not have to be an official policy. That's a red herring. The level of nationalism and racism within government institutions is high where it's a major issue. Why is Gul setting up an investigation into the Dink trial? If the judicial process was carried out correctly we would not be at this stage. Why are Alevis and Kurds complaining about discrimination? The issues with minorities is an almost daily topic in Turkey these days and you're saying "Turkish citizens are equal." On paper, but the practice has been very different.
Maxime Gauin [Moderator] 1 day ago in reply to Random Armenian
The limitation to public use of Kurdish dialects (there is no “Kurdhish language”, and that is why even within the PKK, Kurdish Islamist-Maoist terrorist group, the communication language is... Turkish) decided by military government in 1982, were suppressed by the laws of 1991, 2002 and 2004. The “discrimination” of Kurds and other minorities is nothing but propaganda, mostly Communist/ultraleftist. Turgut Özal, Prime minister of Turkey from 1983 to 1989, then president from 1989 to 1993, was a Kurd. Hikmet Çetin, another Kurd, was, among other top-rank positions, minister of Foreing Affairs (1991-1994), president of Kemalist party (1995), president of National Assemlby (1997-1999), and NATO Senior Civilian Representative in Afghanistan (2003-2006). There are more than 100, possibly 200 of MPs with Kurdish heritage in current Turkish national Assembly. The current president of Kemalist party is an Alevi Kurd.
The so-called cultural claims of some Kurds appeared in an interesting light recently, when the current investigation on PKK activities in France made findings in so-called “cultural” Kurdish association of Marseille. Not surprisingly, the single French party which supported the indicted persons was the Communist Party. Even before, anybody who can read French could see that the so-called “Kurdish Institutes” of Paris and Brussels vituperated Turkey but have absolutely nothing to say against any criminal activity of Islamist-Maoist PKK: assassinations, bombings, drug smuggling, racket, etc.
The cooperation between Armenian and Kurdish nationalists/terrorists is old. The Islamist-Nationalist insurrection of some Turkish Kurds in 1925 was funded by Armenian Revolutionary Federation, as explained by Kapriel Serope Papazian (“Patriotism Perverted”, Boston, Baikar Press, 1934).
Random Armenian [Moderator] 1 day ago in reply to Maxime Gauin
There really isn't much else to say to you Maxime. You're playing a game of pointing out things that didn't happen to argue against things that do you happen and try to drown the discussion with a stream of details. You're ignoring the nationalism on one side by claiming "Turkish citizens are equal." but then going into details on others. One can't have an open discussion with you. You do have an anti-Armenian bias and you're partisan. Good day.
JohnS [Moderator] 5 days ago in reply to Maxime Gauin
You say Charles Aznavour explained that Armenian terrorism was wonderful? now you are living in fantasy land. You list people and places that actually mean nothing. ASALA is a past history, we should look forward and not get stuck in the past. The reason they lived a short life (essentially from 1973 (Yanikian) to mid-80's) because the Armenian communities could not tolerate and put up with such a violent approach. The Armenian communities throughout the world cannot and could not control a handful of people who lean towards violence, the proof? they no longer exist.
The case of Turkey is very different. Unlike what you claim the MHP actually condemned the show of support for Hrant Dink. There are many in Turkey (much more than those showing support) who think Dink had it coming. Look at your qualifier after his name " (a former ultraleftist activist, by the way) ", meaning his hands cannot be clean.
Common man, stop kidding yourself and start reading works of courageous Turkish intellectuals who bear it all open for Turks-first and foremost to- to see. Read Elif Shafak, especially her columns in the old Turkish Daily News, also Orhan Cengiz, Cengiz Çandar and many others who talk about the Turkish sickness of hating Armenians for being just Armenian.
To me what ASALA did was unconscionable, for which Armenians put a stop at the end. However, you cannot use them in a twisted way of forward looking to negate the past. The Armenian Genocide is a fact. The Turkish denial of it is BS. Those hundred thousand Turks who demonstrated in the streets of Istanbul when Hrant Dink was brutally murdered were calling on this BS denial. Dink was killed for being Armenian, and his death truly justifies those who call him the 1,500,001st martyr.
Maxime Gauin [Moderator] 5 days ago in reply to JohnS
Unlike you, I have been read the whole collection of ASALA newspaper “Hay Baykar”, as well as the collections of “Haïastan”, monthly of French young Dashnaks in the 1970's and 1980's, and of “France-Arménie”, newspaper of Lyon's Dashnaks. Charles Aznavour wrote a statement in support for four ASALA terrorists who assaulted the Turkish general consulate of Paris, killing a guard and wounding seriously the consul; he sang for the Support Committee to Armenian Political Prisoners (= terrorists), whose chairman was Jean-Marc Ara Toranian, editor-in-chief of “Hay Baykar” and spokesman of ASALA until the Orly attack. The trial of attack against Turkish consulate, which happened in the beginning of 1984, was the culmination of support for terrorism by big French Armenian associations.
“Haïastan”, from 1980 to 1986, is full of hysterical articles supporting terrorism, and hoping that more Turks would be killed in the future. The most vicious of its writers was Mourad Papazian, currently co-president of Coordination Council of France's Armenian Associations, and co-president of Armenian Revolutionary Federation for Western Europe. I can quote his litterature if you want, I made photocopies for my trial against Movsès Nissanian, which I won. Mr. Nissanian said that he reproves terrorism, so he was stridently insulted by some of his proper “comrades”, who called him a “coward” and a “shame for ARF”...
If you would open my links given before, you would see the not less hysterical support by US Dashnaks to terrorism and more generally to political violence.
As far as December 1986, “The Armenian Weekly” claimed a continuation of Armenian terrorism.
ASALA and JCAG/ARA stopped eventually because:
1) The increasing of security measure by both Turkey and other targeted countries;
2) The Soviet pressure on Armenian Revolutionary Federation to suspend the activities of JCAG/ARA.
3) The internal violence between the Armenian terrorists themselves.
4) The destruction of PLO camps by Tsahal in Lebanon. Many Armenian terrorists were trained in these camps.
As pointed interstingly the French-Armenian political scientist Gaïdz Minassian, when ARF suspended the activities of JCAG/ARA, in 1985/86, it was decided that the experts in explosives be sent to the camps of PKK, the Islamist-Maoist Kurdish terrorist group. As early as 1980, ASALA cooperated with PKK, and PKK integrated the remaining ASALA terrorists after 1985-88. There are still Armenians within PKK, especially in top-rank positions. Moreover, Armenian terrorists killed several dozens of Azeris from 1989-1994 (I am speaking of terrorism, for instance bombs in Baku's underground, not about the war crimes of Armenian forces in Western Azerbaijan).
I am far to agree with what French writer Georges Bernados wrote, but I believe that this sentence is fully right: “The intellectual is so often an idiot that we should consider him like that until that he demonstrates the reverse.” Ms. Shafak and the former ultraleftists who became “liberals” are perfect illustrations of this sentence. Not surprisingly, many of these “intellectuals” were passionate supporters of Communist totalitarianism in 1970's; USSR contributed strongly to create Armenian terrorism, like Tzarist Russia fabricated pre-1917 Armenian terrorism.
Hrant Dink was an ultraleftist in the 1970's, at a time when Turkish far left used terrorism, killing several thousands of people, much more than any other terrorism of that time. It is a fact. There is no evidence of Hrant Dink's participation to terrorism, but his assassination is probably more understandable as an ultimate revenge of far right against far left than an act of racism.
JohnS [Moderator] 4 days ago in reply to Maxime Gauin
You seem to be stuck with ASALA, a non-existing and defunct entity, perhaps you do that to get your anti-Armenianin inspirations, a general tactic of Turks who simply do not wish to face the skeletons of thugs such as Talat, Enver and Jemal, the three Turkish "heroes" who were condemned to death by none other than Turkish courts in 1919 for crimes against humanity for the extermination of the Armenians.
You talk about links that would prove your point but what you give are links of Turkish General Staff (you've got to be kidding me) and other racist anonymous sites such as tall tale. Yeah right.
You keep singing an worn out Turkish propaganda songs of creating some connections between Armenians and the PKK. This is childish on your part. Perhaps in the past some of ASALA's people not finding support from the traditional Armenian organizations, including the Dashnaks, light have connected with the PKK, but this is old news and does not go beyond few fringe elements. You, and by rule Turks who are desperate in finding dirt, continue tout the ridiculous notion of equalizing ASALA and Dashnaks, a grass-roots organization that has the support of the majority of organized diaspora. Call Dashnaks terrorists as much as you want, it does not make them so. In all the countries that they have established chapters they enjoy the respect of the governments of those countries.
You're interpretation of far-left must be different then mine. In my opinion only a far-right individual would consider Elif Shafak, and Hrant Dink for that matter, as belonging to "ultraleftist" groups. Elif Shafak was a toddler during the events in Turkey that you describe. She was born in 1971 for heaven's sake. What takes the cake is your twisted notion that Hrant Dink might have been killed for his left-leaning ideology and not his Armenianness. Do you follow at all current Turkish newspaper articles? I"m sure you do but as is the case of typical Turkish Armenian-hater, you'd instead hide behind fiction than confront reality.
You say "Armenian terrorists killed several dozens of Azeris from 1989-1994, bombs in Baku's underground" prove it, give a reliable reference (and not a hysterical Azeri lie) or else consider yourself a liar. Most probably a liar because it is these kind of lies that Turks who negate the reality of the Armenian Genocide hide behind lies such as "Armenian killing hundreds of thousands of Turks in 1915". To me, this is the ultimate cowardice.
Have a nice day.
(Edited by author 4 days ago)
Maxime Gauin [Moderator] 8 hours ago in reply to JohnS
« You talk about links that would prove your point but what you give are links of Turkish General Staff (you've got to be kidding me) and other racist anonymous sites such as tall tale. »
You are obviously unable to quote any racist statement on Tall Armenian Tale site. Anyway, I gave a link to an article published in a scholar review by an US scholar without Turkish blood (Mary Schaeffer Conroy); I used TAT site only because it is the single site which gives this article for free.
The links to the Web site of Turkish General Staff come to a publication of Ottoman military documents, translated into modern Turkish and into English.
Not surprisingly, you fail to mention my links to ATAA's file against the parole of racist murderer Hampig Sassounian.
Maxime Gauin [Moderator] 2 days ago in reply to JohnS
You are losing the control of yourself. A one can guess in reading my name, I am not a Turk; my four grand-parents are born French. I have no “anti-Armenianin inspirations”. If ASALA is really, “a non-existing and defunct entity”, why the association of ASALA's veterans was able to silence Dr. Armen Gakavian, an Armenian Australian scholar, who wanted to lauch a petition of apologies for Armenian terrorism and war crimes of Armenian volunteers of Russian army during WWI?
The Dashnaks had their proper terrorist group, the JCAG/ARA, passionately supported by Dashnak newspapers, in USA, France, Lebanon and elsewhere. The Dashnak Hampig Sassounian is still serving a life sentence for the assassination of Turkish consul Kemal Arikan; his brother Harout served several years for an attempt of murder against the same Kemal Arikan; Vicken Hovsepian, supreme leader of ARF-Dashak in USA, was sentenced to 6 years of jail for an attempt of bombing; Murad Topalian, one of the main Dashnak leader in USA, served four years for illegal storing of war weapons and explosives; three other Dashnaks served 25 years in Canadian prisons for the assault against Turkish embassy in Ottawa, where a Canadian security agent was murdered. The JCAG/ARA killed more Turkish diplomats (around 20) than ASALA.
I did not say that Elif Shafak is a former ultraleftist; I said that for Hrant Dink, and it is a well-known fact, even among his admirators.
Just_Wondering [Moderator] 6 days ago
I am neither Armenian or Turkish, nor do I have any political or personal interest in this debate, but I do have an opinion. I think the evidence is overwhelming, and trying to define a genocide by the number of people killed is absurd. It is clear that mass murder took place along ethnic lines, and was systematic.
Mr. Gauin, of whom I had never heard of before, apparently is a staunch defender of the Turkish side based on a Google search. I looked at the site he listed, and just because there is a list of 28 "scholars", who don't believe, that is hardly proof that the majority do believe a genocide occurred. Without an in-depth analysis, it is really hard to determine what their biases may be, but I suspect there is great bias involved based on what I did read. Also, on the linked site, they have a link to "falsehoods". Even if they are false, I just did a Google search, and until you can disprove the overwhelming horrific acts that I just read, their "falsehoods" pale in comparison. Disproving one fact does not disprove an entire case.
Just an outsiders take on this.
Instead of all the energy Turks waste trying to defend an indefensible position, admit it, and history will move on. Instead, because you continue to deny it, it stays current in people's minds.
Maxime Gauin [Moderator] 6 days ago in reply to Just_Wondering
On the contrary, the Armenians of Istanbul (160 000), Izmir (13 000), Edirne (30 600), Antalya (500), Kütahya, Aleppo (22 000), were, for the great majority, not deported during WWI. Several thousands of Catholic, artisans, civil servants, and others, were not deported. Among those who were deported, a substantial part was killed, another perished because famines and epidemics, but an important part survived, thanks to the action of local Ottoman authorities, who did nothing else than carry out the orders coming from Istanbul. An Armenian who became US citizen and took the name of James K. Sutherland calls Djemal Pasha, n° 3 of actual Ottoman government, “a great man”, who was “responsible for the saving of half-a-million of Armenians in the part of Turkey subject to his control” (“The Adventures of an Armenian Boy”, Ann Arbor Press, 1964, p. 146). Hilmar Kaiser, one of the few supporters of “Armenian genocide” label who has a Ph.D. in history, acknowledges that Djemal Pasha is the man who saved the greatest number of Armenians during WWI, and that there were not one unified policy vis-à-vis this people (“Regional resistance to central government policies: Ahmed Djemal Pasha, the governors of Aleppo, and Armenian deportees in the spring and summer of 1915”, “The Journal of Genocide Research”, 12/3-4, 2010, pp. 173-218). The fact that Djemal applied simply the decision of government can be checked in the Ottoman archives on this issue, which are, for an important part, available online and translated into English:
http://www.tsk.tr/eng/ermeni_sorunu_salonu/arsiv_belgeleriyle_ermeni_faaliyetleri/arsiv_belgeleriyle_ermeni_faaliyetleri.htm
I have a MA in contemporary history; I defend the truth and free speech; I defended both in my court case in France against an Armenian nationalist, and I was winner, the last year.
Maxime Gauin [Moderator] 6 days ago
“Most scholars agree it was genocide”
False: http://www.theottomanarmeniantragedy.org/scholar.html
“and it’s illegal to claim otherwise in France and Switzerland.”
False again. The French Senate did not vote, did not even discuss, the penalization bill. The infamous sentence against Bernard Lewis was based on the article 1382 of civil code (not penal code) and justified because Prof. Lewis said that the "genocide" version is "the Armenian version of this story" — not because he challenged such a label. In 2004, the Cour de cassation (French supreme court) forbidded absolutely to use the article 1382 to restrict free speech on individuals. So, such a decision could no more happen today. Several prominent French scholars, including Robert Mantran, Xavier de Planhol and Gilles Veinstein, criticized the "genocide" label without be sued.
Ergun Kirlikovali [Moderator] 6 days ago
What a remarkable couple! They have achieved the American dream and more... Three wonderful children juggled along with two very successful careers. His largesse in founding the charitable organizations mentioned in the article to educate the public about Turkish culture, history, and heritage, in the face of relentless campaigns of defamation by Armenian and other lobbies, shows this man's grit. TCA, TCF, TALDF, and TCA-USA PAC are blazing the trails for more than half a million Americans of Turkish heritage. My heartfelt congratulations to this man, to this couple, and indeed, to this family of "Turkish Delights"!
Ergun Kirlikovali [Moderator] 6 days ago
What a remarkable couple! They have achieved the American dream and more... Three wonderful children juggled along with two very successful careers. His largesse in founding the charitable organizations mentioned in the article to educate the public about Turkish culture, history, and heritage, in the face of relentless campaigns of defamation by Armenian and other lobbies, shows this man's grit. TCA, TCF, TALDF, and TCA-USA PAC are blazing the trails for more than half a million Americans of Turkish heritage. My heartfelt congratulations to this man, to this couple, and indeed, to this family of "Turkish Delights"!
Joseph [Moderator] 1 week ago
Congratulations from that one-man shop in 1985 to these $million! My Concord friend's mother was from Albania and talked about climbing trees there for grapes and something about Turkey too but I forget as just a comment, maybe to my saying to her over the kitchen table of my having just attended some religious report at a church on the Heights I think it was back in 1995+ of a visiting pastor/ archeologist IN SEARCH OF...Noah's Ark on Mt. Ararat in Turkey. The Turkish gov't letting explorers in there every now and then, but I think closed at the moment. To get a Progress Report, from who?
http://www.nashuatelegraph.com/news/906334-196/nashuan-couple-among-top-political-donors.html
Armenian Genocide: Millions Killed And Forgotten Ahmed Aziz
Turkey has always denied the death of 1.5 million Armenian Christians as genocide, blaming it on civil war at the time.
On December 24, 2010, the United States once again avoided diplomatic difficulties with a Nato ally, Turkey. The House of Representatives ended its term by not putting forward a resolution recognising the genocide of the Armenians by the Ottoman Empire during World War I. This resolution is unlikely to be passed by the Congress in the next term because the next house speaker, John Boehner, does not support it.
According to the Independent, supporters of the resolution had high hopes for it to be passed before the term ended because the outgoing speaker, Nancy Pelosi, had previously supported the resolution.
Turkey is an important ally of the US in the Middle East playing a supporting role in the Iraq War and has helped the US in the past on other war fronts. Turkish governments have always denied the death of 1.5 million Armenian Christians as genocide, blaming it on general anarchy and civil was at that time. However, historians term it as the first holocaust of the 20th century, of which documentary and photographic proof also exists.
Genocide roots in the Ottoman Empire
Within the Ottoman Empire, the Armenians were generally concentrated in the eastern provinces. According to the Dhimmi system in the Ottoman Empire the non-Muslims were subjected to over-taxation and limited legal freedoms. Generally referred to as infidels or unbelievers, they were not considered equal to Muslims. Testimony of a non-Muslim against a Muslim was not admissible in court and their houses could not be higher than their Muslim neighbor’s.
Initial massacres took place under the rule of Sultan Abdul Hamid II in the late 19th century. These were called the Hamidiyan massacres in which, according to different historians, 80,000 to 300,000 Armenians were killed.
In 1908, the monarchy had collapsed after the Young Turk Revolution and by 1913 the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), Ittihad ve Terakki Jemiyeti, emerged at the head of the government in a coup. The CUP had an extreme Turkish nationalistic ideology and was mainly controlled by Enver Pasha, Minister of War, Talat Pasha, Minister of the Interior and Grand Vizier in 1917, and Jemal Pasha, Minister of the Marine.
The resettlement program
I will not go deep into political background of the genocide which occurred during World War I but one of the basic reasons behind it was Ottoman insecurity that the Armenian Christian subjects will support the Russians pushing on in the eastern front of the war. Some historians also credit it to the policies of the government to create a unified and pure “Turkish state.”
In the spring and summer of 1915 Armenians all around the empire were ordered to deport under a fictitious “resettlement program.” Convoys consisting of hundreds of thousands of Armenians from different parts of the empire started towards the Syrian Desert. These convoys were basically death marches because most of the people were subjected to torture, rape and slaughter during their painful journey towards the desert. The government did not make any plans for the provision of food and water and thousands died of starvation and disease. Some evidence of a primitive form of gas chambers also exists, where women and children were put into a cave and the entrance of the cave was set on fire, suffocating the people inside the cave.
The forgotten holocaust
A new “Special Organisation” called the Teshkilâti Mahsusa, was formed as a tool for extermination. Approximated two million Armenians lived in the Ottoman lands in 1915 but by 1918 an estimated 1 million had perished and by 1923 a negligible number of Armenians were left in main Anatolian Turkey.
Photographic and documentary evidence exist of the extermination of the Armenian race from the Ottoman lands.
This Genocide the forgotten holocaust because it was over-shadowed by the killing of the six million Jews during the World War II by Nazi Germany and generally people really don’t know about it. It is ironic because while persuading his associates that a Jewish holocaust would be tolerated by the west, Adolf Hitler said the following and he was right:
Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?
Events of such magnitude cannot be explained in one article so for readers who are further interested in knowing about what took place in the Ottoman Empire during that time, should have a look at the following:
1. Great War for Civilization: The conquest of the Middle East – By Robert Fisk (Chapter 10)
2. Subjects of the Sultan: Culture and Daily Life in the Ottoman Empire – by Suraiya Faroqhi
3. The Knock at the Door: A Journey through the Darkness of the Armenian Genocide – by Margaret Ajemian Ahnert
4. A Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility – by Taner Akçam
5. Survivors: An Oral History Of The Armenian Genocide – by Donald E. Miller and Lorna Touryan Miller
Readers Comments (82)
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Reply Raqib Ali 4 weeks ago
Turkey has distanced herself from Caliphate and has been a NATIONALIST & strictly Secular country for decades under Mustafa Kamal Attaturk.
Turkish people are very proud people and very sensitive on this matter. They find it unjust that they are being blamed of this Exaggerated genocide when it was done before modern Turkey was formed.
If ET published this as a ‘public service message’, there should be more pieces on forgotten Gypsies. Everyone knows about Jewish genocide, while ignoring more than 5 Million gypsies killed by Hitler!!
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Reply Farrukh Mujahid 4 weeks ago
Interesting piece. Though I better read more about this before I comment.
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Reply Weston Heintz 4 weeks ago
Very nice article, now that this piece of history has been brought to my attention, looks like I have some more reading to do into the matter.
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Reply Malik Siraj Akbar 4 weeks ago
Dear Ahmed, thank you so much for bringing the Armenian genocide to the attention of the Pakistani readers.I have always been perturbed why not many Pakistanis newspapers mention about it in any of their sections. I read about it in detail in Robert Fisk’s book which you have recommended.
@RAQIB: You can not justify or forget one genocide only by suggesting us to take a look at the other genocides. Every genocide merit equal exposure to the reader.
A wonderful piece. Hope to read more on the topic in the future.
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Reply MihranK 4 weeks ago
Mr A.Aziz has thoroughly studied the case of the Armenian genocide,I congratulate you for your excellent article which should be an eye opener for the so called civilised world,as any genocide which goes unpunished will raise its ugly head over and over again,history is the witness of this sad fact.
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Reply Aksal 4 weeks ago
These are blatant lies. Armenian terrorists colloborated with the invading Russian army and murdered half a million Turks and Kurds (Muslims). They had to be relocated because they were a fifth column. Armenian christian savages now claim they were subject to genocide but will never launch a case in the international court to prove it. All they do is political lobbying and aim to defraud and slander.
Its a shame and disgrace that a proud Muslim nation like Pakistanis can side with these armenian liars and racists against Muslims
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Reply omar khan 4 weeks ago
Ahmed, hope it was not your curriculum assignment that you decided to shove down the throats of the readers of this newspapers. Given the fact that a self-righteouys West, including the US, have repeatedly used this issues to arm-twist Turkey, your completely one-sided portrayal of history must have pleased your mentors at the Caterbury University.
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Reply David K 4 weeks ago
Thank you for bringing the Armenian genocide issue to attention to the readers. Genocide is the worse form of crime against humanity and should be condemned by everyone regardless of their backgrounds. Turkey spends millions to promote its denial policy but in the end, truth will always prevail.
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Reply faraz 4 weeks ago
Its certainly the most shameful act of Ottoman history.
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Reply Rajat 4 weeks ago
Well, one should not look back to early 1900?s when the perpetrators more recent genocides of Tamils in Sri Lanka, Timor Catholics in East Timor, Hutu/Tustsi in Rwanda or Bengali genocide in East Pakistan roam freely in our midst. Concentrating on a genocide that happened 100 years ago while being totally oblivious to the more recent ones is just risible. I am not saying that the Armenian genocide should just be rubbished (as the bloke Aksal has done above) and should not be forgotten, but we, as the present day generation should be very very shameful if we let the perpetrators of the more recent incidents get away, and find that our future generation are organising protests and marches a hundred years in the future for such genocides done in our present.
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Reply Vrak 3 weeks ago
“Turkish people are very proud people and very sensitive on this matter.”
So what, the rest of the world should tiptoe around the poor sensitive Turks for fear they’ll cry or, more likely, throw a tantrum like their PM did at Davos? Do me a favour. All this “we are a proud people” crap is a load of emotional blackmail. If you’re really so proud, then you should be confronting your past, not airbrushing it.
“Everyone knows about Jewish genocide, while ignoring more than 5 Million gypsies killed by Hitler!!”
True, that’s because nobody’s denying the Nazi holocaust, (except for the racist, idiotic, delusional, far-right)!
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Reply FlowerPower 3 weeks ago
@Aksal: I’m sorry to say this, but you’re talking about the wrong Armenians! The Armenians that went against you were mainly the Eastern Armenians, not the Western ones! Uh don’t you know your history? If not then I suggest you look at other Western books instead of those textbooks that tell you what to believe. As I recall only 100 were killed by Eastern Armenians, yah by Armenian men in self defense! Stop being such a bully! Also what kind of government puts you in jail for speaking your mind? I mean come on its the 21st century Turkey should have evolved like Germany and the rest of Europe! If you want to keep it in the dark ages, then I suggest not even bothering to come to the EU! The EU is a special place where people agree and have many things in common, and I just don’t see how Turkey is going to get into the EU if they keep on not only denying the genocide, but helping other countries commit it.
I mean come on have a heart for those millions of Armenian women and children that were told they would return to their homes after being, “relocated into another settlement” which was totally bullcrap. They were driven out into the middle of nowhere, where they were tortured, raped, murdered in various ways that I hesitate to repeat! Also pregnant women and old women would be stabbed!
The Pakistanis are not anti-Islam! Listen to your Muslim brothers for Christ sakes! My Russian tutor is married to a man from Iran who is in fact a Muslim himself, and she told me that in fact the Turkish Government did try to murder all the Armenians in Ottoman Territory! I’m pretty sure that if it were the other way around then she would tell me.
I just wish Turkey would stop thinking they’re better than anyone else. Just because we talk about the Armenian Genocide does not mean we’re insulting all the Turks or the entire nation. That doesn’t make us anti-Islam either! I am American and I don’t think I’m better than anyone else in the world, in fact I know for a fact that stuff has happened that I’m not proud of! Just because nobody else is Turkish and have different opinions and state facts doesn’t mean they’re any lesser of a human or that you’re better than us! There are a lot of Muslims that live in America and in other countries too, so don’t use that anti-Islam excuse, it doesn’t work anymore!
Also who cares if more Jews were murdered under Hitler, two wrongs don’t make a right or make another wrong better! Genocide is genocide, and Turkey is guilty of it!
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Reply Saad 3 weeks ago
There was a civil war happening at that time a lot of people died during that time. There is no reason to blame the turkish government. People need to understand that turkey at that point in time was surrounded by all side by enemies that wanted to destroy it and carve it up into their zones of influences. A lot of turks too died during that time. It is unfortunate that the author did not comment on the suffering of the turkish period of that time. It is sad that a Pakistani is writing this kind of non-sense about the Turkey which is a great country and has always sided with us.
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Reply Zarish 3 weeks ago
Good points raised about the Ottoman history that we chose to ignore!!
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Reply KatiaP 3 weeks ago
Thank you Mr. Aziz for your insight on the Armenian Genocide. It is sad that all those “civilized” countries that preach human rights and justice are the ones that are also helping Turkey deny this historical fact.
However, to put things straight, especially to those who comment that Turkey is sensitive about this issue, etc… No one, not even a single Armenian, blames the current Turkish government of Genocide perpetrated against the Armenians and other minorities. The Genocide was committed by successive governments in the latter days of the Ottoman Empire and during the Young Turk rule… I will also have to mention the massacres committed by Mustapha Kemal’s Nationalists in the early 1920s, especially in Smyrna in 1922 when over 60 thousand Greeks, Armenians and other minorities were massacred.
These are the governments being blamed for the Armenian Genocide, not today’s Turkey. What Turkey – and the successive US governments – is guilty of is denying the historical facts. And in crimes, one who protects the criminal and denies the crime is considered an accomplice.
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Reply G. Din 3 weeks ago
@Raqib Ali
“…Exaggerated genocide when it was done before modern Turkey was formed. ”
In the US, there are some whites who tell blacks:”Don’t blame me. I did not put you into your current predicament, my ancestors did. Therefore, I don’t see why you should get any preferential treatment over me for the wrongs you suffered.” They forget that if it had not been for their brutality to blacks, they would not be enjoying the kind of life they are leading over blacks.
If “Modern Turkey” calls itself Turkey, it inherits good with the bad that is associated with that name. Turkey is squarely responsible for the Armenian genocide and if the Turkish call themselves honourable, they should own up the responsibility.
Its conflicting role with Greece in Cyprus has already come back to haunt it. It is Greece that is calling the shots.
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Reply John 3 weeks ago
Thank you Mr. Aziz for superbly summarizing the facts of the Armenian Genocide and calling on all people of moral conscience to help the Armenian people and all other genocided nations achieve restorative justice.
The international community — including more than 20 Western countries — has verified time and time again that the Armenian Genocide is an incontestable reality which must finally come to an end.
Turkey owes Armenians not only an official apology, but also hundreds of billions of dollars in reparations and hundreds of thousands of square kilometers of Turkish-occupied Armenian lands (Western Armenia and Cilicia).
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Reply Refik Bek 3 weeks ago
Very well done!
We are talking of human suffering, injustice and generations lost. It’s amazing how some people very quickly turn this into a religious issue instead of a humanitarian one.
It was actually the Arab muslims and Kurds who saved hundreds of thousands of Armenians during the death marches, provided them with shelter and food, and even protection.
Please refer to the fatwa issued by Al-Husayn Ibn Ali, Sharif of Mecca on 18 Rajab 1336, where he decreed that Armenians should be protected and taken care of.
http://www.armenian-genocide.org/Affirmation.4/currentcategory.1/affirmationdetail.html
Once again, good job. It’s about time .
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Reply Ergun Kirlikovali 3 weeks ago
You are taking Armenian allegations at face value without applying critical thinking or learning the other side of the story. The facts are not that hard to see:
Armenians took up arms against their own government. After a millennium of harmonious cohabitation, Armenians, schoe to resort to revolts, terrorism, and supreme treason, making territorial demands and causing countless Muslim/Turkish casualties, all of which triggered the TERESET (temporary resettlement of 1915).
These facts do contradict with the embellished and falsified Armenian narrative, as seen in thr above artcile, which in turn, creates “cognitive dissonance” in Armenian people. This psychological trauma can be resolved in two ways:
1) accept the facts and change your attitude accordingly, or
2) ignore/dismiss the facts and demonize all dissenters.
Most Armenians, unfortunately, seem to choose the latter, hence no closure after a century.
BIAS IN THE TERM “ARMENIAN GENOCIDE”
If one cherishes values like fairness, objectivity, truth, and honesty, then one should really use the term “Turkish-Armenian conflict”.
Asking one “Do you accept or deny Armenian Genocide” shows anti-Turkish bias. The question should be re-phrased: “What is your stand on the Turkish-Armenian conflict?”
Turks believe it was an inter communal warfare mostly fought by Turkish and Armenian irregulars, a civil war which is engineered, provoked, and waged by the Armenian revolutionaries, with active support from Russia, England, France, and others, all eyeing the vast territories of the collapsing Ottoman Empire, against a backdrop of a raging world war.
Armenians, on the other hand, totally ignoring Armenian agitation, raids, rebellions, treason, territorial demands, and Turkish victims killed by Armenians, unfairly claim that it was a one way genocide.
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Reply Ergun Kirlikovali 3 weeks ago
Part 3
VERDICT WITHOUT DUE PROCESS AMOUNTS TO LYNCHING
Those who take the Armenian “allegations” of genocide at face value seem to also ignore the following:
1- Genocide is a legal, technical term precisely defined by the U.N. 1948 convention (Like all proper laws, it is not retroactive to 1915.)
2- Genocide verdict can only be given by a “competent court” after “due process” where both sides are properly represented and evidence mutually cross examined.
3- For a genocide verdict, the accusers must prove “intent” at a competent court and after due process. This could never be done by the Armenians whose evidence mostly fall into five major categories: hearsay, mis-representations, exaggerations, forgeries, and “other”.
4- Such a “competent court” was never convened in the case of Turkish-Armenian conflict and a genocide verdict does not exist (save a Kangaroo court in occupied Istanbul in 1920 where partisanship, vendettas, and revenge motives left no room for due process.)
5- Genocide claim is political, not historical or factual. It reflects bias against Turks. Therefore, the term genocide must be used with the qualifier “alleged”, for scholarly objectivity and truth.
HISTORY IS A MATTER OF SCHOLARSHIP, NOT CONSENSUS
History is not a matter of “conviction, consensus, political resolutions, political correctness, or propaganda.” History is a matter of research, peer review, thoughtful debate, and honest scholarship. Even historians, by definition, cannot decide on a genocide verdict, which is reserved for a “competent court” with its legal expertise and due process.
POLITICAL LYNCHING OF THE TURKS TODAY
What we witness today amounts to lynching of the Turks by Armenians to satisfy the age old Armenian hate, bias, and bigotry. Values like fairness, presumption of innocence until proven guilty, objectivity, balance, honesty, and freedom of speech are stumped under the fanatic Armenian feet. Unprovoked , unjustified, and unfair defamation of Turkey, in order to appease nagging Armenian activists runs counter to human rights , if not also western interests.
Those who claim genocide verdict today, based on the much discredited Armenian evidence, are actually engaging in “conviction and execution of Turks without due process”, which is the definition of an omenous term in the dictionary: lynching.
Isn’t it time to stop fighting the First World War dishonestly and give peace a real chance?
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Reply David W. 3 weeks ago
Dear Ahmed
Thank you for writing such an objective and well written piece on the Armenian Genocide. Being quite familiar with the history, I have discovered that most people who have an opinion about the Armenian Genocide only have a superficial awareness of the magnitude of the crime and its importance to humanity today. The systematic nature of the Armenian Genocide is well documented in the archives of the world including the Ottoman Empire’s WW1 allies such as Germany. Raphael Lemkin, the man who coined the word Genocide in 1944, used the Armenian case as an example of what the word meant. The creation of the Genocide Convention means that this issue is an international issue and not one confined to just Turks and Armenians. Genocide is defined as a “crime against humanity”. It should concern all of us.
The continued destruction of Christian Armenian monuments in Turkey throughout the 20th century coupled with the denial by the current Turkish state of the genocide, means that this is a current international human rights issue, and not one which belongs only to the past as some claim i.e 100 years ago. It’s about eliminating the physical and cultural elements of a distinct religious/racial group by another. The notion that the Armenians rebelled was only a pretext for the deportation of a whole race. Deporting Armenian women and children from areas of western Turkey such as Bursa, Eskishehir, Afion Karahissar etc dissproves any notion that the Turkish govt’s actions were a justified measure of military necessity. It is great to know that a Pakistani media outlet has published such an insightful piece on the issue.
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Reply yolo 3 weeks ago
The Turks murdered millions of all kinds of Europeans and eastern Europeans throughout their entire history. They massed murdered the Greeks in 1974 on cyprus. They destroyed the churches and supplanted the greeks with Turks. There are almost no Christians left in a once christian land and the nation is becoming islamic again. Turkey needs to be watched closely and the world should be rady for the wars it will start again.
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Reply Refik Bek 3 weeks ago
@Aksal,
Please refer to the original letter from Al-Husayn Ibn Ali, Sharif of Mecca on 18 Rajab 1336:
http://www.globalarmenianheritage-adic.fr/0ab/x9_hussein3.jpg
What the turks did has nothing to do with religion, they used religion to execute one of the ugliest genocide in human history, and are now using religion again to cover it up.
Islam is a religion of peace and brotherhood, and what turks did has nothing to do with Islam.
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Reply Ahmed Aziz 3 weeks ago
I would kindly urge readers to keep an open mind and study the history of this time and this region rather than being defensive. I remember our “selective” history books at school. The Ottoman Empire for us Pakistanis has been imprinted in our minds as the Last Golden Caliphate which is simply not true. All we know is that Maulana M A Jauhar fought with the colonial British to preserve the Ottoman Empire. So In all of our minds its that amazing last glorious time.
So I would urge readers to read survivor stories, Ottoman Documents, Journalist reports, even evidence given by Ottoman Allies during World War One in the form of eye witness testimony and photographs by Armin Wegner – a Second Lieutenant in the German stationed in the Empire (http://www.armenian-genocide.org/photo_wegner.html). All exists.
As Far as the reasons given by different readers above are concerned, being a 5th column, treason and agitation does not justify ethnic cleansing by death. Does not justify deportation of a whole race. Oppressed people agitate it doesn’t mean that the government just decide to arrest all the intellectuals and deport a whole race to a desert. NOTHING justifies annihilation of a whole race from 2 million to a negligible number.
It is the same as saying that the Serbs did the right thing at Srebrenica by by massacring 10,000 Bosnian because Bosnians wanted a separate homeland so they are committing “treason” and “agitating”. It is the same as saying that Israel’s Phalangist allies massacre of 1700 Palestinians in Sabra and Chatila camps in Beirut, Qana Killings, many killed in Operation Cast lead in Gaza, were all justified because Palestinians are agitating so kill all the agitators and people wanting their right. When it happens to us we shout and scream, massacre and genocide. But when we ourselves do it we deny and be defensive.
Nothing justifies an eradication of a race. Nothing justifies Genocide.
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Reply David A 3 weeks ago
I wish that instead of trying to introduce a perverted and one-sided version of history to Pakistani readers, the writer would devote the same effort to talk about the killing of hundreds of thousands of Muslim Turks and Kurds at the hands of Armenian Dashnak forces in World War I. Comparing the events of World War I in Eastern Anatolia to Holocaust of Jews in World War II is an insult to intelligence of readers. Because Jews did not organize into armed forces with support from neighboring countries to kill Nazi Germans, while Armenians did form own militias and fought in organized fashion on the side of Russians against Ottoman Empire.
Genocide (term coined in 1948, some 30 years after World War I) is not simply about killing of people, civilians do die in any war. It’s about an intent to destroy in whole or in part an entire nation, which was present in case of Nazis vs Jews, and not present in case of Ottoman Empire vs. Armenians. For that same reason, Russians, Ukrainians or other Soviet subjects cannot claim genocide by Germans, despite loosing more people (over 20 million) in World War II than Jews.
And while at it, why does not author mention the killing of some 25,000 Muslim Azeri Turks and occupation of 20% Azerbaijani territory by Armenian forces, that is as recent as 1990s. Why not talk about Khojaly Massacre, an act of ethnic cleansing and genocide, committed in 1992 by Armenian forces, with video-recorded evidence of skinning, scalping and cutting women’s bellies. I think telling truth that we see and know is far more valuable than trying to interpret 100-year old history, clearly blackmailing an entire Turkish nation.
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Reply Yuksel Oktay 3 weeks ago
Ahmed Aziz, judging from the photo of his in the article, must be a young chap who probably does not know what he is talking about, but wants to make an impression for himself, forgetting that he is insulting probabaly the only real ally that Pakistan has. Based on my 45 years of involvement in the Armenian issue, which is probably better to label as Armenian tragedy, through reading hundreds of books, magazine articles,attending countless conferences in Turkey and in America and writing in different forums, I can tell the Pakistani people and others as well, that the death of Amenians during their relocation following their many uprisings and their fight against their own government to gain independence on lands where they were never a majority by joining the Russian and French Forces during the First World War, can not be labeled as genocide. To equate this with the Holocaust is insane.
Armenians and Turks were not alone in the creation of the Armenian tragedy since the western nations and America were responsible for inciting nationalistic feelings among the Armenians and supporting them in their ambition to create a state of their own on lands where they were never the majority. This has been told in many books that Ahmet Aziz seems to ignore but refer to those which do not tell the truth. Books written by the likes of Ambassador Morgentahu in 1916 and historian Toynbee in 1919 are all based on fabricated stories and outright lies, as has been shown by many historians. Ahmed Aziz should read books written by Justin McCharty, Prof. Turkkaya Ataov and Sukru Server Aya, including “Genocide of Truth” and apologize from the Turks for his thoughtless article.
Yuksel Oktay
Washington, NJ
2 January 2010
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Reply KatiaP 3 weeks ago
@Yuksel Oktay:
Mr. Oktay:
Turks call for a neutral commission of historians to study the Genocide. However, no matter how “neutral” these historians are, Turks are never satisfied. Why should a commission be formed when the International Association of Genocide Scholars – almost all non-Armenian independent scholars – have unanimously called the events of 1915-1916 a Genocide perpetrated against the Armenians? Why don’t the Turks also agree to the ICG report? You see, no matter how many commissions & committees are formed, Turks will not be satisfied unless their version is agreed to.
Mr. Oktay… as I’ve said in my previous post, no one is blaming the current Turkish governments for committing a crime. It is the Ottoman Empire which you inherited that is being blamed.
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Reply Robert 3 weeks ago
Dear Ahmed
Do not be perturbed by the denialists who have attacked your article. This is quite a normal reaction, it happens whenever an article opposed to their constructed history is posted online.
The direct evidence of the Armenian Genocide is to be found in all the archives of the world including the Turkish. All the archival evidence points to a “systematic attempt to exterminate a race”, which nowadays is referred to as Genocide.
The circumstantial evidence is found in Turkey today – a land which is now over 99% Turkic/Moslem. Before the 13th century, it was the other way around-over 99% Christian and before 1915 had over 4 million indigenous Christians.
The narrative that the Armenians rebelled etc, was used as a pretext for the deportations and massacres. In fact, Armenians in the Ottoman Army had been awarded for their bravery in both Gallipoli and Sarikamish for defending the Ottoman empire. The Armenians in the Russian Empire, as loyal Russian subjects were fighting the Ottomans, but this does not justify the wholesale deportation of women and children from the western and eastern parts of Anatolia. Many Jews fought with the allies against Germany during WW2 but this does not justify the Holocaust.
The posts by Yuksel and David A. etc are an attempt to deny, trivialise and rationalise the Armenian Genocide. It’s a strategy of consolidating and reconciling the gains made by the genocidal campaign. The longer the denial campaign can be prolonged, the more the issue becomes historic and falls victim to the dust bin of history. The lands that were forcibly confiscated from the Armenians are today worth billions of dollas and make up a large part of Turkey’s prime real estate (including Incirlik NATO airbase). Much of Turkish culture today is derived from the Armenians. Facing the truth of the Armenian Genocide not only will result in financial pain for Turkey, but will also smash many of the myths which the Turkish nation has been founded upon. It is this latter consequence which the Turlish ultra-nationalists fear the most.
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Reply David A 3 weeks ago
@Katia P
Katia P, if Armenians strongly believe that their claim deserves the world-wide recognition as a genocide, there is a proper venue for doing so, International Courts ICC and ICJ in Hague. The procedure for doing so is for the Republic of Armenia or other Armenian plaintiffs to sue Turkey for genocide. Yet this is not a path pursued by Armenians worldwide, partly because Republic of Armenia is stuck between the rock and a hard place trying to get its border with Turkey opened while still maintaining the occupation of neighboring Azerbaijan and keeping the territorial claims to other neighboring states. Another reason, is because there is no legal or historical case for the Armenian claim, as the ‘genocide’ term was coined by UN in 1948, while Armenian side is trying to apply the term to 1915 simultaneously accusing modern ethnic descendants of no-longer-existing state.
Instead, Armenian communities are involved in PAID lobbying by the special interest groups, pursuing various ways to intimidate Turkey or Turkish people. This racist, I must add, agenda is subplanted by general Turcophobic reflections, such as intimidating NBA basketball star Kobe Bryant for signing a promotion deal with a 77-year old major world airline, just because the name of it is “Turkish”. I hope you can try to look at the picture from the other side as well.
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Reply David A 3 weeks ago
Ahmed Aziz, if mass resettlement forced by active military warfare is considered a genocide, then the same term shall apply to any civilian displacement in the course of war and just about any major war should be considered an act of genocide. As far as pictures, here are some pictures without a 100-year old questionable or fabricated historical content:
http://www.khojaly.org/
Why don’t the Armenians ever apologize or recognize this crime, despite their own National Hero and President admitting to it in references? With lack of any response on this, as well as ongoing aggressive policy pursued by Armenia, with territorial claims on half of Turkey, irredentist dreams of “Greater Armenia”, history of ASALA organization killing Turkish diplomats and civilians, makes it clear that Armenian agenda is not only about recognition, but more so about territorial expansion on the lands where they were never a majority. Considering that modern Armenia, the territory of which 100 years ago was 80% Muslim populated, is now 99.9% Armenian-populated, this should be a chilling reminder of what the true objective of these claims is.
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Reply FlowerPower 3 weeks ago
@Refik Bek: I agree with you! The Christian nations over in Europe once used Christianty to commit horrible crimes as well!
So if anything, religion has almost nothing to do with human nature, its a set of moral codes to live by. There are some good and some bad things about each religion, it usually comes down to interpretation.
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Reply Mark 3 weeks ago
You are taking Armenian allegations at face value without applying critical thinking or learning the other side of the story. The facts are not that hard to see:
Armenians took up arms against their own government. After a millennium of harmonious cohabitation, Armenians, schoe to resort to revolts, terrorism, and supreme treason, making territorial demands and causing countless Muslim/Turkish casualties, all of which triggered the TERESET (temporary resettlement of 1915).
These facts do contradict with the embellished and falsified Armenian narrative, as seen in thr above artcile, which in turn, creates “cognitive dissonance” in Armenian people. This psychological trauma can be resolved in two ways:
1) accept the facts and change your attitude accordingly, or
2) ignore/dismiss the facts and demonize all dissenters.
Most Armenians, unfortunately, seem to choose the latter, hence no closure after a century.
BIAS IN THE TERM “ARMENIAN GENOCIDE”
If one cherishes values like fairness, objectivity, truth, and honesty, then one should really use the term “Turkish-Armenian conflict”.
Asking one “Do you accept or deny Armenian Genocide” shows anti-Turkish bias. The question should be re-phrased: “What is your stand on the Turkish-Armenian conflict?”
Turks believe it was an inter communal warfare mostly fought by Turkish and Armenian irregulars, a civil war which is engineered, provoked, and waged by the Armenian revolutionaries, with active support from Russia, England, France, and others, all eyeing the vast territories of the collapsing Ottoman Empire, against a backdrop of a raging world war.
Armenians, on the other hand, totally ignoring Armenian agitation, raids, rebellions, treason, territorial demands, and Turkish victims killed by Armenians, unfairly claim that it was a one way genoci
VERDICT WITHOUT DUE PROCESS AMOUNTS TO LYNCHING
Those who take the Armenian “allegations” of genocide at face value seem to also ignore the following:
1- Genocide is a legal, technical term precisely defined by the U.N. 1948 convention (Like all proper laws, it is not retroactive to 1915.)
2- Genocide verdict can only be given by a “competent court” after “due process” where both sides are properly represented and evidence mutually cross examined.
3- For a genocide verdict, the accusers must prove “intent” at a competent court and after due process. This could never be done by the Armenians whose evidence mostly fall into five major categories: hearsay, mis-representations, exaggerations, forgeries, and “other”.
4- Such a “competent court” was never convened in the case of Turkish-Armenian conflict and a genocide verdict does not exist (save a Kangaroo court in occupied Istanbul in 1920 where partisanship, vendettas, and revenge motives left no room for due process.)
5- Genocide claim is political, not historical or factual. It reflects bias against Turks. Therefore, the term genocide must be used with the qualifier “alleged”, for scholarly objectivity and truth.
HISTORY IS A MATTER OF SCHOLARSHIP, NOT CONSENSUS
History is not a matter of “conviction, consensus, political resolutions, political correctness, or propaganda.” History is a matter of research, peer review, thoughtful debate, and honest scholarship. Even historians, by definition, cannot decide on a genocide verdict, which is reserved for a “competent court” with its legal expertise and due process.
POLITICAL LYNCHING OF THE TURKS TODAY
What we witness today amounts to lynching of the Turks by Armenians to satisfy the age old Armenian hate, bias, and bigotry. Values like fairness, presumption of innocence until proven guilty, objectivity, balance, honesty, and freedom of speech are stumped under the fanatic Armenian feet. Unprovoked , unjustified, and unfair defamation of Turkey, in order to appease nagging Armenian activists runs counter to human rights , if not also western interests.
Those who claim genocide verdict today, based on the much discredited Armenian evidence, are actually engaging in “conviction and execution of Turks without due process”, which is the definition of an omenous term in the dictionary: lynching.
Isn’t it time to stop fighting the First World War dishonestly and give peace a real chance?
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Reply Eliran D 3 weeks ago
Instead of arguing pointlessly, can anyone give me solid proof (whatever you speak does not equal solid proof) that this whole history thing is correct? I’ve seen too much here.
Also, why the hell should Turkey be responsible for something the Ottomans did??
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Reply G. Din 3 weeks ago
@Yuksel Oktay
“…Ahmed Aziz, judging from the photo of his in the article, must be a young chap who probably does not know what he is talking about,…”
This is an astounding assertion. So, all young “chaps” have no business researching their subject and draw their own conclusions because, thanks to their age, they lack intellect as well? You don’t need to be wizened, musty old fellow to study history!
“…but wants to make an impression for himself, forgetting that he is insulting probabaly the only real ally that Pakistan has. …”
So, sir, are you claiming that being “only real ally that Pakistan has” exempts Turkey from being indicted for a horrific crime that all but they and their “real allies” have been crying hoarse for years for redress?
Sir, you don’t seem to have learnt any thing in those 45 years!
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Reply Sana Saleem 3 weeks ago
Very Very Interesting and Nice Piece !
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Reply FlowerPower 3 weeks ago
@Turks: Well if you want to present your side of the story so badly to the UN then you need to do so, but I’m sorry not even the USA is going to believe you.
You want this issue solved then you need to go to other archives instead of just your own! You need multiple sources provided not just the Turkish Version or the Armenian Version.
Trust me I don’t just look at Armenian Sources, I look at Arabic Sources, European Sources, and American Sources.
If you just look at the Turkish side then you’re doomed to fail in the real world and with other nations. Also you will suffer from something that i like to call, “Close minded-ness”.
Nobody is against Islam here, and nobody is against Turkishness, we’re against this crime against humanity!
Also Turks are not better than anyone in the world, neither are the Americans, Russians or anyone else that is nationlistic.
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Reply jimmi 3 weeks ago
Turkey has a very bloody history of conquest against Eastern Europe and Arab states.
Most of the Ottoman empire was controlled by fear and brutal retributions.
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Reply Albert Kar-ian 3 weeks ago
I deeply congratulate Mr Aziz. I am absolutely sure that his criticizers will one day regret what they have written, especially when the Turkish government will inevitably acknowledge the Armenian Genocide because truth will triumph sooner or later.
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Reply IZ 3 weeks ago
First of all, I would like to commend Mr Aziz for bringing to light this terrible episode from history. However there are two points I would like to make:
In the interest of historical accuracy I would like to point out that the Hitler quote above was alleged to have been made in 1939 when he was justifying the invasion and ethnic cleansing of Poland to create lebensraum (living room) for Germans – it was not referring to the holocaust per se, but the eradication of Slavic and Jewish Poles. The full quote is:
“It’s a matter of indifference to me what a weak western European civilisation will say about me. I have issued the command — and I’ll have anybody who utters but one word of criticism executed by a firing squad — that our war aim does not consist in reaching certain lines, but in the physical destruction of the enemy. Accordingly, I have placed my death-head formation in readiness — for the present only in the East — with orders to them to send to death mercilessly and without compassion, men, women, and children of Polish derivation and language. Only thus shall we gain the living space (Lebensraum) which we need. Who, after all, speaks to-day of the annihilation of the Armenians?”
.
2. The second point is that as important as it is to recognize and acknowledge the atrocities committed in Turkey a century ago, perhaps it may be more important for us as Pakistanis to acknowledge the atrocities committed in East Pakistan 40 years ago. In scale the slaughter was of similar size (some argue that it was even higher). Its worth remembering what our then President and COAS had to say about the policy of genocide in East Pakistan: “”Kill three million of them, and the rest will eat out of our hands.”
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Reply H. Der Stepanian 3 weeks ago
@Ergun Kirlikovali:
Mr. Ergun,
You should reasearch at least a little bit before you pretend to know so much about something you know so little about.
The term Genocide was first created and used by Mr. Raphael Lemkin.
Raphael Lemkin (June 24, 1900 – August 28, 1959) was a Polish lawyer of Jewish descent. He is best known for his work against genocide, a word he coined in 1943 from the root words genos (Greek for family, tribe, or race) and -cide (Latin for killing).[1] He first used the word in print in Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation – Analysis of Government – Proposals for Redress (1944).
In 1933 Lemkin made a presentation to the Legal Council of the League of Nations conference on international criminal law in Madrid, for which he prepared an essay on the Crime of Barbarity as a crime against international law. The concept of the crime, which later evolved into the idea of genocide, was based on the Armenian Genocide and prompted by the experience of Assyrians[2] massacred in Iraq during the 1933 Simele massacre.[3
So before embarking in giving lectures on the meaning and leagal aspects of Genocide first you should know that the term itself was created to describe the Armenian Genocide by Ottoman Turkey.
But knowing you Turks, I would not be surprised if you contest that Mr. Lemkin ever existed. It must be that the Armenians created Mr. Lemkin and the Genocide term to cover up what they did to temselves. They massacered themselves and deported temselves so that they can blame the poor, the inocent Turks who were amazed at what these Armenians were doing during the WWI.
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Reply David A 3 weeks ago
@Armenians and Ahmad Aziz
Author’s fabricated claim starts right from the title “MillionS killed…”. The population of Ottoman Armenians in 1897 was 1.497 million, the worldwide Armenian population today is about 10-11 million. So how did all 1.5 million get killed?
Even the invented claim of 1.5 million Armenian deaths (which is false according to Encyclopedia Brittanica), made up by Armenians to strengthen the impact of their anti-Turkish defamation, still does not qualify the title “Millions” used by author.
The Armenian claim, especially used for political purposes of defamation, racism and land grab hopes, abuses the word genocide and insults all people who truly deserve recognition of genocides against them.
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Reply David A 3 weeks ago
@FlowerPower
Let’s talk about the ARF Dashnak party archives in Massachusetts inaccessible to anyone. In contrast, Ottoman archives were open for research in Turkey for years now. I hope you can look at the story as a bystander seeking the truth.
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Reply H. Der Stepanian 3 weeks ago
@Ergun Kirlikovali:
So how would you explain the massacers of Adana of 1895? The Armenians were siding with who the Chineese? How about the massacers of 1900, the Armenians were siding whit who the Mexicans?
If you are just writing to find reasons to justify the horrific acts of the Ottomans, I guess you can say or claim anthing.
By your account you are pointing out that there were Armenians, millions of them living in eastern Turkey. You are finding and justifing your reason for getting rid of them, OK.
What happened to the Armenian graveyards, churches, cities, shrines, historic sites of eastern Turkey. How come you can not see any of these but a handful in utter destructive state. Because it is the Turkish governments effort to completely destroy and rewrite its history by eliminating all traces of Armenians from those places. Just as there was no Kurdish issue until a few years ago.
Oh, I guess that by staging detailed, coriographed reconstruction of a few churches will make the world belive that you truly are a tolerant nation. Good luck!
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Reply H. Der Stepanian 3 weeks ago
@Aksal:
Read any other book written by a non Turk and you will see that you have been fed lies and misinformation by your government and the texbooks that you have studied in school.
Turkey should admit of what was done and get on with living in a civilized world like everyone else. The paranoya, that everybody wants to divide Turkey and destroy it should be left for to the sick men of Europe.
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Reply munger 3 weeks ago
There are so many one sided, wrong statements in this article:
“one of the basic reasons behind it was Ottoman INSECURITY that the Armenian Christian subjects will support the Russians pushing on in the eastern front of the war. ” For example it was NOT insecurity, but the killing non-Armenians in eastern Anatolia before and during WWI by of Armenian terrorists and even Armenian regiments under Russian army that prompted the relocation order. The result was a tragedy (especially when you hear individuals) but NOT a genocide! Indeed there has been atrocities, and Ottoman Government had tried and punished many of the responsible people.
What will any government do (even today), if a MINORITY (Armenians were not in majority in Eastern Anatolia even before 1915) group took up arms against its country during a major war, actively fighting with enemy army, with the declared intention of (Armenian Dashnak Party platform) separation? Armenians were very proud of their militia before 1915. Their own Prime Minister has decried in 1920s how they brought this disaster onto themselves. There is NO similarity to what happened to Jews.
There is not enough space and I do do not want to bore everyone with all the WRONG propaganda statements in this article.
Armenian propaganda has convinced many in the West with their lies, despite many reputable, independent historians refuting those genocide claims. Armenians have never dared to open their archives or go to a court to prove unfounded claims of genocide.
Do not judge 95 year old history with 21st century values. Just because there are more articles citing the Armenian sufferings does not mean the other people in the region did not suffer (several hundred thousand other ethnicities were murdered by Armenians prior to 1915).
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Reply MihranK 3 weeks ago
If anyone is interested in knowing what really happened in Khojaly,please read the link below.
KHOJALY: The chronicle of unseen forgery and falsification
http://www.xocali.net/EN/ayaz-mutalibov.html
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Reply FlowerPower 3 weeks ago
@Albert Kar-ian: I agree, I just don’t see how this could be hidden forever, it can’t be, especailly since we have documents and photos proving it!
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Reply Ergun Kirlikovali 3 weeks ago
The Armenian falsifiers and their fellow Turk haters (who may come in any nationality) try to ignore the siz T’s of the Turkish Armenian conflict and subscribe to a racist and dishonest version of history promoted by Armenians. You cannot assign all the guilt to one party and all the suffering to another and call yourself respectable. You must read this interview to educat6e yourself:
http://armenians-1915.blogspot.com/2010/12/3194-turkish-armenian-conflict-what-now.html
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Reply David K. 3 weeks ago
@David A:
That 1.47 number is a lie by genocide deniers based on dubious sources in order to make it look like there weren’t 1.5 millions killed in 1915-1918. As a matter of fact, there were about 2 million Armenians in the Ottoman Empire and 1.5 million were killed during the genocide.
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Reply Yuksel Oktay 3 weeks ago
Dear Editor,
I am glad that Ahmed Aziz’s commentary on the Armenian tragedy, although full of misconceptions, has sparked a dialog among the diverse readers of The Express Tribune with the International Herald Tribune. This issue must be resolved if we all want a peaceful world for our children and grandchildren, not harbour hatred which impacts the lives of Turkis-Americans and Turks and Armenians everywhere. There is too much needless hate, which should be eliminated, as has been presented in a new book by a Palestinian doctor who has lost his daughters during the Gazze operation in 2009, “I do not Hate.”
First, I would like to respond to some of the comments to my first rebuttal of the article. Judging also from the short list of books that Ahmed indicated, he has to do a lot of reading and come and visit the Turkish archives open to everyone before he can pass a judgement on what happened in 1915. Ara Kociyan, the Director of Armenian language newspaper Jamanak published in Istanbul, presented a balanced view of the Armenian issue and the events of 1915 in a book published in 1991 in the following manner:
“During the First World War, Turkey was in the danger of being swallowed up by foreign nations. To achieve this, they endeavored to break up the country internally by brainwashing some Armenians with the promise of an independent Armenia. They gave them money and weapons, encouring them to start guerrila and underground activities. The Ottoman state, in order to preserve Anatolia, forced Armenians living inplaces where guerrilla attacks took place to move elshere. At that time, unfortunately, we must confess that the innocent suffered along wth the quilty, but even in those conditions, the Turks did not witheld help from their neighbors. Unfortunately, people still exist from abroad who seek opportunity to realize this dream, people who have not learned their lesson from History” Turkey, P. 92.
Second, I will be happy to send a copy of a booklet prepared in 2005, to Ahmed Aziz and otehrs, presenting an overview of the issue looking at both sides with a list of 100 books on the Armenian issue (34 pages), called, “1915, the 90th Anniversary of the Battle of Dardanelles in West Anatolia and Rebellions and Resettlement of Armenians in East Anatolia.”
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David A 3 weeks ago
@Mihran K
Here is a far more verifiable and honest Armenian reference, This is from the leader of ASALA, Karabakh war commander and National Hero of Armenia, Monte Melkonian:
Markar Melkonian. My Brother’s Road: An American’s Fateful Journey to Armenia. New York: I.B. Tauris, 2005, p. 213:
“At about 11:00 p.m. the night before, some 2,000 Armenian fighters had advanced through the high grass on three sides of Khojalu, forcing the residents out through the open side to the east. By the morning of February 26, the refugees had made it to the eastern cusp of Mountainous Karabagh and had begun working their way downhill, toward safety in the Azeri city of Agdam, about six miles away.
There, in the hillocks and within sight of safety, Mountainous Karabagh soldiers had chased them down.
“They just shot and shot,” a refugee woman, Raisa Aslanova, testified to a human Rights Watch investigator. The Arabo fighters had then unsheathed the knives they had carried on their hips for so long, and began stabbing.
Now, the only sound was the wind whistling through dry grass, a wind that was too early yet to blow away the stench of corpses.
Monte crunched over the grass where women and girls lay scattered like broken dolls. “No discipline”, he muttered. He knew the significance of the day’s date: it was the run-up to the fourth anniversary of the anti-Armenian pogrom in the city of Sumgait. Khojalu had been a strategic goal, but it had also been an act of revenge.”
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Reply David A 3 weeks ago
@David K
http://books.google.com/books?id=Z59wTl4AuI4C&pg=PA54
“In the mid-1990s, there were approximately 1.3 million Armenians in Ottoman Empire”
Imperialism, evangelism and the Ottoman Armenians, 1878-1896
Jeremy Salt, Psychology Press, 1993
I have doubts that this source has any reason to be biased or attempts to deny atrocities.
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Reply zaigham 3 weeks ago
you read one may be one or two books and reached the conclusion that it was a genocide…
the holocaust got established during the Nürnberg trials…
is it the same case with Armenian genocide?
ever heard of Malta trials?
allies had all the power to establish this fact…
why did they fail to recognize it?
I remember our “selective” history books at school. The Ottoman Empire for us Pakistanis has been imprinted in our minds as the Last Golden Caliphate which is simply not true.
The last Ottomans were pretty corrupt. But without doubt ottomans were the last great dynasty of Muslim rulers.
Even if there were a genocide, the responsibility lies with ‘young turks’ because after around 1909 the last sultan was literally out of business. And even before that Ottomans were carrying out extensive reforms which also dealt with alleviating the status of minorities. You seriously need to see the other side of picture.
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Reply zaigham 3 weeks ago
@Raqib Ali:
the Roma/Gypsy genocide is not acknowledged in Germany on the basis that it was not established during the Nürnberg trials. While they might compensate the third generation of Holocaust survivors, they refuse to entertain any queries regarding the Roma Genocide.
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Reply Tyrone 3 weeks ago
The author has stirred up a hornets nest!
Turkey can claim that the massacre was exaggerated, but can it rubbish these points about modern Turkey?
– Suppression and limitation of the Orthodox faith in the country. In secular Turkey all Orthodox seminaries have been closed.
– Illegal occupation of N Cyprus, only Turkey recognises the ‘state’
– Atrocities against the Kurds
Ironically Armenians are in a bloody war with Azebaijan over a sliver of land known as Nagorno-Karabakh.
Interestingly we support Azerbaijan in return for support on Kashmir.
http://dawnnews.tv/2004/07/09/top6.htm
Those who say the EU has no right to delay Turkey’s membership need to look at the 3 points I’ve mentioned.
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Reply Ahmed Aziz 3 weeks ago
@zaigham:
@Yuksel Oktay:
It is an unfair assumption that the books that I recommend to read are the only ones that I have done my research from and it is an unfair assumption that if I look young in my picture that I do not know what I am writing. In this short space i can only recommend certain reading material. As I have suggested before, readers should read from all different sources like survivor stories, archival documents, photographic evidence and other sources. Evidence exists!! The shortlist is an indicative biography.
Mr Oktay please send me the list, my email address is on my page.
That being said, I should say that I have made my statements on evidence I have seen and the readers who are interested in this should do research. I cannot cover all genocides in one article. I stand by what I have said. The Genocide did happen and the reasons justifying it or semantics about calling it a genocide or not are not valid. As I have said before Nothing justifies Genocide.
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Reply Alexander 3 weeks ago
I congratulate Ahmed Aziz for tackling issues that provoke debate and scholarship. It is not the role of the author, nor of this forum, to establish historical theses. The author has encapsuated his topic in a succinct way, prompting those interested to conduct their own research and arrive at their own cocnlcusions.
When an authority – internationally recognised government or not – plans and executes the physical extermination of a particular because they are members of that group, that is genocide. Unfortunately, the lack of study of this phenomenon has led to it being repeated tie and again in human history.
Readers shoud keep in mind one fact above all: religious belief is always the tool of genocidaires. Religion is abused by those who seek to violate basic humanity.
Between 1914 and 1924, Greeks, Assyrians and Armenians were deported and massacred by the tens of thousands within the Ottoman Empire, and beyond its borders. The authorities of the time were the Ittihad ve Terrakke i Cemayeti (Committee for Union and Progress; CUP) and their successors, the Kemalists. The best evidence comes from the Turks themselves: the war crimes trials held in Turkey after World War One.
The numbers of indigenous Christians who died or were expelled or were forcibly converted to Islam is not the issue. The issue at stake is the responsibility of the Turkish state in the deaths of millions of its own citizens. Until the Turkish establishment comes to terms with its own history, just as Germany has endeavoured to do, it will not be able to find a lasting peace.
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Reply FlowerPower 3 weeks ago
Its one thing for the Turks to claim that the Western Armenians were helping the Russians out, but when they started accusing the Assyarians and Greeks too, they completely lost me. They use the exact same excuse with the Assyarians and Greeks. In fact the Assyarians would have rather of used Russia as a last resort, so its only natural that they chose Iran over Russia as a safe haven. They also murdered the Assyarian leader after he pleded with the Russians to save his people from exstinction, the Russians just ignored him.
I’ve heard of other horrible incidences where the Turks went into villages and just killed women and children at random, burnt them to death which is clearly murder in my eyes. Also what did those women do to deserve rape? There is nothing more offensive to me as a woman than being violated! I find it offinsive that someone would take the rape of innocent women so lightly along with stabbing pregnant women, along with ripping their babies out of their wombs and smashing them against the wall! That is not civil war, that is murder!
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Reply retro 3 weeks ago
Where is Pakistan’s resolution recognising the genocide of the Armenians?
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Reply Ergun Kirlikovali 3 weeks ago
GENOCIDE ALLEGATIONS IGNORE “THE SIX T’S OF THE TURKISH-ARMENIAN CONFLICT”
While some in unsuspecting public may be forgiven for taking the blatant and ceaseless Armenian propaganda at face value and believing Armenian falsifications merely because they are repeated so often, it is difficult and painful for someone like me, the son of Turkish survivors on both maternal and paternal sides.
Those seemingly endless “War years” of 1912-1922 brought wide-spread death and destruction on to all Ottoman citizens. No Turkish family was left touched, mine included. Those nameless, faceless Turkish victims are killed for a second time today with politically motivated and baseless charges of Armenian genocide.
ALLEGATIONS OF ARMENIAN GENOCIDE ARE RACIST AND DISHONEST HISTORY
They are racist because they ignore the Turkish dead: about 3 million during WWI; more than half a million of them at the hands of Armenian nationalists.
And the allegations of Armenian genocide are dishonest because they simply dismiss
the six T’s of the Turkish-Armenian conflict:
1) TUMULT (as in numerous Armenian armed uprisings between 1882 and 1920)
2) TERRORISM (by well-armed Armenian nationalists and militias victimizing Ottoman-Muslims between 1882-1920)
3) TREASON (Armenians joining the invading enemy armies as early as 1914 and lasting until 1921)
4) TERRITORIAL DEMANDS (where Armenians were a minority, not a majority, attempting to establish Greater Armenia, the would-be first apartheid of the 20th Century with a Christian minority ruling over a Muslim majority )
5) TURKISH SUFFERING AND LOSSES (i.e. those caused by the Armenian nationalists: 524,000 Muslims, mostly Turks, met their tragic end at the hands of Armenian revolutionaries during WWI, per Turkish Historical Society. This figure is not to be confused with about 2.5 million Muslim dead who lost their lives due to non-Armenian causes during WWI. Grand total: more than 3 million, according to Prof. Justin McCarthy.)
6) TERESET (temporary resettlement) triggered by the first five T’s above and amply documented as such; not to be equated to the Armenian misrepresentations as genocide.)
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Reply Asdig Magar 3 weeks ago
@David A:
David, do not make up things as you go along. Only some of the Ottoman archives are open in Turkey today. Guess which ones? You are right, only the ones that justifies Turkey’s point of view. Anything else, and good luck to you. You will never find it.
But what a public stunt. Turkey can claim that their archives are open!
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Reply Sevgin Oktay 3 weeks ago
In all this discourse, it is easy to get lost in the woods loosing sight of the forest, so to speak. We should all remember that during Holocaust, Jews were killed for who they were, not for what they did. True, some Armenians were also killed but not for who they were but for what they did. To that we must also add that just as many or more Turks and Kurds were killed in trying to stop what the Armenians were doing, which is never mentioned. I rest my case, and challenge anyone who can attest to the contrary.
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Reply David A 3 weeks ago
@Alexander
You said: “The issue at stake is the responsibility of the Turkish state in the deaths of millions of its own citizens”?
What do you mean by “Turkish state”? The Armenian claim applies to 1915, while the Republic of Turkey was established in 1923. Why should Republic of Turkey be responsible for what one ethnic subjects of Ottoman Empire claim against another? The entire claim against Turkey is driven by ethnic hatred rather than any sense of justice.
Again, the figure artificially inflated by Armenian scholars from the initial Britannica estimate of 300,000 is now 1.5 million. That is, while actual population of Armenians in Ottoman Empire was slightly below 1.5 million at the time, that means every single Armenian must have been killed. How do we then have 11-12 million Armenians worldwide?
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Reply Ibrahim Kurtulus 3 weeks ago
While there is always mention of so called 1 millons dead Armenians during the events, no one mentions the more than a million Turks that were massacered by the armenians and their protectors to create an etnically pure Armenian state within the occupied Ottoman lans.
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Reply Yuksel Oktay 3 weeks ago
This is my 3rd and final comment on the unfortunate article by Ahmed Aziz, specificly a response to the comments made by someone, noted below.
All young chaps have the right to research any subject and write about it but after learning the truth and judging all sides of the issue. Ahmed Aziz begins with stating that “Millions of Armenians were killed.” This is the biggest lie of the 20th century. Most everyone believes that the best estimate of the Armenian population in the Ottoman Empire in 1915 was around 1.3 million (SS Aya book gives different estimates from various sources, including 1.2 million in the New York Times (page 303, Genocide of Turth). Based on an extensive research conducted at several archives including the Ameican archives, Prof. Nursen Mazici wrote back in 2005 that the population of Armenians in 1919 in countries where they migrated before, during and after 1915, including 35,80 in the US, and 70,000 in Turkey, was aorund 880,000 (Vatan newspaper, 1 May 2005.) SS Aya gives a figure of 1,080,000 for the number of Armenians living in 1919, p. 307, Genocide of Truth. At most, the number of Armenians who lost their lives during the conflict for a number of reasons was probably around 400,000, which has been stated to be 300,000 by Kamuran Gurun in his book. If 1.5 million Armenians were killed in 1915, where did the 9 to 10 million Armenians who are living in the world today came from? It is sad to give numbers and the only reason for stating this is because of the false information that has been embedded in the minds of people, including Ahmed Aziz, who may not have a clear idea about what happened almost 100 years ago, especially when the uprisings and the massacres by Armenians are ignored…,
Being a friend of Turkey does not exempt one from criticising the country, no, but one needs to be truthful after a carefull review of all materials on the subject, which Ahmed Aziz has not done.. As far as the final comment goes, it is the same old attitude, insulting when you know you are not being objective and truthful.
Yuksel Oktay
@Yuksel Oktay
“…Ahmed Aziz, judging from the photo of his in the article, must be a young chap who probably does not know what he is talking about,…”
This is an astounding assertion. So, all young “chaps” have no business researching their subject and draw their own conclusions because, thanks to their age, they lack intellect as well? You don’t need to be wizened, musty old fellow to study history!
“…but wants to make an impression for himself, forgetting that he is insulting probabaly the only real ally that Pakistan has. …”
So, sir, are you claiming that being “only real ally that Pakistan has” exempts Turkey from being indicted for a horrific crime that all but they and their “real allies” have been crying hoarse for years for redress?
Sir, you don’t seem to have learnt any thing in those 45 years!
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Reply FlowerPower 3 weeks ago
@Ahmed Aziz: Thank you for bringing this issue up, the more we talk about it the more we can protect those in the Middle East that can’t protect themselves.
@Turks: You need to look in the archives where the historians are allowed to look! You can’t just look at the ones that are opened!
Remember the lie will last nomore.
Also if you deny this crime, you’re only adding to the responsiblity, I mean come on that’s not right to lock people up, or assonate someone just because they have a different claim. That’s not right!
So stop locking up the historians that are allowed in the deep archives that citizens aren’t allowed in and listen to them!
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Reply Ergun Kirlikovali 3 weeks ago
Ahmed Aziz,
The fact that you assert that it was genocide based on what you reviewed shows how hopelessly uninformed you are on this subject. You should know that there is one and only one way to declare an event is genocide: via “competent tribunal” after “dur process”. This is according to articles 4-9 of the UN Convention on genocide in 1948, ratified in 1951.
Genocide cannot be decided by
a) historians
b) sociologists
c) psychologists
d) any other branch of scholarship
e) journalists
f) columnists
g) oped writers
h) activists
i) clergy
j) others…
They can be expert witnesses to the xtent that they can withstand court scrutiny, but no giver of final verdict.
There is one and only one authority: “competent tribunal” as International Court of Justice in den Haag established by the UN.
Why is it so?
Because novice people like you can easily be impressed one way or another. But at a court of law, you must make you case to the satisfaction of legal scruitny, counter arguments, witnessess and cross examination, just like it was done in Nuremberg in 1945.
“I researched and am convinced that ot was genocide, trust me” is no legal argument. Then you must find a convincong argument agaisnt half a million Muslims, mostly Turkish, victims of Armenian revolutionaries armed with Russian-made Mosin rifles. (Have you ever heard the term Mosin in your “extended” research of a few hours?)
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Reply MIKE ADAJIAN 3 weeks ago
THANK YOU, MR. AHMED AZIZ,
for speaking up about this despicable crime
& the shameful suppression of this story.
To ALL who suffer oppression !
To ALL who work for justice & peace !
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Reply Assdig Maagar 3 weeks ago
It is amusing to see that the comments of Mr. Ergun Kirlikovali (The premier Turkish paid Armenian hater) and the comments of Mark, are one and the same to the commas and dots and the meaningless enumerations as the six T’s etc. Is this from a manual that the government of Turkey is passing around to the individuals who are paid to spread their denial camaine?
According to the European archives, the number of Armenian Genocide victims is 2.4 million not the 1.5 conservative figure quoted elsewhere.
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Reply MIKE ADAJIAN 3 weeks ago
The Republic of Turkey has done a grave disservice to its citizens by using its educational & legal systems to attempt to bury evidence of these disgraceful crimes.
But light is shining into this darkness & healing has begun.
Witness Hrant + Dink, Elif Shafak, Taner Akcam, Orhan Pamuk & the many Turks who have taken their words & courage into their hearts.
A copy & paste PR campaign cannot cover up the truth.
It can only cover those foolish enough to attempt it in deeper shame.
Winston Churchill was right about many things, including this:
The truth is incontrovertible.
Malice may attack it.
Ignorance may deride it.
But in the end, there it is.
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Reply Ergun Kirlikovali 3 weeks ago
The following quotes form 1917 and 1923 bu eyewitnesses should give even the most hardened anti-Turk a clue about truth:
1917
“…For fourteen days, I followed the Euphrates; it is completely out of the question that I during this time would not have seen at least some of the Armenian corpses, that according to Mrs. Stjernstedt’s statements, should have drifted along the river en masse at that time. A travel companion of mine, Dr. Schacht, was also travelling along the river. He also had nothing to tell when we later met in Baghdad… …In summary, I think that Mrs. Stjernstedt, somewhat uncritically, has accepted the hair-raising stories from more or less biased sources, which formed the basis for her lecture…”
Source: H.J. Pravitz, A Swedish officer, Nya Dagligt Allehanda, 23 April, 1917 issue
(A Swedish Newspaper published from 1859 to 1944)
1923
“…In some towns containing ten Armenian houses and thirty Turkish houses, it was reported that 40,000 people were killed, about 10,000 women were taken to the harem, and thousands of children left destitute; and the city university destroyed, and the bishop killed. It is a well- known fact that even in the last war the native Christians, despite the Turkish cautions, armed themselves and fought on the side of the Allies. In these conflicts, they were not idle, but they were well supplied with artillery, machine guns and inflicted heavy losses on their enemies….”
Source: Lamsa, George M., a missionary well known for his research on Christianity,
The Secret of the Near East, The Ideal Press, Philadelphia 1923, p 133
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Reply Yuksel Oktay 3 weeks ago
Dear Ahmed Aziz,
Thank you for your response. Although I had mentioned after my third post that it was the final one, after reading your response, I thought I could offer the following additional comments.
When I wrote the three responses, I was either en route from Istanbul to the States, or away from my home and therefore did not have access to my files. I will forward to you the 34 page booklet on 1915 when I return to my home in Istanbul next week. It was first published in 2005 which needs a good update.
I read 3 of the 5 books that you have listed and written reviews of them. I will also send these to you later. On Robert Fisk and his book, “The Great War for Civilisation – The Conquest of the Middle East” is first a misnomer. Chapter 10, “The First Holocaust (referring to the alleged Armenian genocide” does not belon in the book and full of fabricated and distorted views. Robert Fisk is a war correspondant, and a very good one, and has written on his 30 years of experience in many wars from Afghanistan to Iraq, based on his eye witness knowledge when he was based in Lebanon (living like a Sultan, I suppose). But what he wrote in Chapter 10 is what he learned from others without the slightest idea what was going on in 1915. Why include this in the book of his experience as a correspondant for the British newspaper Independent. The map that he has included in his book on Page 317 is the same map that hangs on the wall of the Armenian Quarter in Jerusalem, which is identical to a map that Prof Hikmet Ozdemir presented at a conference, but identifying the region, towns and villages on the map as where Armenians revolted, more than 27 places. Robert Fisk does not mention any of these. As I have stated before, you have read books that tell only one side of the story, ignoring the true facts, and fabricating over the years. More about this in my review of the book which I will forward to you (and others if anyone is interested) next week from my home computer.
In the meantime, I am sure New Zealanders (and Australians) will educate you on the Battle of Gallipoli (also covered in my 1915 booklet) when they came 10,000 miles in 1915 to fight an enemy that they did not know, for the glory of Great Britain and lost, but gained their pride as a nation. Robert Fisk even writes about the Dardanelles in his book, only one sentence, and refers to the Australians only.. I hope you get a good education at the New Zealand University, with inquiry on all sides of issues.
Best regards.
Yuksel Oktay
Great War for Civilization: The conquest of the Middle East – By Robert Fisk (Chapter 10)
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Reply J. Ndluli 2 weeks ago
As a follow-up to the above discussion on ‘modern’ Turkey, why not look at some modern day examples of its approach to the world:
(1) What about the disturbing and painful event which happened on Christmas Day in the small church of Saint Synesios in the town of Rizokarpaso in northern (Turkish occupied) Cyprus. The clergy and worshippers were literally thrown out of their place of worship, by Turkish police goons.
(2) Ask the Kurds on their opinion, of not being allowed to use their native tongue in schools.
(3) What of the Christian school on Heybeliada island near Istanbul – it was a major center of theological learning for more than a century until it was closed by Turkey authorities in 1971.
(4) How about the destruction & theft of Church artifacts in northern (Turkish occupied) Cyprus. (Documented by Interpol).
FYI – The USA passed the Armenian Genocide Resolution (March 5, 2010), which acknowledges the historical facts.
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Reply Sukru Server Aya 5 days ago
I sent you my comments yesterday. Hope you received will post. If lost advise so I can write again… Pakistani writer and commentators are making a HUGE mistake by being taken in so easily. Regards S S Aya
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Reply FlowerPower 5 days ago
@Sukru Server Aya: Yah I wish it was a mistake, but I’m afraid the Pakistani is not joking.
If this were so then why would he waste his time writing this artical? I mean do you exspect us to be anti Turkish or pro Turkish? I mean what is the point to you making us forget, I’m not falling for that genocide denial policy that the government is trying to spead all over the place.
People in the Middle East still remember the crusiades hundreds and thousands of years before, so what makes you think everyone’s going to forget this, they won’t!
Stop killing the Armenians!
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Reply Robert 5 days ago
Dear Sukru
It must really hurt when a person of Pakastani origin has decided to research the truth about the events of 1915 and concludes that it was genocide. Turkish denial of the Armenian Genocide relies to large a degree on the ignorance of the Turkish populous, as well as the religious sentinent of other countries such as Pakistan etc. In regards to the western countries, Turkish denial relies on economic and political blackmail. But as many Muslims are becoming more and more educated, they are embarking on self reflection and self criticism. Truth is becoming more valued and injustice is being more widely recognised as having universal consequences for all peoples regardless of race or religion.
However, there are always sections of the elite which have a vested interest in the denial campaign, so they are never willing to accept the truth even though they know it so well!
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Reply Sukru Server Aya 5 days ago
Dear Pakistani young generation
1- From the moment I entered Pakistan in 1967, until 1983 when my import of various Pakistan made machine tools had to be stopped because of Afgan transport interruption, I have been to Pakistan so many time and I was welcomed as a brother from the very first day. When I was crossing the border at Lahore to Firouzbourg the Commander of the border post stopped me and my wife to have tea and talk about Ataturk and Mohammed Iqbal, who was the greatest support in Mustafa Kemal’s fight againts imperialism.
2- Gentlemen, how easily can you be brainwashed by very few “selected sources” not reading your own author on the subject and wonderful book “Lies, Lies and More Lies”
http://armenians-1915.blogspot.com/2009/06/2894-free-e-book-lies-lies-and-more.html
3- My book “The Genocide of Truth” is on internet since early 2008 and has been downloaded by over 5000 people, you can download or print right away or ARE YOU SCARED of TRUTH or IRRESPONSIBLE TO SIDE WITH LIES?
http://armenians-1915.blogspot.com/2010/12/3189-genocide-of-truth-continues-but.html and
http://armenians-1915.blogspot.com/2008/04/2429-new-e-book-genocide-of-truth-based.html
Gentlemen, this book was the result of 30.000 pages of reading with over 2000 verbatim excerpts from ARMENIAN and ANTI-TURKISH or NEUTRAL sources. No one could refute ONE WORD. By this time (my second English book just launched) my reading is over 50.000 pages and you can read excerpts or summaries under posting 3189. My grand son aged Ahmed Aziz’s ALL sources are “selected-biased and extremely few”.
I advise him to read Armenian heroes or writers’s book, all available on the same blog site, such as “Pastermadjian, Lalaian, Dasnabedian, Katchaznuni, Nassibian, etc.” and read the Armenian memorandum to Paris conference 1919. If you start today it may take you not less than 5 years TO SEE THE BOTTOM of THE ICEBERG OF this WORLD CHARLATANISM. Don’t be surprised, “the decent persons in the world Turks, Armenians, Dutch, Americans, French etc” are fighting against CROOKS DEFENDI.NG TRUTH.
We have room for decency, and global ethics, but no room for “faiths or nationalities” or fanatics! It is a fight of LOGIC – TRUTH and COURAGE TO DEFEND against swindlers, which exist in every community. I am speaking of documented solid facts and person’s intelligence.
I am not referring to slippery Muslim brotherhood, nor reminding Ahmed Aziz to learn the gold donations by his grand grandfathers sent to Turks in their last breath fight against imperalists. I doubt if you know the inspiration of modern Turkey over Cinnah when Pakistan was founded. Didn’t you hear the names I just mentioned above? You decide gentlemen, which side you join before “approving murder of 10.000 persons EVERY day for FIVE MONTHS and burying them in stadium size graves dug by hand shovels” and which graves have not been ever found!
Read “Reno Evening Gazette” of Nov.14,1915 and judge if you haven’t been ALL DUPED! It is the first time that I see my Pakistani brothers cheated so easily on something they don’t read and learn from the honorable M. Aktar Shaikh who spent several years in Turkish archives and is a most respected scholar and man of literature. Find and learn from him and his book before you commit such a mistake.
What a pity if you do not know his contributions to Turkish-Pakistani brotherhood (like myself).Your forgetting Mohammad Iqbal’s attachment and support of the modern Turkey has NO EXCUSE! Huda Hafez!
Sukru S. Aya, Istanbul 22.1.2011
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Reply Kirlikovali 5 days ago
2005
“…From 1911 to 1923, the Ottoman Empire and the people of Turkey participated in five long, hard, and destructive wars. These were the Tripolitanian War / Trablusgarb Harbi / Türk Italyan Harb? (1911-1912), the two Balkan Wars (1912-1913), World War I (1914-1918), and the Turkish War of National Liberation (1918-1923). To most Turkish people who lived through that era, these wars were really only one, the Seferberlik, or period of mobilization, which went on continuously throughout these years.
During these wars, the entire infrastructure of life in the Ottoman Empire was destroyed. Fields were left barren and uncultivated; roads and railroad lines were destroyed and their equipment wrecked; harbors and quays were blown up by repeated bombing, and many of the people living nearby were killed; Istanbul and the other great cities of the empire were partially destroyed by bombing, bombarding and great fires. The entire nation, thus, was for all practical purposes destroyed. One of the greatest miracles of Atatürk’s leadership during and after the Turkish War of National Liberation was the manner in which he was able to raise the Turkish people from this wreckage and lead them to revive and reconstruct what became the Turkish Republic.
In the midst of all this destruction, no fewer than 30 percent, one third, of all the people who lived in the Ottoman Empire at the start of the war died. In the war zones, Macedonia and Thrace, western Anatolia, northeastern Turkey and southeastern Turkey, that percentage was as high as sixty or even seventy percent, much higher than any other country that was involved in these wars. No-one was counting, so it is very difficult to give actual figures, but perhaps no fewer than four million people died in the lands of the Ottoman Empire during these wars, and these were people of all races and religions, all ethnic origins, they were Muslims, Jews and Christians, they were Turks and Armenians, Arabs and Greeks, and many more…”
Source: From “The Ottoman Holocaust”; a lecture delivered by Stanford J. Shaw (1930-2006, Professor of Modern Ottoman History, Bilkent University, Ankara, Turkey; Professor of Turkish History, University of California, Los Angeles,) to the First International Symposium on Armenian Claims and The Reality of Azerbaijan, sponsored by the Atatürk Research Center, 5 May 2005, Ankara, Turkey
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Reply Kirlikovali 5 days ago
Here are the Muslims killed by Armenian revolutionaries through the eyewitness accounts:
“…When we arrived at Zeve, the village couldn’t be passed through because of its stench. It was as if the bones in our noses would fall off… There were bodies everywhere. We saw a weird scene on the threshold of one house: they had filled the house with Muslims and burned it, and so many people had been burnt that the fat that had oozed from under the threshold had turned back into the trench in front of the door. That is, it was as if the river of fat had risen and later receded. The fat was still fresh. The entire village had been destroyed and was in this situation. I saw this with my own eyes, and I’ll never forget it. We heard that they did the same thing to the Muslims on Carpanak Island. The Armenians told me about the latter; I did not see it for myself…”
Source: Haci Osman Gemicioglu, an Armenian-Turk (having converted to Islam) who eyewitnessed the 1915 Zeve massacre; as told to Huseyin Celik, during interviews conducted in the late 1970s.
Close to 40,000 Muslims were killed by Armenians and the city was turned over to invading Russian armies. This act of terrorism, revolt, and treason, all rolled into one, was the last straw. The Ottoman Empire issued the TERESET (Temporary resettlement order of 27 May 1915) order after this.
If you think this is unfair or too harsh, consider this: The U.S. started and wages for 10 years a global war on terrorism because 3,000 people, mostly Americans, were killed on Amrican soil on 9 September 2001. Why then is it so difficult to undertand that the Ottomans resorted to much lesser wartime measure of TERESET after 40,000 of Ottoman citizens were killed by Armenian insurgents? If you do the math, you will note that 40,000 Ottoman victims in 1915 correspondes to some 800,000 American victims today. Imagine what the U.S. would do if if 800,000 Americans were killed… (And that’s just 1915. Armenians killed 120,000 Muslim in 1914 – source: WWI Dictionary, Pope, page 34.)
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Reply MIKE ADAJIAN 4 days ago
…& so we approach understanding.
http://www.armenianweekly.com/2011/01/21/gunaysu-kurds-challenge-turkish-nation-state/
thank you, mr. ahmed aziz & friends, for your work on this matter.
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Reply FlowerPower 3 days ago
You people need to stop looking at information on the internet and go to the archives, they have the answers! How many times do I have to tell you?
The archives hold the answers, not just the Turkish archives but the Armenians, Russian, American, British, French, Syrian, German, Greek, and many other archives as well.
You need to see if both rumors or facts are located in archives around the world!
If you just get the information from the internet it could be wrong either way!
Listen to me I know what I’m talking about!
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Reply Kirlikovali 3 days ago
Check this photo out at http://www.ethocide.com.
Do these look like “poor, starving Armenians” to you?
You’ve been duped !
Armenian con-artists are active here too. Assdig Maagar is no other than JDA, the notorious Armenian terrorist and crook. Please google the words “JDA terrorist” and you will know what I mean.
Sukru Aya 3 days ago
Reply: Mr. Maagar
a- Do you know that over 42 Turkish diplomats (altogether about 70) persons were killed in more than 250 Armenian terror acts between 1973 - 1995, and that the "criminals received medals" in Armenia? One idiot Turkish fanatic killed Hrant Dink, a good citizen, but who messed with "pure Armenian blood and poisnous Turkish blood" and that was enough for an idiot to kill him and become a hero. But the Turkish people over 100.000 protested the murder and marched on streets and are still in defiance for not concluding the tribunal for punishment of the criminal.
b- The rest of your remarks are not worth to be taken for value, since they are "easy speak, big mouth talks, none supported by any factual evidence". It seems that you do not have the "courage and desire to learn the truth by reading thousands pages of hundreds of old documents" (not present wikipedia cookies).
c- I put my book on the internet and you can print the 702 pages for free and read the bibliography to learn the sources. The hard think is to count the hairs on so many skins, and you can be sure that they are all Armenian-British-American Books and official documents, no grand-ma stories, not even a piece of millions of Ottoman documents. Mr. I do not know your age or proficiency but the "blog where you can also write and read my over 300 articles, over 200 E-library books" is a blog site of Armenians living abroad, with over 50.000 readers from all countries. Why don't you become a member and learn from your fellow Armenians?
If you do not want to wake up frrom your "fantasie tales" and do not even know that the "genocide" story was invented in 1960's after the Nazi Armenians were admitted into USA and this move of Dashnak prevented their assimilation and revitalization of all religious and other social institutions. Read my essay "There is no Hell, no Paradise, no Martyrdom, no Genocide"!
Good luck... Please read and refer to my written "verbatim excerpts" and if you find any mistakes, "refer to the sources given in the book".
Reply: Mr/Miss/Mrs FlowerPower
a- Did you enter in any of the given links and start surfing through the hundreds of pages and thousands of references? You are giving childish talk, without having taken the trouble to "look into anything" because you are scared that the facts may be contrary to what you have been whispered since your childhood".
b- All book and sources are there in the E-Library of the "Armenian Genocide Resource Center" (armenians-1915.blogspot.com) If you think that they are traitors, contact and write to them and tell them where and what they did wrong.
c- Turkish archives are open to the whole world, ask Ara Sarafian who spent years in there. Sir, before commenting back (with practical wisdom) take a few weeks, start reading the sources. The links are just the "doors to the library of all types of books in favor of genocide or with bragging and confessions, plus official documentation". Before commenting, did you make a tiny research about my experise in the subject and more than 300 essays sitting there in the section "sukru server aya" in the main menu.
SSA
Thank you for your attention and to Express Tribune for notification.
Sukru Server Aya's Reply Dated (26 April 2011) to a comment
:
All sides suffered? How come there are no Armenians left in Anatolia, their ancestral land?
a- Catholic and Protestant Armenians returned their homes, after end of August 1914. Refer to Morgenthau book diary, his first time conversation with Zenop Bezjian in late September who had returned from Deir-Zor saying “they safely arrived and settled for business, asking money!
b- About 300.000 (or 400.000) Armenians took refuge in Russian Armenia, when the Russians evacuated Van (Armenian Republic?) and adjacent areas.
c- After June 4, 1918 (Batum Treaty) all Armenians and Moslems could repossess their belongings, could return homes under “best preferential laws”. Aharonian and Hatissian went to Istanbul to thank Sultan and were warmly received on Sept.6, 1918! Western part of Armenia was under Ottoman protection but fights and massacres of Muslims continued in the Baku-Zangezur area by Antranik and Dro. Russians were under communist revolt and Turks had not reached that part of the Caucasus.
d- One month after the Mudros Treaty of 30.10.1918,(whereby all Armenians could return and repossess their belonging under new Treaty and French-British Forces) the Dashnakist Armenian Republic abrogated the Treaty on Nov.30,1918 and attacked – occupied Kars-Ardahan procinces with the permission of British Forces in Iran.
e- After the Mudros treaty, about 300.000 (USA accounts say 400.000 or more) Armenians in Syria returned and re-settled in the South-East Anatolia, first under occupation of British, later the French Army which had some 5000 Armenians under French uniform who started atrocities causing a “national resistance by the civilian people.” This Turkish civilian resistance plus Nationalist officers’ fights, forced France to ask for peace and evacuate Anatolia under the Frank Buillon-Ankara Treaty in late 1921. Turks asked Armenians (who had returned) to stay (because they were the economic life) but Armenians afraid of reprisals decided to go with the French Forces and “punish Turks”. Last French ship left Mersin on Jan.10, 1922 and French records say that some thousands Armenians died on roads because of snow-storm and blizzard that took place during this “voluntary retreat”. Ancestral Land ? Armenians were never more than 20% of the population; they were under the rule of Persia, Byzantine, (after 1071) of Turks.
How come thousands of their churches and cemeteries are all destroyed?
In 1850’s about 60-70% of the present Armenia was populated by Muslims! What happened to their cemeteries, mosques? Can they name but one Moslem family in Armenia? At the present time in Turkey there are over 60 Armenian churches active, which averages 1 church for 1000 Armenians. What is the similar proportion of churches in Armenia, France and Glendale?
How come even the Armenians who lived in western Turkey are not there now?
The Armenians in Western Turkey (like many Turks) immigrated to other countries (USA, Canada, and France) where living and earning chances were much better! They went themselves!
How come if you mention the Armenian Genocide in Turkey you end up in jail or get shot in the back like Hrant Dink?
No one ended in jail in Turkey, they were not even sent to court, but in France and Switzerland it is free to say “I do not believe in God”, but it is punishable by prison and money to say “I do not believe in genocide”! What a paradox when speaking of “freedom of thinking and opinion”! Hirant Dink was shot by a “childish fanatic” because of his speaking of “dirty Turkish blood to be replaced by clean Armenian blood”. Over 200.000 Turks protested this murder on streets! But in more than 250 acts of terror more than 42 Turks-diplomats-persons on duty were murdered in cold blood just because they were Turks! Name one Armenian, ever punished by Armenians!
The Turkish suffering during WWI was because they sided with Germany and they were defeated, what does that have to do with the suffering of the Armenians who were systematically subjected by Ottoman state Genocide.
Armenian sufferings (relocation) was the result of their full collaboration with the enemy (Russia, France and Britain) and the fifth column activities they carried, employing the army in back fights when it was needed up front. The relocation done in “war time shortage of men and supplies” finally solved the “military necessity” and more than 90% of the persons relocated reached their destinations and were resettled in camps and new villages built. The camps had their priest, infirmary and kitchen but like the soldiers in the front there was not enough food, medicine and supplies because all sea ports were blockaded by British navy. Armenians shared the same consequences Muslims people shared (starvation, epidemics, cold etc)..
Even the grand son of Gemal Pasha, one of the 3 leaders of the Young Turks who masterminded the Genocide and who were found guilty and sentenced to death by Turkish courts, is on tour now asserting that the 1915 events were genocide.
Intelligence, prudency and idiocy are not hereditary. Ask who invited Hasan Cemal to California, who paid and accommodated his expenses. Grandson Cemal, like all Genocide fanfare scholars, does not have one page of authentic documentation to approve.. History is written on documents cross checked by different sources, and not on rumors or hearsays! Many documents and books are freely available on the “armenians-1915.blogspot.com” and those who have the courage to learn truth from “other Armenian heroes or writers” (Pastermadjian, Kaktchaznuni, Dasnabedian, Nassibian, Vratzian, Lalaian etc) may find plenty to read there, including the book of Col. Maksud Shaikh published in Pakistan “Lies, Lies and more Lies”. I invite the commentators to refute (if they can) the documentary evidence in my essay:
Armenians-1915.blogspot.com/2008/10/2610-genocide-lies-need-no-archives.html
and reply it the same way I did. “Truth defending Armenians” will certainly post the counter comments! Gentlemen, do not get carried away by nationalist or alike instincts, have courage to investigate and learn the truth and search for bilateral compassion based on “facts”!
Sukru S. Aya – Istanbul
http://blogs.tribune.com.pk/story/3713/armenian-genocide-millions-killed-and-forgotten-done/
Twain's Whiskey/Water Quote Appears Greatly Exaggerated By Michael Doyle, McClatchy Newspapers
WASHINGTON — California politicians invariably invoke Mark Twain when debating Western water controversies. They shouldn't.
Rhetoric, too often, runs ahead of historical fact.
The specific quote in question rolls right off the tongue. Sing along, now:
"Mark Twain once said that whiskey is for drinking but water is worth fighting over," then-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger recited, illustratively, in 2009 at a Fresno event.
Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein, a serious player in setting California water policy, has likewise long favored the Twain quote. So did Schwarzenegger's gubernatorial predecessor, Gray Davis. So have many others; ad, to be perfectly honest, nauseum.
"The 'whiskey' quote has been around as long as I have been in the water world, (which is) 31 years," noted Rita Sudman, executive director of the Sacramento-based Water Education Foundation.
But there's a problem. This is, all evidence shows, another sound bite that's too good to be true.
"It's a great quote," Twain biographer Joe Fulton said in an interview Friday, "but I really don't believe that Twain ever said it."
Twain is not alone. Many quotes get recycled for political purposes, even if ambiguity remains about their provenance.
During congressional debate over an Armenian genocide resolution last year, for instance, Rep. Brad Sherman, D-Sherman Oaks, summoned a familiar sounding Adolf Hitler episode from 1939 in which Hitler said, according to Sherman, "We can get away with the Holocaust; after all, who today speaks of the annihilation of the Armenians?"
Many lawmakers have invoked the same Hitler quote, or something like it, and there is evidence to support that Hitler said it. But from the other side, an Institute for Turkish Studies scholar who is opposed to an Armenian genocide resolution conducted his own analysis casting into doubt how the quote sprang to life.
The search for scholarly certitude, though, may miss the political point. The quotes attributed to Hitler and Twain, and others like them, keep resonating in part because they are a type of expert witnessing and in part because the sentiments expressed align with the speaker's reputation.
In other words, they sound right.
"It's exactly the kind of thing he would say," said Fulton, the Twain scholar.
An English professor at Baylor University in Texas, Fulton immersed himself in Twain's correspondence, 19th century newspaper accounts and more to research his new book, "The Reconstruction of Mark Twain." The book includes two chapters on Twain's professionally formative years in California and Nevada, where water fights loomed large.
Another Twain biographer, Texas A&M University English professor Jerome R. Loving, likewise examined every letter and relevant scrap of paper he could find for his 2010 book "Mark Twain: The Adventures of Samuel L. Clemens." He is still not done with his Twain research, and yet he has found no evidence for the whiskey/water quip.
"I have never run across that quotation," Loving said Friday.
Though it's impossible to prove Twain didn't say something during his 74 years, the absence of proof that he did say is it telling, given the extent to which Twain's life was contemporaneously documented. At the University of California's Bancroft Library, keeper of the Mark Twain papers, researchers have combed through a treasure trove that includes 600 unpublished Twain manuscripts and some 28,000 letters to and from the Twain family.
Individually, whiskey, water, drinking and fighting may be common enough topics. As a tidy little quote, though, the "whiskey is for drinking and water is for fighting" observation is nowhere in Twain's documented life and times.
"That's one we have never found," Neda Smith, an assistant with Bancroft's Mark Twain Papers and Project, said Friday.
3 comments
Kirlikovali 01/28/2011
JOURNALISt'S ZEAL MARS HITLER DEAL AT U.S. HOLOCAUST MUSEUM
I am delighted that you would shine a light on the oft-quoted fallacy about the alleged Hitler quote “Who, after all, remembers the Armenians today?” Dr. Arnold Reisman, a Holocaust survivor himself, narrowly escaping Hitler’s killing machine, a meticulous researcher in his own right, and a prolific writer, studied this matter carefully.
Dr. Reisman got the transcripts of the ANuremberg Tribunals and was able to trace the events carefully, so any mistake here belongs to me, not to him. Here is what really happened.
The Associate Press Berlin Bureau chief Louis Lochner, a journalist, submits a document purportedly of Hitler’s speech on Aug 22, 1939, in Obersalzberg, addressing his commanders-in-chief , just one week prior to the launching of the attack on Poland. Lochner gives it to the U.S. Prosecutor Alderman. That version does have reference to Armenians but is found by the U.S. Prosecutor later to be unreliable as it was a garbled mish-mash of two speeches delivered by Hitler that day.
Luckily for the forces of truth, the U.S. Prosecutor was able to locate among the captured OKW (German equivalent of our Pentagon) documents. Now we know there were not one, but two meetings that day between Hitler and his top generals. Besides, the two documents captured from the Germans are authenticated and they do corroborate each other. Here is the clincher: those two genuine German documents do not have any reference to Armenians whatsoever. So, the U.S. Prosecutor decides to number all three (US 28, US 29, and US 30) but only use the genuine German issues in the captured documents, and decides to dismiss Lochner’s jumbled, combined and doctored copy.
Here are the U.S. Prosecutor’s exact words at the Nuremberg Tribunals: …We have three of these documents, related and constituting a single group. The first one, I do not intend to offer as evidence. The other two, I shall offer. The reason for that decision is this: The first of the three documents came into our possession through the medium of an American newspaperman, and purported to be original minutes of this meeting at Obersalzberg, transmitted to this American newspaperman by some other person; and we had no proof of the actual delivery to the intermediary by the person who took the notes. That document, therefore, merely served to keep our prosecution on the alert, to see if it could find something better. Fortunately, we did get the other two documents, which indicate that Hitler on that day made two speeches, perhaps one in the morning, one in the afternoon, as indicated by the original minutes, which we captured. By comparison of those two documents with the first document, we conclude that the first document was a slightly garbled merger of the two speeches….In order to keep serial numbers consecutive, if the Tribunal please, we have had the first document, which I do not intend to offer, marked for identification exhibit USA 28. Accordingly, I offer the second document, 798 PS, in evidence as exhibit USA 29, and the third document 1014 PS as exhibit USA 30…”
This begs one question to be asked: Why would Lochner deliberately put words into Hitler’s mouth like that? Why Armenians? The answer to this mystery also comes from Dr. Reisman’s meticulous research. To find the “smoking gun”, as Dr. Reisman aptly put it, we need to rewind to the years of World War One. One can perhaps the answer in Lochner’s predisposition to right what he has for many years considered to be wrong.
This excerpt establishes that Louis Lochner and Louis P. Lochner are one and the same: “…When Louis P. Lochner, the longtime Berlin bureau chief of The Associated Press, had tried earlier to convey a message from the [German] resistance to Franklin Roosevelt, he was advised by the White House that this would be highly embarrassing to the president…” Source: Gordon A. Craig, “The July 20 Attack on Hitler Brightens a Dark Heritage,” New York Times , July 20, 1994.
That said, it should be noted that Louis P. Lochner had a history of having been a long time activist leader in America’s Peace Movement. In 1916 he was the signatory of a Manifesto proclaiming among other actions “the use of propaganda” for establishing the “autonomy for Armenia” under international guarantee, and the solution of various national questions … in Asiatic Turkey by international agreement.” Source: same NYT article as above.
Could this then be the motivation for Lochner, the idealist and crusader for peace, to have personally inserted the Hitler quote in his alleged Associate Press dispatch?
There is no record in the New York Times archives of ever having published any article whatsoever which included that Hitler quote, hence the word “alleged”.
The above addresses the Lochner’s reliability, yet an excerpt from Lochner’s imaginary version of the Hitler speech is used on the U.S. Holocaust Memorial and Museum wall. At best it is “garbled hodgepodge”; at worst it is hearsay, even forgery.
Might the USHMM have an honest answer? It would be enlightening, at least, for Reisman, a child survivor of the Holocaust with a “Spielberg” oral testimony on file at USHMM, who is naturally sensitive to the potential of any revisionism of Holocaust history to promote the Armenian cause.
If the USHMM can provide a satisfying answer that the Hitler quote came from a primary document and cannot be potentially interpreted as hearsay or worse, as having been manufactured by a correspondent with lofty ideals, Dr. Reisman says he will make a public apology and significantly upgrade his annual contribution to USHMM.
Having studied this matter myself, reading Prof. Heath Lowry’s book on this issue among other books, I would not count on Dr. Reisman’s increased contributions if I were USHMM.
sukruaya 01/30/2011
Dear Editor
In my book "The Genocide of Truth" (P.366) I had proven the forgery behind Hitler's, which you can see with your own eyes by entering
http://armenians-1915.blogspot.com/2008/04/2429-new-e-book-genocide-of-truth-based.html
My very recent book ISBN 978-605-5500-07-08 "The Genocide of Truth Continues...But Facts Tell the Real Story" is obtainable only from me, but you can see a copy at the "Congress Library" or the "Holocaust Museum in Washington" to which I mailed my book, with new evidences on the fact that the Museum knows about this forgery but are unable to remove it. Paragrap 14/2, pages 249-270 gives additional excerpted explanation with U.S. sources and ends with the following paragraph. I have openly invited the Museum Management and hereby I invite your paper or any person or authority in the World to prove that my findings about this open fakery is not true.
Stage 4 - CONCLUSION:
1. My knowledge and capacity to communicate in English falls short in finding the correct wording to summarize the unethical conduct and genocide of truth in the almost sacred Museum of Holocaust.
2. The intrigues, duplicities, political pressures, avoiding the truth or allowing the facts to surface, the “lynching type historical research and elimination of the few decent remarks” goes beyond suspense and deceit. Apparently, nearly all of the Museum committee – council members, directors and executives have knowingly abused, violated the minimal ethical principals by diverse excuses of skilful travesty.
3. The shallowness of historical knowledge and research, the prejudice against Turks and sympathy for Armenians (despite some notices of Turkish Jews and Israeli diplomats) leave no doubt for the “team responsibility” and leadership of Mr. Berenbaum, for including a “fake sentence” on the wall of the Museum, and thus denying the competence and authority of the Nuremberg International Court which rejected the Hitler quote and research of FBI over a piece of counterfeit which the Museum accepted as valid.
4. When this book will be out from the printers, a signed copy dedicated to the Library of the Museum, so that all of their historians (?) can read will be mailed to them with a simple question. In their reply of April 24, the Museum confessed that they were not sure of the accuracy of the Hitler quote and that they are researching and that they will notify Mr. Melih Berk of the findings:
Final Question: Gentlemen, more than eight years have already passed. Do you confirm or refute the accuracy of the quote? Please write to the blog “armenians-1915.blogspot.com” and inform the public, “which of my documents or evidences are wrong!” I am afraid that the Museum will not have the courage to rectify their own mistake and offer a public apology; consequently all the people, who closed their eyes to the complicities, will have to keep them closed when looking into mirrors!
Documented contrary evidence may be posted on the blog "armenians-1915.blogspot.com"
Cordially,
Sukru Server Aya (Author-researcher) (ssaya01@gmail.com Istanbul)
Maxime Gauin 01/31/2011
The Institute of Turkish Studies http://www.ataa.org/reference/hitler-lowry.html and Turkish scholars http://www.turkishpac.org/pdfs/hitlerremarkisforgery.pdf are not alone to consider this Hitler's quotation as apocryphal. Jewish scholar Arnold Reisman added interesting findings on this topic: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1520503
Moreover, the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (ARF), the political party which controls the main Armenian American umbrella (the Armenian National Committee of America) cooperated with the Nazis; for instance, “Hairenik” ARF’s newspaper in USA published vitriolic anti-Jewish and pro-Hitler articles, and Drastamat Kanayan, aka Dro, the main World leader of ARF at that time, was the commander of the 812th Armenian battalion of Wermacht. The current leader of ARF in USA, Vicken Hovsepian, was sentenced in 1984 to 6 years of jail for an attempt of bombing against the building where the Turkish consulate of Philadelphia is established.
http://www.miamiherald.com/2011/01/28/2039646/twains-whiskeywater-quote-appears.html
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