GENOCIDE CLAIM DENIES ARMENIAN COMPLICITY AND THE RESULTING TURKISH SUFFERING Phil Corso seems to have taken the Armenian claims at face value, calling the events of 1915 a genocide. Apparently, Corso knows better than the highest court in Europe. The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR,) in its landmark verdict of December 17, 2013, on Perincek vs Switzerland, remarked that genocide was a highly technical term, difficult to prove. The top judges concluded that research, by its very own definition, is open to debate, without necessarily giving rise to final conclusions or to the assertion of objective and absolute truths. ECHR maintained that the Armenian case cannot be held equal to the Jewish Holocaust, as the former lacked what the latter had: court-proven acts of intent to destroy. ECHR further commented that calling responsible opposing views denial, therefore, is a violation of freedom of speech and human rights. While Jewish Holocaust, Rwanda and Srebrenica cases are legitimate, court-proven verdicts of genocide, Armenian case is nothing more than a long-discredited political claim which deceptively ignores Armenian complicity in the tragedy (revolts, terrorism, treason, territorial demands, and more) and the resulting Turkish suffering. To call 1915 a genocide would be to equate much-discredited Armenian narrative to factual Jewish experience. It would be an insult to the silent memory of six million Jews who were killed just for being Jews. Whereas Armenians resorted to terrorism (1862-1922,) revolts (1882-1920,) and treason (1878-1920) and caused 519,000 Turks and other Muslims to meet their tragic ends at the hands of Armenian revolutionaries. Jews did not do any of those heinous acts in 1930s or 1940s. So how can any decent human being measure the two events by the same yardstick: genocide ? That is why the UN, the US, the UK, Australia, Israel, Sweden and many other countries do not accept the use of the term genocide to describe the Turkish-Armenian conflict. LET THE FACTS SPEAK FOR THEMSELVES I have lived long enough to see the abrupt transformation in the American media from the objective use of the qualifier alleged before the term Armenian genocide in 1980s and 1990s to no qualifier at all today. What caused this? Did some heretofore unknown but game-changing information came to surface? No. Did a competent tribunal go through due process to prove intent to destroy, as required by the 1948 UN Convention on Prevention and Punishment of Genocide for a Genocide label to be legitimate? No. Were mass graves found? No. Actually, yes, but of Turks killed by Armenians in Zeve, Erzurum and Erzincan; in other words, proving the opposite; that Armenians were no innocent bystanders in the Turkish-Armenian conflict and that they were actually extremely brutal belligerents in a bloody war. In fact, this aspect was confessed to and documented by Armenian leaders like Boghos Nubar (Letter published in London Times, 1919) and Hovhannes Katchaznouni (Address to ARF Congress in Bucarest, 1923.) Then, of course, there is the US Congressional Report “American Military Mission to Armenia” 1920 and the Annex Report Nat. Archives 184.021/175 which refers to “…refinements of cruelty by Armenians to Muslims…”. So what transpired this change from journalistic objectivity to overt partisanship bordering on fanaticism in the big media? Answer: Armenian activism and political pressure. This situation and the lopsided coverage of the Turkish-Armenian conflict saddened and frustrated me so much that I felt compelled to coin a new term to help describe it : ETHOCIDE. My humble gift to the English language, ETHOCIDE, was born in May of 2003, on the heels of a visit by some vocal Armenian group to the Boston Globe editorial board when they demanded and got the change. ETHOCIDE is a much-needed but missing companion term for genocide; it supplements and complements it in describing false and/or exaggerated claims of genocide. Short definition of ETHOCIDE is systematic extermination of ethics via mass deception for political gain. It is a crime of conscience and anyone who misleads the public by hiding/censoring the other half of the story to make the genocide charges stick is committing this crime. I am in the process of writing a book on it. There will be Institute of Ethocide for the scholarly study of major violators and a Museum of Ethocide to document and exhibit ethocidal behavior and trends. Any characterization of the Turkish-Armenian conflict with the word genocide, without the qualifier alleged preceding it, is an ethocidal behavior. Turks do recognize what happened in 1915; they just do not think it is genocide. Here is the letter by the then Turkish Ambassador Dr. S. Elekdag to New York Times as far back as May 23, 1985: … No one has ever denied the overall tragedy that, 70 years ago, brought death and suffering to all the people of the Ottoman Empires eastern Anatolian region, and that Armenians perished as a part of this… So we, Turkish Americans and Turks, know the tragedy all too well. They know it befell all the people of the area, not just Armenians, and got scars and mass graves to prove it. They also know that Armenians were no innocent bystanders in the conflict (see ethocide for a photo of the Armenians who killed my grandparents. Where is my pain in the Armenian narrative? ) History cannot and should not be legislated. Doing so would destroy the freedom of speech, as well as free press and academia. Is that what the Armenians really want? If yes, then I got news for you: they will never ever get it. The reason is most eloquently expressed by the French historians who wrote this about the draconian denial laws in Appel De Blois: … History must not be a slave to contemporary politics nor can it be written on the command of competing memories… I certainly put my signature on that public statement by the French scholars.
Posted on: Wed, 03 Dec 2014 02:49:06 +0000
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