Turkey's Take Back

Elizabeth Redden

 

A controversial institute supporting research in Turkish studies has lost its funding from Turkey's government, raising questions about whether an institute that has long been perceived by some in the field of Ottoman and Turkish studies as pushing the Turkish state's agenda had grown too independent for the government's liking.

Confronting the Yazidi Genocide

Aren Torikian

 

Thousands of people leaving their ancestral homeland. Women and children being kidnapped, raped, and sold as slaves. Men slaughtered by the dozens.

While this sounds like something from the Armenian Genocide, it is going on in the world as I write. In Northern Iraq, where the Babylonians and Assyrians once ruled vast empires, the Islamic State (IS) has been waging a genocidal war against the defenseless Yazidi people.

The IS, also known as ISIS or ISIL (Islamic State of Iraq and Syria/al-Sham/the Levant), is a descendant of al-Qaeda in Iraq, the group the U.S. Army fought against for almost a decade. Taking advantage of the Syrian Civil War, the IS swept through Syria in 2013, capturing towns from Kurds, Syrian government forces, and other rebels. The IS continued to grow this year, and expanded operations into Iraq. Coupled with an Iraqi Army retreat, the IS’s advance led to gains just outside of Baghdad, hundreds of miles from where it started its rampage. After capturing Mosul in the north, Iraq’s second largest city, the IS started to consolidate its gains. Ethnic Yazidis, fleeing from almost certain death, collected on Mount Sinjar, and were soon surrounded by IS forces. Facing starvation, heat stroke in the 100-degree Iraqi sun, and massacres, the Yazidis became a sort of call to action.

The Case Against Legitimizing Genocide Deniers: Scholars Speak Up

[The] willingness to ascribe to the deniers and their myths the legitimacy
of a point of view is of as great, if not greater,
concern than are the activities of the deniers themselves.

—Deborah Lipstadt

The participation of a number of Armenian studies and genocide studies scholars (*) in the conference “The Caucasus at the Imperial Twilight” in Tbilisi, Georgia, organized by Prof. M. Hakan Yavuz of the University of Utah and sponsored by the Turkish Coalition of America (TCA) has generated a controversy in the diaspora as well as in Armenia over the enabling of genocide denial.

The individual and organization at the heart of this conference have for much of the past decade been actively engaged in efforts to extend denial of the Armenian genocide into academia as well as in the political realm in North America.