Stealing a page from Big Tobacco and climate-change deniers: How Armenian genocide denialists get away with it

Eric Bogosian

 

It would be a mistake to think of the Ottoman leaders who engineered the mass destruction of the Armenians during World War I as nothing more than bloodthirsty barbarians. To be sure, many of their proxies were intensely violent characters common to the frontier lands of Eastern Asia Minor. But the leaders of the Ottoman Empire, the key figures in the Committee for Union and Progress, specifically Talat Pasha, Enver Pasha, Doctor Behaeddin Shakir and associates such as Ziya Gokalp, were urbane Europeans. They saw the world through European eyes and understood very well European law. To be sure, the eradication of the Armenian people from their homelands was a massive and terrible bloodletting, but it was not the product of a breakdown of civilization. Instead it was, like the Holocaust that would follow only 25 years later, a centrally organized, criminal act planned and prosecuted by wily and callous political leaders.

On the Road of Denial You Only Find Darkness

Vartan Matiossian

 

The Australian Turkish Advocacy-Alliance (ATAA) is pretty busy these days doing what its American namesake, the Assembly of Turkish American Associations (ATAA), does: denying that Armenians were victims of genocide in the Ottoman Empire. To that end, it invited to Australia a rising star of the new generation of non-Turkish revisionists, a Ph.D. student called Tal Buenos, who addressed a group of parliamentarians at the New South Wales Parliament during lunch on November 24, 2014. (There is no such thing as a free lunch, they say, but the luncheon was hosted by the NSW Parliamentary Friends of Turkey, so they ate what they wanted: a warmed-up meal.)

Is There a Single Answer? Notes on Denial, Legitimacy, and the Tbilisi Conference

Vartan Matiossian

 

The Turkish Studies Program (TSP) at the University of Utah, directed by M. Hakan Yavuz,(*) organized a conference in Tbilisi (June 5-8, 2013), entitled "The Caucasus at Imperial Twilight: Nationalism, Ethnicity and Nation-Building (1870s-1920s)." As it is known, we owe to the Utah Series in Middle Studies (Yavuz himself is the Series Editor) the publication of three works with many disputable theses: Guenter Lewy's "The Armenian Massacres in the Ottoman Empire: A Disputed Genocide" (2005), the same author's "Essays on Genocide and Humanitarian Intervention" (2012), and Justin McCarthy et al.'s "The Armenian Rebellion at Van" (2006).

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.

Interview with Jirair Libaridian about Turkish Conference in Tbilisi

Asbed BEDROSSIAN (GROONG): We have a sense of a brewing controversy related to a conference on Turkish studies in Georgia this month. We understand that you will be participating in that conference; indeed you will be the first keynote speaker. Can you tell us something about that conference?

Jirair LIBARIDIAN: Sure. This is the fourth conference of the University of Utah Turkish Studies Project. They have held others in different parts of the world before. This one will take place with the partnership of Tbilisi State University, in Tbilisi, early June. The theme of the conference is quite intriguing: "The Caucasus at Imperial Twilight: Nationalism, Ethnicity and Nation-Building (1870s-1920s)." There will be some 80 papers presented by known and upcoming scholars.

I was invited to participate in these series for the first time; after much thought, deliberation and consultation with some colleagues, I accepted the invitation.

Historians from Armenia Didn't Take Part in Conference Sponsored by Anti-Armenian Organization

Armenian historians did not find it necessary to take part in the conference sponsored by Turkish and Azerbaijani anti-Armenian organizations. The reason is the mismatch between the invitation sent earlier and format of the conference.

Who's Winning the Lobby Wars?

Jirair Tutunjian

"BAKU, April 3—Deputy Chairman of the House of Commons of the Canadian Parliament and chairman of the Canadian-Azerbaijan Parliamentary Friendship Group Barry Devolin will discuss the issue of adopting a resolution by the Canadian Parliament in connection with the Khojaly genocide in Baku. Devolin made his statement for [sic] journalists in Baku. A Canadian delegation began its visit to Azerbaijan today.

E. Mehdiyev, Trend."

From Parliament Hill in Ottawa to the University of Utah, to Texas, Iowa, and the Carolinas, the descendants of the Seljuks and the Ottomans are on the move. But unlike their yataghan-wielding ancestors, contemporary Seljuks and Ottomans (aka Turks and Azeris) are engaged in a PR war fueled by Ankara’s economic upsurge and Baku’s petrodollars.