How Israel Quashed Efforts to Recognize the Armenian Genocide

 Ofer Aderet

In the summer of 1982, Israel's Foreign Ministry set to work on a special mission. “We continue to spare no effort on this issue, which is currently a central one on our agenda,” an internal ministry document says of the mission. “We shall leave no stone unturned, whether or not this thing succeeds,” another document says. “Intensive treatment that encompasses both institutions and public figures in Israel and abroad… feverish and tireless efforts… at the highest diplomatic levels,” other documents add.

The mission that so occupied the Foreign Ministry personnel 40 years ago had nothing to do with the First Lebanon War, which had just begun, but with another much larger and deadlier war: the Armenian genocide in 1915, during which an estimated 1.5 million people were killed by the forces of the Ottoman Empire.

‘The Sins of the Fathers’—The Cardinal Sin of Denial

Vartan Matiossian

The Sins of the Fathers: Turkish Denialism and the Armenian Genocide
By Siobhan Nash-Marshall
The Crossroad Publishing Company, New York (Jan. 1, 2018), 256 pp.
ISBN: 978-0824599164; Softcover, $24.95

Denial is not only the last stage of genocide but also the first. One need merely recall that the diplomatic representatives of the Ottoman Empire in Geneva and New York were denying the annihilation of Armenians in real-time, clinging to the arguments of negation and rationalization that the first denialist pamphlets would go on to compile as early as 1916-1917.

Outfront Media Pulling All Billboards for Armenian Genocide Denial Website

Chris Sweeney

Last month, The Boston Globe’s editorial board delivered a 366-word piece calling on the U.S. government to officially recognize the Armenian Genocide. The article, published in print on April 24, notes that 100 years ago to the day, “Armenian intellectuals and public figures were detained and summarily executed in Constantinople—the beginning of the systematic purge of the Armenian population at the hands of the Ottoman government. By 1917, 1.5 million Armenians were murdered.”

Armenia’s genocide: death and denial

David Gardner

‘They Can Live in the Desert but Nowhere Else’: A History of the Armenian Genocide, by Ronald Grigor Suny, Princeton University Press, RRP£24.95 / RRP$35, 520 pages
Great Catastrophe: Armenians and Turks in the Shadow of Genocide, by Thomas de Waal, Oxford University Press, RRP£20 / RRP$29.95, 312 pages
Goodbye, Antoura: A Memoir of the Armenian Genocide, by Karnig Panian, Stanford University Press, RRP$25, 216 pages
 

Pope Francis caused a diplomatic uproar in Turkey this week when he called the massacre of the Ottoman Armenians of Anatolia a century ago genocide. Even if the term had not been invented when most of the mass killings took place in 1915-16, and was to be legally defined only in the 1948 UN convention on genocide, he was stating a fact. Thoroughly an array of documented accounts over the past two decades, by Turks, Armenians and western historians, have placed the nature of those atrocities beyond the questioning of the modern Turkish republican narrative.

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.)

Armenian-Turkish Solidarity Against Hatred: The Perincek Case before the European Court

Payam Akhavan is a Professor of International Law at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, and a Visiting Fellow at Oxford University.  He was previously a UN prosecutor at The Hague and has served as counsel in leading cases before international courts and tribunals.  He spoke to CivilNet about his representation of a coalition of Armenian and Turkish NGOs that have intervened in the Perincek case, heard by the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg on January 28, 2015.  Dogu Perincek, an ultra-nationalist Turkish politician and member of the Talat Pasha Committee, had been convicted in Switzerland for incitement to discrimination for having called the Armenian Genocide an “international lie”.  Before the European Court, he succeeded in arguing that his freedom of expression had been violated, and that he was not promoting hatred, because he was only questioning the legal classification of the events of 1915, which he did not deny.  After a campaign by Armenian and Turkish NGOs, the Swiss government was persuaded to appeal the case to the Grand Chamber of the European Court, to try and reverse this flawed decision.

Textbooks and the Armenian Genocide in Turkey: Heading Towards 2015

Taner Akcam

 

Education is extremely centralized in Turkey. All issues, including setting policy, the administration, and content of education are decided and implemented by the national government. Textbooks that are to be taught in schools are either prepared by the Ministry of National Education (MEB) or must be approved by the Ministry’s Instruction and Education Board.¹ For this reason, there’s a direct connection between the books taught in schools and the Turkish government’s policies. The content of history textbooks, in particular, reveals firsthand information about government policies and goals.

The MEB made elementary and middle school textbooks available on the internet for the 2014-15 school year. Anyone can now download and read these books.² I did a quick review of the history books that are to be taught this year, to see what is being taught to our children about the Armenian Genocide. I have to characterize what I found as both shocking and saddening.

The Varieties of Denialism

Massimo Pigliacci

 

I have just come back from a stimulating conference at Clark University about “Manufacturing Denial,” which brought together scholars from wildly divergent disciplines — from genocide studies to political science to philosophy — to explore the idea that “denialism” may be a sufficiently coherent phenomenon underlying the willful disregard of factual evidence by ideologically motivated groups or individuals.(*)

Turkey: An Action Movie without a ‘Good Guy’

Ayse Gunaysu

In Turkey today, a very high-tempo, high-tension action scene is unfolding, with a life-or-death fight at the top of the state apparatus. A volcano of corruption is erupting once more, releasing all the filth from below the surface. We’re seeing the sons of cabinet members being taken from their homes, alongside prominent businessmen, and put into custody; the mass removal of middle- to high-ranking security officers; and comprehensive changes in the juridical organization. But there are no prospects for a better Turkey, because both parties of this fierce fight belong to the “bad guy” club—the ruling AK Party and the informal but all-mighty clandestine organization of the “Gulen community.”

The audience is deprived of the expectation of a reward for watching these horrors play out. There is no hope for the emergence of a good guy, who will punish the bad and set things right. There is no need to wait for it, because there is no good guy at all in this action film. None of the already-few forces of democracy in Turkey have the slightest role to play in the plot.