UNESCO Censorship (Censoring Jewish life in Europe) for Ottoman Archives

[MrRight]

About Genocide Denial,
by Deborah Lipstadt, Dorot Professor of Modern Jewish Studies at Emory University, a statement from Concerned Writers and Scholars

About the moral issue of genocide denial, the country's leading scholar on Holocaust and genocide denial, Deborah Lipstadt, Dorot Professor of Modern Jewish Studies at Emory University, has written in conjunction with a dozen other leading genocide scholars and intellectuals:
Denial of genocide--whether that of the Turks against Armenians or the Nazis against Jews--is not an act of historical reinterpretation. Rather, it sows confusion by appearing to be engaged in a genuine scholarly effort. Those who deny genocide always dismiss the abundance of documents and testimony as contrived or coerced, or as forgeries and falsehoods. Free speech does not guarantee the deniers the right to be treated as the "other" side of a legitimate debate when there is no credible "other side;" nor does it guarantee the deniers space in the classroom or curriculum, or in any other forum.

Genocide denial is an insidious form of intellectual and moral degradation and a violation of what a university represents.
Denial of genocide strives to reshape history in order to demonize the victims and rehabilitate the perpetrators. Denial of genocide is the final stage of genocide; it is what Elie Wiesel has called a "double killing." Denial murders the dignity of the survivors and seeks to destroy the remembrance of the crime.
William Styron, Writer; Arthur Miller, Writer; Susan Sontag, Writer; Yehuda Bauer, Professor of Holocaust Studies, Hebrew University; Robert N, Bellah, Elliot Professor of Sociology, University of California, Berkeley; Jean Bethke Elshtain, Rockefeller Professor of Social and Political Ethics, University of Chicago Divinity School; Robert Jay Lifton, Distinguished Professor of Psychiatry and Psychology, CUNY Graduate Center; Roger Smith, Professor of Government and President of the Association of Genocide Scholars.
from A Statement by Concerned Writers and Scholars, 1996.



Association of Genocide Scholars
Department of Government
College of William and Mary
Williamsburg, Virginia 23187-8795 USA
757/221-3038, Fax 757/221-1868

Executive Board
Roger W. Smith, President
Frank Chalk, Vice President
Jack Nusen Porter, Vice President
Steven L. Jacobs, Treasurer
The Armenian Genocide Resolution Unanimously Passed By The Association of Genocide Scholars of North America
The Armenian Genocide Resolution was unanimously passed at the Association of Genocide Scholars' conference in Montreal on June 13, 1997.



Resolution

That this assembly of the Association of Genocide Scholars in its conference held in Montreal, June 11-13, 1997, reaffirms that the mass murder of over a million Armenians in Turkey in 1915 is a case of genocide which conforms to the statutes of the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide. It further condemns the denial of the Armenian Genocide by the Turkish government and its official and unofficial agents and supporters.
Among the prominent scholars who supported the resolution were: Roger W. Smith (College of William & Mary; President of AGS); Israel Charny (Hebrew University, Jerusalem); Helen Fein, Past President AGS); Frank Chalk (Concordia University, Montreal); Ben Kiernan (Yale University); Anthony Oberschall (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill); Mark Levene (Warwick University, UK); Rhoda Howard (McMaster University, Canada), Michael Freeman (Essex University, UK), Gunnar Heinsohn (Bremen University, Germany)
The Association of Genocide scholars is an international, inter-disciplinary, non-partisan organization dedicated to the understanding and prevention of Genocide. The Association is an affiliate of The Institute For the Study of Genocide, New York, Dr. Helen Fein, Executive Director.

[MrRight]

INTERNATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF GENOCIDE SCHOLARS



President

Israel Charny (Israel)



First Vice-President

Gregory H. Stanton (USA)



Second Vice-President

Linda Melvern (UK)



Secretary-Treasurer

Steven Jacobs (USA)







June 13, 2005





Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan

TC Easbakanlik

Bakanlikir

Ankara, Turkey



FAX: 90 312 417 0476



Dear Prime Minister Erdogan:



We are writing you this open letter in response to your call for an “impartial study by historians” concerning the fate of the Armenian people in the Ottoman Empire during World War I.



We represent the major body of scholars who study genocide in North America and Europe. We are concerned that in calling for an impartial study of the Armenian Genocide you may not be fully aware of the extent of the scholarly and intellectual record on the Armenian Genocide and how this event conforms to the definition of the United Nations Genocide Convention. We want to underscore that it is not just Armenians who are affirming the Armenian Genocide but it is the overwhelming opinion of scholars who study genocide: hundreds of independent scholars, who have no affiliations with governments, and whose work spans many countries and nationalities and the course of decades. The scholarly evidence reveals the following:



On April 24, 1915, under cover of World War I, the Young Turk government of the Ottoman Empire began a systematic genocide of its Armenian citizens – an unarmed Christian minority population. More than a million Armenians were exterminated through direct killing, starvation, torture, and forced death marches. The rest of the Armenian population fled into permanent exile. Thus an ancient civilization was expunged from its homeland of 2,500 years.



The Armenian Genocide was the most well-known human rights issue of its time and was reported regularly in newspapers across the United States and Europe. The Armenian Genocide is abundantly documented by thousands of official records of the United States and nations around the world including Turkey’s wartime allies Germany, Austria and Hungary, by Ottoman court-martial records, by eyewitness accounts of missionaries and diplomats, by the testimony of survivors, and by decades of historical scholarship.



The Armenian Genocide is corroborated by the international scholarly, legal, and human rights community:

1) Polish jurist Raphael Lemkin, when he coined the term genocide in 1944, cited the Turkish extermination of the Armenians and the Nazi extermination of the Jews as defining examples of what he meant by genocide.

2) The killings of the Armenians is genocide as defined by the 1948 United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.

3) In 1997 the International Association of Genocide Scholars, an organization of the world’s foremost experts on genocide, unanimously passed a formal resolution affirming the Armenian Genocide.

4) 126 leading scholars of the Holocaust including Elie Wiesel and Yehuda Bauer placed a statement in the New York Times in June 2000 declaring the “incontestable fact of the Armenian Genocide” and urging western democracies to acknowledge it.

5) The Institute on the Holocaust and Genocide (Jerusalem), and the Institute for the Study of Genocide (NYC) have affirmed the historical fact of the Armenian Genocide.

6) Leading texts in the international law of genocide such as William A. Schabas’s Genocide in International Law (Cambridge University Press, 2000) cite the Armenian Genocide as a precursor to the Holocaust and as a precedent for the law on crimes against humanity.


We note that there may be differing interpretations of genocide—how and why the Armenian Genocide happened, but to deny its factual and moral reality as genocide is not to engage in scholarship but in propaganda and efforts to absolve the perpetrator, blame the victims, and erase the ethical meaning of this history.



We would also note that scholars who advise your government and who are affiliated in other ways with your state-controlled institutions are not impartial. Such so-called “scholars” work to serve the agenda of historical and moral obfuscation when they advise you and the Turkish Parliament on how to deny the Armenian Genocide. In preventing a conference on the Armenian Genocide from taking place at Bogacizi University in Istanbul on May 25, your government revealed its aversion to academic and intellectual freedom—a fundamental condition of democratic society.



We believe that it is clearly in the interest of the Turkish people and their future as a proud and equal participants in international, democratic discourse to acknowledge the responsibility of a previous government for the genocide of the Armenian people, just as the German government and people have done in the case of the Holocaust.

[MrRight]

And I must add that it is a shame that this board allows Genocide denial by denialists like Khazar. I am 100% positive if someone came here and started to deny the Holocaust he will be banned, but when it comes to the Armenian Genocide the mods of this board look the other way. Really sad

[Cellis]

damn why i created this topic? I just wanted to point Jewish problem and censor to this problem by UNESCO. I didn't want to write about Armenians in my topic. Maybe i had to erase that part. I think this all fights are my fault

[1.5 million]

Kharzar - if you think your feeble efforts to deny the Armenian Genocide are even remotely effective - you are mistaken - with every denialist trick you intorduce you only dig your hole deeper. The historical record is most clear - and your side stories aren't changing a thing. You cannot directly address the real relevant issues nor can you discount the eyewitnessed historical record, nor the convictions, nor the confessions of those involved - you can only being up circumstansial and unsubstantiated claims that when examined are hardly even relevent to the issue and in fact are incidental at best - and even if true - in no way countermand the facts of the Armenian Genocide - including the fact that it was a Genocide aimed at annhilitation of an ethnic minority - the Armenians - and that there can be no justification for such diobolical deeds. Each and every charge you make has a corralarly with those who deny the Jewsih Holocaust - so you are in excellent company - dont you think? Do you really think that people are so gulible an naive. You would just do better by apoligizing and asking Armenians for forgiveness - and not attempt to justy the horrid actions of your forfathers - as you only make yourself party to the crimes - and in doing so you are making yourself a party to the dispicable behavior of your forefathers - and what you exhibit right here and now on this forum is in fact a perpetuation of the Genocide itself. Have a nice day you Nazi/CUP filfth!