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NARRATOR: "There were similar uprisings
in three other villages."
Only "three." Hoo-boy. What kind of quadruple-checking of the facts, doing
"homework six ways from Sunday" is this? Andrew Goldberg would be conducting a
public service if he would release the long list of "so many people — historians,
journalists" who helped check his facts, so that the world can know to stay away from
such incompetent and/or prejudiced "experts."
To give an idea, from "The Armenian File," a list of events taking place
in a snapshot of time from late February 1915; let us bear in mind these are all internal
Ottoman communications, and never meant to be publicized:
The Governor of Bitlis sent the following telegram to the Ministry of
the Interior on 21 February 1915: `The Armenians of the nahiye of Haksef have rebelled. In
the village of Siranun under the jurisdiction of the central kaza of Mush, shots were
fired on our detachment, and the confrontation continued for two hours. In the village of
Kumes, under the jurisdiction of the bujak of Akan, shots were fired at the house where
the bujak superintendent and the gendarmes were staying, and the confrontation lasted for
eight hours.'33
The same day, the governor of Bitlis, in a second telegram, stated: `Armenians have
revolted in many villages. I became suspicious when I saw that among the Armenians who
opened fire in Kumes, a village in the bujak of Akan, were Rupen, the Tashnak delegate of
Van, Zovin, and Eshroone of the Tashnak leaders in Mush. As a precaution, I had the
delegate of Van, Papazian, be a guest of the sanjak governor, to hold him as a hostage.'34
On 27 February, about 300 volunteer soldiers from Sürt, who were on their way from
Adiljevaz to Van, wanted to spend the night in the Armenian village of Arin. The
Armenians, who attempted to prevent this, opened fire and killed eight privates. Upon this
a detachment was sent from Erchish to Van, but the Armenian bands escaped to Lake Van.
Imagine the pressure the Ottomans were under, being besieged by their mortal, merciless
foe Russia (this was before the French-British attacks on other fronts), and having their
treacherous Armenians attacking from within, from all sides. What would any nation have done, under the same, desperate
circumstances? It is amazing, actually, that the Ottomans waited as late as May, suffering a whole half year of Armenian
revolts, before even considering the relocation program in a serious manner.
Goldberg goes back and squeezes in pre-1915 Armenian uprisings. Here is how he handles it:
"Armenians responded to what they considered to be excessive
taxes and oppression with violence against Turks and Kurds, and engaged in three
uprisings."
We've already covered this chapter, and know the Armenians were fairly content, and the
reasons for the uprisings had only to do with the criminal attacks of their fanatical
terroristic leaders. Andrew Goldberg is trying to pass off the number "three"
again, but that only represented the tip of the iceberg. "They
even took over an Ottoman bank by force," we're told as one of these
"three" uprisings, but there is a huge difference between just any bank and THE
Ottoman Bank. Turkish casualties, as presented by Andrew Goldberg and his "six ways
from Sunday" homework: "Experts estimate that Armenians
killed close to a hundred Turkish officials in these attacks."
Perhaps Goldberg's utterly unqualified "experts" mistook the pre-1915 period for
the Armenian terrorism from the 1970s and 80s, where close to a hundred Turkish officials
and others were killed. But the casualty list before 1915, as with 1915 and after 1915,
included more than just Turkish "officials." The ones who were mainly targeted
were the common people. The idea was to incite the Turks into counter-massacres, and
hopefully bring in European intervention. Why, a better "expert" from those
days, Aghasi, the Armenian rebel leader, claimed he killed 20,000 Turks from one battle
alone!
It is necessary to think about how many immoral acts were committed upon
corpses of killed Muslims by Armenians (for example, like the cutting off of some
of their organs and putting these organs in their mouths), inciting anger and
revenge.
General Mayewski,
Russian Consul General of Bitlis and Van, regarding events of 1895-96
|
BALAKIAN: "In Trabzon, they decided to take men, women and
children out in boats, and just dumped them in the Black Sea, where they drowned."
The background information on Lord Bryce's propagandistic beginnings of this anecdote may
be read here. The initial idea was
that 10,000 had been drowned in one afternoon, yet another unverified horror story the New
York Times was quick to spotlight (it helped that the most trusted Briton in America,
former Ambassador James Bryce, was behind the statement. Bryce was the head of the Turkish
division of his country's war propaganda bureau, Wellington House. At least the tag team
of Goldberg and Balakian didn't go as far as 10,000 in an afternoon, but they sure made it
sound like this was a systematic policy, didn't they? (Not to say there weren't drownings.
But the number of people killed via this method must have been small.)
Goldberg outdid himself and his quadruple fact-checking by allowing the bigoted Tessa
Savvidis Hofmann to include absolutely pure propaganda, based on hearsay: "Diarbekir was then under the leadership of the notoriously
Christian-Armenian hating governor, and he was one who got notorious for his particular
cruel ways of torturing Armenian clerics which were (indecipherable) with burning iron,
stripped naked and chased around and other ways of torture." (Propagandistic
paintings served as the accompanying imagery; must be the "proof.")

PBS Editorial Standards and Policies, June 14, 2005,
IV-L: "Responsible treatment of important issues may sometimes require the inclusion
of controversial or sensitive material, but good taste must prevail in PBS content. Morbid
or sensational details... should not be included unless it is necessary to an
understanding of the matter at hand."
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|
The photo
representing the
"Diarbekir governor." No name
was provided. |
Why, if this keeps up, we can almost expect the arrogant Peter
Balakian to give an actual demonstration of how that other Christian-hating governor of
Van, Jevdet Bey, nailed horseshoes onto Armenian feet... as Balakian wrote in his Burning
Tigris, without providing any evidence.
 |
|
An Armenian
site offered this
shot as Mehmet Kemal Bey. |
(A Feb. 12, 1919 N. Y. Times article, "Turkish Trials
Begin," shown later in the program, identified the Diyarbakir governor as
"Keimal Bey." This requires closer scrutiny, but the closest party found guilty
by that name was Mehmet Kemal Bey, an ex-governor of Bogazliyan [in Yozgat, a vilayet in
Ankara, the center of the country. Diyarbakir is toward the southeast] and hanged by the
puppet Ottomans on April 10, 1919. In point of fact, the Governor of Diyarbekir Province
was Dr. Mehmed Reshid, who would commit suicide in early 1919. )
At least we can be thankful for one thing. There is no shortage of well-rendered
illustrations depicting "genocide" that the program has made sure to adorn
itself with. Perhaps these paintings and pictures can substitute for actual
"evidence."

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Vahakn
Dadrian |
After that old women's
rights advocate, Vahakn Dadrian, gets through telling us that very few Armenian women
were spared, we get into Aurora Mardiganian's experience. (Her voice-over, from Natalie
Portman, sounds down-home American, whereas Enver Pasha's voice-over earlier was slightly
"foreign," and therefore somewhat sinister). She was the star, along with Henry
Morgenthau himself, of the notoriously propagandistic 1919 film, RAVISHED ARMENIA. As the
Chairman of the National Motion Picture Committee stated, Aurora was the tool to make "as many adults as
possible ... know the story of Armenia, and the screen was selected as the medium because
it reached the millions, where the printed word reaches the thousands." Goldberg
makes use of his professional propagandistic tool to shed light on how Armenian girls were
violated in the "harem" (this is a misuse of the term, and old stereotypes.
Ordinary Turks did not have "harems," not in the way Westerners think of that
word, where female slaves were for the taking. Even the one-and-only imperial harem did not operate in such a fashion.) Footage is
presented with the caption "100 girls all under age 20 from
Turkish harems." That is really impressive for producer Goldberg, and his
quadruple fact-checking skills, to have tracked down each of these people and verified
their age and status.

Were Armenian women abused, raped, violated and killed? Of course they were.
Unfortunately, the rape of women is a constant of war. During the break-up of Yugoslavia,
who can forget the tactic of the Bosnian Serbs, to systematically impregnate Bosnian
Muslims, with the knowledge of the Muslims' cultural shame and fear of being regarded as
"soiled" would be devastating? One who is aware of the hateful and destructively
propagandistic tactics of this film must force oneself to be numb to these assaults. Just
as Goldberg makes no mention of a single Turkish victim of the Armenians (unless the Turks
are soldiers or officials), was there no reverse side to this coin? Turkish women who fell
into the clutches of vicious Armenian bands would consider themselves lucky if their
ordeal ended with rape. (This hateful film does not mention the fact that many younger
Armenians were taken into good Turkish homes as a measure of humanistic goodwill, as
happened to Leon Surmelian's sister in "I Ask You, Ladies and Gentlemen."
By using the word "harem," we are, of course, being made to think these women
were all sexual slaves.) To remind all there is no "exclusive victimhood" going
on with these tragic years, here are a few Turkish women who evidently escaped with their
lives: And
for good measure, a few more:
As with every other facet of anti-Turkish propaganda, this omnipresent "harem"
notion meant to suggest the inhuman cruelty of the Lustful and Terrible Turk has another
side.
Next,. we are shown a list of notable Americans such as Ezra Pound, Woodrow Wilson, Rabbi
Stephen Wise and others speaking out for "the Armenian cause." (With Editorial
Consultant and Writer Peter Balakian at the helm, what this show really turned out to be
was a filmed version of Balakian's "The Burning Tigris"... chapter by chapter.) Teddy Roosevelt described the events as "the greatest crime of the
war."
What is the intended effect of presenting the views of these upstanding Americans?
Imagine, the robust former president, Theodore Roosevelt himself confirming the Armenian
propagandistic claims. As usual, the honest truth-seeker must always dig deep beneath the
surface. Roosevelt was very much into the "whites are superior" notion that was
popular during his day. He thought of the Turks
as, basically, human sewage. All of that Armenian propaganda, compounding the existing
age-old anti-Turkish prejudices, served as a driving influence for all of these people...
a practice that goes on to this very day, although not as overtly racist, as demonstrated
by what drives the people of PBS and its affiliates.
Each one of these men had their own reasons for despising Turks. Woodrow Wilson was a
deeply religious preacher's son, and Rabbi Wise was a confirmed Zionist, like his friend,
Ambassador Morgenthau. Engaging in the vicious rhetoric could more speedily knock the
Ottomans out, ensuring a quicker path to a Jewish homeland. (Ironically, the Sultan had offered this very
homeland back in 1516, but the Jews declined,
feeling their best protection against Christian anti-Semitism rested with remaining under
Ottoman jurisdiction.) The Ottomans were history's greatest pure-hearted defender of
Judaism, and unfortunately some who claim they have a "Jewish consciousness"
partake in films (whose propagandistic power the National Motion Picture Committee's
chairwoman spelled out paragraphs ago) that defame the honor of the Turks and results in
hatred against the Turks.
Kamuran Gurun noted in The Armenian File:
Without any doubt the USA was the country where anti-Ottoman views were
most prevalent in that period. The information sent by the Protestant American
missionaries in Turkey from the 1890s onward, and the attitude of the press has poisoned
public opinion in the United States with regard to the Turkish people to such an extent
that a member of that race is seldom thought or spoken of in this country otherwise than
as the "unspeakable" ... Nor was the government itself impartial in its opinion
and attitude concerning the present or the future of the Ottoman state.... When Woodrow
Wilson was considering the appointment of ambassadors shortly after his election in 1912,
Colonel House suggested Henry Morgenthau as Ambassador to Turkey; Wilson replied,
"There ain't going to be no Turkey"...
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Straight out of Balakian's book:
"In 1915 alone, the
New York Times ran 145 articles, and the reporter? was clear: This was government
planned, systematic, race extermination."
It was not up to the New York Times to determine history, since they were mindlessly
printing second-hand reports, like every other publication in the biased West. "The
Great Armenian Horror Boom," as the Armenophile Richard Davey coined back
in 1895, had seen no let-up. The public wanted to read tales of the monstrous Turks
victimizing the poor, innocent Christians; this kind of sensationalism made money.
As an example dating back to the 19th century, Davey had written: "Within
the past six weeks the London papers have been gloating over the 'atrocities'
committed upon Armenians at, and in, Sasoun. The number of the killed was at first
2,000, then 3,000, and finally, thanks to a telegram from Boston, from 'one who had
received a letter from Sasoun' — how the letter had time to reach America, and how
it had been allowed to get out of Turkey, were details never explained! — it was
declared that the 'massacred Armenians exceeded 10,000'." Davey warned his
readers that "The truth must prevail, and the truth about Armenia is
terrible enough, without the aid of hysterical sensationalism."
TWO
FUN "PRESS" FACTS:
1) New York Times Publisher Adolph Ochs was close friends with Henry
Morgenthau, according to Balakian's friend, Samantha Power ("A
Problem from Hell — America and the Age of Genocide"). Both men
were members of New York City's wealthy Jewish elite, going to the same
social events... they must have gotten pretty chummy. Not that Ochs would
have needed his pal to put up all the genocide news unfit to print, since
every other media publication was doing the same... but to the extent of one
article about every two and a half days?
2) According to a propagandistic book where Balakian, Dadrian and
Hovannisian contributed chapters, Jay Winter's "America and the
Armenian Genocide of 1915," there was one and only one American
newspaper correspondent who travelled into the Ottoman interior in 1915 to
witness events firsthand. Can you imagine? Only ONE American reporter. Can
there be a greater indication that these 145 "genocide" articles
from the New York Times, and all the many from America's other
newspapers were almost exclusively based on hearsay and propaganda? (That
reporter's name, by the way: George Schreiner. He's the one who blistered
Henry Morgenthau with a late 1918 letter, appalled over the lies of Henry's "Story"
book... and he's the one who concluded there was no "genocide."
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PBS Armenian genocide propaganda "big gun" Leslie
Davis, the U.S. consul from Harput, is once again utilized as a witness, this time
gaining further weight with the commanding voice of actor Ed Harris. (It is
unsurprising that such a voice of integrity was not chosen to represent Enver
Pasha.) He was the rare Westerner who left his comfy diplomat's office to check
out what was going on outside.
"We saw hundreds of bodies and many bodies in the water
below. It was rumored that many of the people who were brought here had been
pushed over the cliffs by their gendarme. That rumor was fully confirmed by what
we saw."
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|
One
of Goldberg's "gendarmes"; by
making him a regular soldier,
he gets closer to working for the
central "genocidal" government |
Goldberg flashes an image of two snappily dressed regular
Turkish soldiers, equating them with the gendarmes who served a sort of police
duty. Yet note the absurdity of Davis' words. If these people were massacred, as
apparent, how do we know who killed them? How could the fact that the killers were
the gendarmes, and not, say, Kurds or other lawless bands, have been
"confirmed"? (According to another Davis report not mentioned in the
program, a Kurd had told him — falling under the category of hearsay, but likely
not without truth — the gendarmes had made an arrangement with the Kurds; in
exchange for a sum that the Kurds would have to pay the gendarmes, "and
were to have for themselves whatever they found on the bodies of the Armenians in
excess of that sum." Davis's best information told him the actual
killings were done by the Kurds. In his six ways from Sunday homework, Goldberg
must have neglected to read Davis' report of Feb. 9, 1918, as recorded in Ara
Sarafian's "United States Official Documents on the Armenian
Genocide," vol. 3, p. 86. No, Goldberg wanted to make it seem as though
the gendarmes, as "agents of the Turkish government," directed the
actual killing.)
WERE GENDARMES "SOLDIERS"?
Andrew Goldberg used a picture of Ottoman soldiers, varying greatly from
the outfits of the guards accompanying the convoys that were represented
in his other photographs. Was the quadruple-fact checking producer
correct?
Here is how Sir Mark Sykes
described The Gendarme, or Zaptieh:
"He rides, jobs, carries the post, fights, and occasionally makes
an arrest. He is one of the great features of the Turkish Empire; but to
the greater number of untravelled Englishmen he is unknown. If he is seen he is taken for a soldier, which he is certainly not.
A Quaker would not be more shocked than he would if you asked him if he
were one. And yet what is he? If you talk of fighting his eyes blaze. He
tells you how he alone would fight twenty Bedouins, and so I believe he
would."
Sykes, who got to know the Turks close up, and wasn't yet working for his
government's war propaganda division, sized them up as such: "The
average Turk is as honourable as the average Englishman when he receives
his pay, and as dishonest as when he does not."
If we're searching for "murder" motives, assuming the story told
by the Kurd was true, here is the sensible recipe: [1] Ottoman
Empire: Bankrupt. [2] Gendarmes: Can't get their meager pay [3]
With the good men away at the fronts, the 1915 gendarmes were composed of
enough not-so-good men. [4] Away from central government control,
the more corrupt gendarmes saw the way to make a quick buck; some no doubt
saw the Armenians as traitors who deserved what they got. [5] Conclusion:
these massacres were perpetrated by renegade forces, acting on their own.
Let's add one more, just for fun: [6] The Ottoman "S.S.,"
Vahakn Dadrian's "Special Organization" whose duty was to
supposedly polish off the Armenians, was nowhere in sight.
|
A somewhat energetic Ara Sarafian himself appears right
afterwards (having met director Goldberg face to face, and could have set Goldberg
straight on who perpetrated the killings, since Sarafian was behind our
"untold" Leslie Davis report), declaring that "this is an American consul who is describing what he himself saw
directly to the American government in 1915. So this is the sort of information
that we have about the Armenian Genocide in the American archives. It's not
hearsay, it's not secondary, it's not maybe this and that. It is outright killing
on a massive scale."
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|
Ara
Sarafian |
Yet Ara Sarafian, who made such a noble effort to be
truthful at least once (before getting
savagely kicked by a Dashnak-style smear attack, since "Turth" and "Hai
Tahd" are polar opposites), neglected the following:
1) Leslie Davis is one of the very few consuls, perhaps the only one, who
witnessed corpses to such an extent. The rest rarely ventured from their consular
offices, and were content to listen to the words of missionaries and Armenians. So
this might have been perhaps the only example in the U.S. archives, at least in
the case of a U.S. official, where there was no hearsay. The rest of the U.S.
archives is practically useless, as the British ambassador in Washington
determined in 1921. They looked at the cream of the crop, and concluded practically all of
it boiled down to "personal opinions" which is what we would call
"hearsay."
2) Even if we accept what Davis had to say as the truth — let's not forget how
prejudiced Americans were, and he was one of the biased Morgenthau's men, and
under Morgenthau's instructions (like Morgenthau, Davis was dependent on Armenian
translators, and had Armenian assistants, one of the few people in this alien
culture who could speak Davis's language, eliciting Davis' sympathies; moreover,
the Christian Davis was also under the influence of the constantly exaggerating
missionaries. On the second of three trips he took on horseback to check out these
corpses, his partner was the missionary, Herbert Atkinson) — the best
information we have is that these massacres were directed by what Halil Berktay
had described (it looks like he borrowed what Germany's Col. Stange had said about
the Special Organization, "scums," or at least what Dadrian told us
Stange had said) as "scum of the earth," immoral men who were out to
make a fast dollar. Such criminal actions cannot implicate these bad-apple
gendarmes' central government, so far away, and so powerless to control forces deciding to
act independently. Even if Davis was being one hundred percent honest, he was
witness to a massacre. As My Lai demonstrates, a massacre does not equal a
genocide.
It is also necessary to add that the general impression after reading
pages of harrowing details concerning such enormities, as gathered together
in the Blue Book, is that most of them were based on
hearsay evidence. [FN 63: Almost every page of the report contained
phrases such as “some said,” “I was told,” etc., despite Bryce’s
statement that “by far the larger part” of the information came from
eyewitnesses. The Treatment of the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire,
p. xxvii.]
James Morgan Read, Atrocity
Propaganda, 1914-1919 (1941), p. 221. Ara Sarafian, who tells us
"It's not hearsay," is a cheerleader for the veracity of
the Blue Book.
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Next, we are featured to a long tirade by a U.S. consul, Jesse
Jackson, who certainly has demonstrated his bigotry against Turks in a good
several writings. Jackson felt "careful estimates
placed the number of those surviving even this far as being less than 150,000,"
and ends with "there seems to be about one million
persons lost, up to this date." (September, 1915.)
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All
the way with J. B. J.:
Jesse B. Jackson |
Jackson had trouble with his numbers on other occasions. On this
particular occasion, what he stated was especially wacky, because he himself
prepared a report for boss Morgenthau on Feb. 8, 1916, contending that 486,000 represented "the statistics of
Armenian immigrants, according to best information."
The next month, Morgenthau was quoted by Vahan Cardashian, in a letter to Lord
Bryce, as stating the Ottoman government's attitude toward Armenians was
"passive" and that the "Armenians were found in good numbers in
almost all the interior cities of Turkey." [The Armenian Review,
Winter 1957, p. 107.] That is, the relocation was all but over, as even Vahakn
Dadrian has kindly taught
us. (Talat Pasha had first ordered the movements to stop as early as August, 1915;
locals had different ideas. But we can see the bulk of the relocation had been
finished with by the time Jackson had filed his September report.) So let's put
aside the pertinent question the PBS people should have asked themselves, that is,
if the idea were state-sponsored extermination, why would the genocide (that's
a synonym for "relocation," among genocide folks) process have come to a
halt so soon; let's concentrate on the following:
If Jesse Jackson agreed the number of the "deported" ran only around
half a million in early 1916, and if hundreds of thousands of Armenians still
remained in the empire, and if hundreds of thousands of Armenians were with the
Russians (Hovannisian would tell us some 150,000 of these would go on to die of
starvation and disease with Turks nowhere in sight; of course, these numbers must
also be added to the "genocide" toll), and if many thousands of
Armenians had also gone off to other lands on their own accord (since the Ottomans
did not control lands like Iran and Greece), and if the pre-war population of the
Armenians hovered around 1.5 million (and not at exaggerated levels as the
Patriarch's 2.1 million), then how in the world could it have been possible for
one million Armenians to have died by September 1915?
Let's think about the above in another way. There were only "odds and
ends" displacements of Armenians going on until 1916, as the bulk had already
been moved out by Sept. 1915 or so. If Jackson is saying there were 150,000
survivors in September and then jacked up this figure by a whopping 350,000 or so
in the following February, we know these extra 350,000 did not magically appear.
Especially when there is reliable evidence on record that there were already some
500,000 survivors in September, as an Armenian representative himself told Morgenthau. The obvious
conclusion: Jackson's report isn't worth the pimple on a baboon's butt. So why are
Goldberg and Balakian choosing to include this terribly incorrect information?
(That is a rhetorical question.)
The irresponsible producer included yet another biased personal
opinion of some traveling businessman named August Berneau , who witnessed the
suffering Armenians and concluded the "1,001 horrors"
boiled down to "governmental barbarianism which aims at
the systematic annihilation through starvation of the survivors of the Armenian
nation in Turkey." There you have it— "proof" that the
starvation of the Armenians was intended. (He also used the helpful word "executioners" at one point.)
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|
A
shot of a few Turks that
Goldberg forgot to put in his film |
As the ever-present sad violin music plays in the
background, Berneau also added, "I gave them some
bread; they threw themselves on it like dogs dying of hunger." (This
voice was particularly overacted and irritatingly melodramatic, oozing with
sanctimony. Orlando Bloom, the talent, might have asked Goldberg what his
motivation should be, and Goldberg must have surely thought of the perfect
directorial guidance: "Think of the Turks as those monstrous Orcs you fought
in LORD OF THE RINGS.") If we may refer to a previous "genocide
witness," Consul Leslie Davis, we may learn: "Since the beginning of the war even bread is
almost unobtainable." As Morgenthau had written, the desperate life or
death war required every able-bodied man to be mobilized, leaving few to till the
fields. As a result, thousands of Turks were dying daily of starvation. (That is
what Morgenthau himself wrote, and it bears repeating: thousands of Turks...
dying... daily.) Add to this grim situation the British naval blockade, making
sure no supplies could reach the nation's ports. (What else could the British have
been striving for, save for a true "systematic annihilation through
starvation"?) Even the nation's first line of defense, its soldiers, were
dropping like flies from hunger. (Testimony of Liman von Sanders, 1921 Berlin
trial: "...The economic situation was so dismal that not only many
Armenians, but thousands of Turkish soldiers as well died of the lack of food
supplies, disease, and other consequences of poor organization in the Turkish
government. In my division alone, after the battle of Gallipoli, thousands died of
malnutrition.")
It's one thing if the oppressors were fat and jolly while their victims were
turning into living skeletons, as in the case of the Nazis and their Jewish
victims. It's quite another when everyone is in the same boat. We'll need a lot
more than the opinion of a Christian-sympathizing Westerner whose emotions ran
away with him, before concluding the Armenians' starvation was purposefully
forced. Incidentally, if this fellow was a "travelling businessman," did
he not see the plight of the Moslems? Let's put our heads together and wonder why
he likely never wrote such anguished words about the humans who did not share his
own faith.
(ADDENDUM, 8-06: Contrary to how the program
presented him, Bernau was no disinterested party who just happened to be
travelling nearby; his mission was to help the Armenians. "An employee of
the Vacuum Oil Company of New York, Auguste Bernau... was sent by Consul Jackson
to distribute relief." Guenter Lewy, "The Armenian Massacres in
Ottoman Turkey," 2005. ADDENDUM, 9-07: A couple of years before this
page was presented, Bernau had already been featured on TAT, in the analysis of Balakian's "The
Burning Tigris." It
appears Bernau made other wild claims, such as 60,000 buried Armenians, and mounds
of hundreds of corpses, "as far as the
eye can reach.")
NARRATOR: "These men, and other American diplomats
filed reports on the atrocities they witnessed which today are housed in the U.S.
National Archives. They constitute nearly 4,000 pages of testimony and witness to
the Armenian genocide."
To my knowledge, only Leslie Davis firsthand saw corpses in great numbers (aside
from various missionaries, whose word cannot be taken at face value), and we've
already established such is a far cry from genocide, as we can never be sure who
killed those people, and why. Genocide is a very serious charge, and singular
massacres do not prove genocide. The definition of "atrocities" in my
dictionary: "Savage or brutal acts committed in wartime." What
the above businessman witnessed was heart-wrenching misery and suffering, but not
"atrocities." In 1919, Armenian leaders, through their corruption and
neglect, caused what Sam Weems called the "real genocide of the Armenian people," basing his
information on Richard Hovannisian's history. "It was verily a land of
death," wrote Hovannisian ("8.7 births and 204.2 deaths, a net
loss of 195.5"); could these constitute as "atrocities"?
What those 4,000 pages are filled with are mostly the opinions of biased
Christians, indoctrinated with hatred against what they were raised to believe
were a different species, the "unspeakable" Turk. They might have
witnessed suffering, but suffering does not equal genocide. As mentioned before,
the British, in their desperate search for factual evidence in order to convict
Ottomans accused of crimes against Armenians at Malta, rejected these worthless
documents. ("I fear that nothing is to be hoped from addressing any
further enquiries to the United States Government in this matter.")
What's more, the British Embassy's report made clear that "officials of
the Department of State expressed the wish... that no information supplied by them
in this connection should be employed in the court of law." What does
that mean? It means the embarrassed State Department was aware of how utterly
unreliable and false the caliber of their 4,000 documents was.
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| |
NARRATOR: "The International
Association of Genocide Scholars affirms that over one million Armenians died during the
Armenian Genocide. Other scholars put the numbers as high as 1.5 million."
"The International Association of Genocide Scholars" is frequently referred to
in order to strengthen the genocide thesis. Who are these people? In order to join the
genocide club, they must first agree there was an Armenian genocide because, for one
thing, wealthy Armenians support the genocide industry. For another thing, anyone who
begins a thesis with a conclusion first and then tries to fit the evidence around the
conclusion is anything but a scholar; such a person can more accurately be termed a
"propagandist." These people unquestioningly take what unscrupulous researchers
as Vahakn Dadrian have written, and accept them at face value. Like the people at PBS,
their ingrained belief system, after years of propaganda bombardment, tells them the
barbaric Turks must have been guilty. Very few of these so-called scholars have a
background in history. A famous one, Israel Charny, for example, has a background in
psychology. Charny has mainly edited other people's research. Israel Charny, who serves as
the Association's current president, is not a "scholar." (As Prof. Guenter Lewy
— not incidentally, a Holocaust survivor — succinctly put it: "I am less than
impressed by the unanimous vote of the International Association of Genocide Scholars...
The great majority of these self-proclaimed experts on Ottoman history have never set foot
in an archive or done any other original research on the subject in question." Commentary.
Feb. 2006.)
Few of these hypocrites ever concentrate on the many other examples of historical
extermination campaigns. The two that are the best financed attract them the most, but at
least one of these two happens to be a real genocide. Regardless, majority opinion can
never substitute for genuine history. Because there is a preponderance of ignorant,
agenda-ridden bigots who are in agreement does not make "The International
Association of Genocide Scholars " any more valid than the "4,000 pages" of
the U.S. Archives.
Simply look at the propagandistic numbers "The International Association of Genocide
Scholars" has agreed on, to demonstrate their partisanship. The pre-war Armenian
population was around 1.5 million, and hardcore Armenian propagandists themselves agree there were one million survivors. 1.5
million minus 1 million does not equal the result these scholarly frauds would like us to
believe. What they are basing their estimate on is the propagandistic pre-war population
figure provided by the Armenian Patriarch, 2.1 million. (Lepsius swore, under oath at the
1921 Berlin trial of Talat's assassin, that the Patriarch had told Lepsius 1,850,000...
but that's the Armenian Patriarch for you.) Regardless, even the dishonest Armenian
Patriarch broke down his initial 2.1 million figure as such, at the tail end of 1918: 1,260,000
survivors, and 840,000 dead. "The International Association of Genocide
Scholars" have the shame to out-propagandize even the propagandistic Armenian
Patriarch.
NARRATOR: In 1919, shortly after W.W. I ended, the British pushed
the Turks to hold war crimes tribunals for the Armenian massacres. A series of trials were
then held in Constantinople. DADRIAN: "The Turkish
court-martials are a very significant event... in terms of future settlements of the issue
of the Armenian genocide, because the Turkish military tribunal scrupulously
investigated the issue of the Armenian genocide and concluded in its final verdict
that the Young Turk party as responsible for the conception, organization, and execution
of the Armenian genocide."
Whew! Old man Dadrian sure knows how to stick the phrase "the Armenian
genocide" into his sentences, doesn't he? (By the way, the issue of "future
settlements" has already been resolved;
the Armenians had put their John Hancock on a treaty wherein they "agreed 'to
forego their rights to ask for damages . . . as a result of the general war, thus closing
the doors FOREVER to reparations for the enormous destruction of Armenian life and
property," in the words of Arthur Derounian.
Let's say, God forbid, the Nazis had defeated the Americans during WWII and installed a
puppet government in Washington. They held a gun to the Americans' heads and forced war
crimes trials to be held for Truman, Eisenhower, Patton, MacArthur, and other war
principals. Otherwise, the Nazis would come in and really take control of the nation, as
they eventually did with Vichy France. Should these trials be considered as legitimate?
The 1919-20 trials were such a travesty, even the British rejected their findings during
the longer process of the 1919-21 Malta Tribunal. What's more, Dadrian, who investigated
and translated the "transcripts" of these trials (actually, the summaries
printed in lackey Ottoman government newspapers; the transcripts are unavailable)... the
unscrupulous Vahakn Dadrian, cited for his "misleading quotations" and the
"selective use of sources" even by fellow pro-Armenian "genocide
scholar" Hilmar Kaiser... desperately points to these kangaroo courts as his
"evidence," because he has nothing else. Naturally, he is desperate to suggest
these courts were conducted professionally (as he reminds us above with the word
"scrupulously"), but when their legitimacy does not serve his purposes, he has
been known to quickly reverse
himself, in the typical style of a shifty Dashnak "historian." If readers want
to get what lay behind these spurious courts, please tune in to Prof. Guenter Lewy's
even-handed evaluation.
NARRATOR: "On March 15th, 1921, a young man named Soghoman
Tehlirian approached Talat, tapped him on the shoulder, then shot him in the head...
Tehlirian, an Armenian student, was arrested by the German police and tried for murder. He
was found not guilty."
Yet this cursory two-day trial was another
kangaroo court, where only witnesses for the defense were allowed, and wealthy Armenians
throughout the world hired the best German legal talent money could buy, through a
"Soghoman Tehlirian Defense Fund"... a tactic Armenians would follow in the defense of their future terrorists. The
imbalance of the trial was further demonstrated when several of the high-priced lawyers
took their turn versus one for the District Attorney, and there was further mention in the
transcripts that the verdict could have been pre-determined. A defense lawyer provided
reason; the Germans were seen as the masterminds behind the Armenian "genocide,"
and the freshly defeated and demoralized nation figured the best way to get let off the
hook would be to let the murderer go. What this trial amounted to was a historic case
of murder justification, and the German nation will have to live forever with this
shame. The verdict's destructive effect would become apparent in future years, as other
Armenian terrorists figured they could get away with murder. Many did, in the courtrooms
of the biased Western world.
The quadruple-fact checking Andrew Goldberg was aware of easily available Internet
resources such as the TAT site, yet still chose to go with the typical propaganda. (But
it's looking more and more like "Writer" Goldberg was the "Ambassador
Morgenthau" to "Additional Writer" Balakian's "Burton Hendrick,"
the ghost writer of Ambassador Morgenthau's Story.) Tehlirian did not tap Talat's
shoulder; the trial transcript tells us he waited for Talat to pass by, and shot Talat in
the back of the head, in a fashion befitting the cowardly murderer. It was Tehlirian's
second known assassination, according to a 1960 article about him in The Armenian
Review; he also knocked off an Armenian, suspected of snitching on Ottoman-Armenians to Talat Pasha,
in 1915. Tehlirian might have taken dance lessons to idle his itchy trigger finger in
Berlin, but he was not a "student"; he was a member of Nemesis, the
Dashnak organization's professional hit squad. Tehlirian had betrayed his Ottoman nation,
among the many other Armenians who defected to Russia, at age 17 and war's outset, 1914.
Eventually fighting under Antranik,
he doubtless was behind many of the cold-blooded mass killings the Armenians perpetrated
in eastern Anatolia.
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|
Ataturk
Marches On. |
At least Goldberg did not go so far as to claim, while continuing to
tell us of the fate of other Ottoman officials, that Enver Pasha was felled by the bullet
of an Armenian, as Armenian propaganda likes to tell us. (The newspaper clip states Enver
was "left dead on the field after desperate fight in Bokhara.") The
producer also found an exciting "Time Marches On" type of newsreel,
popular in movie theaters at the time, regarding Mustafa Kemal.
Halil Berktay, always with a mysterious ax to grind against his country that (to him) can
do no right, has his heart broken as he relates the secular and westernized changes
Ataturk implemented: "As a result, Britain, France, Germany,
everybody else, they were now out to court this new Turkey to try to become friends with
it, and the great powers did not have any interest in pursuing the dirty matter of what
had happened in 1915, and all kinds of reasons like this, made it undesirable for the
Republic to maintain an honest memory of what had been done in 1915. And as a result, you
have an enormously constructed, fabricated, national memory."
This boy really has a chip on his shoulder. He makes it sound like it was a bad thing for
the other nations to want to become friends with his own country. Even if everything about
the Armenian "genocide" were true, note the double standard: Turkey must forever
be held to past ills, while what England had done in Kenya (with the Mau Mau) during the
1950s is never talked about, France's "dirty business" in Algeria (also from the
later 20th century, as well as before; France may also have been complicit in the Rwandan
Genocide) is frequently brushed aside, and in one of the real first genocides of the 20th
century, German colonialist actions in South West Africa (evidently the real influence for Hitler's "Final
Solution" instead of his fabricated quote),
is paid only lip service to. Why isn't Berktay up in arms over these, and many, many other
examples of historical "Man's Inhumanity to Man"?
As we have seen from the Malta Tribunal process, it is not as though the powers had lost
interest. What happened is that they simply could not find the real evidence. In the long
1919 to 1921 process, the Western world discovered what deceivers the Armenians and Greeks
had been. Their lies had begun even to filter down to the common person, as William T.
Ellis nicely put it in a 1928 article
about "Smyrna": "[T]he average American was beginning to grow
sophisticated and sceptical concerning propaganda about the Near East."
What Ataturk had achieved was truly miraculous. He conducted what might be
televisionalistically (I coined that) called today as an "extreme makeover" for
his country. In order to make the transition more successful, the nation's back was turned
to the old history. But far from what a one-note thinker as Berktay has his heart bleeding
over, the detriment came not in hiding dirty laundry, but in reducing the pride of Turks
over their rich history. That is one reason why Turkey has an identity crisis, and is
often unsure of itself today.
The benefit, however, came in keeping future generations free of hatred; Turkish people
had an excellent reason to be resentful of the traitorous Armenians, who slaughtered
hundreds of thousands of innocent Turkish people. That is the real reason this
catastrophic period was not dwelled upon in Turkish schools. Would it have been better to
foster hatred in the hearts of the young, as Armenian parents and churches have been doing
with their own innocent youth?
There is no "fabrication" for Turkey's national memory. As may be seen from this
page's analysis, utilizing almost exclusively pro-Armenian sources, the real history was
that the "Sick Man" was in for a fight for its life, a fight that ultimately
resulted in its death. During this most dangerous moment, the Armenians turned traitor and
joined the enemy. Treacherous actions bear consequences, as with any other nation, and the
price for the Armenians to pay was their relocation under horrible circumstances. The
circumstances were not horrible out of "intent," because manpower and resources
were painfully limited, and the rest of the nation was also suffering dreadfully. Anyone
who wishes to detract from this very real history is the real fabricator.
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We then get into how Turkey is in denial. With objective academicians frightened away from this debate,
through the unscrupulous smear tactics of the genocide industry, the strategy has
been to single out the propagandistically ill-reputed Turkish government as the sole
"denier." Naturally; who is going to believe the word of the
"criminal"?
After establishing that Turkey is a crook, the sole
contra-genocide spokesman on the program, Prof. Yusuf Halacoglu, is introduced as
"the head of the Turkish Historical Society in Turkey." In other words, he
is an "agent of the Turkish government." Already the viewer is biased
against what he has to say. The fair choice would have been to feature a speaker
having no links to the Turks. (I realize these were hard to find for the producer,
because of the producer's partisan reputation, but the producer should have tried
harder to do so... assuming he were objective. But his instructions to me was that
he was looking for a "Turkish" professor. Later on, as he was getting more
desperate, he mentioned that he did ask one non-Turk, Justin McCarthy, but McCarthy
declined.)
Finally we get the first word on the program that "many Moslems were
massacred by Armenians." Unfortunately, it came from the mouth of a man who
had already been discredited on the surface. Halacoglu concludes with the point that
if both sides were killing each other, that could only amount to a "civil
war." However, while the producer did a good job with the show's Turkish
translations, based on my own limited knowledge — it was good to not have a dubbed
voice-over, and only subtitles, so those who are interested could make out what was
being said — this was not the best translation. I wouldn't otherwise quibble, but
this point is critical, as I don't prefer the term "civil war." [The
reason why liberty may have been taken with this translation is because Armenian
propagandists have ready-made arguments for what Dadrian calls, "the futility of the argument of civil
war."] What the professor said was "ic catismasi," and not
"ic savasi." "Catismak" means, as I just looked it up in
a dictionary, "to come up against one another in dispute or competition."
(And "ic" means internal; "savas" means war.) What Halacoglu was
getting at was along the lines of "intercommunal fighting," and not
"civil war." (In a broad sense, "civil war" is not incorrect,
because the whole of the Ottoman-Armenian community sided with the enemy, by choice
or coercion. However, "civil war" connotes the clash of two armies, as in
the American experience. "Fifth column" Armenians within the empire mainly
engaged in guerilla warfare... although there were rare times when Armenians, armed
with artillery, engaged in what was a clash of armies.)
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|
Gunduz
Aktan in Congress, Sept. 2000 |
Then we get Congressional hearing footage from
Sept. 2000 with ex-Ambassador Gunduz Aktan. (Why, isn't that Robert Melson's dome in
the background? One can always count on
Melson to pay visits to Congress, to defend beloved Armenians.) Aktan stated the
relocation affected "only the eastern Anatolian Armenians," but
that was a misstatement; Armenians from other communities were affected as well, as
in the heartland's Sivas;
Armenians were rebelling there, too. Aktan explains the Armenians were collaborating
with the invading Russians, with the aim of creating an independent state of their
own, "in areas where they were only a minority, by ethnically cleansing the
majority Turks... Many Armenians were killed, but many more Muslims and Turks
perished as well."
Now get a load of Ara Sarafian's response: "It's complete
garbage, of course." Ara, how could you! The only blunder in what Aktan
stated was the part about the eastern Armenians. But the affected WERE mostly the
eastern Armenians (and some of the central ones, and a dab and dash from the rest of
the country), so even that was not an attempt at deception. The western Armenians
were mostly untouched, as even a "genocide map" on the program
demonstrated. (Although this silly map featured a HUGE dot in the Istanbul vicinity.
Two people were behind the program's maps in the end credits, and Ara was one of
them.)

Above is a "genocide map" taken from Armenian sites. It's very
standard, and may be seen all over the place. Note how the "deportations"
are concentrated in the eastern and central areas of Anatolia. Note the big dot in
the center, which is Sivas. This map has not been cropped, that is, the cut-off at
left was their doing.

Now this is the map used on the
program. Note all the dots from the northwest, especially the gargantuan one from
around Istanbul. As everyone knows, the Armenians of Istanbul were mostly untouched.
Also, note the biggest dot in the center, which on this map is well right of center.
That's Sivas too, but look at all the other dots that have sprung up toward the
left, and in fact, all around.
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The Armenians
of Istanbul, and the Armenians in the sanjak of Kutahya and the province of
Aydin had not been required to emigrate. The Armenians who at the present
time are in the sanjak of Izmit and in Bursa, Kastamonu, Ankara, and Konya, are
those who had emigrated from these areas, and who have returned. There are many
Armenians in the sanjak of Kaiseri, and in Sivas, Kharput, Diyarbekir, and
especially in Cicilia and in Istanbul, who have returned, but who are unable to
go to their villages. The rest of the Armenians of Erzurum and Bitlis are in
Cilicia.
The Armenian Patrirch, elaborating after the late 1918 decree permitting
Armenians to return; British Archives, F.O. 371/6556/E.2730/800/44
|
(ADDENDUM: Turkish historians have a breakdown of
Armenians who were forced to leave on this outside page, and there was a large number — 58,000 —
relocated from Izmit, which is next to Istanbul. That would be the smaller big dot,
to the right of the gargantuan "Istanbul" one.)
Sarafian explains that there was no systematic killing on the part of the Armenians.
In his defense, he may not have been responding to what Aktan said specifically,
just responding to "Turkish propaganda" in general; but Aktan said nothing
about "systematic" killing (although "ethnic cleansing" does
carry a systematic connotation). Systematic killing certainly enters into the area
of genocide, but Ara: let's face facts. The allies of the Armenians, the Russians
and the French, that is the honorable officers among them, have provided many accounts of the savage actions of
your forefathers, where killing was conducted for killing's sake, in an attempt to
create a "Greater Armenia." There were even American observers a little
later, those who went in there generally sympathetic to the Armenians, like Lt.
Robert Dunn and Niles and Sutherland
... and even the Armenophile, General Harbord himself... who reported exactly on the
unbelievable crimes the Armenians had committed, on a wide, massive scale. It's
heart-breaking that Ara Sarafian, the "new breed" of Armenian researchers,
Sarafian who has issues with the repulsively deceptive ways of the old
Dadrian-Hovannisian guard, would sit there with a straight face and regard these
truths as "garbage," and "not true."
The Armenians behaved even more ruthlessly than the invading Greeks from western
Anatolia, and the Western world bore too much of a witness to the unbelievably
atrocious actions of the Greeks. This is why the Armenians are getting a cleaner
bill of health than the Greeks; the only Westerners around in eastern Anatolia to
see what was happening were in the Turks' enemy camp. And Muslim lives were
considered comparatively worthless anyway.
|
Few Americans who mourn, and
justly, the miseries of the Armenians, are aware that till the rise of nationalistic
ambitions, beginning with the 'seventies, the Armenians were the favored portion of
the population of Turkey, or that in the Great War, they traitorously turned Turkish
cities over to the Russian invader; that they boasted of having raised an army of one
hundred and fifty thousand men to fight a civil war, and that they burned at least a
hundred Turkish villages and exterminated their population.
Prof. John Dewey, 1928 |
Prof. Suny informs us reasons for Turkey's "denial" stems from fear of
compensation (which is a non-issue, as the Treaty of Gumru/Alexandropol made clear;
unless Prof. Suny is insecure about Armenians keeping their word), and that they are
so nationalistic, "Turks do not want to recognize that
they actually committed this terrible crime."
It looks like Suny has been hanging out with his sociologist pal, Fatma Muge Gocek too long. She is
sociologically-challenged to think even Turkish-Americans are mindless drones of the
Turkish state, when the truth is Turks in the USA, with no supportive immigrant
network, assimilate into American society, very often at the expense of their
Turkish identity, and are quite able to think independently. As for the Turks in
Turkey, it is naturally the propagandists' aim to make it seem as though the Turkish
government is a Stalinist state exercising mind-control over its citizens. The fact
is, Turks are like every other people in a free society who can gather the facts and
come up with the correct conclusions. (And for those who can't accept that Turkey is
a democracy, keep in mind, especially with the Internet, even totalitarian states
like China have trouble maintaining a grip on their people). If anything, unlike
diaspora Armenians, who generally think of Armenia first and sacrifice honest
scruples for Hai Tahd (the Armenian Cause), Turks are guided by honesty and
truth. This is why, when Turks come to America and are bombarded by the incessant
Armenian propaganda (learning about these issues for the first time in a big way,
since their schooling largely avoided the matter... as Gocek herself has related as
her own experience), too many get suckered in. That's because they know the truth
takes precedence over "my country, right or wrong" notions. And just like
ignorant genocide scholars and PBS people who refuse to look beneath the surface, if
everyone else is saying there was an Armenian genocide, these Turks can be the
perfect pigeons.
Silly Samantha Power lends her personal opinion that Turkey is afraid of "putting itself permanently in the company of Adolf Hitler."
She is severely into the Turk-Nazi association, but this particular notion can much
better be categorized as a Problem from Her Own Hell. Shall we count the number of
nations who have committed extermination campaigns, starting with her own, which...
if we leave the obvious example of the Indians aside... probably truly earns the distinction of committing
"The First Genocide of the 20th Century." As the 1900s began, American
troops — commanded by veterans of the Indian wars, where the philosophy was "the
only good Indian is a dead Indian" — carried a vicious ethnic cleansing
campaign that claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands of Filipino civilians (the
20,000 Filipino military mortality was separate). If Samantha Power would stop being
such a "genocide club hypocrite" and direct her outrage in this direction,
and Americans were to be made aware of this shameful chapter, how many Americans
would associate their nation with the Nazis? Even now, with Americans aware of what
their nation had done to the Indians, their nation's being on a par with Hitler is
the farthest thing from their minds. (She also goes on to say another factor for
Turkish intransigence is "an unwillingness to wrap your
mind around atrocities carried out by people like you." Is that why
Power doesn't focus on the crimes of her nation, because she can't bear the fact
that she happens to be just like the 19th-early 20th century Americans who committed
cold-blooded murder? And to think, Turk-biased members of the Pulitzer Prize
Committee, like William Safire,
actually thought this woman worthy of that prize... with nutty logic like that.)
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|
Samantha
Power |
Because Samantha Power and her bigoted ilk are
in a frenzy to have the world believe there is no difference between the Turks and
the Nazis... and Power will make this link crystal-clear by the show's close... she
probably believes Turks will never get over their shame, even if it is proven the
Ottoman Empire acted genocidally. She is truly in a world of "denial" of
her own. Turks already acknowledge their forefathers had committed massacres. So if
the genocide hoax becomes authenticated, it will be no skin off any Turk's nose.
Life will go on. Every nation has blood on its hands, and no nation with an
"exterminating" past is going to put itself on a plane with the Nazi
regime that committed a crime unique into itself.
"The Jewish experience in World
War II particularly, where the full power of an industrial state like
Germany, were trained on a single people... for no crime except that they
were Jewish; and where, of the six million people who died, over a million
and a half were children under twelve years old; we think is unique. There
has been nothing like it in history."
Barry Jacobs, Jewish Committee Director, "Sari Gelin" documentary
|
What Turks hate are these ugly lies being
perpetuated in the prejudiced and ignorant West. Being compared to the Nazis when
it's painfully obvious the allegations have nothing to do with genuine facts is what
hurts. And when one tries to present the case, providing sources that are infinitely
more reliable than the tainted sources pro-Armenians rely upon, and when fair,
educated folks as those who run PBS can't bear to listen because their prejudices
are so ingrained... that is exactly what stabs Turks in the heart.
Goldberg now makes use of the ample footage that he shot, trying to grab that one
Turk on the street who gave a "genocide"-supportive opinion, of all the
many Turks who don't believe there was a genocide. (To Goldberg's credit, he did not
translate the last part of the first fellow's line, that Turkey couldn't have
committed genocide because Turkey is not that kind of a nation, Turkey is a Moslem
nation. The producer restrained himself from further agitating the minds of
anti-Muslim American viewers, and his "Jewish consciousness" made a
fleeting appearance for real.)
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|
Yusuf
Halacoglu |
While Goldberg was in moral territory, he
permitted the one moment in the entire program that seriously offset the propaganda
that had come before; that was when Halacoglu was allowed to calmly state, without
an Ara Sarafian following with a dismissal that it's garbage, "There are
many people in Turkey that you can show crying on TV. People know that their
relatives were murdered and they can cry too. But just because people cry doesn't
make this written history." (No sad violin music was playing in the
background at this point.)
PBS Editorial Standards and Policies, June 14,
2005, IV-A. Fairness: Fair treatment of individuals generally requires that a
producer represent the words and actions of the people portrayed or identified in a
way that presents their strongest case, and gives individuals or organizations that
are the subject of attack or criticism an opportunity to respond. Fairness also
requires that a producer be willing to consider all relevant information and points
of view.
We next get into the technicalities of "genocide." Aktan asks why
Armenians are not content with words like catastrophe, tragedy or disaster. He
states what determines genocide is not the number of casualties or the cruelty of
the persecutions, but the intent to destroy a group. Turks have never harbored any
anti-Armenianism. The victims of genocide must be totally innocent.
And that's the 100% truth. Now let's see how Samantha Power, "genocide
scholar," addresses this. Like almost all genocide scholars, she has no
background in history, but at least she can utilize her skills as the attorney that
she may be (having attended Harvard Law School):
"What the word genocide connotes is a systematic campaign
of destruction. If you simply call the horrors of 1915 'crimes against humanity' or
'atrocities,' it doesn't fully convey just how methodical this campaign of slaughter
and deportation really was. And I think that's why historians look at the record and
they really can come to no other conclusion but that this word genocide applies to
this methodical campaign of destruction."
If Ms. Power is referring to "genocide scholars" as
"historians," she is getting herself into very deep water. Let us remind
ourselves of what is expected
of a real historian: "A historian has a duty to try to write only the
truth. Before historians write they must look at all relevant sources."
There were more real historians a generation ago, such as the sixty-nine Western
academicians who signed this 1985
declaration. But such real historians have been frightened away by unscrupulous genocide advocates like Israel
Charny, who think nothing of harming the precious reputations of real historians.
But brave ones do surface now and then, such as Prof. Guenter Lewy, whose scholarly
methodology puts the partisan genocide scholars' pretensions to shame. Lewy reminds
us there are still some real historians around who do their duty and look at all
relevant sources: "Distinguished scholars of Ottoman history like Roderic
Davison, J. C. Hurewitz, Bernard Lewis, and Andrew Mango have rejected the
appropriateness of the genocide label for those occurrences." (Commentary,
Feb. 2006)
Counselor refers to how "methodical" was
"this campaign of slaughter and deportation."
Deportation, or more accurately relocation in this case, is not genocide. Relocation
is not pretty, but it has nothing to do with an "intent to destroy."
Otherwise, WWII relocations of Alsatians in France and Japanese in the USA &
Canada could be called genocide, which would be ridiculous.
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So let's focus on what Ms. Power should have been addressing,
Aktan's statement that there was no "intent." Ms. Power can use all the
words like "methodical" and especially "systematic campaign of
destruction" as she likes. But where is the proof of this "intent"? There
is nothing in Goldberg's program that proves "intent." We were offered plenty of
sad violin music, the personal opinions of endless ignorants and bigots, accounts of
biased newspapers ready to print second-hand stories, decisions of courts lacking due
process and conducted under enemy occupation... everything but genuine, factual evidence.
Meanwhile:
—There was no mention of Ottoman orders safeguarding the lives of Armenians and their
properties, displaying a formal commitment to, as Dr. Lewy put it, a "relatively
humane" process.
—There was no mention of Dashnak and Hunchak revolutionaries who bragged in their
publications not of "self-defense," but of their heroic fight for national
liberation, nor was there mention of Armenians being the "Seventh Ally" of the
Entente Powers, as the Daily Chronicle beamed on Sept. 23, 1914. (5-6,000 Armenians
accompanying the Russians was mentioned, but that didn't give the idea.)
—There was no mention of the punishment of Turks who committed crimes against Armenians,
during the war, at times to the point of execution.
—There was no mention of the callous disregard the Ottoman government had for the
welfare of its own people, revealing the Armenians were not singled out as a deprived
party, nor was there mention of the suffering of all of the Ottoman people, of famine and
disease.
—There was no mention of the counterpart of Nuremberg, the Malta Tribunal.
That is little more than the tip of the iceberg for facts there was no mention of. But
again, most importantly, there was no mention of the real facts that would prove
"intent." A possible lawyer like Samantha Power should know that without
"intent," there can be no "genocide." Assuming, of course, that she is
not as poor a lawyer as she is a "scholar." (ADDENDUM:
The pathetic way in which Power lays out her case for the "Armenian genocide"
has been examined: tallarmeniantale.com/samantha-power-hell.htm)
Goldberg found a great old CBS-TV news clip where Raphael Lemkin (at the time a
"professor of law at Yale University"), who coined the "genocide"
word, was shown revealing that he thought of the Armenian experience as genocide.
But here, it looks like Goldberg pulled a fast one. After the interviewer asked Lemkin of
his interest in genocide, Lemkin replies, "I became interested in genocide because
it happened so many times, it happened to the Armenians. and, uh, after the
Armenians..."
Lemkin takes a second to formulate his next words, and we stay on his face while he is
thinking. And then we suddenly switch to what appears to be an insert shot of the
interviewer as Lemkin continues in voice-over, "...Hitler took action..."
If Goldberg did what I think he did, replace Lemkin's next words with words that came
later in the program in order to make the all-important Hitler connection, he proved
himself to be a man after Vahakn Dadrian's blackened heart. Engaging in "misleading
quotations" and the "selective use of sources," and an all-around breach of
ethics.
 
Reasons lending themselves to possible manipulation are that, number
one, "quick-cutting" was not the style of the older television programs. Number
two, while a guest is briefly pausing with his thoughts to possibly come up with a
revealing statement, it would be the rare TV director who would cut away and miss out on
something important, for the sake of an undramatic non-reaction shot. And number three,
the "...Hitler took action..." comment unnaturally starts the instant of
the reaction shot, and as soon as the line ends... that is, lasting about one second, much
too quick for the editing style of the period... we're back on Lemkin again, with the
show's voice-over taking over. (Not to say it couldn't have happened this way; but the
sequence was so jumpy, it caught my immediate notice.)
PBS Editorial Standards and Policies, June 14, 2005,
IV-K, Unacceptable Production Practices: Never invent or add elements that were not
originally there; and Never make choices that mislead or deceive the audience.
ADDENDUM (5-06):
Looks like this TV clip was not all that novel a find; the relentless genocide
industry certainly has dug up every genocide scrap in existence. Here is how an
Armenian genocide site transcribed the order of Lemkin's words:
Raphael Lemkin Interview on CBS TV (1949):
I became interested in genocide because it happened to the
Armenians; and after[wards] the Armenians got a very rough deal at the Versailles
Conference because their criminals were guilty of genocide and were not punished.
You know that they [the Ottoman Turks Holdwater: If
Lemkin were better educated and objective, it sounds like he could have been
referring to the Armenians' NEMESIS here, not the Turks] were organized
in a terroristic organization which took justice into its own hands. The trial of
Talaat Pasha in 1921 in Berlin is very instructive. A man (Soghomon Tehlirian),
whose mother was killed in the genocide, killed Talaat Pasha. And he told the
court that he did it because his mother came in his sleep ... many times. Here,
…the murder of your mother, you would do something about it!
We can therefore make two deductions: [1] Mr. Hitler was not
on Lemkin's mind at this point in the interview, and [2] For wholeheartedly
accepting Armenian propaganda without question, Lemkin was either too
prejudiced and/or not all that bright.
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Lemkin, a "Polish Jew" as the program informs us (have you
noticed that whenever we run into a description of Lemkin, those words, "Polish
Jew," are sure to follow?), grew up in Poland, mainly a Christian country. Like
genocide advocates who never scratch beneath the surface because they arrogantly think
they are right, like the prejudiced people who run PBS and its affiliates, the only thing
that reached Lemkin's ear was "Terrible Turk" propaganda. If everyone was saying
the Turks were bloody butchers, why should Lemkin have had the desire to poke around, to
find the real truth? (It doesn't say much about Lemkin's scholarly integrity, to allow his
emotions to supersede his science, since he did go on to become a professor... but his
specialty was in law, and just because someone specializes in law does not make that
person a specialist in history. As we know so piercingly from Samantha Power's example.)
The fact that Lemkin believed there was a genocide of the Armenians was nothing more than
his "personal opinion," as relevant as the consensus of "personal
opinions" of the hypocritical "International Association of Genocide
Scholars."
We then move on to how the "Turkish state" is steadfast in its refusal to accept
the charge of genocide, but now there is an "increasing number
of Turkish intellectuals" who have broken with the state line. Cue in a fuming
Halil Berktay:
"I was speaking out of a feeling of utter disgust at all the
hypocrisy surrounding this question. That is to say, the nauseating repetition of all the
state line phrases about the 'Armenian slanders,' the 'so-called genocide,' the 'false
Armenian allegations,' and so on and so forth. It was fairly clear that somehow the
state... was signaling the press that this was how they should be talking, and the media,
the press, the journalists, the TV anchorman, etcetera were all instinctively falling into
line."
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"Falsified
Genocide"! |
Part of the visuals accompanying the above were the scrolling
written words like "allegations" that Berktay was listing. The last and central
example was "Falsified Genocide," which came to a stop and remained
frozen by itself for seconds, getting the most screen time. Since, most likely, nobody had
used the word "Falsified" in relation to this genocide matter before the
creation of the TAT site (the reason why it was chosen to represent the site's slogan was
that the word catchily rhymed with "The Other Side" and "Genocide"),
it's a sure bet Andrew Goldberg was paying a nod to TAT, for which TAT feels honored, and
gives thanks.
This is the first time I am seeing Professor Berktay "in action," seeing what he
really looks like, and sounds like. He comes across as a man who is really, if you'll
pardon the expression, pissed-off. As opposed to many of the Armenian propagandist
scholars, who know the real facts and purposely stray from them, I am getting the
impression that Halil Berktay really believes everything he is saying.
Berktay proudly relates how he was proclaiming that the emperor has no clothes, only to
receive accusations for being a traitor, and of aiding and abetting the enemy. If he
genuinely believes in what he is saying, all of that would have been terribly unfair,
because what he would be suffering from would be "delusion" and poor
scholarship. He used to be part of a Marxist movement that wanted to save his Fascist
state. Maybe he feels his Fascist state is beyond redemption, and this is his patriotic
way of saving Turkey... who knows? (Although whole-heartedly joining a camp that is
clearly hostile to his country would be a funny way of saving his country.) The one thing
that is clear is that if Halil Berktay has been allowed to spew his poison in Turkey for
so many years, Turkey cannot possibly be the "totalitarian" state that
Peternocchio Balakian likes to say it is.
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The
publisher |
We are next treated to the tale of a publisher
in Turkey whose office was bombed by extremists, for having published genocide
books, some dozen years back. This is kind of like when Prof. Stanford Shaw's house
in California was bombed by extremists in 1977, because his version of Ottoman
history was not the preferred variety (no mention of this bomb attack in Goldberg's
program, in case you were wondering; fittingly, the publisher in question, Ragip
Zarakolu, would appear in Glendale, California, addressing genocide-cuckoo
Armenians, days after this film's airing. Balakian shared his 2005 "Raphael
Lemkin prize" with Zarakolu, and Zarakolu was happy to publish the
Turkish-translated version of Balakian's "Ambassador Morgenthau's
Story" in Turkey... especially with its lovely Chapter XXII, "The Turk
Reverts to the Ancestral Type," as much of a must-read book as "Mein
Kampf" would be in Israel.)
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"Les
Arméniens," by Yves
Ternon, is an example of
the publisher's output. With this choice of imagery, we
can see where the fellow's heart lies. One must ask,
where is this fellow getting the money, to run his
propagandistic enterprise? Unfounded rumor: George
Soros. There are many other candidates.. |
That was then, and this is now. The tentacles
of the powerful genocide industry have infiltrated Turkey, and genocide books now
line the shelves of book stores. Even a book by the dreaded Vahakn Dadrian has made
an appearance... all in a sinister attempt to mold gullible and ignorant Turkish
minds.
Turkey's position in the world is vulnerable, despite its powerful military. Enemies
from within and without are working constantly to undermine the country. The
hostiles include supposed friends from Europe, who can't regard Turkey as a friend,
despite all the gestures Turkey has shown since its inception. The West is simply
too prejudiced. They will take the side of the Greeks in Cyprus, they will take the
side of Kurdish terrorists, they will turn a blind eye to Armenia's aggressive and
illegal actions in Karabakh, and the European Union will demand that Turkey admit to
the lie of a mythological Armenian genocide before membership can be considered,
despite the fact that Turkey has been waiting like a dog for many years. In the wake
of these very real dangers, of course some of the brighter Turks in Turkey are going
to be resistant to efforts designed to weaken their nation. Europe will herald
principles of human rights and freedom, deploring defensive moves made by the Turks,
applauding the chipping away of safeguards maintaining the separation of church and
state, all the while employing their usual double standards, as they have been doing
since some of these nations tried to split the Ottoman Empire apart. One example
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