928) Allegations Are Racist And Dishonest: Letter to the Editor -LA Times

To: letters@latimes.com
Sent: Thursday, August 10, 2006 3:30 PM
Subject: Armenian Allegations Are Racist And Dishonest

Allegations Are Racist And Dishonest


Allegations of one-sided Turkish massacres of Ottoman-Armenians during WWI are racist and dishonest ("Glendale's Abril Bookstore an Outpost of Armenian Culture", by James Ricci, Times Staff Writer, August 10, 2006.)

They are racist because they imply that Turkish dead do not matter, but Armenian dead do.

And they are dishonest because they deliberately misrepresent as one sided massacre a civil war within a world war, caused by Armenian greed, armed revolts, terrorism, and treason, against the backdrop of territorial designs at the expense of the Ottoman Empire by the major powers of Europe at the time.

Such allegations completely ignore Armenian butchery which is directly responsible for the killings of 523,000 Ottoman-Muslims, mostly Turks, during World War I and only demand that the 300,000 thousand (not 800,000 to 1.5 million) Ottoman-Armenian dead to be commemorated. Most of the 300,000 Armenian casualties perished by starvation, epidemics, harsh climate, difficult terrain, and marauding Kurdish bands, and not by Turkish soldiers or nationalists.

To address such chronically lopsided and unfair coverage of the Turkish-Armenian history in American media, I had coined a new word back in 2003, my humble gift to the English language, which word now perfectly describes the article I am responding to: ethocide. Coined from the words "ethics" and "cide" (killing), ethocide means " extermination of ethics via systematic, deliberate, and malicious mass deception for political, social, economic, religious, and/or other gain”. It is time, I believe, the cheap, populist, and ethocidal coverage of the Turkish-Armenian conflict gave way to civilized dialogue and thoughtful debate to elucidate a dark chapter in history where my Turkish predecessors paid the highest price by far in terms of loss of life, property, and 91 years later, it seems, dignity.

Peace,

Ergun Kirlikovali
3029 South Harbor Blvd.,
Santa Ana, CA 92704-6448
Day phone: 714/434-0800