Justin McCarthy addressing audience
The documentary in my hands must have been a work-in-progress, under an old title, A POWERHOUSE OF METAPHORS. I see the video is available for distribution at "serafilm," and it has been retitled to A PEOPLE, A FAITH, A LEGEND (which does not do the best job in describing the content, either). Here is the description of the production that the from-the-heart filmmaker has provided at this site (I say "from-the-heart," because his end credits run longer than the list of Armenian financiers from PBS's "The Armenian Genocide," and that means really long. We get loving descriptions as to why each party is getting thanks, the intent of which was very warm):
“Where do you come from?”
This was the question that started it all. I thought that I knew where I really came from. “A people, A faith, A legend” is a documentary I completed during my three year stay in the United States for a master’s study in documentary film production. And I think I learned to ask this question carefully ever since upon meeting anyone abroad. You never know what you are doing to this person when asking him the very essential question of our lives: “where are we all coming from?”
Of course, this was not the only question I was asked about my Turkish origin. The second question was ever so more interesting than the first one actually: “You are nice. How can you be a Turk? You must be really different than the rest of your people!” In order to be prepared to answer all such impossible questions, I made a documentary on the image of the “barbarous Turk” in the Western eye! I didn’t know that we were the least liked people in this world. I didn’t know that stories told about this villain were the nightmares of many children in the States and maybe many other countries in Europe as well. I asked myself why these prejudices about Turks have remained the same where no Japanese is thought anymore to make slip-shot things, you know, in the old days “made in Japan” was an insult: or the prejudices about Cambodians who massacred half their own people have changed or have been altogether forgotten. I didn’t know why no other film other than “Midnight Express” was able to make such an impression on people in the West and it still continues to do so where no film is made against it as a counter argument. I asked myself all these questions and found out that there was so much to be done about it. But yet no one dared! Why?
What follows is a selective, and not complete, transcript. The program begins with an examination of the European imperialists ganging up on the Ottomans, and we are told the powers had to justify the partition of the Ottoman Empire, the one power that escaped getting colonized by the West.
Prof. McCarthy:
But to do it, they had to create a completely evil image of the Turks. An image that was not historical, an image that was wrong, but nevertheless an image that was, oh, very captivating, There’s something that people like to think about; they like to think about the evil Turk with the, you know, moustache and the great big sword... they like to have an image, probably most human beings do, an image of something that’s evil. It wasn’t true, but it was never countered.
Prof. Heath Lowry:
Dr. Heath Lowry, who directed the
Institute for Turkish Studies at the time
Superpowers, whether it was the Ottoman Empire in the 15th or 16th centuries, or the American empire in the late 20th century, don’t have to sell themselves. Other people come to them. And if we look at Ottoman history, it’s no coincidence that already in the 16th century, the French kings, the British, others were beginning to want to establish relations and in fact began sending embassies as early as the 16th century. The Ottomans didn’t send any permanent embassies abroad; they didn’t establish any embassies until the mid-19th century. There is a kind of implicit attitude in superpowers. A confidence that means that if others want to know about me, they’ll come to me. And we see, I think some of that in America today which is one reason why Americans know so little about the rest of the world, or really pay so little attention to the rest of the world. And the Ottomans typically had this attitude.
Keith Botsford
(Writer, "The Independent"):
Keith Botsford
It is a question of the interpenetrability of cultures. It is very easy, for instance, for an Austrian to understand German. Spaniards get along fairly well with the Portugese; they are neighbors. But all those countries which were on the limits or were part of the Ottoman Empire after it had a history of subjection, political subjection, military subjection, so they don't want to Turkicize... they don't want to belong to that.
Lowry:
And therefore when the Ottoman Empire comes to an end, and the Turkish Republic is formed in 1923, it's not, there's no sudden overnight change in this attitude. The Turkish Republic spent very little time, very little effort in the first sixty years of its history, in trying to correct misunderstandings in the way Turkey and its history were viewed abroad.
Botsford:
The Turkish Republic, as successor state to the Ottoman Empire, had an uneasy entry to the world picture. At the closing off of the dying days of the Ottoman Empire — well, after all, Turkey unfortunately fought on the wrong side as far as Western Europe was concerned, fought alongst the Central Powers, and this gave it a very bad name indeed. After the first World War, that was natural. Turkey's first image in Western eyes was not particularly successful.
Lowry:
Turkey was much more concerned in building a nation out of what was left to the Turks of the Ottoman Empire, and therefore spent its time and effort in what it had in building the Turkish state.
McCarthy:
Prof. McCarthy
I have been working on a book, and on other materials on the image of Turks in America. In other words, why Americans feel the way they do about Turks, and what they feel about Turks. The material we found is very depressing. First of all, there were surveys that were made in the 1930s and the 1950s in America, just asking people, university students especially, asking them what they thought of various peoples, asking them what they thought of Turks and of Japanese and of Germans and of Jews and of various identifiable groups of people. Most of the prejudices that people had given out were pretty much exactly what you would expect. You know, Jews were thought to be very commercial, blacks, the prejudices against blacks were exactly the kind that you always would see, people would consider them to be lazy or something like that. Prejudices against Orientals, it’s very strange because the Japanese were not at all considered to be good businessmen or manufacturers or anything; (in fact) in the old days, they believed they made very slipshod things, they talked about “made in Japan” was an insult.
So those prejudices have changed. People now have fewer prejudices about the Jews, fewer about the Japanese surely. Not necessarily more liking. In the surveys we see now you see, for instance, that often times the Japanese are more disliked for different reasons. But the prejudices aren’t as strong.
But the one group that always holds out in the prejudices is the prejudice against Turks. In the early surveys, when people were very willing to say what they really thought in the 1930s and the 1950s, you asked people to say what do you think about people? They gave them a list of about eighty words and they got to pick. The words they picked for Turks were “vicious,” “very cruel,” “sadistic,” “licentious”...
1932 Princeton Survey: Description of Turks. [Top Twelve Choices]
McCarthy in front of audience:
Take a look at the 1932 Princeton Survey This is a survey that was taken not of people who were out on farms in America, but people who supposedly were the intelligentsia, the educated, the high-class Americans who were going on to run the country, probably running it today. The primary attribute attributed to Turks was “cruelty.” The secondary one was “very religious,” but it wasn’t meant as a compliment. It was meant to mean religious fanaticism.
The next word for Turks, “treacherous,” “sensual,” “ignorant,” “physically dirty,” and then it goes down the line. We see things like... “revengeful,” “conservative,” and “superstitious.”
McCarthy (interviewed):
...At my university, we took a survey of more than three hundred students in basic civilizations classes. Studying history. And we asked them what they thought of various people. We asked people to pick the groups of people that they liked the most and that they liked the least.
And we also gave them lots of questions about why do you think what you think is true. How much do you know about these people. A number of questions that sort of, in a fairly sneaky way, found out what people thought about different groups.
"Which would you most like to meet?"
Cambodian, Colombian, English, French, German...
Last column: Turk
McCarthy in front of audience:
Take a look. Who would you most like to meet? Now remember, this is 1990; this is the time when people like Cambodians and Colombians were not popular. Right? Cambodians had just had — genocide is a bad word — a mass murder of perhaps half their own people... Colombians had been full of, you know, bad press about drug-related things, Americans dying in the streets, Colombian drug lords, Miami Vice always had Colombians on, etcetera. When we took this survey we deliberately stacked the deck, so that people could choose people that they really, you know, said we really don’t like these guys.
Then we threw in Turks. Take a look at this. Turks, of all the people we asked about, the least likely to be liked. People wanted to meet Turks less than anyone else in the world. And, when it came (to) which would you (most) like to meet, boy, (Turks lost) ... hands down.
Now you can see, Colombians, Cambodians didn’t do too well. But think, Cambodians, killing millions of people, Colombians, sending off drugs to America. Compare that to Turks, who had been allies of America for forty years, who had stood by America in war. People who had been among the greatest friends Americans had in the world.
General MacArthur: "Turks: the bravest of the brave."
From the Korean War to (below) the Gulf War, Turkey
has proven herself to be among America's most
reliable allies.
The New York Times November 1, 1990, “The Second Front”:
“Turkey was the first nation in the region to denounce the invasion of Kuwait; first to support U.N. sanctions and first to make the blockade count by shutting down Iraq’s pipeline.”
And what do they get for it? This. (The survey.) And this is not an uncommon sort of response.
The big squeeze: Turkey won't let Iraqi oil leave.
Complying Tuesday with U.N.-ordered sanctions,Turkey halted tankers from loading Iraqi oil from Iraq's last operating pipeline through the country.
When President George Bush Senior began to put together the alliance in preparation for the Gulf War, Turkey's then President Turgut Ozal was the very first (if memory serves) to pledge significant support—ultimately costing billions of dollars to the Turkish economy in years to come.
The Wall Street Journal, August 10, 1990, “The Forgotten Ally”
"Turkey is... the only Islamic nation in NATO. It is, however, totally secular; it grows wine; sells Stars of David in the grand bazaar; and has the best record of democracy of any Islamic nation."
Definition of "Turk" in the dictionary
McCarthy:
Nevertheless, people did not want to go to Turkey, they were afraid of Turks — all sorts of things came out in this survey. And, very interestingly, the people who knew the least about Turks were the people who hated Turks the most.
McCarthy in front of audience:
The basic impression one gets in reading this survey was, people saying... I don't know anything about those Turks, but I don't like them. And I wish I was joking.
McCarthy:
We asked in (the survey) what do you know about Turks? And they answered, nothing. They said, we don't know anything about Turks, and these were the same people that rated Turks in the worst possible way.
Whitman Shepard
American College, Istanbul
Whitman Shepard; today, he is the director
of the Üsküdar American Academy for Girls
(now also admitting boys).
Several years ago, we did not get many Turks going to America, so they didn't have the chance to meet Turks. The only way that the American people would understand, could understand what a Turk was out of initially, out of, actually the Korean conflict. Where the Turks presented themselves as, sort of, not a barbaric people, but, well, they were the true soldiers.
McCarthy:
The only thing people knew about Turks was something that was true indeed. The Turks were good fighters. Wonderful fighters. The Turks, when they were captured by the Chinese and by the North Koreans, never gave up anybody. They all stood there; the Americans, we had people who defected to the Chinese and everything. When I was a kid, we were taught those Turks were tough. But think of the image. There wasn't, balanced with that, any idea of Turkish art, Turkish culture, of Turkish poetry — none of that.
Keith Botsford:
...Sure, the Turks have a considerable influence on cuisine in Hungary, Serbia, Bosnia, in places like that. Turkish coffee, or Greek coffee, whichever you want to call it, whatever your national prejudice is, [indecipherable]. But the language didn't, the form of paintings didn't, the music didn't, it was all very exotic and somehow removed and kept out of [indecipherable; later, Mr. Botsford related a similar point: "In the mental map of a European, Turkey belongs to another world"]. So the Turk gradually emerges as a figure, he's famous, really, for two things: that he's warlike, and that he's not to be trusted near women. These two things were the main characteristics.
McCarthy:
...They always thought the Turks were involved in sex and things, and they thought this was nasty. I haven't noticed that Turks were more involved with sex than anyone else. But nevertheless, that was the image, and always in a very nasty way.
Zeynep Oral
Zeynep Oral
Turkish Writer/Journalist
What the Western world imagines, the harem, the seven veils, and so on; I mean, their images of Turkish woman is mostly what they received as the image of the Ottoman Empire, let's say, the palace culture. Well, of course the palace of the harem, [had] not only four women but maybe four hundred women in it. But I must say that even at that time, in let's say, 12, 13, 14th until eighteenth century, well, the Ottoman Empire, the palace, had its harem, with all these beautiful women, hundreds of them; the Turkish men living and working on the soil didn't have such a harem. I mean, they could hardly afford one wife.
Suna Kili
Prof. Suna Kili
Bosphorus University
We had a very important reform of the whole legal structure between 1925 and 1930 in Turkey, and we adopted the Swiss Civil Code. Immediately, the rights governing the Swiss women were granted to the Turkish women. But at that time, the Swiss women did not have the right to vote. In 1934, the Turkish women were given the right to vote, and to be voted, in national elections.
Mustafa Kemal Ataturk with the "modern" Turkish women of his time
"Turkey is the first country in the world to have a woman supreme court judge."
McCarthy:
People just thought Turks were these different people. All that anyone knew about Turks in my neighborhood in Chicago was that Turks had fought on the side of Americans in the Korean War on the one hand, and on the other hand, lots of bad things. Lots of bad history. When I was a child, I was born in 1945, people still talked about starving Armenians. People, if they knew about Turks at all, generally thought of Turks as being murderers and butchers. This is a very common sort of thing. The image of Turks was of very good soldiers, but very dangerous people.
A dangerous Turk
The Turks were the lower under-people, but they were dangerous lower under-people.
Everyday Turkish street vendor; not too dangerous.
And they were dangerous because, as you will look here, look at the qualities of Turks. "Dull, reserved, somewhat sullen and apathetic." Now, you might like Turks, you might not like Turks. But dull, sullen, apathetic? No-o. 'Course, these people have never seen a Turk in their lives.
Things develop and grow and they keep on going until the common cultural vision of Turks comes in the United States.
The Washington Post, September 3, 1990
NFL's most personal insult: bting cut. The process of making cuts... has given birth to one of pro-football's most mystical and feared figures: the turk. 'The turk' ... a name derived from the vision of a sword-wielding Arab is the individual chosen to deliver the dreaded words to the soon-to-be departed players. The word 'cut' is not used. It doesn't need to be ... When it's around cut time; ... I try to keep a sign around me at all times. 'Turk Not Allowed'.
Close-up of the newspaper page (not The Washington Post) shown above: "THE TURK: He brings the worst news a player can hear: 'Coach wants to see you; bring your playbook.'"
YELLOW SUBMARINE's Snapping Turks
McCarthy (continued):
Pretty much everybody who knows anything about Turks in the United States, until very recently, had only heard bad things. Even something as funny and humorous and nice as "Yellow Submarine," with the Snapping Turtle Turks.
McCarthy in front of audience:
...Did you know that in the Korean War that Turks collected eyeballs from everyone they found? That's one of the nicer stories. Turks, when they went home, had carried piles of eyeballs home, and Turks who had the biggest pile of eyeballs get to be the political leaders of Turkey. Now, I was taught this as a child; it was believed. I had never met a Turk; I had never even seen an eyeball collection. [Audience Laughter].
McCarthy:
These people make up these things and then put people into the stereotypes, and that's exactly what happened. Turks took on an image as being the leader of the brown people, or the yellow people. And they were a group that was the leader, why? Because the Turks hadn't been taken over by the West, they were independent.
Coskun Kirca
Journalist/Former Diplomat
Who is a Turk? In Turkey... to be Turkish doesn't mean to be a member of a ...race. There is no pure race in Turkey, everybody is mixed up with others. We came here at the end of eleventh century while other people were living here. ...There have been intermarriages with other people, even the, actually, what is my type. Am I looking like an Uzbekh, a [Kinkiz?], a Kazakh, or even a Turkmen? No. I have a Mediterranean type. And most of the Turks have a Mediterranean type. This means they have been mixed in with other peoples. Actually, there is no single Turk who is not a mixture...
McCarthy:
I first went to Turkey in 1967, I was in the United States Peace Corps. ...At the time, I knew almost nothing about Turks. So I went into the Peace Corps, and I spent two years in the Peace Corps in Ankara, and in Ankara I found out, obviously, that Turks were pretty much human beings like everyone else.
I did not find especially anything about the history the Americans believed. I didn't find anyone speaking about Armenian problems. No one in Turkey, in 1967, mentioned those things. They were just completely not part of what Turks were interested in. The government didn't talk about it, the people didn't know about it, it wasn't taught in the schools. So I assumed, still, even when I lived in Turkey, I assumed that the prejudices people had about Turks in WWI were probably pretty much true. 'Cause usually when people avoid things, they avoid them for a reason. And so I thought, well, maybe they did it.
It was only when I came back to America and decided I wanted to continue to study about Turkey and about the Middle East and the Balkans, and went to graduate school, it was only then that I began to look into what really happened in that period of time.
And I became more interested in World War I time as I studied .... demography, population studies. I went into that, and I found, as I studied, that there were some very strange things about World War I, and about the period of the wars between the Armenians and the Turks and the Greeks and the Turks.
Lowry:
You cannot, overnight, change attitudes. If we look, for example, at the U.S. Congress, the average age of the members of the U.S. Congress is probably 55. And that means that, you know, these are people who grew up around the time of the second World War. Their parents were alive at the time of the first World War. Their parents were subjected to, you know, massive, massive doses of anti-Turkishness, at the time of World War I.
Nejat Eczacibasi; the pharmaceutical entrepreneur died in 1993, aged 80.
Nejat F. Eczacibasi
Turkish Industrialist
I remember going to a Senator's [?] some years ago, during the Cyprus turmoil. We were asked by the, our Minister of Foreign Affairs to go to the States and speak. Give a piece of our minds. I remember going to one of the senators, and he said, now listen, [laughs] this is a profession. We live by votes. He said, knowing that you were coming to me today, I prepared a list of my electorate. In my constituency, I have so many Greeks, I have so many Armenians, so many this, so many that. You are the first Turk that I have met in my life. [Laughs.] So, what do you expect out of me?
I know what this is all about. I have learned to like Turkey, to respect Turkey, but I will let you know [leaning forward] that I will vote against Turkey, he said. Well, that was a shock to me.
One of the countless resolutions brought before Congress,
this one (S. J. Res. 212) losing out by a hair-thin margin. Senators
Joseph Biden and Bob Dole were the forces behind this one, from 1989-1990.
Lowry:
I'll give you an example from my own life. My mother, as far as I know, when I was a child, had never met an Armenian in her life. But I remember, during the second World War, where we lived there was no meat available. Meat was rationed and went to the Army, and the only meat that was available was liver. And even today, I hate liver. Because, as a child, I was forced to eat so much of it. And one of the first memories I have as a child is of my mother urging me to eat this liver, which I didn't like, by asking me, or telling me, to remember the poor, starving Armenians. Now this was an experience from her childhood. Her mother had told her the same thing. My mother, you know, had never met an Armenian. But during the first World War, and after the first World War, there was an amazing outpouring of humanitarian aid and sympathy in this country, much of it very clearly less pro-Armenian than anti-Turkish in tone. And a lot of this image problem goes back to times like this.
Turkish women carrying shells to the front, during the
desperate War of Independence.
Not that anybody who stops to think about it really knows anything about the history of that period, but if you grow up from childhood, hearing, knowing, being told that Turks carried out, you know, planned systematic massacres of Armenians, this isn't something you think about, you just accept it. The way you accept the fact that, you know, George Washington was the first President of America. And this is, of course, the danger. I mean, the difficulty is in getting people to stop, to realize that their misconceptions are misconceptions.
McCarthy:
As I started writing my dissertation, I found this amazing phenomena. I went through, and I did my numbers, and I worked on the computer, and I worked again and again and again, and every time I did my calculations, I came up with the same factor. There were all of these dead Turks.
Over 2.5 million Muslim dead; 600,000 Armenian dead.
(The Armenians, with Russian help, killed one- fifth of those Muslims and Jews, roughly equaling the entire Armenian toll who died from all causes.)
Turkish women carrying shells to the front, during the
desperate War of Independence.
In World War One, when I got done with my calculations, I found more than two and a half million dead Turks in Anatolia alone. And I looked and I said there were about 600,000 dead Armenians, there were two and a half million dead Turks. This doesn't sound like genocide. There must be something wrong. I did the figures again and again and I talked to a lot of people. Finally, I said, the figures are right. What's wrong is the history. What's wrong is the perception of people that Turks were always killers and Armenians were always victims. And then I started to study the real history of what had happened.
The Turkish Government, and the Turkish schoolbooks, and everything, were very quiet about what had been done to the Turks. They never went to America and said all these things you had been writing about us [indecipherable.] They never said, sure, we killed Armenians, but Armenians killed us too. They never put that forward, and consequently, the only story that was told in the West, especially in America, was the story that was told by the enemies of the Turks.
Lowry:
And because nobody was responding to them, they had a great deal of success in saying that there was no difference between the Ottoman Empire and the Republic of Turkey. Turks were Turks.
Even if there was a "genocide," what made this old-timer
think it could have possibly been carried out into 1923?
McCarthy:
(I'm not saying the Armenians should not have) told their story, it's fine that they did. People have a right here to say what they think is true, whether it's true or not. But the Turks also had a right, and indeed, a duty, to tell what had happened to them.
Not only did Turks not tell Americans what had happened to Turks, the Turks didn't even tell themselves. So that grandchildren and great grandchildren of people who had been tortured and murdered and beaten and almost starved to death, people who had indeed died in tremendous numbers, the descendants of these millions of Turks and other Muslims who had died, oftentimes they didn't know their own history. And they didn't understand; and that was unfortunate.
Botsford:
But because of all these many factors together, the idea of the barbarous Turk and the idea of the Arab re-awakening of Muslim revivalism, all of this fell into a single category, and Turkey got lumped in with that category, without being really part of it, because the Ottoman Empire was not Turkish in any real sense, it was Ottoman.
Lowry:
If it were possible to just sort of wave some kind of magic wand and tomorrow all Americans would go to Turkey, would spend a week there, you wouldn't be making this film. There would be no image problem.
(The film ends at this point, and the following is presented as teasers for a planned second chapter of a series the director called, "Mama, Il Turca." That expression signifies "Turk" as a curse word in the Italian culture/language.)
The late Edward Tashji was shown speaking
McCarthy:
When you're asked about why people feel the way they do about Turks, why they know so little and why they have so many prejudices, when you ask that question, you're asking for a whole history of Western civilization. Because the feelings against Turks are rooted, first of all, in the Christian feelings against Muslims that go back to long before anyone knew what Turks were. They go back to a time when people in Western Europe talked about Muslims as being evil, as Muhammad as being the Devil.
McCarthy in front of audience:
In the United States, the religious tradition that mitigated against the Turks was the tradition of American missionaries who went to Turkey, became missionaries especially to Armenians, and brought through, back to America, prejudices against Turks that have lived even until today.
Give you a couple of quotes. Here's a man who is one of the heads of the whole missionary establishment in the United States, a man named Barton. Quote: "History has clearly demonstrated that Mohammedanism (Islam) rests like a blight upon every country, race and individual that it masters."
Here's another one, a member of the Bliss family, famous missionaries to Turkey: "Islam recognizes no moral obligation of any kind. Sin is merely a transgression of statute." In other words, no sins, you just do things by law, that's all that counts to Muslims. "Falsehood, deception, robbery, murder have no moral quality at all to Muslims. Cruelty, greed, and the grossest sensuality were not merely allowed, but encouraged by Muhammad's teachings."
Now, most of you who are believing Muslims may not find that in the Koran. But this is a Christian missionary; he knows. He knows that Muslims are told by Muhammad to be cruel, greedy, and sensual. Now these are printed in books, newspapers, you name it. Distributed all over America.
Botsford:
...Most Europeans also felt these people were not so much a menace to them as a menace to their own religion. It was really basically a question of Muslim vs. Christian. Therefore, they understood it as a religious question, and didn't view it as a particular peril to their [persons?].
McCarthy:
And that made their prejudices even that much stronger. Because they didn't look at what the Christian kingdoms were like that the Turks were fighting. They didn't see the problems and the rules of, say, the Serbian king, the Bulgarian king, the people who were ruling in Greece. They didn't notice that many times the Turks were welcomed in by the Christians in the Balkans, for instance. They didn't think about those things. They just thought about this great enemy to Christianity.
"...races and nationalities by the score, and yet
(all of them) known vaguely to Europeans as Turks."
Botsford:
The Turks who, after all, came to the area we now know as Turkey from far more remote places took over, and kept taking over, gathered, rolled it up like it was some Oriental carpet, also to absolutely mad, madly different people. They've got different colored eyes, different colored hair, different habits, different religions.
McCarthy:
This was compounded especially with the Turks, because the Turks came into Europe as a strong military force. The Turks were a danger. People perceived the Turks as people to fear.
Botsford:
Most Europeans [looked at] the Ottoman Empire as some sort of abstract entity. The Ottoman Empire obviously greatly impressed the Europeans, and it impressed them in a great number of ways. One of the ways in which the Ottoman Empire most impressed was that it was a [very] successful empire; one which expanded very rapidly, which had great energy, and great thrust. And ...came damned close to taking over Europe.
Eczacibasi:
...This was a conquering empire. Of course, we don't like conquering people.
Another form of a conquering people are the Armenians and their genocide scholar allies, and the weapon they have wielded to great success has been their dishonest and racist propaganda. We might, on one level, excuse the Armenians, because too many have been raised by their parents, teachers and churches to signify their anti-Turkish hatred as a form of patriotism, and too many simply have not been taught the necessary morality to recognize the course they are pursuing as being so very wrong. (Meanwhile, this very documentary instructs that Turks have been raised in exactly the opposite fashion, responsibly shielding the hearts of their young from the flames of hatred. The downside has been ignorance on the parts of the Turks, which means even too many Turks do not defend the Turks.)
Yet what the genocide scholars are doing, those who are supposed to be neutral (since true scholarship demands neutrality; naturally, the genocidists are not true scholars), and enjoy the image of superior ethics (since they are for "human rights." Naturally, valuing one human group over another goes against the very fiber of human rights, a concept which demands universalism), is simply inexcusable. When the genocide scholars support their selfish and hypocritically selective genocide agenda by falsely portraying both Ottoman Turks (as the perpetrators) and modern Turks (as the "deniers") with Nazi characteristics, what they are doing is adding to this tremendously established anti-Turkish prejudice. It's one thing to defame a people who do not suffer from a negative image, and quite another to keep defaming the already defamed and perpetually voiceless.
What the bigoted genocide scholars are doing, as much as many no doubt delude themselves into believing how noble they are, amounts to nothing less than evil.
© Holdwater
The source site of this article gets revised often, as better information comes along. For the most up-to-date version, links and the related photos, the reader may consider reviewing the direct link as follows:www.tallarmeniantale.com/prejudice.htm
