2593) Human Tragedy For All; Not Armenian Genocide

The essay by David Holthouse, Southern Poverty Law Center:
“U.S. Politicians and Scholars Are Helping Turkey Cover up WWI Armenian Genocide” is a calculated misrepresentation of a complex human tragedy where suffering of one side is embellished and exaggerated while the other side is part belittled, part ignored, and part dismissed. Such unfair, lopsided, and ethocidal [1] treatment of any controversy, historic or not, . ought to be a cause for concern for disinterested third parties and truth-seekers. I will try to organize my thoughts under following headings:

1) A POLITICAL MOVE BY ARMENIANS BASED ON BAD HISTORY
Holthouse will tell you that the Toronto District School Board voted to require all public high school students in Canada's largest city to complete a new course titled "Genocide: Historical and Contemporary Implications", but he will not say this move was largely planned, implemented, financed, supported, and “rammed through” the political system by the Armenian lobby, including the Armenian political machine, clergy, academia, and others as well as Armenian sympathizers. Such political moves are typical in areas around the globe (Glendale, Fresno, Dearborn, Beirut, Marseille, among others) where Armenian colonies seem to be locked on their sole-purpose in life, cultivating hate for all thing Turkish, with all other purposes and issues stemming from it as an afterthought, hence secondary. This might explain why such political moves happen in Toronto, but not in Vancouver or Edmonton, or in Glendale but not in Santa Ana or Irvine. It is important to see the political muscle of a single-issue-community and their ethocidal [1] sympathizers behind this partisan history legislated into education.

2) HISTORICAL EVIDENCE BELIES THE ARMENIAN CHARACTERIZATION OF WWI
The politically motivated genocide course includes a unit on the “alleged” Armenian genocide which mentions “more than a million Armenians” as having perished in a “methodical and premeditated scheme of annihilation orchestrated by the rulers of Turkey during and just after World War I.” Paris Peace Conference of 1919 put this figure at 200,000 in its March 29 report (please see:
NUMBERS DON’T LIE; LIARS DO !
What this course fails to expose is the extent of suffering of the Ottoman-Muslims, mostly Turks: more than three million! Tragic demise of 524,000 of those can be directly attributed to the unspeakable acts of Armenian revolutionaries. This genocide course, therefore, tries to whitewash war crimes and responsibilities by Armenian nationalists, supported by the powers at the time, i.e. Britain, France, Russia, and the U.S.

3) "A BADLY MISMANAGED WAR-TIME SECURITY MEASURE" IS HARDLY A GENOCIDE
Guenter Lewy, world renown professor emeritus of political science at the University of Massachusetts, rebuked the Armenian claims of genocide using historical evidence and arguments. Lewy, and many others like Lewis, Shaw, McCarthy, Stone, Mango, Gurun, Sonyel, Cicek, strenuously reject the efforts to classify the Armenian genocide in the same category as the Holocaust.

4) HOLOCAUST IS PROVEN BY NUREMBERG; WHERE IS THE COMPETENT TRIBUNAL “PROVING” ARMENIAN GENOCIDE?
After all, did Jews resort to armed revolts, terrorism, and treason, in order to establish a Jewish state on German soil? Did Jews establish Jewish armies armed with British, French, and Russian weapons to kill half a million German citizens? Did Jews receive for nearly a century money, education, healthcare, divisive and polarizing teachings, money and more from missionaries from Europe America, all hell bent on dividing and eliminating Germany? Did Jews join the invading enemies of Germany and slaughter their German neighbors while Jews were wearing invaders’ uniforms? Of course, not. But Armenian committed all that and more heinous crimes in the Ottoman Empire. Armenian used propaganda, agitation, terror, revolts, and treason, in that order, from 1890 to 1920. How can Armenian Tereset (temporary resettlement) caused by Armenian war crimes and provocations be held in the same esteem as with the undisputed, court-proven, unique Jewish Holocaust? Isn’t that an insult to the silent memory of six million Jews who were exterminated just for being Jews? What Armenians and their ethocidal [1] sympathizers are trying to attempt here is “credibility by association.” They think if they can manage to have the “proven Holocaust” uttered in the same breath with the “bogus Genocide”, then the obvious inference shall be that genocide must be true because we know Holocaust is. But Armenians are wrong in this respect as the fair-minded, honest truth-seekers are on to the Armenians tricks.

5) IF PROF. LEWY FINANCED BY TURKS, IS HOLTHOUSE THEN FINANCED BY ARMENIANS?
Holthouse labels Lewy “… one of the most active members of a network of American scholars, influence peddlers and website operators, financed by hundreds of thousands of dollars each year from the government of Turkey, who promote the denial of the Armenian genocide…” It seems fair, therefore, to ask Holthouse these questions: Has Holthouse ever received money, directly or indirectly, from sources that can be considered Armenian or Armenian-related? Did Holthouse receive from the Armenians, directly or indirectly, any monies in the form of expenses, honoraries, fees, campaign funds, gifts, awards, book advances, book sales, jobs, projects, service or product contracts, funding for a documentary, full- feature, or other films, income from testimonies, promotions, or other benefits that can have monetary and/or goodwill value? Another scholar defending the deceptive and exaggerated Armenian claims of genocide, just like Holthouse, was later exposed to be a paid Armenian agent (please see: “ IT IS OFFICIAL: TANER AKCAM IS PAID BY ARMENIANS”
I wrote to the University of Minnesota, Akcam’s employer, and heard from UM’s legal counsel that Akcam was indeed paid by Zoryan Institute (a notoriously anti-Turkish propaganda house) and Cafesjian Foundation.

6) HR 106 HAD ENORMOUS FLAWS AND MAJOR ERRORS IN IT
Holthouse complains about what he calls “network… financed by… Government of Turkey” in this manner: “… a network so influential that it was able last fall to defy both historical truth and enormous political pressure to convince America's lawmakers and even its president to reverse long-held policy positions…” What he neglects to mention is that same HR 106 was introduced by the Armenian lobby and contained inaccuracies in total defiance of facts, truth, and history (Please see: INACCURACIES CONTAINED IN THE HOUSE RESOLUTION 106

HR 106 ignored the massive Turkish suffering and gigantic death toll, a major portion of which caused by the Armenian revolutionaries; dismissed Armenian revolts, terrorism, and treason; and tried to pass Armenian-provoked TERESET (TEmporary RESETtlement) as Turkish-planned genocide. What’s more, it ignored the current Armenian aggression in Karabagh and military occupation in Azerbaijan where more than a million Azeris were expelled from their homes at gunpoint after Armenians committed a genocide-like massacre in Khodhaly: “…on the night of February 25-26, 1992. The gruesome statistics indicates that 613 people had been killed (by Armenians), of which 106 were women and 83 were children; 1275 taken hostage, 150 went missing; 487 people became disabled and invalid, 76 of whom are teenage boys and girls… ( see: genocide-like massacre in Khodhaly

One would think that those who seem so concerned about a human tragedy of 100 years ago would certainly be concerned about one that is still unfolding as you read these lines… But since the perpetrators are Armenians, those same “genocide scholars” look the other way. So much for honesty, integrity, truth, balance, fairness, objectivity, scholarship, and more… In the face of such blaring double standards, pushed forward by such “partisan scholars and intellectuals”, so aggressively and arrogantly, I remain humbled and speechless…

7) APRIL 24, 1915 IS TURKISH GUANTANAMO, NOT ARMENIAN GENOCIDE
What is the U.S. doing in Guantanamo? Bringing together all suspects of 9/11 and other acts of terrorism, real or imagined, involved directly or indirectly, with or without justification and/or evidence, into one secure location, to sort out the truth, right? Well, Turks did the same back in 1915. They gathered the obvious leaders of on-again, off-again Armenian revolts, terrorism, and treason, at a wartime no less, and sent them to secure locations in the heart of Anatolia, awaiting trials and/or removal of the threat of war. What has this got to do with genocide? Some may have been man-handled or abused, but these thinly veiled Armenian revolutionaries were not exactly 5-star hotel guests and they did not exactly cooperate with Ottoman authorities. Consider this: the largest armada of allied ships with half a million men are pounding the Dardanelle shores with an eye on delivering a quick knockout punch to the Ottoman Empire by capturing Istanbul, the capital of the Ottoman Empire. Consider further that the colossal Tsarist Russian armies, using Ottoman-Armenian divisions and scouts in its makeup, are brutally invading the Northeastern territories of the Ottoman Empire. Most Armenians (not all) are colluding with the enemies of their government from both the West and the East. What would you do with this lot? Let me tell you that if it was not for the centuries long Turkish tolerance for other religions and ethnicities, these Armenians would be killed. Instead, they were removed to Anatolian hinterland [2] , [3.] That’s genocide?

8) “UNARMED ARMENIAN” IS AN OXYMORON
Please see the photos of armed Armenian bands which later coalesced into a 150,000 men Armenian army.

9) ARMENIAN LOSSES INFLATED ; TURKISH LOSSES IGNORED
“…More than a million Armenians were exterminated…” asserts the writer. In actual fact, none were “exterminated”, lots of people, both Muslim and Armenian, however, did perish. Some died of war, regular and irregular, but more died of starvation and epidemics. Ottoman war effort reduced the harvest and British naval blockade during war prevented the emergency food supplies, sent by overseas Ottoman provinces and fellow Muslim communities, from reaching the mainland. More Muslims than Armenians died. But because of religious bias, Muslim (mostly Turkish) victims of starvation, epidemics, and war are cruelly dismissed.

10) WHY THE ARMENIANS REALLY LEFT AFTER COMING BACK TO TURKEY
“… The rest of the Armenian population fled into permanent exile…” Azerbaijanis from 192 to present are the one who fled into exile under Armenian guns of today. Honest researcher will note that most Armenians survived the Tereset (temporary resettlement.) Some of those Armenian did come back to their homes but left in panic—after France ended its occupation of Southeastern Anatolia and Bolshevik Russia vacated the Northeast Anatolia—because Armenians had treated the Muslim population so evilly that they were fearful of Muslim retaliation once the French and Russians were gone. That is from where today’s Armenian communities of the U.S., Canada, France, Lebanon, and other places originated.

11) GENOCIDE ALLEGATIONS IGNORE “THE SIX T’S OF THE TURKISH-ARMENIAN CONFLICT”
While some amongst us may be forgiven for taking the blatant and ceaseless Armenian propaganda at face value and believing Armenian falsifications merely because they are repeated so often, it is difficult and painful for someone like me, the son of Turkish survivors on both maternal and paternal sides, of yet untold, unfairly dismissed, or prejudicially ignored massacres of Turks during the Balkan Wars of 1912-13 (which preceded the World War I of 1914-18 and the Turkish Independence War of 1919-1922.) These seemingly endless “War years” of 1912-1922 brought wide-spread death and destruction to Ottoman Muslims as well as others. Those nameless, faceless victims are killed for a second time today with politically motivated and baseless charges of Armenian genocide.

Allegations of Armenian genocide are racist and dishonest history. They are racist because they ignore the Turkish dead: about 3 million during WWI; around half a million of them at the hands of Armenian nationalists. By ignoring the suffering of one side completely, any war, including the American civil war, may be made to look like a genocide.

And the allegations of Armenian genocide are dishonest because they simply dismiss “THE SIX T’S OF THE TURKISH-ARMENIAN CONFLICT”:

1) TUMULT (as in numerous Armenian armed uprisings between 1890 and 1920)

2) TERRORISM (by Armenian nationalists and militias victimizing Ottoman-Muslims between 1882-1920)

3) TREASON (Armenians joining the invading enemy armies as early as 1914 and lasting until 1921)

4) TERRITORIAL DEMANDS (where Armenians were a minority, not a majority, attempting to establish Greater Armenia, the would-be first apartheid of the 20th Century with a Christian minority ruling over a Muslim majority )

5) TURKISH SUFFERING AND LOSSES (i.e. those caused by the Armenian nationalists: 524,000 Muslims, mostly Turks, met their tragic end at the hands of Armenian revolutionaries during WWI, per Turkish Historical Society. This figure is not to be confused with 2.5 million Muslim dead who lost their lives due to non-Armenian causes during WWI. Grand total: more than 3 million, according to Justin McCarthy)

6) TERESET (temporary resettlement) triggered by the first five T’s above and amply documented as such; not to be equated to the Armenian misrepresentations as genocide.)

Armenians, thus, effectively put an end to their millennium of relatively peaceful and harmonious co-habitation in Anatolia with Muslims by killing their Muslim/Turkish neighbors and openly joining the invading enemy. Turks were only defending their home like any citizen anywhere would do.
Isn’t it time to stop fighting the First World War and give peace a chance?
Peace,

ERGUN KIRLIKOVALI
Son of Turkish Survivors from Both Maternal & Paternal Side
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References:
[1] Ethocide: a term coined by Ergun Kirlikovali in 2003 to describe bogus genocide claims; a brief definition of which is: “ Systematic extermination of ethics via malicious mass deception and propaganda for political and other benefits. “
[2] Turkish-Jewish Friendship Over 500 Years:

[3] 'Ottoman Tolerance Could End Islamophobia'

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U.S. Politicians and Scholars Are Helping Turkey Cover up WWI Armenian Genocide, By David Holthouse, Southern Poverty Law Center, June 5, 2008,
http://www.alternet.org/story/87223/

Early this year, the Toronto District School Board voted to require all public high school students in Canada's largest city to complete a new course titled "Genocide: Historical and Contemporary Implications." It includes a unit on the Armenian genocide, in which more than a million Armenians perished in a methodical and premeditated scheme of annihilation orchestrated by the rulers of Turkey during and just after World War I.

The school board members each soon received a letter from Guenter Lewy, a professor emeritus of political science at the University of Massachusetts, rebuking them for classifying the Armenian genocide in the same category as the Holocaust. "The tragic fate of the Armenian community during World War I," Lewy wrote, is best understood as "a badly mismanaged war-time security measure," rather than a carefully plotted genocide.

Lewy is one of the most active members of a network of American scholars, influence peddlers and website operators, financed by hundreds of thousands of dollars each year from the government of Turkey, who promote the denial of the Armenian genocide -- a network so influential that it was able last fall to defy both historical truth and enormous political pressure to convince America's lawmakers and even its president to reverse long-held policy positions.

Lewy makes similar revisionist claims in his 2005 book The Armenian Massacres in Ottoman Turkey: A Disputed Genocide and in frequent lectures at university campuses across the country. Speaking at Harvard University in March 2007, he chalked up the ghastly Armenian death toll to "bungling misrule," and stressed that "it is important to bear in mind the enormous difference between ineptness, even ineptness that had tragic consequences" and deliberate mass murder.

"Armenians call the calamitous events of 1915-1916 in the Ottoman Empire the first genocide of the twentieth century," he said. "Most Turks refer to this episode as war time relocation made necessary by the treasonous conduct of the Armenian minority. The debate on what actually happened has been going on for almost 100 years and shows no signs of resolution."

But it's not only Armenians calling the slaughter a genocide, and there is no real debate about its essential details, according to the vast majority of credible historians. Although Lewy's brand of genocide denial is subtler than that of Holocaust deniers who declare there were no gas chambers at Auschwitz, it's no less an attempt to rewrite history.

"The overwhelming opinion of scholars who study genocide -- hundreds of independent scholars, who have no affiliations with governments, and whose work spans many countries and nationalities and the course of decades -- is consistent," the International Association of Genocide Scholars stated in a 2005 letter to the Turkish government.

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

Despite this clear consensus of experts, Turkey exerts political leverage and spends millions of dollars in the United States to obfuscate the Armenian genocide, with alarming success even at the highest levels of government. Lobbyists on the Turkish payroll stymied a Congressional resolution commemorating the genocide last fall by convincing lawmakers to reverse their stated positions. Even President Bush flip-flopped.

Revisionist historians who conjure doubt about the Armenian genocide and are paid by the Turkish government provided the politicians with the intellectual cover they needed to claim they were refusing to dictate history rather than caving in to a foreign government's present-day interests.

"This all happened a long time ago, and I don't know if we can know whether it was a massacre or a genocide or what," said U.S. Rep. John Murtha (D-Penn.) after changing his vote.

"The last thing Congress should be doing is deciding the history of an empire [the Ottoman empire] that doesn't even exist any more," said President Bush.

But experts in genocide saw things quite differently.

"Denial is the final stage of genocide," says Gregory Stanton, president of the International Association of Genocide Scholars. "It is a continuing attempt to destroy the victim group psychologically and culturally, to deny its members even the memory of the murders of their relatives. That is what the Turkish government today is doing to Armenians around the world."

Last year, the Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity issued a letter condemning Armenian genocide denial that was signed by 53 Nobel laureates including Wiesel, the famous Holocaust survivor and political activist. Wiesel has repeatedly called Turkey's 90-year-old campaign to cover up the Armenian genocide a double killing, since it strives to kill the memory of the original atrocities.

He was hardly the first. As long ago as 1943, law professor Raphael Lemkin, who would later serve as an advisor to Nuremburg chief counsel Robert Jackson, coined the term "genocide" with the Armenians in mind.

Stanton, a former U.S. State Department official who drafted the United Nations Security Council resolutions that created the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, spoke this April at a United States Capitol ceremony honoring victims of the Armenian genocide -- a ceremony held four months after the bill to commemorate the slaughter was shot down.

"The U.S. government should not be party to efforts to kill the memory of a historical fact as profound and important as the genocide of the Armenians, which Hitler used as an example in his plan for the Holocaust," Stanton said before an audience that included three survivors of the Armenian genocide and more than 100 representatives and senators.

Infiltrating the Academy

Efforts to kill the memory of the Armenian genocide began while carrion birds were still picking over corpses in their desert boneyards, with Turkey issuing a first official statement assuring the world at large that no atrocities had occurred. Turkey's primary strategy for denying the Armenian genocide since then has shifted from blanket denial to disputing the death toll to blaming the massacres on Kurdish bandits and a few rogue officials to claiming the Armenians who died were enemy combatants in a civil war.

Turkey began intervening in the U.S. on behalf of denying the genocide in the 1930s, when Turkish leaders convinced the U.S. State Department to prevent MGM studios from making a movie based on the book The Forty Days of the Musa Dagh because it depicted aspects of the Armenian genocide.

In 1982, the government of Turkey donated $3 million to create the Institute for Turkish Studies, a nonprofit organization housed at Georgetown University that pushes a pro-Turkey agenda, including denial of the Armenian genocide. Three years later, in 1985, Turkey bought full-page advertisements in The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Washington Times to publish a letter questioning the Armenian genocide that was signed by 69 American scholars. All 69 had received funding that year from the Institute for Turkish Studies or another of Turkey's surrogates like the Ankara Chamber of Commerce, a quasi-governmental agency in Turkey's capital city.

The Institute for Turkish Studies has since received sizable donations from American defense contractors that sell arms to Turkey, including General Dynamics and Westinghouse. Turkey continues to provide an annual subsidy to support the institute. In 2006, the most recent year for which tax records are available, the institute awarded $85,000 in grants to scholars. Its chairman is the current Turkish ambassador to the U.S., Nabi Sensoy.

he first unassailable evidence of the extent of the Armenian genocide denial industry's reach in academic circles arrived in 1990 in an envelope addressed to Robert Jay Lifton, a professor of psychology and psychiatry at the City University of New York's Graduate Center and John Jay College. It contained a letter signed by Nuzhet Kandemir, who was then Turkey's ambassador to the United States, protesting Lifton's inclusion of several passing references to the Armenian genocide in his prize-winning book The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide. "It is particularly disturbing to see a major scholar on the holocaust, a tragedy whose enormity and barbarity must never be forgotten, so careless in his references to a field outside his own area of expertise," Kandemir wrote. "To compare a tragic civil war perpetrated by misguided Armenian nationalists, and the human suffering it wrought on both Muslim and Christian populations, with the horrors of a premeditated attempt to systematically eradicate a people is, to anyone familiar with the history in question, simply ludicrous."

There was nothing out of the ordinary about Kandemir's letter. Academics who write about the Armenian genocide were then and still are routinely castigated by Turkish authorities.

What Lifton found intriguing, however, was a second letter in the envelope, which the Turkish ambassador had included quite by accident. It was a memo to Kandemir from Near East historian Heath Lowry, in which Lowry provided Kandemir with a point-by-point cheat sheet on how to attack Lifton's book, which Lowry chummily referred to as "our problem."

Lowry at the time was the founding director of the Institute for Turkish Studies. He resigned that position in 1996 when he was selected from a field of 20 candidates to fill the Ataturk Chair of Turkish Studies at Princeton University, a new position in the Near Eastern Studies department that was created with a $750,000 matching grant from the government of Turkey.

Prior to joining the Princeton faculty, Lowry had never held a full-time teaching position and had not published a single work of scholarship through a major publishing house. As a result of that and of what The Boston Globe described in 1995 as his work as "a long-time lobbyist for the Turkish government," his appointment sparked a firestorm of controversy. A protest group called Princeton Alumni for Credibility published a petition decrying Lowry's appointment that was signed by more than 80 leading scholars and writers, including Kurt Vonnegut, Arthur Miller, Cornel West, Joyce Carol Oates and many historians and experts in genocide.

Peter Balakian, the director of Colgate University's Center for the Study of Ethics and World Societies and the author of The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America's Response, called Lowry "a propagandist for a foreign government."

Speaking at a 2005 symposium at Princeton commemorating the 90th anniversary of the Armenian genocide, Balakian posed a rhetorical question: "Would a university want someone who worked with a neo-Nazi group to cover up the Holocaust on their faculty?"

The relationship of Turkey to U.S. scholars promoting Armenian genocide denial is similar to that of the oil industry to fringe climatologists who dispute the reality of global warming. The cause and effect relationship is murky. It's impossible to know for sure if they're making the claims to get the money or getting the money because they make the claims. And many of those who receive money from the Institute of Turkish Studies do little or nothing to support the government's version of what happened to its Armenian minority.

But a number of them certainly seem to, including Justin A. McCarthy, a professor of history at the University of Louisville. McCarthy claims that death tolls attributed to what he calls "this imaginary Turkish plan" are grossly exaggerated and resulted from justifiable wartime self-defense actions triggered by traitorous Armenians conspiring with Turkey's enemies.

McCarthy also points out that Armenians massacred Turks on at least one occasion before the "so-called Armenian genocide." In other words, they had it coming. "The question of who started the conflicts is important, both historically and morally important," McCarthy declared in a 2005 speech before the Turkish Grand National Assembly. "In more than 100 years of warfare, Turks and Armenians killed each other. The question of who began the killing must be understood, because it is seldom justifiable to be the aggressor, but is always justifiable to defend yourself."

He continued: "If those who defend themselves go beyond defense and exact revenge, as always happens in war, they should be identified and criticized. But those who should be most blamed are those who began the wars, those who committed the first evil deeds, and those who caused the bloodshed. Those who began the conflict were the Armenian nationalists, the Armenian revolutionaries. The guilt is on their heads."

Enforcing the Turkish View

In France and Switzerland, it's a crime to deny the Armenian genocide. In Turkey, it's a crime to affirm it.

Enacted in 2005, Article 301 of the Turkish penal code makes it illegal for any citizen or resident of Turkey to give credence to the Armenian genocide. Numerous journalists and scholars have been prosecuted for "denigrating Turkishness" under that statute, beginning with Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk, who was charged for stating, "A million Armenians were killed in these lands." Turkish-Armenian newspaper editor Hrant Dink was prosecuted three times for criticizing the Turkish government's longstanding policy of denying the Armenian genocide.

Where the law failed to silence Dink, bullets succeeded. He was gunned down in front of his central Istanbul office last January by a Turkish ultranationalist. Footage and photos later surfaced of the assassin celebrating in front of a Turkish flag with grinning policemen.

Dink's friend and ideological ally Taner Akam, a distinguished Turkish historian and sociologist on the faculty of the University of Minnesota's Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, attended Dink's funeral in Turkey, despite the considerable risk to his own life. Akam, a leading international authority on the Armenian genocide, was marked for death by Turkish ultranationalists following the November 2006 publication of his book, A Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide and The Question of Turkish Responsibility. The book is a definitive history based in large part on official documents from Turkish government archives.

"It would be better for world peace and truth if sewer germs like you were taken off the planet," went one of the dozens of anonymous threats Akam continues to receive in Minnesota. "Pray that the devil takes you away soon because otherwise you'll be living a hell on earth. Who am I? You're going to find out, Taner, you're going to find out."

Turkish ultranationalists have, in effect, targeted many other people who, like Akam, affirm the genocide. Several of their websites include home addresses, phone numbers and photos of these scholars.

Genocide deniers often disrupt Akam's lectures. In November 2006, a gang of Turkish ultranationalists attacked him at a book signing at City University of New York.

"Denial of the Armenian genocide has developed over the decades to become a complex and far-reaching machine that rivals the Nazi Germany propaganda ministry," says Akam. "This machine runs on academic dishonesty, fabricated information, political pressure, intimidation and threats, all funded or supported, directly or indirectly, by the Turkish state. It has become a huge industry." Convincing Congress

Academia is one of two major American fronts in Turkey's campaign to kill the memory of the Armenian genocide. The other is Congress.

As the only Muslim-dominated country in a troubled region to call the U.S. and Israel its allies, Turkey wields significant political influence that it uses to prevent the U.S. from joining 22 other nations in officially recognizing the Armenian genocide as a historical fact.

In 1989, the U.S. State Department released archived eyewitness accounts that, according to State Department officials, showed that "thousands and thousands of Armenians, mostly innocent and helpless women and children, were butchered." That same year, a bill commemorating the genocide was introduced in the U.S. Senate. But Turkey responded by blocking U.S. Navy ships from entering strategically important Turkish waters and by declaring a ban on all U.S. military training operations on Turkish territory. The bill quickly evaporated.

Last September, the matter came up again. The U.S. House Foreign Relations Committee voted to bring a nonbinding resolution to the floor of Congress condemning the mass murder of Armenians by Ottoman Turks, placing the death toll at 1.5 million, and labeling the killing a "genocide."

This time, Turkey responded by recalling its ambassador to the United States and forecasting dire repercussions. "In the case that Armenian allegations are accepted, there will be problems in the relations between the two countries," warned Turkish President Abdullah Gul.

"Yesterday, some in Congress wanted to play hardball," said Egmen Bagis, foreign policy advisor to Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. "I can assure you, Turkey knows how to play hardball."

The next day, State Department spokesman Sean McCormack apologized to Turkey on behalf of the United States by issuing a statement expressing "regret" for the committee's actions, which, he cautioned, "may do grave harm to U.S.-Turkish relations and to U.S. interests in Europe and the Middle East."

Defense Secretary Robert Gates added his opposition to the resolution and pointed out that 70% of the air cargo sent to U.S. forces in Iraq and 30% of the fuel consumed by those forces is delivered via Turkey. President Bush, perhaps forgetting his campaign promise in 2000 to push for official recognition of the Armenian genocide if elected president, also came out against the resolution.

While Turkish officials made threats, lobbyists paid by Turkey delivered money to congressmen in the form of campaign and political action committee donations. Louisiana representative Bobby Jindal (a Republican who's now Louisiana's governor) and Mississippi representative Roger Wicker (now a Republican senator representing that state) both dropped their sponsorship of the resolution and began speaking against it -- but only after receiving around $20,000 each from former congressmen Bob Livingston, a Republican, and Richard Gephardt, a Democrat, who now work for lobbying firms contracted by Turkey to oppose any recognition of the Armenian genocide.

In 2000, while still in office, Gephardt had declared that he was "committed to obtaining official U.S. government recognition of the Armenian genocide." In 2003, he co-sponsored a resolution placing "the Armenian genocide" in the company of the World War II Holocaust and mass deaths in Cambodia and Rwanda that was voted down after a Turkish lobbying blitzkrieg.

Since leaving office and accepting a $1.2 million-a-year contract to lobby for Turkey, the former House majority leader has experienced a profound change of heart. "Alienating Turkey through the passage of the resolution could undermine our efforts to promote stability in the theater of [Middle East] operations, if not exacerbate the situation further," he wrote in an E-mail to the International Herald Tribune. Last fall, as part of his efforts to help torpedo the symbolic Armenian genocide resolution, Gephardt escorted Turkish Ambassador Nabi Sensoy to meetings with Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and other Democratic leaders.

Bob Livingston, whose firm has been paid more than $12 million by the Turkish government since 1999, also pitched in. As part of the lobbying effort last fall that U.S. Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), one of the sponsors of the resolution, called "the most intense I've ever seen," Livingston shepherded Turkish dignitaries from office to office on Capitol Hill.

As another part of that campaign, the government of Turkey took out full-page advertisements in major American newspapers calling upon the members of Congress to "support efforts to examine history, not legislate it." The ads featured a testimonial from Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice -- "These historical circumstances require a very detailed and sober look from historians" -- that implied that historians have yet to seriously study the Armenian genocide.

More than 100 supporters of the resolution reversed their positions, and H.R. 106 was voted down.

The government of Turkey has since continued to call for a "historian's commission" of scholars to "study the facts of what happened in 1915-1923." The proposed committee is marketed as a high-minded quest for truth and reconciliation, a long overdue arbitration of disputed history, and a chance to finally give equal weight to both sides of the story.

But as the saying goes, a lie isn't the other side of any story. It's just a lie.

"When it comes to the historical reality of the Armenian genocide, there is no 'Armenian' or 'Turkish' side of the question, any more than there is a 'Jewish' or 'German' side of the historical reality of the Holocaust," writes Torben Jorgensen, of the Danish Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies. "There is a scientific side and an unscientific side -- acknowledgement or denial."

© 2008 Southern Poverty Law Center All rights reserved.

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