ANY CLAIM OF GENOCIDE MUST BE SUPPORTED BY A COURT VERDICT I have learned with sadness and disappointment that USC Shoah Foundation decided to add testimonies from Armenian survivors of the Turkish-Armenian conflict to commemorate 100th anniversary of the alleged Armenian Genocide. The personal accounts of human tragedy, although coached by Armenian lobbyists, may be true to a large degree, but they do not prove that the 1915 events are genocide, even when all of them put together. Please remember, too, that Turks have many more accounts of personal tragedy than Armenians. That proves nothing, either, other than perhaps teach the children that mans inhumanity to man knows no borders during times of war. War itself is hell. But then, what else is new? VERDICT WITHOUT DUE PROCESS AMOUNTS TO LYNCHING Those who take the Armenian allegations of genocide at face value seem to ignore the following: 1- Genocide is a legal, technical term precisely defined by the U.N. 1948 Convention On Prevention and Punishment of Genocide; it is progressive, looking to the future, not retroactive, planning to judge 1915. It is the fundamental rule of law that no law can be retroactive for obvious reasons. Armenians try to revert this rule de facto and disrespect the spirit of justice in the process. No law can be made for vengeance or settling old scores. 2- Genocide verdict can only be given by a competent court after due process where both sides are properly represented and evidence mutually cross examined. 3- For a genocide verdict to stand, the accusers must prove intent to destroy. This was never be done by the Armenians whose evidence mostly fall into five major categories: hearsay, mis-representations, exaggerations, forgeries, and other. Scholarly books are written on each of those items. 4- Such a competent court was never convened in the case of Turkish-Armenian conflict and a genocide verdict does not exist (save a Kangaroo court in occupied Istanbul in 1919-1920 where partisanship, vendettas, and revenge motives left no room for due process and Malta Tribunal of 1919-1921 which had to be abandoned due to lack of evidence. 1915-1916 Ottoman courts martial tried and convicted several officers and civilians for harming those Armenians who were being temporarily resettled (TERESET) which goes to show that it was no genocide. (Can one imagine Hitler trying Nazi officers for maltreating Jews?) 5- Armenian claim of genocide is political, not historical or factual. It reflects bias against Turks. Therefore, the term genocide must be used with the qualifier alleged, for scholarly objectivity and truth. WHAT ABOUT ARMENIAN TERRORISM, REVOLTS, TREASON, TERRITORIAL DEMANDS AND THE RESULTING TURKISH SUFFERING? Why does USC Shoah Foundation tell only one side of the story in the Turkish-Armenian conflict? Why not tell it like it is: wartime tragedy, not genocide that engulfed all the peoples of Anatolia. And Armenians were no innocent bystanders and caused half a million Muslim, mostly Turkish, deaths at the hands of Armenian revolutionaries Take this photo, for example: ethocide . How can you reconcile this photo with the alleged Armenian Genocide narrative? Impossible. This is a revealing photo of Armenian cadets in full uniform, arrogantly brandishing their Russian-made Mosin rifles at the Armenian Military Academy in Bulgaria, as far back as in 1906—i.e. 9 years before 1915. This single frame refutes the poor, starving, unarmed, helpless Armenians official narrative, proving that Armenians prepared for the attack on Turks systematically and over a long period of time. If one cherishes values like objectivity, truth, and honesty, one must use the phrase Turkish-Armenian conflict. Asking someone Do you accept or deny Armenian Genocide slows little more than anti-Turkish bias. The question, in all fairness, should be re-phrased: What is your stand on the Turkish-Armenian conflict? Turks believe it was a civil war within a world war, engineered, provoked, and waged by the Armenians with active support from Russia, England, and France, and passive support from the U.S. diplomats, missionaries, media, and others with anti-Turkish agendas, all eyeing the vast territories of the collapsing Ottoman Empire. Most Armenians claim that the wartime TERESET (temporary resettlement of 1915) of the Armenians was genocide, exploiting universal suffering and base it mostly on hearsay, exaggerations, and forgeries, ignoring Armenian war crimes and hate crimes causing many casualties in the Muslim, mostly Turkish, community, all of which triggered the TERESET. Genocide is a legal term with a very specific definition requiring, not a political, but a LEGAL verdict by a competent tribunal proving intent, which the official Armenian narrative lacks. There is massive evidence to the contrary, though, clearly pointing to a civil war fought by Muslim and Christian irregulars and insurgents. GENOCIDE ALLEGATIONS IGNORE THE SIX T’S OF THE TURKISH-ARMENIAN CONFLICT The endless War years of 1912-1922 (seferberlik) brought wide-spread death and destruction on to all Ottoman citizens. No Turkish family was left untouched, mine included. Those nameless, faceless, selfless Turkish 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 imply only Armenian (or Christian) dead count, the Turkish (or Muslim) dead do not. And the allegations of Armenian genocide are dishonest because they simply dismiss THE SIX T’S OF THE TURKISH-ARMENIAN CONFLICT: 1) TUMULT : Numerous violent Armenian armed uprisings between 1862-1920. 2) TERRORISM: Nalbandian puts the start of Armenian terrorism victimizing Ottoman-Muslims as 1862. This first phase lasted until 1922 when Armenian volunteer gangs in Greek armies tortured, raped, and killed many Turkish civilians in Western Anatolia. The second phase is 1973 to current and mostly waged in North American and Europe assassinating innocent Turkish diplomats and their families. Armenians killed four Turkish diplomats on US soil: Santa Barbara (2), Los Angeles (1) and Boston (1). No one expressed remorse in the Armenian community for these cold-blooded murders. 3) TREASON: Armenians joining the invading enemy armies as early as 1914 and lasting until 1922. Armenian volunteers traitorously carried uniforms of the invaders (Russia, France, Britain and Greece) and raped and pillaged Turkish villages exterminating their Turkish population. Still no remorse by Armenians to this date. 4) TERRITORIAL DEMANDS: From 1877 to present, in regions where Armenians were a minority, not a majority, attempting to establish Greater Armenia, which if succeeded, would have been one of the first apartheids of the 20th Century, with a tiny Christian minority ruling over a massive Muslim majority. 5) TURKISH SUFFERING AND LOSSES : More than 3 million Muslims, mostly Turks, died during WWI; 1.1 million of them in Eastern Anatolia alone; and half a million of those at the hands of Armenian revolutionaries. Compare that with less than 300,000 Armenian casualties (Gurun) which number is shamelessly magnified to 1.5 million over the years through sheer Armenian propaganda. (Bottom line: more Turks than Armenians perished; what kind of genocide is that? Answer: a bogus one.) 6) TERESET : Temporary resettlement order of May 31, 1915. Triggered by the first five T’s above and amply documented as such; not to be equated to the Armenian misrepresentations as genocide. What we need is more honest research and civilized dialogue; not defamation and distortion. HISTORY SCHOLARSHIP IS A MATTER OF RESEARCH AND PEER REVIEW, NOT PASSION OR CONVICTION History is not a matter of conviction, consensus, political resolutions, political correctness, or propaganda, either. History is a matter of research, peer review, reasoned debate, and honest scholarship. Even historians, by definition, cannot decide on a genocide verdict, which is reserved for a competent court with its legal expertise and due process. What we witness today amounts to lynching of the Turks by Armenians to satisfy the age old Armenian hate, bias, and bigotry. Values like fairness, presumption of innocence until proven guilty, objectivity, balance, honesty, and freedom of speech are stumped under the fanatic Armenian feet. Unprovoked , unjustified, and unfair defamation of Turkey, one of Americas closest allies in the troubled Middle East, in order to appease some nagging Armenian activists runs counter to American interests. Those who claim genocide verdict today, based on the much discredited Armenian evidence, are actually engaging in conviction and execution without due process. Last time I looked in the dictionary, that was the definition of lynching. Armenian youths are subjected to systematic indoctrination at an early age cannot separate fact from fiction. The psychological load dumped on their young shoulders may help explain the persistent acts of Armenian terrorism that plagued America since 1973. Four Turkish diplomats were killed on American soil (Santa Barbara, Los Angeles, and Boston) and NO REMORSE were shown by either the Armenian elders or the youth. Now with USC Shoah Foundations oral Armenian history project, one can expect an increase in the Armenian acts of terrorism. Thus, will academia be cultivating terrorism? There is something awfully wrong in all this. Learning about ones culture and heritage and grieving for ones losses are accepted and encouraged norms in a modern society such as ours. But turning a lopsided interpretation (not facts) of past events into an orthodoxy on which violent advocacy is passionately built is not the American way. Where does it say in the American constitution or laws or customs that Immigrants shall bring their hate and vengeance with them to America and organize terrorism from these shores to redress perceived past grievances? Such indoctrination cultivating hate results in a behavior where most Armenian youths today may have never met a single Turk in their lives, but are ready to kill one on sight. And USC Shoah Foundation is smack in the middle of it. Is it just me or is there something terribly wrong here? Will USC Shoah Foundation take liability when the next Armenian youth kills the first Turk s/he sees on the street? A legitimate question, would you agree? In a landmark decision, the highest court in Europe, The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) unequivocally supported the Turkish position in its Dec 17, 2013 verdict on Perincek vs Switzerland, convicting Switzerland for violating Turks rights to free speech and expression when Swiss laws gullibly banned dissent on the alleged Armenian genocide. ECHR stated that [t]he existence of a ‘genocide’, which was a precisely defined legal concept, was not easy to prove… (ECHR) doubted that there could be a general consensus… given that historical research was, by definition, open to discussion and a matter of debate, without necessarily giving rise to final conclusions or to the assertion of objective and absolute truths. Thus, the ECHR created a legal precedent of inadmissibility of any comparison between the court-proven Jewish Holocaust and the discredited Armenian political claims, as the latter lacks what the former clearly has: concrete historical facts, clear legal basis, and existence of the acts had been found by an international court to be clearly established.
Posted on: Thu, 01 Jan 2015 03:39:47 +0000
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