The AFATH community is busy plastering anti-Turkish messages on any blog they can get their hands on. This is why I coined a new term back in 2003: Ethocide. A brief meaning of ethocide is: “extermination of ethics via malicious mass deception for political and other gain.”
I hear you say: “So the AFATH community writers resort to ethocidal coverage of the Turkish-Armenian conflict. What else is new?” I agree, nothing new for 93 years… Make that since 1877… Their hate messages, however, suffer from lack of credibility, as Dr. Gwynne Dyer put it so eloquently in 1976:
“… The deafening drumbeat of the propaganda, and the sheer lack of sophistication in argument which comes from preaching decade after decade to a convinced and emotionally committed audience, are the major handicaps of Armenian historiography of the diaspora today…”
There are those cyber-thugs with questionable morals, cyber-stalkers with convoluted messages, and a whole cyber community of insulters and slanderers to whom concepts like Armenian terrorism means nothing. I suggest to my readers not to address their postings to these cyber-lynch-mobs, but to the open-minded truth-seekers. The minds of these cyber-lynch-mobs cannot be changed, but the other side of the story can certainly be told to fair-minded truth-seekers.
AFTER ALL, OUR MESSAGE IS VERY SIMPLE
Wartime suffering ?
Yes, but on all sides, Turks, Armenians, and others, alike…
Genocide?
No, not even by a long shot.
The term genocide does not apply to warring factions; never did. Armenians were certainly “de facto belligerents” with an army of more than 150,000, as Nubar, head of Armenian delegation to Paris Peace Conference, himself wrote in 1919. That army was not created for picking flowers.
A court verdict does not exist supporting Armenian genocide claims. Insisting on a guilty judgment without a court verdict, therefore, boils down to lynching.
And that is the plain truth.
MARK TWAIN
Mark Twain once said “It is by the goodness of God that in our country we have those three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either of them.” AFATH writers prove Mark Twain right everyday by attacking the freedoms of speech and conscience of all Turkish-Americans, with their posture tainted by anti-Turkish discrimination.
HOW THE AFATH WRITERS COMMIT ETHOCIDE
By only telling one side of the story and hiding the other. One will tell you, for example, about an article demonizing Turkey and Turks, but will fail to tell you the rebuttal to it in the same column.
Or he will tell you about Guenter Lewy’s quotes out of context, but will not tell you about the fact that there may have been comments setting the record straight. That’s AFATH morality for you.
If one chooses to believe the AFATH writers with “selective morality”, that is that person’s problem. Trying to silence people like me who are only telling their side of the story, calling them names for doing so, and basing this lynch-mob-like behavior on the long discredited Armenian propaganda, however, is hardly fair, ethical, or American, whether in journalism, academia, or politics.
The Armenians have defined the Turkish-Armenian conflict one way, their way, for 93 years. Even this could be understood within the context of ethnic and/or religious fanaticism. After all, it is a free country, you can believe whatever you want, even that the world is flat.
Problem arises when the Armenians demand their claims be declared as settled history with zero tolerance for the other side of the story, coming from Turks and non-Turks alike. The problem turns into a criminal conduct when these demands turn to violence, as in Armenian terrorism that claimed 70+ innocent lives (three right here in Southern California) since 1973, aimed at imposing the Armenian will on others.
Whether the Armenian claims of genocide are recognized by this country or that, does not change the fact that Armenians engineered, provoked, and waged a civil war within a world war; took up arms against their own government; killed their Muslim/Turkish neighbors; joined the invading enemy armies; demanded territories where they were a minority to create Greater Armenia; and did all that with the help of active allies (Russia, Britain, France), passive allies (U.S. diplomats, Protestant missionaries, the New York Times) and others.
THE SIX T’S SUMMARIZE THE TURKISH-ARMENIAN CONFLICT WELL
1- Tumult (Armenians taking up arms against their own government;)
2- Terrorism (by Dashnaks, Hunchaks, and other such Armenian terror groups;)
3- Treason (Armenians joining the invading enemy armies;)
4- Territorial demands (where Armenians were a minority attempting apartheid;)
5- Turkish suffering (at the hands of Armenian revolutionaries and terrorists; number exceeds half a million Muslims, mostly Turks)
6-Tereset (temporary resettlement triggered by the above 5 T’s and misrepresented by Armenians as genocide.)
MY OBJECTIONS TO LEWY
I praised the world renown Historian Guenter Lewy for the damning conclusion in his article titled “Revisiting the Armenian Genocide” published in Fall 2005 edition of Middle East Quarterly ( https://www.meforum.org/895/correspondence ):
” …Most of those who maintain that Armenian deaths were premeditated and so constitute genocide base their argument on three pillars: the actions of Turkish military courts of 1919-20,…, the role of the so-called “Special Organization” accused of carrying out the massacres, and the Memoirs of Naim Bey, which contain alleged telegrams of Interior Minister Talât Pasha…. Yet when these events and the sources describing them are subjected to careful examination, they provide at most a shaky foundation from which to claim, let alone conclude, that the deaths of Armenians were premeditated….”
…
Can you see how masterfully Lewy refutes the Armenian allegations with just a few simple words?
My hat is off to Lewy. I was so impressed that I bought and read Lewy’s book. I did have some objections about some of the arguments and sources in his book which were conveyed to Lewy himself in a letter signed by yours truly two years ago:
1) Lewy seems to have spent spent little or no time describing the immense Turkish suffering and death toll at the hands of the Armenian nationalists. In my humble opinion, any treatment that fails to take into account the Turkish side of the story is inherently and inevitably incomplete and biased. No one can explain a controversy by completely ignoring half the story.
2) Lewy also seems to have made very limited use of the Ottoman archives (perhaps due to his lack of skills in reading the original documents in the Ottoman language which is understandable but perhaps not easily excusable.
3) He took at face value most of reporting from Anatolia by biased sources: the Armenian Patriarchate, ARF, Armenian insurgents, allied diplomats, military personnel, missionaries, and others who all clearly had vested interests in the conflict and/or were parties to the civil war and/or the world war, raging concurrently.
4) others
Having pointed out my objections to his book this way, I must emphasize that none of my objections above change the ultimate conclusion by Lewy that the Turkish-Armenian conflict, as tragic as it was, cannot be classified as genocide.
That conclusion stands on its own feet and I congratulate and praise Lewy for that… eternally.
Peace,
Ergun KIRLIKOVALI
Son Of Turkish Survivors From Both Maternal And Paternal Sides
www.turkla.com
…………..
Legend:
AFATH : Armenian Falsifiers And Turks-Haters
ETHOCIDE: Systematic extermination of ethics via malicious mass deception for political, social, academic, religious, ratings, and/or other gain.”
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