Not a day passes when someone from the AFATH community (Armenian Falsifiers and Turks-Haters) doesn’t demonize Turks, Turkey, Turkish-Americans and/or friends of Turkey.
Forgetting that there are no substantiations by historical evidence for their political claims other than hearsay, forgeries, and partisan interpretations of wartime human suffering and ignoring that there are no court verdicts by competent tribunals to support their accusations, these genocide lynch mobs arrogantly resort to insults, slanders, and threats. They think they are protected under freedom of expression, but the question begs to be asked:
Are obvious insults, malicious slanders, direct threats, and/or other similar hate speech protected under the U.S. constitution?
Gregory Lisby, a communications professor at Georgia State University, who has tracked criminal libel prosecutions and found 17 states that had not updated laws from English common law. His research revealed that that criminal libel cases have dropped but he says the Internet could reverse that. His words: “More and more people view the online world as a free-rant place…They think it’s par for the course, but they’re setting themselves up for lawsuits or prosecution”
(Source: “Colorado man faces criminal charge in libel case”, by Times Staff writer Nicholas Riccardi, Los Angels Times, December 4, 2008)
I know several of these cyber-thugs, myself, who insult me personally, attack me without even knowing me based on my ethnic heritage and the views I hold of my own family’s history. And these insults, slanders, and threats come to me not in just one or two postings, but in majority if not all of postings. I reserve my right to defend myself against these cyber-thugs.
Last October and November, I was attacked in many blogs for organizing a fund-raiser for a political candidate out of my district. I figured, if one businessman (Daryl Issa) can spend his own money and succeed in replacing a sitting California Governor (Gray Davis), then why cannot another one (i.e. yours truly) replace a sitting congressman (Adam Schiff?)
Do I need to explain myself to anyone what politician, when, and why I should support?
Or do I need to get permission from my political adversaries to do so?
Isn’t fundraising one of the most cherished ways of participating in the political process? Isn’t such participation encouraged, revered, and protected in the U.S. constitution?
Why the strange efforts to show this American practice as something clandestine, dangerous, vile, or otherwise undesirable?
Isn’t anti-Turkish bias, bigotry and hatred as well as ethnic and religious discrimination at work here?
Hold those thoughts as I would like to bring to your attention the following press release I received today.
Let’s read:
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PRESS RELEASE
Washington, DC, December 3, 2008: On November 17, 2008 Professor Guenter Lewy filed a defamation suit against the Southern Poverty Law Center, Inc., and writer-editor David Holthouse in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia, supported by the Turkish American Legal Defense Fund. TALDF seeks to preserve and promote open discourse about issues significant for Turkish Americans, including the characterization of the events bearing on the World War I deaths of Ottoman Muslims and Armenians.
Among other works, Professor Lewy is author of The Armenian Massacres in Ottoman Turkey: A Disputed Genocide (University of Utah Press, 2005), which concludes that the evidence to support the popular allegation of genocide in the Armenian case is inconclusive.
The defamation claims pivot on twin false assertions made by Defendant Holthouse in an article published in the Summer 2008 issue of Intelligence Report entitled, “State of Denial: Turkey Entices U.S. Scholars, Law Makers to Cover Up Armenian Genocide.” The first was the false statement that Professor Lewy was on the payroll of the Government of Turkey in exchange for compromising his scholastic integrity in disputing the Armenian allegation of genocide. The second was that Professor Lewy deceived his readers or audiences by failing to disclose the money he had received from the Government of Turkey to shape his view of the Armenian claim. The false statements also insinuated that Professor Lewy had violated the Foreign Agents Registration Act by failing to register with the Department of Justice as a mouthpiece for the Government of Turkey. Professor Lewy is seeking damages to clear his good name and to send a message that sham accusations of being on the take is not an acceptable substitute for reasoned and civil debate over genuine historical controversies. The climate of intimidation, coercion and worse that confronts anyone who quarrels with the Armenian view of the events of 1915 in the Ottoman Empire must end.
Professor Lewy is being represented by attorneys Bruce Fein and David Saltzman on behalf of the Turkish American Legal Defense Fund.
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