Armenian genocide denial

The Southern Poverty Law Center two years ago (summer 2008) reported on the Turkish propaganda campaign in the United States to deny the Armenian genocide. The Turkish government has spent millions of dollars supporting scholars and members of Congress alike to "prove" that the genocide did not occur during WWI.

Early this year [2008], 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.

And the same thing has just happened this year. The House Foreign Relations Committee just passed a resolution by a 23-22 vote declaring that the killing of Armenians was genocide. This resolution was opposed by the Obama administration even though both Secretary of State Clinton and President Obama supported such a resolution when they were Senators.

In 2007, Clinton was co-sponsor with Senator Harry Reid of a Senate resolution recognizing the Armenian genocide. A press release of 4/18/2007 from the Armenian National Committee of America also refers to Obama's position:

Last week, during remarks at a Washington, DC breakfast for Illinois constituents, Senator Barak Obama, fielded a question from ANCA Eastern U.S. Executive Director Karine Birazian about his support for the Armenian Genocide Resolution. In his response, he explained to the audience the basic facts about the Genocide and promised to give careful consideration to cosponsoring the measure.

See Harry's Place for a longer discussion of this issue - Obama's failure to acknowledge Armenian genocide.

See also a good discussion by David Schraub on Jewish American lobbyists who in 2007 lobbied on the Turkish side against the genocide resolution: Genocide Denial. (Guenter Lewy, mentioned above in the SPLC report, is Jewish - he was born in Germany in 1923 and fled with his family to Palestine in 1939).