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Press Release: Institute on the Holocaust and Genocide

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  • Press Release: Institute on the Holocaust and Genocide

    Institute on the Holocaust and Genocide, Jerusalem
    Prof. Israel Charny, Executive Director
    Prof. Yair Auron, Associate Director
    Marc Sherman, M.L.S., Assistant Director
    Contact: P.0.B. 10311 91102 Jerusalem, Israel
    TEL/FAX: 011-972-2672-0424 phone/fax

    Email: [email protected]

    PRESS RELEASE MAY 30, 2005

    The Institute on the Holocaust and Genocide in Jerusalem, Israel
    protests the Turkish Government's cancellation of an important
    scholarly conference on "the Armenian question" sponsored by a
    consortium of Turkish universities, which was to have been conducted
    in Turkish at one of the universities with an expected attendance of
    more than 700 registrants.

    The program titles of many of the presentations made it very clear that
    many of the scholars addressing the conference intended to recognize
    the historical validity of what is known in history in the free world
    as "the Armenian Genocide."

    They were going to do so despite the fact that current Turkish law
    prescribes jail sentences of several years for statements either
    about the Armenian Genocide or calling for Turkey withdrawing from
    Cypress. These speakers are loyal Turks who love their country and
    want to see it advance and grow. Several of them have written about
    the importance for Turkey itself to achieve a free society, with
    guaranteed academic freedom, freedom of speech, and freedom of ideas;
    and thus also for Turkey to demonstrate its readiness to be accepted
    in the European Union.

    Our Institute on the Holocaust and Genocide in Jerusalem was perhaps
    the first in the world to hold an interdisciplinary, multiple ethnic
    conference on the genocides of all peoples when we convened the "First
    International Conference on the Holocaust and Genocide" in 1982.
    Six lectures out of a total of 300 at our conference were scheduled
    to deal with the Armenian Genocide. As reported in many stories in
    the New York Times and other world press, Turkey pressured Israel
    to remove these six lectures, the government of Israel shamefully
    complied, and when we refused to do so the government attempted with
    considerable use of government powers to close our conference down
    entirely. Fortunately, even when Israel errs, it is overall a genuine
    democracy, and our insistence on holding the conference including the
    lectures on the Armenian Genocide could not be broken. The process
    of our resistance and success has been honored many times in articles
    and books by many writers ever since (for example, in the Yale Review).

    The Institute on the Holocaust and Genocide calls on all governments
    of the world to strive for a high level of accuracy, objectivity and
    transparency about genocidal massacres and genocides, including by
    its own peoples for many of our peoples in our shared Earth-world
    have committed genocidal atrocities against others. In the long run,
    the goal of human life, and all government, should be to protect
    human lives more and more.

    Institute on the Holocaust and Genocide, Jerusalem

    Prof. Israel Charny, Executive Director
    Prof. Yair Auron, Associate Director
    Marc Sherman, M.L.S., Assistant Director

    ####
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