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Why Give Platform To Armenian Genocide Deniers?

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  • Why Give Platform To Armenian Genocide Deniers?

    WHY GIVE PLATFORM TO ARMENIAN GENOCIDE DENIERS?

    Daily Journal , Venezuela
    http://www.thedailyjournalonline.com/art icle.asp?ArticleId=230059&CategoryId=13303
    Mar ch 13 2006

    I am a devoted viewer of PBS. From "Masterpiece Theater" to "Sesame
    Street," I have always considered it a bastion of creative and
    intelligent TV.

    But two weeks ago, PBS stabbed me and every other Armenian-American in
    the back when it announced that its upcoming documentary, "The Armenian
    Genocide," would be followed on some stations by a panel discussion
    featuring two so-called scholars who claim that the genocide is a myth.

    Worse, according to genocide historian Peter Balakian, PBS threatened
    to pull the documentary if he and another genocide scholar declined
    to participate "on the other side" in the panel discussion, which
    was taped in January.

    Although the documentary is not slated to run until April, programmers
    across the country are now deciding whether to air it at all, air it
    alone or air it with the taped debate. "We believe (the genocide)
    is settled history," said Jacoba Atlas, senior vice president of
    programming at PBS, but "it seemed like a good idea to have a panel
    and let people have their say." This is perverse. Either there was
    a genocide or there wasn't.

    Would anyone tolerate David Irving, the notorious Holocaust
    revisionist, hashing it out on a panel with Elie Wiesel after a
    documentary on the Nazi concentration camps? Should we give janjaweed
    reps air time the next time we run a documentary on the genocide
    in Darfur?

    Why has PBS resorted to doublespeak in regard to the Armenian genocide?

    The answer is simple: PBS is capitulating to politics. For years
    the Turks, America's so-called allies, have issued threats against
    any organization or country that challenges their quack reading of
    history. When the French recognized the Armenian genocide, the Turks
    recalled their ambassador to France, boycotted French products and
    canceled military contracts. They have threatened to withdraw strategic
    support from our country if we should dare make the same mistake.

    Article 301 of the Turkish penal code makes it a crime to "denigrate"
    Turkey by, for instance, mentioning the Armenian genocide in public.

    In March, the famous Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk did just that and
    faced charges. International outcry and a technicality got his case
    dismissed, but others are still in peril.

    One of PBS's genocide deniers, University of Louisville history
    professor Justin McCarthy, was invited by the Turkish Grand Assembly -
    reeling from European Union pressure to come clean about its genocidal
    past - for a pep talk this month.

    "I know that the Turks will resist demands to confess to a crime they
    did not commit," McCarthy intoned,"no matter the price of honesty. I
    have faith in the integrity of the Turks."

    These rousing words brought the lawmakers, many of whom had sanctioned
    Article 301, to their feet. Does PBS really want to give such a
    belligerent falsifier air time?

    "It seemed like a good idea," Atlas said. Raphael Lemkin wouldn't
    agree. He coined the word "genocide" in 1944, and viewed the Armenian
    case as a seminal example of such an atrocity. Norman Mailer, Carol
    Gilligan, John Updike and Cornel West wouldn't think so either.

    They signed a petition, along with 150 other scholars and writers,
    reaffirming the genocide's historical truth. Directors of Holocaust
    research centers around the world - including Wiesel and Yehuda Bauer
    in 2000 - also signed a statement declaring the Armenian genocide an
    incontestable historical fact.

    Even the Turks are on the record as acknowledging the truth. When
    Turkey was defeated in World War I, the allied powers created a
    tribunal that included members of the new Turkish government.

    The butchers behind the genocide had fled by then, but they were
    found guilty and sentenced to death in absentia. Certainly the few
    remaining genocide survivors, now in their 90s, would not think it
    "a good idea" to give the deniers a forum.

    They were children when hundreds of thousands of Armenians were herded
    like cattle through the scorching slaughterhouse of the Anatolian
    desert toward one of 25 concentration camps.

    They watched as their people were murdered, raped, tortured and left
    to starve in those camps.

    Armenian homes and shops were occupied and looted; ancient churches
    were turned into mosques or barns, used for target practice by
    the Turkish army or burned to the ground to eliminate any trace of
    Armenians in those lands.

    By the time the Turks were finished, an estimated 1.5 million people
    had perished - more than half the Armenian population in Turkey.

    Armenians called it Medz Yeghern: "The Great Cataclysm."

    The denial of genocide, as many have rightly observed, is the
    continuation of genocide.

    It should be clear to PBS, to Atlas and to programmers across the
    nation that the American public broadcasting system should not be
    complicit in a murderous lie.

    Aris Janigian is the author of the novel 'Bloodvine.'

    From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
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