WHY GIVE PLATFORM TO ARMENIAN GENOCIDE DENIERS?
Daily Journal , Venezuela
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