Amos,

The DEMOCRATS are pushing the issue- Bush objects, for the same reason YOU do.



"The Republic of Turkey and the Armenian Genocide
Main article: Denial of the Armenian Genocide
The Republic of Turkey's formal stance is that the deaths of Armenians during the "relocation" or "deportation" cannot aptly be deemed "genocide." This point has been contended with a plethora of diverging justifications: that the killings were not deliberate or were not governmentally orchestrated, that the killings were justified because Armenians posed a Russian-sympathizing threat as a cultural group, that Armenians merely starved, or any of various characterizations recalling marauding "Armenian gangs."[101][102][103] Some suggestions seek to invalidate the genocide on semantic or anachronistic grounds (the word "genocide" was not coined until 1943).

Turkish World War I casualty figures are often cited to mitigate the effect of the number of Armenian dead.[104] The website of the Grand National Assembly of Turkey currently features a section entitled Archive Documents about the Atrocities and Genocide Inflicted upon Turks by Armenians, suggesting that the Turks of Anatolia experienced a genocide at the hands of the Armenians.

The website of the Turkish General Staff also offers many of its own publications intended to bolster denial of the Armenian Genocide. One such example defines the Armenians as "an incapable, parasite and greedy nation that can live only at another nation's expense."[105]

Turkish governmental sources have asserted that the historically-demonstrated "tolerance of Turkish people"[106] itself renders the Armenian Genocide an impossibility. One military document leverages 11th century history to disprove the Armenian Genocide: "It was the Seljuk Turks who saved the Armenians that came under the Turkish domination in 1071 from the Byzantine persecution and granted them the right to live as a man should."[106] A Der Spiegel article addressed this modern Turkish conception of history thus:

"Would you admit to the crimes of your grandfathers, if these crimes didn't really happen?" asked ambassador Öymen. But the problem lies precisely in this question, says Hrant Dink, publisher and editor-in-chief of the Istanbul-based Armenian weekly Agos. Turkey's bureaucratic elite have never really shed themselves of the Ottoman tradition — in the perpetrators, they see their fathers, whose honor they seek to defend.

This tradition instils a sense of identity in Turkish nationalists — both from the left and the right, and it is passed on from generation to generation through the school system. This tradition also requires an antipole against which it could define itself. Since the times of the Ottoman Empire, religious minorities have been pushed into this role.[107]

Public prosecutors have utilized Article 301 of the Turkish Penal Code prohibiting "insulting Turkishness" to silence some Turkish intellectuals who spoke of atrocities endured by Armenians in the last days of the Ottoman Empire.[108] Turkish state officials say that no one is currently incarcerated for expressing their ideas, and that the law may soon be amended.[109] The modern Turkish government continues to protest the formal recognition of the genocide by other countries.

Open University of Israel scholar Yair Auron, in his The Banality of Denial, has addressed the various means employed by the Turkish government to obscure the reality of the Armenian Genocide:

Despite the vast amount of evidence that points to the historical reality of the Armenian Genocide, denial of this genocide by successive regimes in Turkey has continued from 1915 to present… Out of political expediency, other governments, including that of the United States and Israel, have aided and abetted Turkey in its rewriting of history.

In the 1960s, efforts were made to influence journalists, teachers, and public officials by telling "the other side of the story." Foreign scholars were encouraged to revise the record of the Genocide, presenting an account largely blaming the Armenians or, in another version, wartime conditions… The Turkish government has also attempted to exclude any mention of the Genocide in textbooks and to prevent its inclusion in Holocaust and human rights curricula.

The Turkish government has attempted to disrupt academic conferences and public discussions of the genocide, notably a conference in Tel Aviv in 1982, with demands backed up with threats to the safety of Jews in Turkey…

Since the 1980s, the Turkish government has supported the establishment of "institutes" affiliated with respected universities, whose apparent purpose is to further research on Turkish history and culture, but which also tend to act in ways that further denial. The volume and extent of these activities have been described by one scholar as "an industry of denial" and by another as "an industry of denialism."[110]"