On Wed, 7 Nov 2007 20:59:54 +0100, Panta Rhei <cool.multitec@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
wrote:
>The Armenian Genocide is well do***ented and has been corroborated by
>many eminent historians and scholars world wide!
hogwash and bull****!
"Bernard Lewis (born May 31, 1916, London) is the Cleveland E. Dodge
Professor Emeritus of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University. He
specializes in the history of Islam and the interaction between Islam
and the West and is especially famous for his works on the history of
the Ottoman Empire. (...) In a November 1993 Le Monde interview, Lewis
said that the Ottoman Turks’ killing of up to 1.5 million Armenians in
1915 was not "genocide", but the "brutal byproduct of war".[19]
He further suggested in the interview that "the reality of the
Armenian genocide results from nothing more than the imagination of
the Armenian people."[20]
A Parisian court interpreted his remarks as a denial of the Armenian
Genocide and on June 21, 1995 fined him one franc. The court ruled
that while Lewis has the right to his views, they did damage to a
third party and that "it is only by hiding elements which go against
his thesis that the defendant was able to state that there was no
'serious proof' of the Armenian Genocide."[21]
(...)
Lewis argues that:
“ There is no evidence of a decision to massacre. On the
contrary, there is considerable evidence of attempts to prevent it,
which were not very successful. Yes there were tremendous massacres,
the numbers are very uncertain but a million may well be likely,[24]
...[and] the issue is not whether the massacres happened or not, but
rather if these massacres were as a result of a deliberate
preconceived decision of the Turkish government... there is no
evidence for such a decision.[25] ”
Lewis thus believes that "to make [Armenian Genocide], a parallel with
the Holocaust in Germany" is "rather absurd."[24]
In an interview with Haaretz he stated:
“ The deniers of Holocaust have a purpose: to prolong Nazism and
to return to Nazi legislation. Nobody wants the 'Young Turks' back,
and nobody wants to have back the Ottoman Law.
What do the Armenians want? The Armenians want to benefit from both
worlds.
On the one hand, they speak with pride of their struggle against the
Ottoman despotism, while on the other hand, they compare their tragedy
to the Jewish Holocaust. I do not accept this. I do not say that the
Armenians did not suffer terribly. But I find enough cause for me to
contain their attempts to use the Armenian massacres to diminish the
worth of the Jewish Holocaust and to relate to it instead as an ethnic
dispute."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Lewis
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