Wow Michael, that’s a resounding ring of support for the Turkish thesis right there. I am taken aback at it’s strength and confidence.
Murtha, who is a member of the Turkish caucus and has always been an outspoken supporter of the country because of his military interests, clearly is saying there that he is not well-versed in the events and so cannot speak on whether it was a genocide or not. Or it’s a weasel-phrase to avoid having to either deny that it was one or speak with confidence that the ‘jury is still out’. Either way, I suggest Mr. Murtha spend five minutes looking into the research that has been done. Feigning ignorance does not reflect well on anyone.

“and yes, it was a civil war - the Armenians rebelled against the Ottomans, seized the city of Van, for instance, the list goes on and on. ”

Which is why your list ends there. The citizens of Van were suffering under an oppresive Ottoman governor who had it out for them. Meanwhile notice how Van is the one and only event you ever bring up at your blog, etc. as evidence that Armenian revolutionaries “took over cities”. The events of Van are described as if Armenians everywhere were behaving in the same manner and everyone was throwing over their town governments and wreaking havoc. I’m astounded that someone could remain so historically ignorant for so long- I don’t get how people continue to claim the Armenian population was in outright revolt all over the empire despite there being no notice to it or other examples you can even bring up. There’s no there there, and yet you continue to trot out this dead horse and pretend it can stand.

And the notion that “Armenians were traitors to their government”, the same government which had massacred them in huge numbers since 1894, the same government which had recently adopted pan-Turkic policies and wanted a “Turkey for the Turks”. The notion that sick decrepid empires deserve loyalty from their second-class citizens and that only their subjects are able of committing treason, as opposed to the fact that their government had long ago betrayed them and multiple times, is absurd and sets a dangerous precedent.

Don’t you think if “there was no genocide” was a tenable position the administration and Congressional opponents would be all over it? Notice how not a single one of them have brought up a hint of doubt that it might not have been genocide, or suggested that idiotic “civil war” notion (though some of the more uninformed members of the press have- once this became a huge issue everyone with a blog or microphone suddenly found themselves Ottoman experts).

That’s not true. Murtha, for instance, said: “I don’t know whether it was a genocide or not.”

If you make sweeping statements like that, you should be able to back it up Paul. Otherwise, make them less sweeping.

O, and yes, it was a civil war - the Armenians rebelled against the Ottomans, seized the city of Van, for instance, the list goes on and on. The Armenians collaborated with the Russians against the Ottomans. There’s no use in denying that.

Ottomans never had the “intention” to wipe out Armenians just because they were Armenians or Christians. Armenian citizens of the Ottoman Empire betrayed their own country, their own people and revolted against their own state, cooperating with the brutally invading Tsarist Russian troops the lands of the Ottoman empire by cutting the supply routes of the Ottoman Army intent to fight against the occupying Russian forces. They massacred in the rank and file of the Russian Army, almost half of the Muslim population of Van after which the “relocation Decree” of the Ottoman Government proclaimed and took effect.

Exactly.

Shortly the Armenian ” genocide” claims is wanting of any international judicial backing. Trying to get the “genocide” accepted through the parliaments decisions of many countries may give self satisfaction to those pro-genocide claimers but they bear little value. The truth, if we are looking for it, will depend on earnest, rational and reasonable dialogue and discussion among the contenders of both parties, and by no means on slandering, intimidations, assasinations etc. as have been the practices of Armenian terrorists. Buying the votes of corrupt parliament members will not help in the long run. Even finding, buying “quislings” among the so-called Turkish historians such as Taner Akcam &co will not help!
I strongly believe that there so many reasonable, truth seeker Armenians in Armenia, Diaspora and Turkey, as I see them among my good Armenian friends.

Preach it! The bully tactics of the Armenian lobby should be exposed.

And - it’s terrible what happened to many Armenians, but it’s also terrible what Armenian militias did to Ottoman (Turkish) Muslims.

Perhaps it’s time for both sides to aknowledge that they made each other suffer, and move on.

http://mvdg.wordpress.com/

I guess if you are going to be stubborn, there are ways around the otherwise ironclad fact that genocide was created with the Armenian example in mind. Denialists will be denialists and not even the most blatant truths will change that it seems.

In 1915, thirty-three years before UN Genocide Convention was adopted, the Armenian Genocide was condemned by the international community as a crime against humanity. It is well acknowledged that Polish jurist Raphael Lemkin, when he coined the term genocide in 1944, cited the Turkish extermination of the Armenians and the Nazi extermination of the Jews as defining examples of what he meant by genocide.

http://www.newstatesman.com/200710120004

Q & A: But Was It Genocide?

by Corey Flintoff

The term — from Greek and Latin roots meaning “the massacre of a family, tribe or race” —was coined in 1943 by Raphael Lemkin, a Jewish legal scholar from Poland. In the 1930s, Lemkin sought unsuccessfully to get the League of Nations to recognize such killings as an international crime. As examples, he cited the massacre of Armenians during World War I and the slaughter of Assyrians in Iraq in 1933.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=15264313

Raphael Lemkin (June 24, 1900 – August 28, 1959) was a lawyer of Polish-Jewish descent. Before World War II, Lemkin was interested in the Armenian Genocide and campaigned in the League of Nations to ban what he called “barbarity” and “vandalism”. He is best known for his work against genocide, a word he coined in 1943 from the root words genos (Greek for family, tribe or race) and -cide (Latin for killing). He first used the word in print in Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation - Analysis of Government - Proposals for Redress (1944).

[…]

In 1933 Lemkin made a presentation to the Legal Council of the League of Nations conference on international criminal law in Madrid, for which he prepared an essay on the Crime of Barbarity as a crime against international law. The concept of the crime, which later evolved into the idea of genocide, was based mostly on the experience of Assyrians[1] massacred in Iraq during the 1933 Simele massacre and the Armenian Genocide during World War I.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raphael_Lemkin

Is there anything more than can be said given this fact?