126 Holocaust Scholars Affirm The Incontestable Fact Of The Armenian Genocide And Urge Western Democracies To Officially Recognise It As Such

Statement by 126 Holocaust Scholars, Holders of Academic Chairs, and Directors of Holocaust Research and Studies Centers – March 7th, 2000

At the Thirtieth Anniversary of the Scholar’s Conference on the Holocaust and the Churches Convening at St. Joseph University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, March 3-7, 2000, one hundred and twenty-six Holocaust Scholars, holders of Academic Chairs and Directors of Holocaust Research and Studies Centers, participants of the Conference, signed a statement affirming that the World War I Armenian Genocide is an incontestable historical fact and accordingly urge the governments of Western democracies to likewise recognize it as such.

The petitioners, among whom is Nobel Laureate for Peace Elie Wiesel, who was the keynote speaker at the conference, also asked the Western Democracies to urge the Government and Parliament of Turkey to finally come to terms with a dark chapter of Ottoman-Turkish history and to recognize the Armenian Genocide. This would provide an invaluable impetus to the process of the democratization of Turkey.

Below is a partial list of the signatories:

Prof. Yehuda Bauer – Distinguished Professor, Hebrew University; Director, The International Institute of Holocaust Research,Yad Vashem, Jerusalem

Prof. Israel Charny, Director – Institute of the Holocaust and Genocide, Jerusalem; Professor at the Hebrew University; Editor-in-Chief of The

Encyclopedia of Genocide

Prof. Ward Churchill – Ethnic Studies, The University of Colorado, Boulder

Prof. Stephen Feinstein – Director, Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, University of Minnesota

Prof. Saul Friedman – Director, Holocaust and Jewish Studies, Youngston State University, Ohio

Prof. Edward Gaffney – Valparaiso University Law School

Prof. Zev Garber – Los Angeles Valley College

Prof. Dorota Glowacka – University of King’s College, Halifax, Nova Scotia

Dr. Irving Greenberg, – President, Jewish Life Network

Prof. Herbert Hirsch – Virginia Commonwealth University

Prof. Irving L. Horowitz – Hannah Arendt Distinguished Professor, Rutgers University, NJ

Rabbi Dr. Steve Jacobs – Temple Sinai Shalom, Huntsville, Alabama; Associate Editor of The Encyclopedia of Genocide

Prof. Steven Katz – Distinguish Professor, Director, Center for Judaic Studies, Boston University

Prof. Richard Libowitz – Temple University

Dr. Elizabeth Maxwell – Executive Director of the International Scholarly, Conference on the Holocaust, London, England

Prof. Erik Markusen – Southwest State University, MN

Prof. Saul Mendlowitz – Dag Hammerskjold Distinguished Professor of International Law, Rutgers University

Prof. Jack Needle – Director, Center for Holocaust Studies, Brookdale Community College, Lincroft, NJ

Dr. Philip Rosen – Director, Holocaust Education Center of the Delaware Valley

Prof. Alan S, Rosenbaum – Dept. of Philosophy, Cleveland State University

William L. Shulman – President, Association of Holocaust Organizations City University of New York

Prof. Samuel Totten – The University of Arkansas; Assoc. Editor of The Encyclopedia of Genocide

Prof. Elie Wiesel – Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities, Boston University; Founding Chairman of the United States Holocaust Memorial

Council; Nobel Laureate for Peace

I hereby declare that the originals of these one hundred and twenty-six signatories are on file in my office. All affiliations supplied are for identification purposes only.

Dr. Stephen Feinstein,

Director, Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, University of Minnesota

TURKISH BELIEVERS "SATANICALLY TORTURED" BEFORE BEING KILLED

TURKISH BELIEVERS "SATANICALLY TORTURED" BEFORE BEING KILLED

BosNewsLife, Hungary
April 26 2007

WARNING: GRAPHIC CONTENT, READERS' DISCRETION ADVISED

ISTANBUL, TURKEY (BosNewsLife)-- There was increased concern
Thursday, April 26, about the plight of active Christians in Turkey
after investigators revealed that three evangelical believers were
"satanically tortured" last week before being killed.

The influential American human rights group International Christian
Concern (ICC) with website www.persecution.org told BosNewsLife that
the circumstances surrounding the deaths of German Tilman Ekkehart
Geske, 45, and Turkish Christians Necati Aydin, 35, and Ugur Yuksel
,32, at the Christian Zirve publishing house were even worse than
thought.

ICC, based in Washington DC, said the troubles began on Easter
Sunday when five of the alleged killers had been to a service that
Pastor Necati arranged in the eastern town of Malatya, the capital
of Malatya province.

The men were reportedly known to local believers as searching for
the faith in Christ. The suspects, one of whom is the son of a mayor
in the Province of Malatya, are part of a tarikat, or a group of
"faithful believers" in Islam, ICC added.

Tarikat membership is "like a fraternity membership" and means that
"no one can get into public office without membership" of such
a group, ICC said. "On the day of the killing, the young Muslim
men had arranged to meet the Christians at 10:00 am [local time]
to ostensibly learn more about the Bible. They had gathered guns,
bread knives, ropes and towels [as] they knew there would be a lot
of blood, ready for their act of service to Allah," ICC stressed.

READING BIBLE

After Necati read a chapter from the Bible the assault reportedly
began. "The young men tied Ugur, Necati, and Tilman's hands and feet
to chairs as they videoed their work on their cell phones," ICC said,
adding that what "followed in the next three hours is beyond belief."

ICC said the men were "disemboweled, and their intestines sliced up in
front of their eyes. They were emasculated and watched as those body
parts were destroyed." The group added that "fingers were chopped off"
and "their noses and mouths and anuses were sliced open" as part of
what it called "satanic torture."

It added that "possibly the worst part was watching as their brothers
were likewise tortured. Tilman was stabbed 156 times, Necati 99 times
and Ugur's stabs were too numerous to count."

Finally, their throats were sliced from ear to ear, and their "heads
practically decapitated," ICC said.

Several hours later at 12:30 local time a fellow Christian reportedly
arrived at the publishing house but discovered that the door was
locked from the inside. After he called cell phones of the men, Ugur
apparently answered his phone saying: "We are not at the office. Go
to the hotel meeting. We are there. We will come there." Yet as Ugur
spoke he heard in the background weeping and a strange snarling sound,
ICC said, citing its investigation.

POLICE INTERVENTION

After he phoned police the nearest officer arrived in about five
minutes and pounded on the door shouting: "Police, open up,!" reports
said.

Initially the officer apparently believed it was a domestic
disturbance, but when he heard another snarl and a gurgling moan he
understood that sound as human suffering, ICC explained. The officer
"prepared the clip in his gun and tried over and over again to burst
through the door. One of the frightened assailants unlocked the door
for the policeman, who entered to find a grisly scene."

Reports said the attack happened following Muslim protests against
the distribution of Bibles and other Christian literature by the
publishing house for which they worked.

One of the victims, Necati Aydin, a husband and father of two young
children, was also an actor who reportedly played the role of Jesus
Christ in a theater production that TURK-7 network aired over the
Easter holidays.

DETENTION DEMANDED

Prosecutors have asked a court to allow jailing 11 suspects, 10 young
men and a woman, pending trial over the gruesome murder of the three
Christians. A 12th suspect, allegedly the leader, remains in hospital
with a serious head injury after jumping from the third-floor office
of the Christian publishing house in Malatya where the victims were
killed, to escape arrest.

At least four of the suspects have reportedly been charged with
"founding a terrorist organization and murder within the framework of
the organization." In a first reaction, Tillman's wife publicly forgave
the those who killed her husband saying "they know not what they do."

ICC President Jeff King said he was impressed by the "contrast between
the acts of the killers and the forgiveness of Tillman's wife." He
said it was "glaring and in the end seems to be at the center of this
story for us. For in the end, these events serve as a stark reminder
of the difference between Islam and Christianity."

He added that, for "the 'faithful' Muslims, following their god meant
brutally killing three men [with the excuse] "we did this to protect
Islam". For the faithful Christians, following God meant forgiving
the men who had tortured and murdered their loved ones."

The attacks have added to concern among Turkish Christians who comprise
about 0.2 percent of the mainly Muslim nation of over 71 million
people. The murders followed the January murder of Turkish-Armenian
journalist Hrant Dink and the shooting of Italian Roman Catholic
priest Andrea Santoro in the town of Trabzon in February 2006. (With
reporting from Turkey).

THE HIDDEN HOLOCAUST

San Francisco Chronicle, CA
Dec 15 2003

by Ruth Rosen

IMAGINE IF a producer from National Public Radio invited a scholar to
speak about his new book on the Jewish Holocaust and then, to provide
"balance," included another guest known for denying that the Nazis
murdered 6 million Jews.

Inconceivable, right?

Yet this is analogous to what happened to Peter Balakian, a professor
of American Studies at Colgate University and author of "The Burning
Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America's Response" (HarperCollins,
2003) -- a gripping and evocative account of the 1915 genocide of
more than a million Armenian people at the hands of the Ottoman
Turks.

As soon as his book appeared on the New York Times bestseller list,
Balakian received a flood of invitations to speak about what some
have called "the hidden holocaust."

One NPR
producer, however, insisted on inviting another guest to
present the Turkish "perspective" that no genocide ever occurred.
Balakian declined the invitation.

Unfortunately,much of the American media still thinks that the
Armenian genocide is subject to debate. Until recently, many American
newspapers wrote about the "alleged" Armenian genocide or felt
obliged to give equal weight to Turkey's denial of this grotesque
crime.

To counter such historical inaccuracy, in June 1998 the Association
of Genocide Scholars unanimously defined this event as the 20th
century's first genocide. Two years later, 126 Holocaust scholars,
including Elie Wiesel -- awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his
lifelong effort to bear witness to genocide -- published a petition
in the New York Times affirming "the incontestable fact of the
Armenian genocide."

Denial of the Armenian genocide didn't always exist in this country.
Before World War I,
Americans knew exactly what had occurred. During
the 1890s, American reformers launched a human-rights campaign to
protest repeated massacres of the Armenian people. In September 1895,
the New York Times headlined a story as "Another Armenian Holocaust."
During 1915, that paper published 145 articles about the mass murder
of the Armenian people, describing the massacre as "systematic,
"authorized" and "organized by the government." In 1918, Theodore
Roosevelt called it "the greatest crime of the war."

The rest of the world also knew what had happened. In May 1915, the
Allies conceived of the term "crimes against humanity" to describe
the Ottoman government's massacres of the Armenian people. When the
Polish jurist Raphael Lemkin coined the term genocide in the 1940s,
he said that his definition was based on what the Armenian people had
suffered.

So what cast such a cloud of uncertainty over the Armenian genocide?

The short
answer is: oil and military bases.

After World War I, the United States' drive for oil in the Middle
East resulted in an alliance with the new Turkish republic. Even
though post-war Ottoman military confessions and American eyewitness
accounts provided indisputable proof of the genocide, Turkey waged a
systematic campaign to erase the Armenian genocide from historical
memory.

During the Cold War, Turkey gained even greater leverage to promote
its denial when it became a strategic site for American and NATO
military bases.

As Rabbi Matthew Berkowitz recently wrote in the Jerusalem Post, "The
government of Turkey has been waging a campaign of denial involving
threats [to close military bases], political bullying, coercion and
an unabashed assault on truth. Successive administrations of the
United States have succumbed to pressure, preventing the passage of
legislation referring explicitly to the Armenian genocide and
calling
on Turkey to take responsibility for this blemish on humanity."

Such denial is deadly. Deborah Lipstadt, a distinguished scholar on
Holocaust denial, calls such intentional amnesia the "final stage of
genocide, " because it "strives to reshape history in order to
demonize the victims and rehabilitate the perpetrators." Wiesel
describes such denial as a "double killing" because it also murders
the memory of the crime. "To remain silent or indifferent" Wiesel
reminds us, "is the greatest sin."

Never forget that Adolf Hitler relied on that silence when he said on
Aug. 22, 1939, "Who after all speaks today of the annihilation of the
Armenians?"