What Do Real Historians And Experts Say?

Bernard Lewis (Princeton University; Best expert on Islamic Empires and Ottoman Empire in the United States)

Le Monde, 2002
"There is no evidence of a decision to (Armenian) massacre. On the contrary, there is considerable evidence of attempt 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," and that because of this and other significant differences between the Armenian massacres and the Holocaust, parallels are "rather absurd". In 2006 he re-iterated this point, arguing that "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," and that "there is no evidence for such a decision."

Prof. Justin McCarthy (University of Louisville; expert in population research and genocide research)

"The Blue Book written by Viscount Bryce and Arnold Toynbee has been used as proof that Armenians and the victims of the Jewish Holocaust suffered the same fate in history. This book has been said to be a product of British intelligence designed to promote and promulgate lies during World War I. Britain had set up the war propaganda bureau at Wellington House for the sole purpose of promoting lies and misinformation on Germany and the Ottoman Empire. The British were in full co-operation with American missionaries in Anatolia and the American Embassy in Istanbul conjured a so called Armenian genocide based on gossip, hear-say and erroneous information.

The real purpose behind this exercise was to create and strengthen an image in the minds of British military officers that the Turk were evil, horrible and untrustworthy McCarthy adds.

Among other well-known historians who do not name the 1915 civil war a 'genocide' and are against calling these events a 'genocide' are Heath Lowry (Princeton University), Gilles Veinstein (College de France), Stanford Shaw (UCLA), J.C. Hurewitz (Columbia University), Guenter Lewy (University of Massachusetts), Roderic Davison (Central European University), Jeremy Salt (University of Melbourne), Malcolm Yapp (University of London) and Rhoads Murphey (University of Birmingham).

On May 19, 1985, a total of 63 scholars from various American universities sent a letter to the U.S. House of representatives opposing the House Joint Resolution 192 which defines the events of 1915 as genocide.

Prof. Stanford Shaw (Bilkent University)
Prof. Stanford J. Shaw, the historian who challenged the Armenian claims of genocide at the hands of the late Ottomans and provided evidence of Turkey’s aiding and fostering Jews during WWII, died on Saturday at the age of 76. Shaw was a professor of Turkish history at Bilkent University in Ankara and at UCLA as well as the founder of the International Journal of Middle East Studies, published by the Cambridge University Press for the Middle East Studies Association.

Shaw's house in California was bombed in 1977 by Armenian extremists as a result of his research on the alleged genocide.Shaw served as an assistant and associate professor of Turkish language and history at the department of history at Harvard University from 1958 until 1968 and as professor of Turkish history at the University of California Los Angeles from 1968 until 1997. His final post was at Bilkent University as professor of Ottoman and Turkish history from 1999 to 2006.(www.turkses.com)

Hrant Dink (Turkish Armenian journalist)
Hrant Dink, was strictly against the Armenian bill in the French parliament. Dink had protested the bill and said “I will go to France and say that there is no genocide to protest the bill”.
(http://www.turkishweekly.net/news.php?id=42208)

Prof. Norman Stone (British historian of modern Europe, especially Central and Eastern Europe, served at the University of Oxford)

Diaspora Armenians claim that ‘historians’ accept the genocide case. There is some preposterous organization called ‘association of genocide scholars’ which does indeed endorse the Diaspora line, but who are they and what qualifications do they have? Knowing about Rwanda or Bosnia or even Auschwitz does not qualify them to discuss Anatolia in 1915, and the Ottoman specialists are by no means convinced of the ‘genocide’. There is in fact an ‘A’ team of distinguished historians who do not accept the Diaspora line at all. In France, Gilles Veinstein, historian of Salonica and a formidable scholar, reviewed the evidence in a famous article of 1993 in L’Histoire. Back then the Armenian Diaspora were also jumping up and down about something or other, and Veinstein summed up the arguments for and against, in an admirably fair-minded way. The fact is that there is no proof of ‘genocide’, in the sense that no document ever appeared, indicating that the Armenians were to be exterminated. There is forged evidence.

(To read the continuation: http://www.turkishweekly.net/comments.php?id=2326)