12/20/2010
This is fascinating:
SOUTHERN POVERTY LAW CENTER charged with “unscholarly and unethical” efforts to cast doubt on Armenian genocide.The Inside Higher Ed piece they linked to startsPosted at 8:35 am by Glenn Reynolds
The Southern Poverty Law Center is among the premier civil rights organizations in the United States, known for taking on hate groups and defending the powerless.Which shows that Inside Higher Ed knows absolutely nothingabout the $PLC.
A group of leading genocide scholars this month sent the center a stinging letter, obtained by Inside Higher Ed, that charges the center with getting out of a lawsuit in part by assisting "unscholarly and unethical" efforts to cast doubt on the Armenian genocide.The answer is it was their lawyers. In talking about the Armenian Genocide, and what you might call "Armenian Genocide Denial," as is popular with the Turkish Government, they libeled elderly scholar Gunter Lewy, (author of The Armenian Massacres in Ottoman Turkey: A Disputed Genocide) saying, in effect, that he was a Turkish secret agent.(This is typical SPLC — if you disagree with whatever is the conventional wisdom, it must be because you have hidden ties to hate groups.)How could the Southern Poverty Law Center end up facing such an accusation?
Lewy doesn’t say that a lot of Armenians weren’t killed by a lot of Turks, he just denies that it was an organized plot by the Young Turks who were ruling Turkey at that time.
Anyhow, in apologizing to him (not because they were sorry, but because they'd been sued) for their smears of him, they apparently became so fulsome that they found themselves apologizing to the Turks as well, which has led to them being accused of being “unscholarly and unethical.”
Since I never considered them either scholarly or ethical in the first place, I’m not surprised, but apparently Inside Higher Ed is.
By the way, since I mentioned the original Young Turks above, I'll also mention that some of our writers have done interviews with the modern left-wing radio show The Young Turks, and here’s something I wrote about that:
"By the way, I assumed the program title was just a metaphor, that the kids who ran it were “Young Turks” in the dictionary sense of “an insurgent or a member of an insurgent group especially in a political party”, named after a pre-World War One student’s movement in Turkey. But it turns out that the main guy is called Cenk Uygur, who is an actual young Turk, or Turkish-American, who is on record as denying the Armenian genocide in a college paper. [Historical Fact or Falsehood?, By Cenk Uygur, November 20, Daily Pennsylvanian, November 20,1991]"
This is a content archive of VDARE.com, which Letitia James forced off of the Internet using lawfare.