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Is it fair to pick on Thomas O'Dwyer? After all,
he is only one of so many journalists accepting claims of Armenian propaganda
at face value. Unfortunately, an article spotlighting his blind partisanship
caught my eye, and it's only fair to reveal his shoddy journalistic standards.
Not that he may otherwise be a shoddy journalist; but because of his apparent
prejudices against Turks, he has committed the unpardonable sin among
professional journalists: to rely 100% on one side of an issue, and one that
is a propagandistic one at that.
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Thomas O'Dwyer's biographies make sure to tell us he is from
Ireland, and he is described as "one of the most experienced journalists in the
Middle East." We learn that he lived in Cyprus for nine years, and that he "became
editor of the Cyprus Mail before being hired to open the first permanent Reuters office in
Nicosia." "Cyprus," of course, means Greek Cyprus. We can be sure Mr.
O'Dwyer did not escape the prevalent anti-Turkish atmosphere during his near-decade long
stint, and that he would see anything but eye-to-eye with Irish M.P. Sean Power, who had a refreshing bead on
Cypriot realities.
("For several years he wrote the Cyprus sections of the
Encyclopedia Britannica Yearbook and The Annual Register of World Events."
Great!)
He later moved to Israel, becoming foreign editor and columnist for
The Jerusalem Post; his column was later featured in Ha'aretz.
That is the newspaper where this unbelievable commentary on the
Armenian "Genocide" appeared, entitled "Nothing Personal / Among the
deniers," and dated May 9, 2003. It may be accessed here.
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The boo-hoo'ing begins with "If the victims of
genocides cannot depend on the support of the descendants of the Holocaust — where
on earth will anyone ever find truth and justice?" Thankfully, we
have Mr. O'Dwyer to sanctimoniously tell us that the Armenian experience
should be termed a "genocide," without paying note to certain basics of the 1948 United Nations
Convention on Genocide.
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Deborah
Lipstadt, from a PBS show on Auschwitz |
He drops Deborah Lipstadt's name without being
aware that Ms. Lipstadt herself had earlier (in "Denying the Holocaust")
concluded the Armenian experience "was not part of a process of total
annihilation of an entire people."
Apparently, Ms. Lipstadt herself has a short
memory: "'Outrageous,' is how Deborah Lipstadt, the defeater of deniers, has
described the Turkish denial. 'The Turks have managed to structure this debate so
that people question whether this really happened'." Whether what
really happened? Massacres? The Turks don't deny that. Genocide? Now, there are
certain definitions of genocide where only one person needs to be killed in order to be construed as a
genocide. This is what waters down the word and makes it essentially meaningless.
Yes, the U.N. Convention does state "in whole or part." So if Lipstadt is
zeroing in on the "in part" part (as she must, because we know from her
earlier quote that she is aware what occurred did not have the goal of annihilation
for all), then she is not being honest, because there is no evidence of intent
even for the "in part" part; more importantly, the Armenian mythology is
put on the same plane as the Holocaust. She is implying that what "really
happened" was on a parallel with
the Holocaust. If that's the case, then this "defeater of deniers" is
defeating herself, as she herself had distanced the Armenian episode from the
Holocaust. (These "genocide scholars" have a tendency to get much too
emotional, forgetting reason and, what's worse, ethics. )
"After a newspaper item appeared on
Sunday saying that a government brochure mentioned that a 'third generation survivor
of the Armenian holocaust in 1915' would light a torch at the Independence Day
ceremony, Turkish embassy hysteria went into its customary overdrive in
protest."
It never occurs to biased partisans as O'Dwyer
that the reason why there is protest is not because crimes are being deliberately
covered up — the Turks admit Armenians were massacred, in stark contrast to
pro-Armenians who won't utter a peep about the horrendous crimes of the Armenians' own forefathers — but
because the charges are unsubstantiated. Let's see how much Thomas O'Dwyer would
like being accused of a ruinous crime based on hearsay, and whether he would not be
"in denial." Look at that demeaning word he uses, by the way:
"Hysteria." What form did this protest take? Was the Turkish embassy
running through the streets half-naked and screeching?
Here we go with the usual mindless blather: "The
Ottoman Empire ethnically cleansed and murdered 1.5 million
Armenians between 1915 and 1918." Is this the kind of sloppiness we
can expect from "one of the most experienced
journalists in the Middle East"? A responsible journalist would make sure to
substantiate the facts. This fellow is completely content to amateurishly rely on
propagandistic sources.
The pre-war population, according to most
"neutral" sources (that is, Western, and pro-Armenian) of the period was
around 1.5 million. For example, the Encyclopedia Britannica said so in its 1911
edition. Mr. O'Dwyer must have respect for that work, since he has been recruited to
contribute what must surely be his slanted views on Cyprus for this work.
He goes on to amateurishly inform us that "About
600,000 survived." Does that mean 1.5 million minus 1.5 million would equal
600,000?
He is taking the propagandistic pre-war number
of the Armenian Patriarch's 2.1 million. He has no idea that the Patriarch himself broke down his own inflated number as
such, at the very end of 1918: 1,260,000 survivors, and 840,000 dead. It's
beginning to look more and more that he is the kind of journalist that would make
cub reporter Jimmy Olsen seem like Edward R. Murrow.
Of course, the Patriarch exaggerated on both
ends of his inflated figure. (When he was in a different mood, the Patriarch's
pre-war population went down to a more realistic, but still inflated, figure of
1,850,000, as Holy Man Johannes Lepsius swore at the 1921 Berlin trial of Talat
Pasha's assassin.) But look at how deeply Thomas O'Dwyer embarrasses himself.
Hard-line Armenian propagandists don't go as high as the Patriarch's figure of
1,260,000 survivors, but even they have a consensus
for one million survivors. Yet, this amateur journalist outdoes even the
hardcore propagandists, by citing a figure of almost half.
Those who cite from propaganda become
propagandists. These blind proponents of Armenian propaganda seem to have no idea
how their practices can reflect on the credibility of the rest of their work. Why
should we trust anything a propagandistic reporter has to tell us?
But he really outdoes himself by writing, "the
government sanctioned raids by Turkish soldiers, who destroyed whole Armenian
villages, not sparing even the women or the children."
Shame on Thomas O'Dwyer for writing such an
incriminating statement as that without the proof. We know he has no proof, because
that is exactly what the British had set out to prove during the 1919-21 Malta Tribunal process. They couldn't
come up with a single shred of factual evidence; instead, they learned firsthand
about what a liar the Armenian Patriarch was, whose reports they almost solely
relied on at the outset.
"Modern Turkey continues to vehemently
deny these crimes against humanity and fights ferociously around the globe to bury
the historical facts. And again this week — and not for the first time — we have
witnessed the State of Israel's complicity in the lie, because it is scared of
upsetting its only friend in the Muslim states."
When has aggressive Israel ever made moves
based on being "scared"? Is this fellow actually trying to tell us Nobel
Prize winner Shimon Peres would make a statement to the tune of "We
reject attempts to create a similarity between the Holocaust and the Armenian
allegations. Nothing similar to the Holocaust occurred. It is a tragedy what the
Armenians went through but not a genocide," because Peres would have been
afraid?
The Armenian foreign minister is pointed to as
having stated,
"Israel has to show a moral authority since we have gone through a similar
history and experience." Quite the contrary, Israel has a moral
responsibility for the Jewish victims of the Holocaust. Comparing their plight with
the victims of an unproven genocide would be deeply disrespecting their memory. And
proof is not gathered by pointing to those such as Yehuda Bauer, as O'Dwyer has
done. (Bauer: "We and many others have accepted the United Nations
definition of genocide and there can be no argument about [the Armenian case] being
genocide") If these genocide-sensitive individuals are blinded by emotion,
we can put their testimony in the same category as the sources the British
themselves had dispensed with during the Malta Tribunal, when the British tried
desperately to come up with real evidence. The reason? As their embassy in
Washington stated, once rejecting the material from the U.S. archives, what was
offered all boiled down to "personal opinions."
(Another Bauer opinion, this one not as
Armenian-friendly: “We should properly use the term “Holocaust” to describe
the policy of total physical annihilation of a nation or a people. To date, this has
happened once, to the Jews under Nazism.” From "The Holocaust in
Historical Perspective," P. 38. Bauer had better be careful, otherwise he may
face the wrath of Harut
Sassounian... known to charge anyone daring to proclaim the Armenian experience
'is not entirely analogous to the Jewish
Holocaust" as having an "anti-Armenian Genocide stance.")
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The office of Turkey's chief
rabbi said in a statement: "We stress that the genocide of six million Jews in
the Holocaust in World War II should not be compared to any other event and should not
be overshadowed by so-called genocide claims."
The statement said inclusion in
the British ceremony of "so-called genocides or claims unconfirmed by
historians" was disturbing to Turkish Jews.
"This comparison is
considered disrespectful to the souls of the six million victims (of the Nazi
Holocaust)."
From the CNN report, "Europe remembers the Holocaust," January 27,
2001 |
"The British for many decades denied responsibility for the
Irish
potato famine that killed an estimated two million people and sent
another two million into exile - because it was a natural disaster -
although history recorded full well that the British were taking
convoys of food out of Ireland under armed guard. It took Tony Blair to admit
responsibility 150 years later, and apologize, to lay the shame to rest."
No, there are still plenty of folks who consider the Irish Famine as
another example of "genocide," a contention a good few Irish historians disagree
with. Tony Blair did not say the Irish Famine amounted to a "genocide," so this
"shame" is not at rest among those who are genocide-batty. What Turkey is being
asked to do is to acknowledge these events as a "genocide," and O'Dwyer's
parallel simply does not fit.
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"Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation
of the
Armenians?" asked Adolf Hitler when persuading his fellow thugs that a Jewish
extermination would be tolerated by the West.
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Thomas
O'Dwyer, late 1990s |
Boy, Thomas O'Dwyer is really out of control.
Not only is that statement in reference to the Poles, and not the Jews, but there is
no evidence that Hitler actually uttered those words. But at this point, I think we are justified in asking
what does "evidence" matter to Thomas O'Dwyer?
But at least he tries to offer more
"genocide evidence"; being the faithful proponent of propaganda that he
is, he points to the August 1, 1926 Ataturk interview from The
Los Angeles Examiner. But if he had taken the time to inspect
that hoax, he would have discovered it's an "interview" in the form of a
first-person article written by Ataturk. (In other words, the article does not even
know what it is.) There are many other discrepancies
about this piece that a professional journalist would instinctively question,
assuming the journalist is professional enough to look beneath the easy surface.
O'Dwyer shares a little whining with us:
"When we have the word of Ataturk
himself, we don't need to be accused of 'pandering to the views of the enemies and
haters of Turks' as one Turkish diplomat once wrote to me for daring to question the
lie. I assume he meant the Kurds - who for decades 'didn't exist' either in Turkish
myth except as 'mountain Turks'."
He sure proved himself to pander to the
"enemies and
haters of Turks" by trying to be funny about the Kurds. No, the "lie"
referred to the so-called genocide. What O'Dwyer did here was add salt to the wound
by telling us a genocidal people as the Turks, a people who can do no right, also
did a number on the Kurds. We can no longer be certain whether he is pandering to
the haters of Turks, or whether he has become one of those very haters.
And, no, we don't have "the word of
Ataturk himself." If we resort to the word of Ataturk, then we go to a real
interview, as the one in the March 27, 1921 issue of Pennsylvania's The Public
Ledger, conducted by Clarence Streit. There, Atatürk had focused on the "conspiratorial
nature of Armenian armed attacks, the bloodshed and massacre caused by them,
endorsed by General Harbord as well." Click on the last link to learn more.
But in case he has not convinced you that he is
100% in line with Armenian propaganda, he embarrasses himself further by quoting
from Lord Bryce... who just happened
to be in charge of the Turkish division of Wellington House, Britain's war propaganda division! How's that
for some genuine, neutral testimony?
He actually has the nerve to present this bit:
After the German ambassador persistently brought up the Armenian question in
1918, Talat Pasha said "with a smile": "What on earth do you want?
The question is settled. There are no more Armenians."
The Armenian Patriarch himself testified the majority of Armenians had survived at
the tail end of 1918, and Talat Pasha was going to say "there are no more
Armenians"??
The quote is one that the notorious Vahakn
Dadrian had translated from 1936's "Memoirs of Count Bernstorff," but
anyone who trusts Dadrian's willful manipulations would have to have rocks in his
head. Unless the German ambassador was another Christian-sympathizing bigot, perhaps
the intention here was that the Armenians had been "deported," meaning
there were fewer left... and Dadrian twisted this around to mean
"extermination." Or perhaps Bernstoff had no idea what was really taking
place, like his American ambassadorial counterpart, Henry Morgenthau. As George
Schreiner wrote in his preface to “The Craft Sinister,” in criticism of
Morgenthau, "It is to be hoped that the future historian will not give too
much heed to the drivel one finds in the books of diplomatist-authors.”
O'Dwyer has done a wonderful job in visiting
Armenian sites to mindlessly present these quotations. His last offering is one from
"Prince Abdul Mecid, the heir apparent to the Ottoman Throne." When
one runs a search, one can find plenty of Armenian sites who have dutifully
reproduced this quotation. What's missing is the source; the more unethical among
the Armenians have made an art form of putting murderous words into Ottoman
officials' mouths. This kind of substantiation, we can see, is a big annoyance to
Thomas O'Dwyer.
The frightening thing is that O'Dwyer comes
across as a "humanist," in his participation with an organization called
"Opendemocracy," which states that it "stands for human rights and
democracy." How can one be a proponent of "human rights" when one
accepts one form of human as more equal to another? (No word about the suffering of
Turks, from Mr. O'Dwyer; everything is straight down the middle, black and white,
good and evil, where he is concerned.) He also serves as editor of Coexist
International Magazine, which champions the "coexistence ideal." On its
International advisory board are Gunduz Aktan and Prof. Vamik D. Volkan. Hopefully,
O'Dwyer's Turcophobia will be lessened, if he values the opinions of these
gentlemen.
Harut Sassounian, activist publisher of
The California Courier, was so delighted by this "neutral" observer's
stance, he made sure to highlight this awful Ha'aretz article in one of his awful
columns. ("Irish Writer Slams Israel's Stand," 07/31/2003)
"Contacted by phone in Israel, O'Dwyer
told this writer that even though he is an Irishman, he was deeply offended by the
double standard practiced by the Israeli government on the Armenian Genocide. He
wanted to give the Israeli officials a piece of his mind. He did not mince his
words."
He sure did not mince his words. Too bad
O'Dwyer has a double standard regarding his evaluation of double standards. It
doesn't look like he is at all offended about Armenian extermination tactics, when
they brutally murdered hundreds of thousands of other Ottomans.
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