Thursday, March 05, 2009

AMERICA'S EDUCATION: FUNDED BY THE TURKISH REPUBLIC

"The movie is done in the style of a documentary, the central thesis being the immutable racial personality traits that, according to Nazi doctrine, characterize the Jew as a wandering cultural parasite. Throughout the film, these supposed traits are contrasted to the Nazi state ideal. . . "
~ The Eternal Jew.


The other day I posted a short item on a disgusting documentary that the Turkish general staff produced and has forced on the school children of Turkey. In the comments to that post, JB, a regular reader of Rastî, dropped a dime on an organization that works for the Turkish general staff, and is attempting to brainwash American children and university students in the same manner that they're attempting to brainwash Turkish school children.

That organization, the Turkish Coalition of America, is closely linked to the Deep State and has created and founded an "academic" program to officially deny the Armenian genocide:


TCA and University of Utah Establish Turkish Program

The University of Utah and the Turkish Coalition of America are pleased to announce the establishment of a major new academic program, “The Origins of Modern Ethnic Cleansing: The Collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the Emergence of Nation States in the Balkans and Caucasus.”

This novel program will advance scholarship on a critical period in a region that continues to make headlines, in part due to the turbulent forces unleashed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. According to Project Director, Professor M. Hakan Yavuz, “Our new program will explore the shaping of modern Turkish identity through scholarly work, conferences, community participation, and support for new research, much of which will focus on a series of traumatic formative events including crises in the Balkans and the Caucasus, the loss of major territories, and forced migration that presaged the establishment of the Turkish Republic.”

Lincoln McCurdy, President of the Turkish Coalition of America expects this program to be particularly vital because it will produce a new cadre of scholars who will impact the study of Turkey and the surrounding region for years. To provide insight and guidance, a Partnership Board composed of recognized experts and leaders has been formed: Dr. Sukru Elekdag, Member of the Turkish Grand National Assembly and former Ambassador to the United States, Rifat Hisarciklioglu, President of the Union of Chambers and Commodity Exchanges of Turkey, Professor Yusuf Sarinay, Director of the State Archives of Turkey, Professor Norman Stone, Historian and Professor of International Relations at Bilkent University, and Alev Alatli, journalist and writer. The project is made possible thanks to a generous multi-year gift from the Turkish Coalition of America.


"The project is made possible thanks to a generous multi-year gift from the Turkish Coalition of America." Let me translate that for you: "The Turkish Republic is footing the bill to bring genocide denial to an institute of higher education near you". The news is found at TCA's website, but do the Google thing for that. Don't expect a link here.

Let's note something right off the bat. Lincoln McCurdy has a long history with the American Turkish Council (ATC), including having earned a "distinguished career award" from them. YOWZZA!! I mean, that would be like getting a "distinguished career award" from Şeytan himself. Here you go:


G. Lincoln McCurdy has over 30 years of leadership and management experience in both U.S. government service and the private sector. He has extensive experience in dealing with bi-national boards; working with senior officials of the governments and military of the United States and Turkey; leading trade/investment missions and U.S. congressional delegations to Turkey; co-sponsoring activities with the State and Commerce Departments, Environmental Protection Agency, Smithsonian Institute and National Public Radio; and fundraising.

He served as the senior advisor to the Turkish American Chamber of Commerce and Industry in New York in 2005 and 2006.

McCurdy was the president and chief executive officer, 1998 - 2004, and executive director, 1989 – 1998, of the American-Turkish Council (ATC) in Washington, the leading business association in the United States devoted to the promotion of U.S.-Turkish commercial, defense and cultural relations. He received ATC’s Distinguished Career Award in 2005.

Before joining ATC, Mr. McCurdy served in the American Consulate General in Istanbul as the Consul for Commercial Affairs, 1980 – 1984. In this capacity, he received the Department of State’s Meritorious Honor Award for “re-establishing American pre-eminence in the Istanbul International Business Community.” After government service, he consulted in Istanbul for five years for the Bank of Boston and several Turkish companies. In the late 1970s, he worked at the U.S. Department of Commerce in Washington, DC, organizing trade shows in Brazil.


Oh, yeah, he's in there deep. Real deep. He's one of those auctioned-off statesmen that Sibel Edmonds talked about. He's spent his life engaging in some serious licking of paşa backside to get where he is, and he's seeing to the education of young Americans?? Jaw-dropping. Absolutely jaw-dropping; but this little arrangement with the University of Utah confirms that most intellectuals, and academia in general, don't have a lick of sense.

The University of Utah Press published one of Justin McCarthy's books, The Armenian Rebellion in Van. McCarthy, who wrote a 284-page teachers' manual on Turkey--helpfully including the URL to the TSK's website, among others--addressed the TBMM on the Armenian "Question" in 2005, in which he basically said that the Armenians were asking for "It". "It" being the genocide. "It" being self-defense on the part of Ottoman Turks.

The University of Utah Press also published Guenther Lewy's The Armenian Massacres in Ottoman Turkey: A Disputed Genocide. Lewy is a weird kind of guy--a professional genocide denier. He denies not only the Armenian genocide, but also the Nazi genocide of the Gypsies, the American genocide of the Native Americans, and he contends that American atrocities in Vietnam were faked. He also writes for--surprise, surprise, surprise!--the official publication of the American Enterprise Institute, The Middle East Quarterly, edited by Michael Rubin (a rebuttal by Armenian scholar Vahakn Dadrian to Lewy's article may be found halfway down the page here).

It looks like the University of Utah is ground zero for scholarly genocide denial. In what seems like another coincidence, in April 2007 Yusuf Kanlı mentioned that many of the leaks against the TSK were coming from Utah. Could it be that the Fethullahçı are also involved in the denial? It wouldn't come as a shock to me.

Interestingly enough, as late as November 2008 Lewy brought a lawsuit against the Southern Poverty Law Center. The suit that is being funded by the Turkish American Legal Defense Fund (TALDF). Bruce Fein and David Saltzman, among TCA's board of directors and officers, are Lewy's attorneys in the action. Coincidentally, Fein and Saltzman are the contact guys at the TALDF. Isn't that cozy? But why is Lewy suing the SPLC? Because they wrote the truth:


Early this year, the Toronto District School Board voted to require all public high school students in Canada's largest city to complete a new course titled "Genocide: Historical and Contemporary Implications." It includes a unit on the Armenian genocide, in which more than a million Armenians perished in a methodical and premeditated scheme of annihilation orchestrated by the rulers of Turkey during and just after World War I.

The school board members each soon received a letter from Guenter Lewy, a professor emeritus of political science at the University of Massachusetts, rebuking them for classifying the Armenian genocide in the same category as the Holocaust. "The tragic fate of the Armenian community during World War I," Lewy wrote, is best understood as "a badly mismanaged war-time security measure," rather than a carefully plotted genocide.

Lewy is one of the most active members of a network of American scholars, influence peddlers and website operators, financed by hundreds of thousands of dollars each year from the government of Turkey, who promote the denial of the Armenian genocide — a network so influential that it was able last fall to defy both historical truth and enormous political pressure to convince America's lawmakers and even its president to reverse long-held policy positions.


The SPLC goes on to describe the Ankara regime's efforts to wipe the Armenian Genocide from America's history books:


The first unassailable evidence of the extent of the Armenian genocide denial industry's reach in academic circles arrived in 1990 in an envelope addressed to Robert Jay Lifton, a professor of psychology and psychiatry at the City University of New York's Graduate Center and John Jay College. It contained a letter signed by Nuzhet Kandemir, who was then Turkey's ambassador to the United States, protesting Lifton's inclusion of several passing references to the Armenian genocide in his prize-winning book The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide.

"It is particularly disturbing to see a major scholar on the holocaust, a tragedy whose enormity and barbarity must never be forgotten, so careless in his references to a field outside his own area of expertise," Kandemir wrote. "To compare a tragic civil war perpetrated by misguided Armenian nationalists, and the human suffering it wrought on both Muslim and Christian populations, with the horrors of a premeditated attempt to systematically eradicate a people is, to anyone familiar with the history in question, simply ludicrous."

There was nothing out of the ordinary about Kandemir's letter. Academics who write about the Armenian genocide were then and still are routinely castigated by Turkish authorities.

What Lifton found intriguing, however, was a second letter in the envelope, which the Turkish ambassador had included quite by accident. It was a memo to Kandemir from Near East historian Heath Lowry, in which Lowry provided Kandemir with a point-by-point cheat sheet on how to attack Lifton's book, which Lowry chummily referred to as "our problem."

Lowry at the time was the founding director of the Institute for Turkish Studies. He resigned that position in 1996 when he was selected from a field of 20 candidates to fill the Ataturk Chair of Turkish Studies at Princeton University, a new position in the Near Eastern Studies department that was created with a $750,000 matching grant from the government of Turkey.

Prior to joining the Princeton faculty, Lowry had never held a full-time teaching position and had not published a single work of scholarship through a major publishing house. As a result of that and of what The Boston Globe described in 1995 as his work as "a long-time lobbyist for the Turkish government," his appointment sparked a firestorm of controversy. A protest group called Princeton Alumni for Credibility published a petition decrying Lowry's appointment that was signed by more than 80 leading scholars and writers, including Kurt Vonnegut, Arthur Miller, Cornel West, Joyce Carol Oates and many historians and experts in genocide.


This may be just another coincidence, but Justin McCarthy is currently a member of the board of The Institute of Turkish Studies.

There was something on the matter from the History News Network:


Turkey’s government also has been quick to identify American scholars (there are only a handful, but Turkey knows them all) who back its view that the right approach to 1915 is not to call it genocide, but to figure out what to call it, and what actually took place.

Normally, you might expect historians to welcome the interest of governments in convening scholars to explore questions of scholarship. But in this case, scholars who study the period say that the leaders of Turkey and the United States — along with that handful of scholars — are engaged in a profoundly anti-historical mission: trying to pretend that the Armenian genocide remains a matter of debate instead of being a long settled question. Much of the public discussion of the Congressional resolution has focused on geopolitics: If the full House passes the resolution, will Turkey end its help for U.S. military activities in Iraq?


This article notes that the Ankara regime has stepped up its denial efforts at a time when access to Ottoman documentation is beginning to provide "even more solid evidence of the intent of the Turkish authorities to slaughter the Armenians." Furthermore, many of those breaking ground in this field, are ethnic Turks:


Among the scholars attracting the most attention for work on the genocide is Taner Akçam, a historian from Turkey who has been a professor at the University of Minnesota since 2001, when officials in Turkey stepped up criticism of his work. Akçam has faced death threats and has had legal charges brought against him in Turkey (since dropped) for his work, which directly focuses on the question of the culpability of Young Turk leaders in planning and executing the genocide. (Akçam’s Web site has details about his research and the Turkish campaigns against him.) Opposition to his work from Turkey has been particularly intense since the publication last year of A Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility.

[ . . . ]

Another scholar from Turkey working on the Armenian genocide is Fatma Müge Göçek, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Michigan. Until she came to Princeton to earn her Ph.D., Göçek said that she didn’t know about the Armenian genocide. For that matter, she said she didn’t know that Armenians lived in Turkey — “and I had the best education Turkey has to offer.”

Learning the full history was painful, she said, and started for her when Armenians she met at Princeton talked to her about it and she was shocked and angry. Upon reading the sorts of materials she never saw in Turkey, the evidence was clear, she said.


So are these Armenian Genocide deniers working purely out of the goodness of their hearts? I find that impossible to believe, especially when former ATC presidents and CEO's are involved. I find that impossible to believe when the Ankara regime is funding all of these lies, and not only against the Armenians. The regime, hand-in-hand with the TCA, is doing the same thing regarding Macedonia:


Today, the Cyprus Action Network of America (CANA) was informed of major Turkish lobby financing of “The United Macedonian Diaspora (UMD)” . The UMD is a newly formed organization in Washington DC, dedicated to advancing false historical revisionism on Macedonia, in support of the irredentist, fascistic, and anti-Hellenic Skopje government.

According to a press release issued by the UMD today “The United Macedonian Diaspora (UMD) and the Turkish Coalition of America (TCA) are pleased to announce a generous challenge-matching grant of $150,000. Over the next three years, TCA will match every dollar donated to UMD up to a maximum of $50,000 per year equaling a total fundraising goal of $300,000. This gracious gift will allow UMD to expand its work dramatically and, for the first time, retain a full-time Executive Director.” (Full comments can be read below).

The Turkish Coalition of America (TCA) is another recently formed organization in Washington DC following on the heels of scandals surrounding testimony by FBI whistleblower Sibel Edmonds, and reports of FBI wiretaps of the Turkish Embassy and its allies the Assembly of Turkish American Associations (ATAA) and the American Turkish Council (ATC). Articles in Vanity Fair and Sunday Times, and in 2007, public advocacy requests for a Congressional hearing on the Sibel Edmonds case bring up charges of illegal arms deals, illegal drug activities, money laundering, influence-peddling, and racketeering, obstruction of justice, bribery, espionage and treason. David Rose, contributing editor to Vanity Fair, wrote the expose on the FBI wiretaps of the Turkish Embassy and its allies in relation to the scandal. (An Inconvenient Patriot by David Rose, Vanity Fair/September 2005).


Wow! Could it be that the ATC, ATAA, and others, are pushing their initials around into new configurations because Sibel's determination to out them and all of their shitty laundry has damaged their credibility? Bijî Sibel!

The Ankara regime's efforts to deny the Armenian Genocide is not just an Armenian problem. Until the regime comes clean on what happened in 1915, it's not going to come clean on what happened in 1925. Or in 1937. Or in 1980. Or in 1984. Or in the 1990s. Or today. For those reasons, in addition to the fact that some Kurds did take part in the Genocide, denial of the Armenian Genocide is not an option for Kurds. It must be acknowledged and admitted, as it was by Öcalan and the Kurdish Parliament in Exile in the 1990s.

Otherwise, as JB commented, "THE ETERNAL ARMENIAN" will become "THE ETERNAL KURD".

10 comments:

Anonymous said...

"The Ankara regime's efforts to deny the Armenian Genocide is not just an Armenian problem. Until the regime comes clean on what happened in 1915, it's not going to come clean on what happened in 1925. Or in 1937. Or in 1980. Or in 1984. Or in the 1990s. Or today. For those reasons, in addition to the fact that some Kurds did take part in the Genocide, denial of the Armenian Genocide is not an option for Kurds. It must be acknowledged and admitted, as was by Öcalan and the Kurdish Parliament in Exile in the 1990s."

Rast beji. Her biji Mizgin!

mishka said...

As you cleary state Mizgîn, by denying the genocide and other atrocities the kemalist state of Turkey will perpetuate them. What's even worse is that the Turkish lobbyists have close ties with the Israel lobby. But then again fascism comes cheap.

Anonymous said...

In a sharply worded protest to Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the Middle East Studies Association on May 27 condemned the forced resignation of Donald Quataert from the chair of the Institute of Turkish Studies after Prof. Quataert affirmed in a book review that “what happened to the Armenians readily satisfies the U.N. definition of genocide.” “Institute of Turkish Studies chair was ousted for acknowledging Genocide: Middle East scholars protest Turkish government interference in academic freedom,” Armenian Reporter, May 31, 2008

While the identity of the Ankara-based officials who allegedly threatened to defund the Washington-based Institute of Turkish Studies in 2006 remains an open question, three past or present Turkish ambassadors controlled the scholarly institute’s endowment at that time, Internal Revenue Service records show. Among them was Şükrü Elekdağ, the institute’s founding honorary chairperson and a forceful opponent of Armenian Genocide recognition. “Politics, scholarship, and the Armenian Genocide: Perspectives on the ITS scandal,” Armenian Reporter, July 19, 2008

Anonymous said...

The situation was changing in October 2000, as Ankara lobbied furiously against another U.S. House resolution on the Armenian Genocide. Mr. Elekdağ in his Milliyet newspaper column complained that the “69 scholars” petition had become useless because, with the exception of Justin McCarthy, none of the original signers were prepared to sign a similar communiqué.

By the time H. Res. 596 was shelved a few weeks later, Mr. Elekdağ had come to the “chilling realization” that only “accidental” developments had averted the collapse of U.S.-Turkey relations. “Turkey must take measures” against a new resolution, Mr. Elekdağ declared. In particular, “the Washington-based Institute of Turkish Studies has lost its function and its effectiveness. It should be dissolved and replaced by a new Turkish think-tank.”

Armenian Reporter, July 19, 2008

KB said...

And let's not forget that Univ of Utah is the home of Hakan Yavuz...professed scholar of Kurds in Turkey. http://kurdistancommentary.wordpress.com/2008/12/22/review-of-hakan-yavuz-five-stages-of-construction-of-kurdish-nationalism-in-turkey/

--KB

Anonymous said...

Hakan Yavuz wrote together with Michael Gunter about Kurds. Gunter sometimes have pro-PKK sympathies and visited Ocalan and wrote about Ocalan's defence after he was caught. I doubt Yavuz work for the 'Turkish deep state'.

Anonymous said...

General Staff's plan to "reshape" Turkey
http://www.taraf.com.tr/haber/10772.htm
Berfo

Anonymous said...

Bilgi, just because Yavuz wrote with Gunter, it doesn't mean he is not affiliated with the deep state. When Turkey doesn't pay Gunter and the payment is due, he reminds them with a slight dose of fair or "pro-PKK" view. Mehmet Ali Birand and many other reporters/writers have visited Ocalan too. I don't think it means much.

Berfo

Mizgîn said...

. . . only “accidental” developments had averted the collapse of U.S.-Turkey relations.

Oh, yeah, Anonymous. It was SO accidental how all that Turkish drug/bribe money landed in Hastert's lap.

The more they deny the dumber they look. and they've already started another round of pressure since Kerdogan's stupidity at Davos so we'll just have to wait and see if Obama's administration is going to be change we can believe in :P

KB, Hakan Yavuz is as good a scholar of Kurds as he is of Armenians.

Bilgi, Gunter's reputation is not quite sterling among Kurds from Turkey. He's been suspected of having CIA connections for some time and I STRONGLY suspect him of the same. Therefore, your argument for clearing Yavuz of ties to the Deep State simply doesn't wash.

Thanks for the reminder, Berfo. Here's something on that from June.

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