Emre Yücel

Today, the harbinger of racism emanating in the public is not only coming from a fanatic bugle of defamatory propaganda but also from lack of objectivity and double standards in the mainstream media. Worse; ignorant self-ordained ace-reporters, who copy from each other, just like they have done for the past 200 years and more, continue copying to produce ‘accessible’ publications in voluminous quantities with prejudicial judgment that the genocide occurred, and that the Turks are to blame for it. Turks have become this century’s scapegoat. Any time Armenian genocide is mentioned, proponents of the idea are treated as heroes, defending an irrefutable and undisputable fact against the relentlessly evil Turk! Thus, heroes’ words must be hailed. Heroes’ voices must be repeated everywhere and the voice of the evil Turk must be canceled.

This is exaclty what is happenning now: any time, any contra-argument is heard, it is completely canceled before any opportunity to lay out the inconsistencies, the impossibilities, and the lack of evidence. For example, a recent Washington Post article on the Disney+ decision not to release a program on Ataturk as a result of mounting pressure from the Armenian National Committee of America (ANCA: an Armenian American organization rooted from the terrorist organization of ASALA) didn’t see a problem of referencing Armenian Genocide in the same words enchanted by the fanatic Armenian terrorists;

              ‘Historians estimate that 1.5 million Armenians, Assyrians and Greeks were killed in a campaign of forced marches and mass killings between 1915 and 1923, born out of Ottoman concerns that Christian communities would align with Russia during World War I. Armenians argue that the latter stages of the genocide were overseen by Ataturk once he took office.’[1]

This happened despite there was a ‘Standards desk’ formed at the Washington Post.

In fact, a concerned citizen wrote an article to the Standards Desk on this issue.

Washington Post did not respond at the time of publishing of this notification.

We are sharing his response below for your reading pleasure:

“Liz Seymour, Deputy Managing Editor (Standards and Planning)
Carrie Camillo, Standards Editor
Meghan Ashford-Grooms, Standards Editor
The Washington Post

August 8, 2023

Dear Ms. Seymour, Ms. Camillo and Ms. Ashford-Grooms,

We are happy to learn there is a new sheriff in town, since the beginning of this year. We hope the three of you are sincere and dedicated to “Ensure that the newsroom meets the Post’s rigorous criteria for fairness and accuracy.” (As you have put it on your Linkedin page, Ms. Camillo.) We are very familiar with WaPo’s Standards and Ethics Guidelines, but we are also painfully aware of how your newspaper has been intentionally substituting fiction for facts on the subject of concern, and for the longest time.

Marty Baron has received many letters from us over the years, shared with many from WaPo in the hope there would be some who actually care about journalistic ethics. Unfortunately, prejudice against those of our heritage is too deeply ingrained, and there is a mysterious agenda at work, where truth is regarded as a four-letter-word.

What is called the “Armenian genocide” has come to be commonly accepted after 1971-1997 Armenian terrorists (over 600 killed and injured for this cause) conducted violence, and the frauds known as “genocide scholars” (who begin with a conclusion, instead of building up to one) conducted smear campaigns against true historians, chasing them away. (Here are sixty-nine who protested to Congress in 1985; once they were intimidated and left/died, there have been no new replacements.)

The idea of this evidenceless charge is to uphold the worst negative racial stereotype in existence, that of the “Terrible Turk,” which teaches the ones with Turkish ethnicity possess a gene compelling these half-humans to kill. In addition, nothing unites a people more effectively than a common enemy, and Orthodox Christians are often groomed on anti-Turkish hatred since childhood; Greeks and Assyrians, and especially Armenians have made an art form of this driving force. (When Serbs wiped out fellow Slavs at Srebrenica, the victims were derogatorily referred to as “Turks.”) It’s not enough for the hatred to be shared among themselves; their hatred must also be transferred to as many outsiders as possible (Christian Europe and the USA, and Jewish people who are over-emotional about the Holocaust, have made for very willing accomplices).

(In addition, as The Washington Post reported on October 9, 2000: “The Armenian Assembly has also made allies with Greek Americans and human rights groups, longtime critics of Turkey.” Those from the world of human rights, perceived as unimpeachable, only defend the humans they determine to be the right kind of human. When those who pretend to be against hatred exercise racism, they become far more dangerous than traditional hate groups.)

“Armenian genocide” articles are all practically carbon copies of each other, including the many that have been published in The Washington Post, by highly biased journalists and editors, who all have access to the internet, but choose not to conduct honest research.

Typically, the articles claim there were 1.5 million Armenians who were exterminated in the thick of a life-and-death war which ended in death for the Ottoman Empire (since WaPo has been fully in line with the forces of darkness that democracy dies in, now Greeks and Assyrians have included themselves as genocide victims, and no one objects, or cares to ask for any evidence), between 1915-1923, when WWI ended in 1918, the Young Turks fled, and key regions of the defeated nation were occupied and ruled by the Allies for the next five years. (Genocides cannot occur without someone being in charge.) For balance, instead of referring to the works of that endangered species of genuine historians, or primary “neutral” sources from the period (neutral in this case mainly meaning the ones with antipathy against Turks who let the truth slip out, as with missionaries), the “Turkey says” ploy is used, in the knowledge no one will take that villain of villains, Turkey, seriously.

The latest debacle by your newspaper was published on August 2, and entitled “Turkey Investigates Reported Cancellation of Disney Plus Series on Ataturk,” by the highly partisan “journalist” named Joe Snell, who is an Assyrian-American. Ms. Seymour, Ms. Camillo and Ms. Ashford-Grooms, assuming you take your jobs seriously and your hands are not tied by that mysterious agenda, we would like you to pay attention to the following claims from the article.

1) “Ataturk’s role in the Armenian genocide” was Joe Snell’s wording from the article that allowed for readers to think Ataturk was driven to kill Armenians for some inexplicable reason. Let’s put aside the fact that there was no “Armenian genocide,” since there is no evidence for it, as even the British failed to discover while combing through the archives of several nations, including their own, our nation’s archives as a desperate last resort, as well as the Ottoman archives in British-occupied Istanbul from 1919-21, in preparation for the planned Nuremberg of the British, the abortive Malta Tribunal. (For example, “…the ABSENCE OF LEGAL EVIDENCE…” British archives, F. O. 371/6504/E.8745, Minutes by Edmonds of 3.8.1921, PDF p. 35). It is highly immoral to make a false criminal accusation, as any of us would be the first to admit were we to be on the receiving end.

Ataturk was never or rarely cited in the more than half-century of this obsessive propaganda until recently, since these forces of darkness have the full blessing of outlets such as WaPo and can get away with any claim. (The goal is to demonize all things Turkish, and the haters realized what a coup it would be to also smear the savior of Turkey.) Ataturk was an officer involved in the invasion of Gallipoli in 1915, located in western Anatolia, and he had nothing to do with Armenians, who resided primarily in the east. Even if this claim were real, and Ottomans really tried to exterminate Armenians, by implicating Ataturk, Joe Snell made a blatant falsehood.

He later wrote, “Armenians argue that the latter stages of the genocide were overseen by Ataturk once he took office.” Although he made it seem at this later point that this was the notion of Armenians, it was Joe Snell who began the piece by making it seem Ataturk’s role in this “genocide” is not to be questioned. He offered nothing to make the reader think otherwise, even though standards requires for “opposing voices” (which becomes even more essential when a criminal charge is involved).

He did write that Ataturk became president in 1923, which was the year that he “took office.” Since Mr. Snell wrote that Ataturk only became interested in killing Armenians for some inexplicable reason “once he took office,”  was Joe Snell suggesting his beloved “genocide” went beyond 1923? Even the vicious propaganda has not gone that far.

To lull readers’ minds into thinking Ataturk was a genocidal maniac, here was the only “evidence” offered by Joe Snell: “Ataturk completed the last stages of the crime; he denied it and then consolidated the fruits of that atrocity and set the stage for basically a century of Turkey obstructing justice for that crime,” said Aram Hamparian, executive director of the Armenian National Committee of America (ANCA).

Ms. Seymour, Ms. Camillo and Ms. Ashford-Grooms, please review the section, “Verification and Fact-Checking Standards” in this page for WaPo Ethics, which states, “The Post has a multilevel structure for the review and editing of stories that may include fact-checking,” and then describes the editors (where there may be more than one, including assignment editors and copy editors) who provide “initial review.”

Joe Snell may be somewhat excused, since his ethnicity gives him trouble distancing himself from his emotions (if he can’t be objective here, he could easily be the same with other articles, which means he has no business working as a journalist, especially for a newspaper that touts such high standards), but is it to be assumed that WaPo employs an editor or editors who actually took the foregoing seriously as “evidence”? The “say so” of a hateful Armenian lobbying group..? That editor or editors would then need to be reprimanded, if not fired, since they have shown they have no conception of what “neutrality” means.

When there was a post-WWI war between Turkey and Armenia which was provoked by Armenia (according to Armenia’s first prime minister, Hovhannes Katchaznouni, who also admitted in his 1923 manifesto, “In the Fall of 1914 Armenian volunteer bands organized themselves and fought against the Turks.” This was done in the belief that “Turkey would be defeated and dismembered”; Armenians colluded with the enemy — Katchaznouni: “We had embraced Russia wholeheartedly” — and rebelled en masse, leading to their temporary relocation that halted for the most part by the Fall of 1915, that is, what has been turned into a “genocide”), even hateful missionaries serving as eyewitnesses are on record for describing Ataturk’s actions as thoroughly professional (if Ataturk was genocidal, wouldn’t the total defeat of Armenia have provided opportunity to exterminate the inhabitants?), and the great number of Western eyewitnesses were impressed with the degree of professionalism when Izmir (“Smyrna”) was liberated in 1921. Ataturk did not commit any crimes against Armenians.

2) Ataturk “is so widely celebrated in Turkey today that insulting his name is a criminal offense.”

There was an ‘insulting Turkishness” law called Article 301, rarely put to use, and repeated by the corrupt genocide world ad infinitum, including by biased WaPo reporters (in an effort to show how undemocratic a nation Turkey is; a recent example was provided by the 2021 article, analysis of which will follow), but we have never heard of such a “criminal offense.” We don’t live in Turkey, and don’t know the laws of Turkey, but you may see how your editor(s) did not demand proof of what Joe Snell has claimed. Mr. Snell probably lifted this idea from the ubiquitous propaganda he is devoted to, but just because someone “says” something does not make it true. We are aware of times President Erdogan himself has insulted Ataturk for being an alcoholic (the religious-minded leader probably would welcome secularist Ataturk to be disparaged), and people in Turkey are generally free to say whatever they want, no less than the people in our country.

(It is interesting why the “editors” did not call up one of the many non-Turkish journalists stationed in Turkey — non-Turkish, because everyone knows Turks are all liars and killers — to ask, “Hey, if you denigrate Ataturk, can you be sent to jail?” Unfortunately, the ugly propaganda has complete license to see print, no matter what.)

3) “Historians estimate that 1.5 million Armenians, Assyrians and Greeks were killed in a campaign of forced marches and mass killings between 1915 and 1923…”

The marches were forced, because there was no other mode of transportation from the east; train travel was available for Armenians from the west.

The use of the word “historians” was dishonest. Anyone who says such nonsense cannot be called a “historian.” Historians, as journalists, are interested in what happened and why, using reliable references. (If Mr. Snell were to come up with an example of such a “historian,” there was a time when he would have needed to cite an agenda-ridden “genocide scholar.” By now, there are many pseudo-historians on this matter — and many are of Turkish heritage. These opportunists have been able to get university jobs through “genocide.”)

Of course, Joe Snell could not resist including “Assyrians and Greeks,” but the “1.5 million” figure is often cited, as in many past WaPo articles, as the figure strictly for Armenians. That is an impossible figure since there were 1.5 million to begin with according to numerous Turk-unfriendly sources. Frenchman Cuinet spent twelve years compiling Ottoman population statistics, and these were his figures. This 1922 U.S. State Department report vouched for 1.2 million living Armenians in 1922. (817,873 + 281,000 + 95,000.) Simply subtract the ending figure (over a million) from the beginning figure (1.5 million). The result cannot be “1.5 million,” and even Joe Snell and his editors should not argue with “arithmetic.”

Why wasn’t Joe Snell required by the “editors” to provide proof of those “mass killings”? If any of us were to be accused of being a murderer, would such “say-so” be enough to make us murderers? That is a very serious charge made by Joe Snell, and for the biased “editors” not to require proof exposes their bigotry/lack of professionalism, and becomes beyond the pale.

The ones who killed Armenians were tribes, often Kurdish, and revengists. There were no state-sponsored “mass killings.“ Anyone who insists on this reinforcement of the “Terrible Turk” stereotype needs to come up with evidence. There could not have been state-directed “mass killings,” because the Ottoman government took 1,673 “Turks” to trial during the “genocide” years of 1915-1916 (inasmuch as how Joe Snell and the WaPo “editors” prefer to extend this fiction to 1923 without offering any evidence), punishing ten percent of decided cases with executions. (Many of the rest were put in shackles and sentenced to hard labor. Here is a 1915 NYT article providing one example, while they called the Young Turk leader who ordered hangings a “rebel,” to uphold The Times’ wartime propaganda.)

4) “…Born out of Ottoman concerns that Christian communities would align with Russia during World War I.”

That was Mr. Snell’s continuation of his prior line, offering “motive” for why the Christians needed to be all killed. If that was the reason, why weren’t these suspect populations simply booted from the country, instead of going through the laborious and expensive (the nation was bankrupt) process of “extermination,” especially when not a man could be spared (the men were whittled down, including from three wars between 1911-13, two of which were catastrophic for the Ottomans; WWI began the next year, in 1914) for the defense of the country in a war for life and death — involving 7,500 miles of fronts being invaded by superpowers, and aided by Ottoman traitors? Deportation is what Britain employed with their Germans in WWI, and so did Russia with their Muslims close to the border, driving the latter across the war zone with the shirts on their backs. Why did the Ottomans need to kill? That is because it is important to reinforce the “Terrible Turk” stereotype, to drive home how Turks are not qualified to be human beings; they have crocodile brains, and are compelled to murder.

Yet Mr. Snell’s “motive” is preposterous, because as even Armenia’s first prime minister Katchaznouni has testified in the case for Armenians, the bulk of the Christian groups were already, and solidly, in collusion with the enemy. (As were Arabs, by the way, as those who have seen Lawrence of Arabia will be reminded.) There is no end of Armenian testimony that buttresses this fact. Here is an article from WaPo’s “Armenian genocide comrade-in-arms,” The New York Times, dated Nov. 13, 1914, or scarcely ten days after WWI involved the Ottomans (the Armenians began revolting months earlier; see this other Times article), and half a year before the temporary relocation (that is, “genocide”) was implemented in early June of 1915: “TURKISH ARMENIANS IN ARMED REVOLT — We’re Ready to Join Russian Invaders, Having Drilled and Collected Arms.”

Joe Snell and the “editors” are determined to instead present the picture that Armenians and the other Christians were innocent lambs led to the slaughter by inhuman Turks, which is why the fact of the rebellion must be kept under wraps. (Armed conflict also goes against the rules of the 1948 U.N. Genocide Convention.) As a Dashnak (the primary terrorist group serving as the Armenians’ leaders) named Garo Pasdermadjian flat-out admitted (while bragging in detail about how traitorous Armenians made the difference in battles against the Russians) in Why Armenia Should Be Free, his 1918 propaganda book: “…If the Armenians had sided with the Germano-Turks… those frightful Armenian massacres would not have taken place.” (In other words, had Armenians remained loyal, there would have been no temporary relocation — that is, “genocide.”)

Please also bear in mind that killing minorities would have gone against the essence of the Young Turks. Of a good many open-minded books from the period was Modern Turkey (1924), by Elliot Grinnell Mears, which is online (your amateur reporters have the advantage of the internet, as opposed to the old days when libraries were the only option, yet are simply too biased to conduct honest research. Their overseeing editors, no less biased, are perfectly fine with the usage of propaganda). Page 477: “The expression ‘Young Turk,’ as opposed to Old or Conservative Turk, means merely ‘Liberal Turk.'” Their goal: “suppressing absolutism.”

The last word of their party, CUP, or Committee for Union and Progress, stood for progressivism, what many at WaPo profess to be. (Given how many at WaPo practice “racial preferentialism,” it could be argued these Ottomans whom WaPo has painted as madmen were far more humanitarian than those of WaPo.) The evolved meaning of “Young Turk” in our language, as defined in dictionaries as this one: “Young progressive or insurgent member.” Ottoman historian François Georgeon: “The Young Turks… are patriots and progressive secularists.” Secularists are not going to mass-murder those of different religions.

The main “motive” presented for this genocide fabrication is “Muslims hate Christians”; while a U.S. journalist named E. Alexander Powell could not entirely escape the influence of the massive propaganda of a hundred years ago, he admirably maintained enough of an open mind to reveal the Armenians’ “religion has had very little to do with his persecution.” Pages 58-59, The Struggle for Power in Moslem Asia, 1923. Powell also relates (on pages 38-39) a conversation with the sultan, who poignantly explained that providing the truth “would be a hopeless undertaking,” because “foreign prejudice… is so great.” Here we are in 2023, and who could have imagined The Washington Post would so diligently be following this great tradition.

5) For “balance,” Joe Snell made sure to utilize the “Turkey says” ploy, so that the following truths will be immediately dismissed by brainwashed readers: “Turkey has acknowledged that many Armenians were killed in fighting with Ottoman forces, but disputes the larger casualty counts and denies that the events constituted genocide.”

(Interestingly, Mr. Snell did not dispute the notion that Armenians were killed in “fighting,” rather than through extermination. In genocide, victims need to be defenseless. Here is one of the sleaziest “genocide scholars,” Israel Charny, inadvertently revealing how the Armenian tale breaks the rules for genocide.)

Notice how he made sure to use a variation of the toxic “Deny” word, which is code for neo-Nazi, an ad hominem term that instantly ends the discussion. If there is no evidence, there is no fact. One cannot “deny” a non-fact, such as ducks having teeth. A principled person may only refute, or reject, a non-fact.

As for the larger casualty counts, it’s not just “Turkey,” but any rational person (let alone a newspaper with integrity, as with how WaPo presents itself) who must reject nonsensical figures such as “1.5 million.” Murdered Armenians (again, at the hands of tribes and revengists) numbered in the low tens of thousands. For example, in 1977, Le Figaro conducted an investigation in response to the raging Armenian terrorism of the time (the goal of which was to have everyone accept this genocide falsehood; crime certainly can pay), and the French newspaper concluded 15,000 were “dead from shootings, sickness and deprivation on the march” (as quoted in the Los Angeles Herald Examiner, Jan. 31, 1982). 15,000 is one percent of “1.5 million.”

For the “genocide” that drives a proud Assyrian-American as Joe Snell, “Assyrian genocide” propaganda frequently claims 750,000 Assyrians were murdered (without, of course, providing any evidence; this site called “Assyrian Genocide” claims there was a total of 3,250,000 murdered Ottoman Christians, only one example — of course, Wikipedia is another — of such hate sites that maliciously exercise this level of mendacity that The Washington Post has allowed free rein for). How many Ottoman-Assyrians were there to begin with? You may look at the Cuinet figures cited above (here again); 1,475,000 prewar Armenians, with “Other Christians” counted as 1,285,853, over a million of whom were Greeks.

A thoroughly disreputable “genocide scholar,” the late Rudy Rummel, asserted 154,000 Nestorians (Assyrians) were murdered (107,000 “domestic,” and 47,000 “foreign”… foreign? So the Ottomans traveled to mysterious other lands, compelled as they were to kill Assyrians for no reason?), but one may see that wherever Rummel got these figures from (he may have just pulled them out of a hat) were exaggerated, since in the same table, Rummel also claimed 2.1 million Armenians were murdered.

Lost in the equation are the factual systematic extermination campaigns perpetrated mainly by Armenians, with the other Christian groups sometimes joining in. 529,000 mostly Ottoman women and children (all the men were in the army) heartlessly killed by Armenians from 1914-20, another half-million Turkic Azerbaijanis also killed by Armenians, and 640,000 killed by invading Greeks from 1919-21 (M. Franklin-Bouillon: “In Anatolia the Greeks have destroyed, devastated, and exterminated everything and everybody.”) Why has WaPo never printed an article about these lost lives? Aside from ignorance and unwillingness to conduct honest research, it is because many of the “good liberals” of WaPo must not regard Turks as human beings. (Even after the personnel is told, they do not care; it’s not just ignorance, but outright bigotry. Then many at WaPo enjoy patting themselves on the backs, presenting the image that they do not possess a racist bone in their bodies.)

From the Russian archives, telegram sent to Russian Supreme Military Command HQ by General Bolhovitinov, March 17, 1916: “When I learned that the civilian population was massacred by the Armenians, I called Andranik, the commander of Armenian unit. Andranik told me that these kinds of incidents are natural.” (Almost the entire eastern region of today’s eastern Turkey was in the hands of the Russians and their Armenian allies, beginning in 1914; see map. The Muslim inhabitants, mostly women and children, were sitting ducks.)

Macmillan Dictionary of the First World War, 1995, p. 34, had British historians Stephen Pope and Elizabeth-Anne Wheal write that Armenian nationalists, by December of 1914, “slaughtered an estimated 120,000 non-Armenians while the Turkish Army was preoccupied with mobilization.” This was nearly one half-year before the famous April 24, 1915 start of what WaPo has been cherishing as a “genocide.”

The Ottomans were very humanitarian to postpone the measure of temporary relocation for so many months while their nation was under the threat of extinction. Does anyone feel the USA would have done the same, even if the nation’s survival was not at stake? The New York Times allowed for a very rare truthful article in 1923 (whereas that newspaper would never do so in current times, meaning anti-Turkish bigotry is worse today than a century ago), “Angora and the Turks.” Its American author who had rare knowledge about Turkey, Arthur Tremaine Chester, drew an imaginary parallel and believably wrote that he felt “confident that if America had been put in the hypothetical situation above referred to, it would have stopped that insurrection if it had had to kill every negro in the South, and would not have gone to the tedious and laborious defensive act of deportation…”

Russians usually served as a check against Armenian excesses, but sometimes they took part in the killings as well. From the British archives, Major E. W. C. Noel reported (March 12, 1919, F.O. 371/4173/80976), after touring the area for three months after the war: “The Russians, acting on the instigation of the Nestorians (Assyrians) and Armenians who were with them, had ‘murdered and butchered indiscriminately any Moslem of the civilian population who fell into their hands’… the destruction was enormous, and ‘anything more thorough and complete would be difficult to imagine‘.”

Major E. W. C. Noel was almost certainly misled as to whom the majority of the killers were. This is being included, because Joe Snell’s “innocent” Assyrians also served as “genocide” perpetrators.

6) Finally, for “evidence,” Joe Snell offered: “In 2021, President Biden officially recognized the Armenian genocide, making him the first U.S. president to do so since Ronald Reagan.” Indeed, the “word” of two bigots, given their racial and religious prejudices with no care to conduct honest historical research, represents “evidence.”

There was a second article cited in Joe Snell’s propaganda piece that appeared two years earlier and was written by another biased amateur named Gillian Brockell, who has been with WaPo for a decade, and who has the nerve to present herself as an expert on “history.” It was outrageously entitled “The Armenian ‘Genocide’: This Is What Happened in 1915,”

Your amateur wrote, “The Ottoman Empire killed an estimated 1.5 million Armenians during World War I” (this one didn’t include Greeks and Assyrians; indeed, the entire prewar population of 1.5 million Armenians, she is telling us, were killed — and without offering a stitch of evidence), although later revised to “Historians estimate that between 600,000 and 1.5 million Armenians died.” (That is a huge discrepancy, and the professional journalist is supposed to minimize guesswork. 600,000 is closer to the truth, but not specifying the cause for most deaths as famine and disease, which is how the majority of all Ottomans mostly died, was grotesquely dishonest), and she also pointed out the mostly irrelevant (for 2021, the year of this article), the “insulting Turkishness” law.

Gillian Brockell made use of wall-to-wall propaganda, and her WaPo “editors” have allowed for all of it, without question.

What was especially obscene was that Ms. Brockell was so bereft of intellectual curiosity, and so absolutely prejudiced, that she accepted anything as long as it agreed with her conclusion and comfort zone.

The article begins with an undocumented photo of corpses that could have been anyone or from any time period, and without care for who the killers were, nor for the circumstances for death, with the caption, “The U.S. ambassador to the Ottoman Empire included this photo of dead Armenians on a road in his 1918 book recounting the horrors he witnessed.” She was referring to Ambassador Morgenthau, who never left the environs of Istanbul (save for a quick trip to Jerusalem to visit Ottoman Jews), and did not “witness” anything. He simply listened to his Armenian assistants, and to biased U.S. consuls who listened to their Armenian assistants, as well as missionaries, who also listened to Armenians. (Gillian Brockell repeated this lie twice in the article, as with how Morgenthau “witnessed many of the atrocities.”)

If there were so many atrocities that Morgenthau miraculously bore witness to, where are the burial sites? It would take several football stadium sized graveyards to fill up 1.5 million bodies with. To kill so many in about 100 days of relocation, 15,000 would need to be killed and buried each day, a feat even Hitler was unable to accomplish. Can your crackerjack reporter point to a single corroborated graveyard? In a highly biased 60 Minutes episode from 2010 — note CBS’s freeze frame, utilizing one of many forged photos, this one so crudely compositing different elements — with the episode’s only “balance” amounting to a few seconds of “Turkey says,” the unusually dishonest Peter Balakian claimed there was one in Deir Zor, Syria, and Syrian Information Minister Mohsen Bilal replied the claim was “fictitious.” Meanwhile, Turks dug up graves of the Armenians’ “Turkish” victims in the 1980s to counter the calumnies, but it is not as though Ms. Brockell and her WaPo editors, nor the West in general, would consider those victims as human beings.

There were reliable Western eyewitnesses who were on-the-spot that Ms. Brockell could have referred to, if only she was able to control her deep prejudices. Hj Pravitz, a Swedish firsthand eyewitness who was at the right places at the right time, wrote in a Swedish newspaper article, after admitting his typically Western anti-Turkish feelings: “I sure got to view misery, but planned cruelties? Absolutely nothing.” A.P. correspondent George Abel Schreiner traveled extensively in the affected areas during 1915 (one of the extremely few reporters who did so; Western journalists preferred the safety of Istanbul, covering the events of Gallipoli), and wrote that “I saw none of the cruelties the Turks have later been charged with.”” (From his 1920 book, The Craft Sinister, available online.)

In a scathing December 11,1918 letter to Ambassador  Morgenthau — whom Schreiner accused of trying “to make the Turks the worst beings on earth,” this true journalist concluded: “Ultimately truth will prevail.” (It sure is taking a long time for truth to prevail, with highly biased people as the ones working for The Washington Post who do everything they can to suppress the truth for some unfathomable reason.)

One of Morgenthau’s motivations for demonizing Turks: he was into the “Jewish Cause,” and worked for the defeat of the Ottomans to free up Palestine. In a Nov. 26, 1917 letter to Woodrow Wilson, he confessed the book was intended as propaganda, to help the war effort. Over thirty years before Gillian Brockell’s article, Prof. Heath Lowry exposed what a fraud and liar Morgenthau was, through Morgenthau’s own words, in “The Story Behind Ambassador Morgenthau’s Story,” which is available online. It is absolutely embarrassing The Washington Post would be using proven century-old drivel as a reliable source. (When hatred is involved, minds turn to mush.)

Your ace reporter continued: “The Armenian soldiers were disarmed and murdered by Ottoman troops.” That was a major lie. (Gillian Brockell’s “evidence”: “Say-so,” again.) They were disarmed because they couldn’t be trusted (from Arthur Tremaine Chester’s 1923 NYT article, beginning with, “At the front the Armenians used blank cartridges and deserted in droves. This was bad enough, but the Armenians were not satisfied with this form of treachery…”) and placed in labor battalions, exactly as what the French did with their “Armenian legionnaires” in the postwar occupation of Marash (in southern Anatolia), because their Armenians could not control themselves and were cleaning out the Muslim populace (so driven by hate, they even attacked France’s Muslim colonial soldiers). “On April 24, 1915, the government arrested about 250 Armenian leaders and intellectuals.” Many were in fact leaders of their rebellion, and Armenian “scholars” themselves have documented how a good few found to be wrongly arrested were soon released. (The statistics are in corrupt Wikipedia, which pro-Armenians have taken over completely.)

In order to cruelly evoke the Holocaust, she claimed there were “concentrations [sic] camps”; indeed, the bankrupt “Sick Man” was going to spend scarce resources to construct and maintain such camps, using men who were unavailable, while feeding Armenians with money that was hard to come by, when Morgenthau himself wrote in his 1918 propaganda book that starvation was so prevalent, “thousands of Turks (were) dying daily.”

At least Armenians were being fed by Christian relief organizations from the USA, the Ottomans’ nominal wartime enemy, an advantage dying Turks and others did not have. For leader Talat Pasha to look after the Armenians’ welfare, to the extent of allowing for agents from an Entente nation to come into his country — which was incredibly humanitarian — was a curious way to conduct a “genocide.” Read Turk-unfriendly missionary James Barton’s 1930 book, Story of Near East Relief (1915-1930); since WaPo “journalists” do not know how to research, it is available online. (Note from the title that relief efforts began in 1915, in the thick of “genocide.”)

Although some had to wait in way stations (and certainly suffered), as the most Turk-hateful U.S. consul himself wrote in a 1916 report to Morgenthau, the Armenians were transferred to villages (with almost all of the 556,000 — figure from Turks and Armenians, McCarthy, 2015, p. 152; dishonest Armenian leader Boghos Nubar’s figure, from Dec. 11, 1918 letter to Armenian ally France: 600,000-700,000 — total relocated having safely made it), which was far more humane than the way the USA treated some of our “Axis” citizens during WWII, who were innocent, and who were placed behind barbed wire. (YouTube has also been taken over by pro-Armenians; this comparative video was there for a decade, before they took it down.)

Morgenthau made sure to exclude from his horrid book what he had recorded in his private diary in Sept. 1915; Armenian representative Zenop Bezjian told him “that Armenians at Zor were fairly well satisfied; that they have already settled down to business and are earning their livings,” and that “over one half million have been displaced.” In other words, over 500,000 were alive, and they were not in “concentration camps.”

How could anyone with a sense of ethics write such a scandalous and Nazifying claim as  “concentration camps,” just because it was read in a biased place like Wikipedia? It is absolutely astounding how one totally lacking in journalistic principles and who is absolutely guided by racial and political prejudices could be allowed to work for The Washington Post (and for a decade). Yet Gillian Brockell is no worse than the WaPo editors who are supposed to  have at least some concern for “the Post’s rigorous criteria for fairness and accuracy.”

We would like to stress the way we support our arguments are (as you may discover by clicking on any of the links, which the principled need to take the time to study) through solid references that are hostile to Turks, as with Armenians and Westerners. This is how courts establish facts, by stressing sources without conflicts-of-interest. What were the sources used by your two bigoted amateurs, Joe Snell and Gillian Brockell, as much as they disingenuously prefer to describe non-historians as “historians”? (Any non-“genocide scholar” with a history degree who vouches for this genocide fabrication becomes disqualified as a historian.) The sources are all hostile to Turks, as with Armenians and Westerners, that is, those who are completely conflicted. (Turkish sources are frequently mistranslated or words are taken out of context by the genocide peddlers, in the knowledge no one from WaPo will dig up the originals written in the difficult Ottoman language, in order to verify.)

The Standards and Ethics page acknowledges WaPo’s great power to influence, necessitating “special responsibilities”:

• “To listen to the voiceless.” Few people are as voiceless as those of our heritage. The articles, save for the “Turkey says” ploy, are top-heavy with citing the biased and agenda-ridden ones with the loudest voices. WaPohas chosen to ignore our many letters through the years.

• “To avoid any and all acts of arrogance.”Deliberate avoidance of the facts is the ultimate in arrogance. Never responding to serious letters relating to critical matters could have other reasons, but the connotation is that you are so correct, facts cannot matter. We are not worthy of a response. At the root, that is arrogance.

• 3) “To face the public politely and candidly.”We are part of that public. By ignoring our facts, WaPo is being extremely impolite. Given how WaPo has sided with racial supremacist principles, not just impolite, but highly disrespectful, and contemptuous.

• In regard to your corrections policy, “If we are substantively correcting an article, photo caption, headline(etc.)… we should promptly publish a correction explaining the change.”Seymour, Ms. Camillo and Ms. Ashford-Grooms, you will hopefully see both of these articles employ a kindergarten level of journalism, are replete with falsehoods, and reinforce the worst negative racial stereotype in existence, creating or fostering hatred against those of our heritage. The message for WaPo’s many “Armenian genocide” articles, past and present, is this: Turks must kill, because Turks are not really human beings.Let’s see how factual that claim of “we should promptly publish a correction” proved to be. In June of 2021, your predecessor, Managing Editor and Ethics Arbiter Tracy Grant, was informed about two “Armenian genocide” articles from that time, written by pseudo-journalists Miriam Berger and John Hudson, who mindlessly “copy-pasted” the propaganda. (Both of whom are apparently still working for the newspaper. So much for “standards” and “ethics.”) The letter may be downloaded from here, and it would be professional for the three of you to read it. (Ms. Seymour, you were sent a copy at the time.) Tracy Grant has moved on to Britannica, which is fitting for such a biased woman.Britannica has an “Armenian genocide” page written by an activist ethnic Armenian named Ronald Suny. He first wrote the prewar population of Armenians was 2 million, a figure from the Armenian Patriarch that even their British allies rejected in 1916, specifically Arnold Toynbee in his infamous “Blue Book” or Bryce report from Wellington House, Britain’s war propaganda division — a report freely being used as “evidence” even today. (Which should come as no surprise, given WaPo’s legitimization of Ambassador Morgenthau’s Story.)  In 1911, Britannica provided the correct 1.5 million figure, as may be seen in PAR 4. With a snap of his fingers, Suny jacked up the figure to 2.5 million so that the math could work: 2.5 million prewar minus 1 million postwar living equals 1.5 million “exterminated.” Suny can do this, because he knows Britannica and The Washington Post will give his propaganda their blessing.We wrote Tracy Grant: “As the specialist on ‘ethics,’ it is difficult to understand how you, Ms. Grant, could have allowed for such giant canards, as it is to be assumed you must have read our letters from the past, offering incontestable facts. Yet you didn’t need the past letters. You have access to the internet, and the facts are as plain as day. You only needed the will to tap a few keys.”After reminding her of the nearly two million “Turks” who were systematically killed by Armenians and Greeks (Assyrians weren’t mentioned, but they participated as well): “When the Armenians’ systematic extermination campaigns are ignored, especially their primary one conducted against fellow Ottomans, the “Armenian genocide” charge becomes especially racist. This “Washington Post Standards and Ethics” page states: “Fairness includes completeness.” How could the Armenians’ victims not be mentioned?” (Neither Joe Snell nor Gillian Brockell wrote a word about the Armenians’ victims either, likely because these “journalists” only consulted propaganda depicting Armenians as innocent Christian martyrs. Even if they knew, they probably wouldn’t have made mention, because to bigots as these, only Armenian and Christian lives matter.)

  “If you pride yourself on professionalism and if you have a conscience as a human being, you must correct these articles.”
  After Tracy Grant broke all three of the “special responsibilities” (“To listen to the voiceless,” “To avoid any and all acts of arrogance” and “To face the public politely and candidly”) by completely ignoring such a serious letter, we brought the matter to the attention of Executive Editor Sally Buzbee (downloadable from here), and wrote, “This is the way QAnon followers with impenetrable minds behave: no care for facts, with some operating from deep racial hatred. Here you have your chief ‘ethics’ officer, and she could not have cared less. This is incomprehensible.”Two years after receiving silence from your top leader who decided to ignore such a severe breach in the Code of Ethics (mind you, these letters were shared with other WaPo personnel, and the Code of Ethics did not mean anything to any of them either), we wrote Ms. Buzbee a new letter, asking her to please expose the corrupt way in which the U.S. Department of Education and its Office for Civil Rights have handled this critical matter, by allowing for hatred and falsehoods to infiltrate the schools of our nation. This letter was sent days ago, and resulted in the letter to your Standards department you are reading now. Given your top editor’s allegiance to this mysterious agenda to stamp out the truth, and probably her personal prejudices (if she were impartial, she would have felt outrage. Imagine what would happen to her if she were to say the N-word out loud, even without malice; the degree of bigotry expressed here causes astronomically greater harm), it is not expected for Sally Buzbee to care. (She did not care when contacted years earlier while she directed A.P.’s news operations.) Ms. Camillo and Ms. Ashford-Grooms, you were not sent a copy of this recent letter, and it may be downloaded from here.Ms. Seymour, at first we thought you may be Jewish, but later realized “Seymour” is not a Jewish surname. Regardless, you and the others may find it interesting that it was not just the Nazis who attempted to exterminate the Jews. Jews were included in all of the systematic extermination campaigns of the Armenians, and for that matter, the Greeks as well. Few are aware that Turks were the Jewish people’s greatest historical friends and protectors (before our nation took over the role after WWII), from 1324 until the Holocaust.What did you think when you received our recent letter to Sally Buzbee, with the mention of the two articles (by Joe Snell and Gillian Brockell), now being brought to your attention in detail? Were you able to maintain an open mind, and to understand the tremendous deviations from truth and ethics, as well as The Washington Post’s contribution to hate?Ms. Seymour, you have been sent copies of our letters since January of 2017. You are the one Ms. Camillo and Ms. Ashford-Grooms report to, making you the chief of the standards department. Yet your conscience has been unmoved despite receiving inarguable facts about this genocide myth. Why haven’t you done anything about it?How could you have allowed for, as the most recent example, Joe Snell’s horrendous article? (The Gillian Brockell article was Tracy Grant’s responsibility, although if you read that article, you were partly responsible as well, as with any WaPo employee pledged to adhere to the ethical guidelines.) In other words, if someone is wrongly accused of murder, and you knew that person was being railroaded, you wouldn’t do anything? In fact the parallel here is worse, because in this case, not only have you not done anything, you have helped more people to believe the accused is a murderer by permitting the newer articles. You need to conduct very deep soul-searching, Ms. Seymour.Gillian Brockell’s piece was not covered as much above, since the emphasis was on the most recent article. There was much more that could be said about the way Gillian Brockell handled herself as a “journalist.” Now paying attention to her article’s beginning, she wrote Raphael Lemkin was inspired by the Armenian story. Lemkin only started talking about Armenians when he, destitute, began to work with Christian groups circa 1949; there was no mention of Armenians in his 1944 book (Axis Rule In Occupied Europe) where he coined the “genocide” word,.Of the Armenian assassin who influenced Lemkin that Gillian Brockell wrote of — Soghoman Tehlirian, who has been made into a hero for murdering Talat Pasha (in Germany. Samantha Power loves him) — actor Eric Bogosian remarked while promoting his genocide book: “Everything that Tehlirian said in court was a fabrication,” 15:39 mark. (Also revealing, at 01:54, that when he was four, his grandfather would tell him “horrific narratives,” at the end of which he instructed the boy: “If you ever meet a Turk, kill him.” Turk-hatred is drilled into the minds of the young of many Orthodox Christians, to insure future soldiers for the cause.)Tehlirian was not even present during what he testified as a 1915 “massacre” of 20,000 Armenians in a few hours by a couple of dozen gendarmes using blunt instruments (nor was his Protestant family, since Protestants were exempted from the relocation at that early stage in June), having joined the Russians in 1914, and then the bloodthirsty Andranik.The Dashnak criminal Tehlirian was a mass murderer of Turks and others (mostly women and children, often raped first, especially the little girls; this was standard procedure for the many other fanatics operating under those such as Antranig, whose name has different spellings), and WaPo’s bigoted amateur, as well as her “editors,” have glorified this criminal who made Jack the Ripper look like Mary Poppins (when the emotional Raphael Lemkin gave Tehlirian credence, Lemkin lost all credibility).This is not just a matter of getting the facts wrong, The perpetuation of these defamatory falsehoods is highly offensive, and your newspaper has actively been nurturing a hate campaign. This is happening even though you, Ms. Seymour, have been repeatedly told the facts for almost seven years, and even though you have been entrusted to safeguard the “ethics” of The Washington Post, you have chosen to remain oblivious.You bear responsibility for allowing for these terrible articles to keep seeing print. Even the ones from years ago keep working their “Ku Klux Klan”-like malevolence each time they are accessed on the worldwide web, while effectively molding minds, given the positive reputation of the newspaper. Perhaps you did not read our letters, and dismissed them in the belief shared by most of your WaPo colleagues that Turks (including Turkish-Americans, as us) are the scum of the earth. Yet if you have read them and exercised your above-average ability (as your current position dictates) to distinguish between fact and fiction, how could you have been so conscienceless as to not protest?These two articles desperately call to be corrected. Perhaps the two of you, Ms. Camillo and Ms. Ashford-Grooms (by the way, Ms. Ashford-Grooms; regarding this matter, “fact checking” is a foreign concept for PolitiFact, where you used to work), assuming you are capable of objectivity yourselves, can talk sense into Jane Seymour, and remind her that spreading falsehoods is wrong, and that spreading lies that cause hatred is even more wrong. We are hoping not everyone who works for your newspaper can be so racially and politically prejudiced, and hopefully the two of you will prove to be exceptions.

Of course, correcting the articles will indicate the “Armenian genocide” claim is groundless (which is the truth. Those who disagree need to provide the evidence. If there is no evidence, there can be no crime). Exactly why should defending the truth be considered as something to shun at all costs?

The Western press has always depicted Turks as butchers in this WWI story, but at least they stopped short of calling it a genocide; the Journalists’ Code of Ethics made many aware it would be wrong to make this conclusion (especially regarding the worse crime on earth) without evidence. The term used was “alleged Armenian genocide.” Then in 2004, a highly bigoted executive editor named Bill Keller from The New York Times made the decision from the air, giving license for all else in the news media to use the term, aching as many were to exercise their intense anti-Turkish animosity.

From the Standards and Ethics page: “The Washington Post is pledged to an aggressive, responsible and fair pursuit of the truth without fear of any special interest, and with favor to none.” That certainly is not true, as far as this subject (and once an exception is made, other subjects easily follow); the special interests have been supported wholeheartedly for years, and the “pursuit of the truth” has never taken place. (Except once, in 1983.) Also: “Washington Post reporters and editors are pledged to approach every assignment with the fairness of open minds and without prior judgment. The search for opposing views must be routine.” Absolutely untrue, as the two articles brought to your attention demonstrate painfully. Joe Snell and Gillian Brockell and their editors were incapable of maintaining open minds, could not tolerate “opposing views” (save for the sneaky “Turkey says” ploy) and were ruled by prior judgment.

“We avoid active involvement in any partisan causes… that could compromise or seem to compromise our ability to report and edit fairly” is a line from the “Conflict of interest” section of WaPo’s Ethics Policy. Our ending line to Sally Buzbee in 2021: “Won’t you please explain why there is this conspiracy to censor the truth?” The fact of the matter is that The Washington Post is deeply involved in this partisan cause, and it is very difficult to understand why,

If even the Armenian Patriarch has stated the “Armenian genocide” represents “hate speech,” it is to be hoped for the leaders of this newspaper, especially the ones who consider themselves as progressives, to stop behaving as the Proud Boys, and to finally (bearing in mind how no one has cared before, and for years; it is a disgrace) be intolerant of such destructiveness. Ms. Seymour, Ms. Camillo and Ms. Ashford-Grooms, we hope you will succeed in performing your duty, and in doing the right thing. If you choose to stick your heads in the sand (as you have so nonchalantly been doing, Ms. Seymour), you must live with the fact that your entire function becomes a sham.

Dr. Martin Luther King: “To ignore evil is to become an accomplice to it.”

Sincerely,”

[1] [Author’s note: Who are these historians? How is the number 1.5 million Armenians, Assyrians and Greeks estimated? It was, in the past, that 1.5 million Armenians, but the number keeps growing by an inflated rate by the minute! How is it possible that Christian communities would align with Russia during World War I when in fact, it was Russia that wanted all these lands to itself in its entirety and didn’t see a problem of decimating any other Christian population which claimed a piece of it? Who are the Armenians who argue that the latter stages of the genocide were overseen by Ataturk once he took office? Was that before or after 1923 because Ataturk did not ‘take office’ in any of these times to pursue and commit genocide against any group of race/ethnicity? In fact, it was Ataturk, who didn’t prosecute the captured Greek generals or who pursued peace with all its neighbors, including but not limited to the newly formed Armenia, despite mass murders that both Greeks and Armenians did during the War of Independence. I will explain all of this in another article.]