Armenia On My Mind

The ABC's current affairs program Foreign Correspondent on 22/4/08 dealt with Turkey, Armenia, and the conflicting passions surrounding the Armenian genocide of 1915. In Armenia/Turkey: Ghosts of the Past, reporter Eric Campbell ably exposed the refusal of the Turkish establishment to acknowledge Turkey's responsibility for the ethnic cleansing of its Armenian minority. So far, so good. The synopsis of the program on Foreign Correspondent's website (www.abc.net.au/foreign), however, detracted massively from Campbell's report.

It contained the following sentence: "Respected historians say as many as a million people were killed and many more made refugees. (see extract*)" The extract turned out to be a quote from The Middle East by Bernard Lewis, billed as "an authority on Islamic and Middle Eastern History." Lewis' description of the mass deportations of Armenian civilians were oddly tentative, almost apologetic: "... a practice sadly familiar in the region since biblical times"/"... the task of escorting the deportees was entrusted to hastily recruited local posses"/"The Ottoman central government seems to have made some effort to curb the excess."

What possessed the ABC? Quoting neocon Godfather and Israel apologist Bernard Lewis ("respected historian" and "authority on Islamic and Middle Eastern history") on the subject of the Armenian genocide is like quoting David Irving on the Nazi genocide*. Despite the synopsis' acknowledgment that "in some countries such as France, it is a criminal offence to deny the Armenian genocide," it appears that those responsible for the program (or at least the synopsis) were unaware that they were quoting a holocaust (as in Armenian holocaust) denier.

In fact, Lewis was convicted of denying the Armenian genocide by a French court in 1995. The relevant part of the judgment reads, "... the fact remains that it was by concealing information contrary to his thesis that the defendant was able to assert that there was 'no serious proof' of the Armenian genocide; consequently he failed in his duties of objectivity and prudence by offering unqualified opinions on such a sensitive subject; and his remarks [in an interview with Le Monde], which could unfairly rekindle the pain of the Armenian community, are tortious and justify compensation..." The plaintiff's brief, quoted in the judgment, advanced the view that Bernard Lewis is "actually an engaged intellectual who conducts intensive 'lobbying' activities on behalf of Turkey."

But it gets worse. Lewis' academic career kicked off with a fascination for Kemal Ataturk's secular/democratic transformation of Turkey, a seductive vision which he communicated directly to Dick Cheney in the months before the US invasion of Iraq and which came to be adopted as a blueprint for a post-Saddam Iraq. The 'Lewis doctrine' as it was known held that democratic transformation could be forced on Iraq and that Ahmad Chalabi was just the man to do it. It was also Lewis, not Samuel Huntington, who constructed the 'clash of civilizations' thesis, the intellectual underpinning of Islamophobia. (See Michael Hirsh's 2004 essay, Bernard Lewis Revisited, at http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/)

*Nor can Lewis be entrusted with the subject of the Nazi holocaust. As US academic and author Norman Finkelstein points out, "Especially in the wake of Israel's ill-fated invasion of Lebanon in 1982 and as Israeli propaganda claims came under withering attack by Israel's 'new historians', apologists desperately sought to tar the Arabs with Nazism. Famed historian Bernard Lewis managed to devote a full chapter of his short history of anti-Semitism... to Arab Nazism." (The Holocaust Industry, p 62)