My photograph from USA TODAY, published for my membership to the All-USA Academic First Team, has appeared in the anti-Armenian TallArmenianTale.com – a website that hatefully denies the Armenian Genocide.

Holdwater, the ghostwriter of the hatesite, is apparently pissed off at my blogging about Turkish historian Taner Akcam’s findings that Holdwater is Murad Gumen, an ex-Disney cartoonist of Turkish desent.

Hilariously enough, Holdwater is now denying that he is Murad Gumen by saying his communication with the United States Holocaust Memorial Council he wrote about wasn’t really his because somebody else had written it and in order not to get somebody else in trouble he said he had written it. (It was through this communication that Akcam made Holdwater’s identity public). Mr. Gumen, stop embarrassing yourself.

The idiot, who continuously claims he has proven the Armenian Genocide never happened and is now saying he is not who he said he was, is even unable to find the source that first wrote about his comparison of Armenians to rodents.

The fact of the matter is that “Armenian genocide” photos are undocumented, even Armin Wegner’s; some Armenian sites have sunk so low as to use documented photographs of Ottoman Muslims slaughtered by Armenians, in order to represent Armenian victims. While I don’t know which photograph The Jewish Advocate made use of, if the source of the photograph cannot be verified, an ethical journal must use a word such as “alleged.”

There are lots of things that Mr. Gumen doesn’t know, including the fact that he can be embarrassingly ignorant and stupid. The webpage he refers to has a link to my actual letter that he failed to read (oh, what a researcher).

If the idiot opened that link, he would see the photo I had written about (in fact, The Jewish Advocate acknowledged its mistake in silence by removing the ridiculous article from its website and its archives). And guess what the photo is?

I wonder if anything else on Earth can be more convincing to Murad Gumen than an old photograph with skeletons and a banner mentioning “Armenian cranes.” But again, genocide denial is not a simple rejection of the word “genocide” to describe the destruction of Ottoman Turkey’s native Armenian population. Denial is the micro-level refusal of accepting that a crime was committed against Turkey’s Armenian population.And to understand how embarrassingly short-sighted Mr. Gumen is, consider his unchallenged acceptance of a Turkish nationalist’s comment at this blog that “the recently discovered cave with the mass grave said to be of Armenian victims has been confirmed by European scientists to have been a Roman site.”If the idiot were to do a little bit research, he would find out that the Roman site had been reused during World War I as a mass grave. Whether used for Armenians or others, though, it will never be known. Because for some reason Mr. Gumen’s beloved Turkish Historical Society covered up the destruction of the mass grave by the Turkish military.We are not talking about a 90-year-old document, Mr. Gumen. This is a documented, photographed mass grave from last year that has been erased from the face of the Earth. Even if you don’t think there was Armenian Genocide, one wonders why would deniers like you not even accept the possibility of even one small mass grave of Armenian victims in Turkey.

This week’s Reporter (June 30, 2007) has my newest article on the destruction of Djulfa cemetery that I just wrote for them using much information from my last semester’s research.

You can download the PDF version of current issue’s Section A – where my piece is – from here.

Here is the article in full:

International Reaction to Djulfa cemetery destruction has been only words and no action

by Simon Maghakyan

June 30, 2007

DENVER, CO. – After several failures to visit Djulfa (Jugha), where the largest medieval Armenian cemetery was reduced to dust by Azerbaijan’s military a year and a half ago, officials at international organizations are talking again about sending experts to the region.

      While reports about plans to send a mission by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) to Armenia and Azerbaijan have again appeared in the media, words are all that have reached so far the remote shores of the Araxes where an archeological monument with thousands of ancient Armenian burial stones, khachkars, existed not too long ago.

      Still a UNESCO spokesperson says their talks are serious and, according to Armenpress, the organization is now working out the details of a visit both to Nakhichevan – where Djulfa is located – and Karabakh, where Azerbaijan alleges Armenians have destroyed Azeri monuments.

      And this week, the Armenian Foreign Ministry spokesman Vladimir Karapetian said that UNESCO has already determined the make-up of its monitoring group and that currently the issue is with the visits’ timing.

      Armenians and others have long urged UNESCO to interfere in the destruction of the Djulfa cemetery and other Armenian monuments.

      In October 2006, an international group of parliamentarians from Canada, France, Greece, the United Kingdom, Russia and Switzerland traveled to UNESCO’s Paris headquarters in order to request that Director-General Koїchiro Matsuura take up an investigation in Djulfa.

      Canadian Parliamentarian Jim Karygiannis, a member of the delegation to Paris, this week told this author that he still has not heard back from UNESCO.

***

      In addition to UNESCO, the Council of Europe Secretary General Terry Davis has expressed interest in sending experts to monitor cultural sites whenever a relevant agreement with Armenia and Azerbaijan is reached.

      But efforts by the European Parliament to send a delegation to Djulfa, headed by British MP Edward O’Hara, first in 2006 and again in April 2007 have been unsuccessful. This was despite the February 16, 2006 European Parliament resolution condemning the destruction of Djulfa and calling on Azerbaijan to allow “a European parliament delegation to visit the archaeological site of Djulfa.”

      O’Hara told this author that no party but himself is to blame for this year’s postponement which was “entirely due to domestic commitments.” This explanation is different from last year’s cancellation, which as The Art Newspaper (London) reported in June 2006, was due to Azerbaijan’s refusal to allow ten delegates to enter its territory.

      Meantime, there has been no reaction towards claims by Azeri officials and nationalist historians that the cemetery did not exist or was not Armenian. Foreign diplomats and organizations with presence in Baku have also been quiet toward Azerbaijan’s anti-Armenian activities. Former Norwegian Ambassador Steinar Gil, who publicized a case of vandalism at an Armenian church in central Azerbaijan, remains the only exception.

      Thomas de Waal, an expert on Armenian-Azerbaijani relations says that “foreign investors and diplomats in Azerbaijan are very sensitive towards anything that touches on the Armenian-Azerbaijani issue and the peace process and are therefore very timid about raising the issue of the destruction of cultural monuments.”

***

      Azerbaijan’s continuing military build-up and threats to launch a new war to win control over Nagorno Karabakh add on to the concern for the peace process. But Human Rights Watch has also blamed the West, especially the United States, for trading human rights for oil in Azerbaijan for inaction to condemn broad range of human rights violations.

      The U.S. State Department did not react on the Djulfa vandalism until pressed for comment. Following a congressional hearing on February 16, 2006, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice sent a written response to Rep. Grace Napolitano (D-Calif.) acknowledging U.S. awareness of “allegations of desecration of cultural monuments” and urged Azerbaijan to “take appropriate measures to prevent any desecration of cultural monuments.” She also said the U.S. has “encouraged Armenia and Azerbaijan to work with UNESCO to investigate the incident.”

      During a visit to Armenia in March 2006, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Matt Bryza called the destruction a “tragedy.” He said: “it’s awful what happened in Djulfa. But the United States cannot take steps to stop it as it is happening on foreign soil. We continually raise this issue at meetings with Azeri officials. We are hopeful that the guilty will justly be punished.”

      Later that month, Bryza’s State Department manager, Assistant Secretary Dan Fried, told the Armenian Assembly of America conference in Washington that he “would be happy to raise issues of Armenian historical sites” with Azerbaijani officials because respect and protection for cultural sites is “a universal policy of the United States.”

      And in her May 12, 2006 response to Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), U.S. Ambassador-designate to Azerbaijan Anne Derse noted that the U.S. is “urging the relevant Azerbaijani authorities to investigate the allegations of desecration of cultural monuments in Nakhichevan. If I am confirmed, and if such issues arise during my tenure, I will communicate our concerns to the Government of Azerbaijan and pursue appropriate activities in support of U.S. interests.”

***

      The destruction of Djulfa, nonetheless, did not make it into the State Department’s 2006 International Religious Freedom Report on Azerbaijan released on September 15, 2006. The report only repeated the previous years’ language that “all Armenian churches, many of which were damaged in ethnic riots that took place more than a decade ago, remained closed.”

      Likewise, the report failed to notice the words of the Norwegian Ambassador that a church in the village of Nizh was in early 2006 “restored” with Armenian lettering eliminated from its walls and nearby tombstones. That “restoration” was part of the Azerbaijan’s effort to present the Armenian cultural heritage on its territory as “Albanian” – that is belonging to a culture that became extinct hundreds of years ago – and therefore not Armenian.

***

      The most detailed outsider’s account of Nakhichevan’s Armenian heritage remains that of Steven Sim, a Scottish architect who visited the area in the summer of 2005. During his visit he found no trace of a single medieval Armenian church he had travelled to research, with local interlocutors denying there were any churches there in the first place.

      Still, while traveling along the border with Iran, Sim did manage to see the Djulfa khachkars from his train before the hand-crafted stones were erased from the face of the Earth in less than half a year.

      More than 350 years ago before Sim’s visit, a foreign traveller to Djulfa had estimated 10,000 khachkars in the cemetery. By 1998, less than seven decades after a Soviet agreement with Turkey placed Nakhichevan under Azerbaijan, there were only 2,000 khachkars remaining while the entire Armenian population had disappeared.

      According to eyewitness reports cited by the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS), Azeri authorities made efforts to destroy much of the Djulfa cemetery in 1998 and again in 2002. Describing what he saw in Djulfa in August 2005, Sim reported “what I saw was real savageness, but I cannot say that they did not leave anything, since there are still lying khachkars.”

      Four months later, on December 15, 2005, Russia’s Regnum News Agency was the first international outlet to quote reports of approximately “100 Azerbaijani servicemen penetrate[ing] the Armenian cemetery near Nakhichevan… using sledgehammers and other tools… to crush Armenian graves and crosses.”

      This final stage of destruction, which also amounted to desecration of Armenian remains underneath the burial monuments, had reportedly started on December 14 and lasted for three days, leaving no trace of a single khachkar.

      An Armenian film crew in northern Iran, from where the cemetery was visible, had videotaped dozens of men in uniform hacking away at the khachkars with sledgehammers, using a crane to remove some of the largest stones from the ground, breaking the stones into small pieces, and dumping them into the River Araxes using a heavy truck.

      Nevertheless, Azeri president Ilham Aliyev told the Associated Press that the reports of the destruction are “an absolute lie, slanderous information, a provocation.”

      By March 2006, photographs of the cemetery site showed that it had been turned into an army shooting range. An Azerbaijani journalist who visited the area on behalf of the London-based Institute for War and Peace Reporting in April 2006 similarly found no traces of the cemetery left.

Two things you don’t want to be in Azerbaijan are a journalist or an Armenian.  While I am still trying to find out why the government hates independent journalists so much, I may be closer to finding out where there is so much hate for Armenians. THE TEXTBOOKS, of course!

From MehrNews via WikiPedia

A 5th grade history book from Azerbaijan entitled “Fatherland” shows most of northern Iran and significant portions of Armenia (including all of Lake Sevan) and Georgia (Kvemo Kartli and southern Kakheti) under Azerbaijani control.

A Turkish Daily News Column by Orhan Kemal Cengiz (“Kunta Kinte, ‘Armenian Seed,’ the Denial of Racism,” June 22, 2007) resonates with the recent revealing of racist denier “Holdwater” (the ghostmaster of TallArmenianTale.com hatesite) as cartoonist Murad Gumen.

Cengiz writes:

I have never come across any Turkish person who considers himself a racist. However, racist remarks are just flying in the air in the daily conversations in this country. Our language is full of racist remarks. For example, Abdullah Öcalan, the leader of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party, is called an “Armenian seed” (Ermeni Dölü). If you consider how much Öcalan is hated in this country then you can imagine how “flattering” being an “Armenian seed” may be. “Jews are cowards!” “Arabs are back stabbing people”! Not to mention very offensive vocabulary about the Roma people!

What Cengiz says is true, but not only for Turks. I don’t think any person in this world would admit they are racist, not even a single member of the Ku Klux Klan. Yet Cengiz is particularly upset with the denial of racism in Turkey for the simple fact that Ottoman Empire’s desendant Turkey sees itself a victim and hence doesn’t see its minorities as vulnerable to hate in Turkey:

I believe this feeling of ‘being a victim’ serves as a kind of block in our collective unconscious. It is a way of turning upside down some historical facts in this country. It is a way of not confronting what had happened to non-Muslim citizens of this country. “I am the victim, not the Armenian, or Greek, or Jew!” Today we still have this feeling and it is getting stronger. We are again the victims of the Western powers’ conspiracies against us! We are the Kunta Kintes of the modern times, surrounded by enemies and about to be victimized again by the white man! Are we really!?

Interestingly, racist Murad Gumen has been doing exactly whatCengiz writes about.  Shamelessly comparing Armenians to rodents (“Armeni-lemmings identify with this [photographed] rodent”) and hatefully denying the Armenian Genocide (“I have 100% hatred of the deception of Armenians’ age-old propaganda”), Murad Gumen is fast to proclaim he is not a racist (“I have zero hatred of Armenians”).  You are what you do, would respond the French philosopher.

Celebrity’s operated hate website is not removed though  

An e-mail from a Blogian reader informs that Google search engine has apparently removed www.muradgumen.org, a website revealing the identity of Murad Gumen – a celebrity cartoonist who has been secretly operating the anti-Armenian hate website tallarmeniantale.com.

Just two days ago, a Google search of “Murad Gumen” listed www.muradgumen.org as the third website about the cartoonist.  But an apparent lobbying by Gumen has removed the link from the Google search engine.

It is interesting that Google removes a website about a racist cartoonist, but doesn’t remove the hate website operated by the same racist pig.

Turkish-American cartoonist Gumen’s argument for his anti-Armenian hate website is that every story has two sides.  What about your “other” side, Mr. Gumen?

Armenia’s tiny Jewish community is “deeply irritated,” in the words of its leadership, with an interview in the Azerbaijani media where the Chief Rabbi of Azerbaijan’s European Jews is quoted as accusing Armenia of intolerance and praising Azerbaijan for tolerance toward its minorities.

 Photo: Azerbaijan’s Chief Rabbi who says “Azerbaijan’s propaganda by an ethnic or religious minority leader [from Azerbaijan]  is taken with large trust in the world”

The letter, co-signed by Rimma Feller Varzhapetyan (Head of Armenia’s Jewish Community), Rabbi Gershon Meir Burshtein (Chief Rabbi of Armenia), and Villy Veiner (President of Menora Cultural Center) and published in full by PanArmenian, ridicules Azerbaijan’s Chief Rabbi Meir Bruk.  Indeed the Azerbaijani Rabbi is very interesting.  He is quoted as saying in the anti-Armenian newspaper that “Azerbaijan’s propaganda by an ethnic or religious minority leader [from Azerbaijan]  is taken with large trust in the world” (“Пропаганда Азербайджана представителем этнической группы или духовного лидера пользуется большим доверием в мире“) crediting his own campaign about tolerance in Azerbaijan.

Rabbi Bruk said in his interview to Azerbaijan’s Russian language Zerkalo newspaper on June 12, 2007 that “Armenia is weak spiritually and economically.”  Not surprised with seeing regular anti-Armenian “dirt” in the Azerbaijani media, Armenia’s Jewish leaders say they still cannot remain silent on the “well-paid order” their kin is obeying.

Armenia’s Jewish leadership calls “illiterate” Azerbaijani young Rabbi’s data that there are only 200 Jews left in Armenia because of the intolerance in the country.  There “are officially registered four Jewish public, religious and cultural organizations in the republic,” they write, “which are recognized by all world Jewish organizations. Here we have a working synagogue headed by the Chief Rabbi of Armenia.”

Although there is some extent of anti-Semitism in Armenia, the outcry of Armenian Jews is especially reasoned due to the outrageous intolerance of not only anything Armenian (remember the wipe out of the medieval Armenian cemetery in 2005), but the recent imprisonment and persecution of independent Azeri journalists, for example, across Azerbaijan.

The desecration of Jewish graves in Azerbaijan is of course not government sponsored.  So compared to how the Armenian culture has been wiped out in Azerbaijan by the state, yes, Jews live in a country of extreme tolerance.  They are just a bit scared to wear the star of David in Azerbaijan says the New York Times and their leaders need to do a bit of, in the words of Rabbi Burk himself, “propaganda” to fit in the anti-Armenian society. 

Here is more from the letter by Armenia’s Jewish leadership:

Doesn’t Mr. Bruk know the opinion of the European Parliament on countless violations of democratic bases and human rights committed by Azerbaijan, the continuing political and judicial prosecutions of any kind of dissent?

And of course God forbid Armenia and Nagorno Karabakh from goods that Mr. Bruk promises them in case if Armenia returns Nagorno Karabakh to Azerbaijan. Nobody here has forgotten Sumgait, Kirovabad, Baku, and Karabakh. People in other countries, including Israel too remember those “goods”.

We think that the wise Rabbi has forgotten that his and our mission is in peacekeeping and helping our countries to settle the accumulated problems on the level of popular diplomacy, and not in compressing the complex relations between the two neighbors, which are intense and without it. Our mission is not to become marionettes in the hands of certain political and financial bosses.

At the end we’d like to draw the attention of the whole European community, public and religions International Jewish Organizations that Jews of Armenia are deeply irritated at the above-mentioned article. We think that similar statements made by an official religions leader, Mr. Bruk, are of quite provocative character, they promote ethnic discord and are contrary to the tolerance policy declared by those organizations. We hope that actions of Mr. Bruk will receive adequate evaluation and condemnation.

A discussion at Topix.net links to www.muradgumen.org, a website revealing the identity of Turkish-American celebrity cartoonist Murad Gumen who is the racist webmaster behind TallArmenianTale.com, a website that denies the Armenian Genocide.

Another photo of racist “Holdwater” Murad Gumen

According to Muradgumen.org,

Ex-Disney cartoonist and celebrity illustrator Murad Gumen is quick to take credit for his famous Mickey Mouse cartoons and made-up characters like Wonderguy.

But one thing the Turkish-American celebrity doesn’t want anyone to know is that he operates one of the most vicious hate websites in the Internet – TallArmenianTale.com. Disguised under “Holdwater,” Gumen has been hatefully denying the Armenian Genocide – the murder of Ottoman Turkey’s native Armenian population during World War I. His tactics have included dehumanizing respected scholars of the Armenian Genocide in order to discredit their work. When there is nothing else to write to prove his thesis, Mr. Gumen writes that Armenians are rats.

Until late May 2007, the identity of “Holdwater” remained a mystery. “Holdwater” admitted he would lose his career if his identity was ever revealed.

British archaeologist Sam Hardy has updated his recent post on Turkey’s Mardin mass grave with photographs he took in May 2007.  I placed these images next to October 2006 photographs taken by a now banned Kurdish newspaper in Turkey.  They show the “glorious” work of the Turkish Historical Society in covering up a possible mass grave from the Armenian Genocide.

(there are two more photographs in Hardy’s post)

Now you know the face of “Holdwater” Murad Gumen – one of the most anti-Armenian Turkish-Americans on Earth and the webmaster of tallarmeniantale.com, a hate website that denies the Armenian Genocide and compares Armenians to rodents.  

A reader of Blogian sent the following information:

Murad Gumen had his own cable TV show in the 1980s. Here is a page with some photos of him in character as host “Renald Rap.” I assume they are out of date. He would look 20 years older now.

http://www.fortunecity.com/lavender/shaft/780/page2.htm

PROOF that the character of “Renald Rap” is Murad Gumen:

http://shonext.imdb.com/name/nm0347933/

Holdwater: The mysterious name behind the “premier” anti-Armenian websiteBy Taner Akçam

On July 27, 2005, the Yeni Şafak newspaper published an interview, “The Mysterious American Who Drives the Armenians Mad,” about an “interesting and unique” person who writes under the pseudonym Holdwater. “This mysterious American has been financing, for many years, a highly effective, U.S.-based Internet site,” Yeni Şafak reports. “The principal aim of Tall Armenian Tale: The Other Side of the Falsified Genocide is to provide substantial responses to the Armenian Diaspora’s claims of genocide.”According to the newspaper, Holdwater, a New York native, was born in the 1950s to Turkish parents who had migrated to America in the 1940s and raised their son without teaching him a single word of Turkish. He champions the Turkish theses [denial of the Armenian Genocide] on his website at www.tallarmeniantale.com.Holdwater says he uses a pseudonym because he is the target of threats and sabotage on a daily basis. “If I tell you my real name and you publish it in your newspaper,” he told Yeni Şafak, “trust me, within a few days neither my family harmony nor my good business nor my Internet site will still be in existence.”While afraid to disclose his own name because his peace will be disturbed, Holdwater does not hold back from publishing the photographs of intellectuals such as Halil Berktay and Müge Göçek [of the Workshop for Armenian-Turkish Scholarship], and parading them as targets in his articles full of animosity and hatred. It is quite difficult to understand how someone who is afraid of being attacked can organize such ruthless campaigns of belligerence against others.

I too am among Holdwater’s priority targets. He leads the campaign against me, along with institutions such as the Assembly of American Turkish Associations (ATAA) and the Turkish Forum. He publishes articles on his site which claim that I am a terrorist; that I am responsible of the death of Americans in Turkey ; and even that I have planned and organized murders of American civilians. He lists my “terrorist activities” from the years 1974 to 1975, including precise dates and locations. These amount to nothing more than ordinary, small-scale arrests during student demonstrations of the era, which didn’t even make the press at the time. [See “A Shameful Campaign,” Armenian Reporter, Mar. 17]

It doesn’t take too much intelligence to guess who might have passed to Holdwater the police records of these insignificant arrests, whose dates even I had forgotten. But here’s the real problem: Those who funnel this information to Holdwater as “Taner Akçam’s terrorist activities” are actually taking advantage of Holdwater’s ignorance about Turkey .

Poor Holdwater thinks these arrests were for “terrorist activities,” not realizing that they were all related to crimes of leafletting and postering, for which police permission had been obtained. He seems to have no idea that in 1970s Turkey , one had to obtain permission from what is now called the Security General Directorate’s Special Inspection Branch Directorate for Associations, and that even with a special permit in hand, one could be arbitrarily arrested and held at police headquarters for three to five days.

Once I was arrested for an issue regarding the Cyprus landing. As the Student Association, we were distributing authorized leaflets against the [Turkish] military invasion of Cyprus [1974]. Despite showing our permits, we were held for two to three days at police headquarters.

The other actions Holdwater has publicized as my “terrorist activities” were related to our demand for the foundation of a student representation office on campus, where we could voice our issues with the university administration. All this is somewhat difficult to understand for someone who was raised and educated as an American.

In addition, whoever transferred to Holdwater the information about my arrests forgot to send him my photograph. For a long time, therefore, Holdwater represented me on his site by a photograph of a PKK member.

Those who are carrying out a campaign against me, portraying me as a “terrorist,” are exploiting this “mysterious American” called Holdwater. Their calculation is simple: To make use of the “terrorist” image which took root in the U.S. after September 11. They are expecting favors from a mindset which labels as “terrorist” both a person arrested for handing out flyers in 1974 and those who attacked the Twin Towers in 2001.

With this attitude, they are actually making fun of Americans, too. After all, here we have a “terrorist” who has carried out direct “terrorist activities” against Turkey ; and what is logical would be to get hold of this terrorist and hold him to account according to Turkish law. Or at least give information to Americans regarding the past activities of this “terrorist,” his investigation and trial.

Instead, they are telling the Americans something which amounts to: “We treat this man as a citizen with a clean record, but could you be so kind as to treat him as a terrorist?” Because, in fact, the citizen in question had his prison sentence annulled with changes made to the Turkish Criminal Code in 1991 and also has a document stating he has a “clean record.”

Ignorant as Holdwater is about Turkey , it is impossible for him to understand all this. But what I find difficult to understand is why this “mysterious” person is so full of hatred and animosity and why he organizes campaigns of belligerence against others despite stating that he is very afraid. I wouldn’t even want to imagine that Holdwater, who describes his appearance as that of “a typical Christian who goes to church with his family on Sundays,” does not know of the Christian teaching which proclaims: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

It is time for someone to take a closer look at the Holdwater issue.

* The golden rule

In his interview with Yeni Şafak newspaper on July 27, 2005, after stating the reasons for withholding his identity, Holdwater says: “I have been able to sustain this struggle for 30 years because I have been able to keep my mouth shut. So please do not push me too much on this sensitive issue.” Holdwater claims to have exceptional skill at protecting his anonymity.I don’t know if anonymity lends a special mystery to Holdwater and a special meaning to his work, or if it makes people wonder, “Who, actually, is this person?” It didn’t strike me that way. I had no interest either in his writings or in his website—until he took on a key role in the campaign against me.

One of Holdwater’s important arguments in this campaign was that a complaint should be filed with American immigration authorities, denouncing me as a “terrorist.” Now, I don’t know if he actually did such a thing. Nor am I aware of a direct link between his argument and my recent four-hour detention at the Canadian border. But I did mention Holdwater and the campaign in an article I wrote on the detention. [See “A Shameful Campaign,” cited above.] Holdwater wrote a 30-page rebuttal, full of lies, insults and attacks.

Holdwater relies on the fact that his name and address are withheld. No one knows who I am, so I’ll say whatever I like, he must think.

This approach of Holdwater must be curbed, and he must be reminded that every game must be played according to its rules. To shamelessly insult others while hiding one’s own identity fits with no proper principle. It’s a disgrace, to say the least.

Holdwater’s claim regarding his intense effort to conceal his identity doesn’t seem to … hold water. Or he doesn’t take historians seriously enough. He doesn’t know we are enthusiastic about documents and love to trace them. To sum up, he has shown a certain degree of carelessness, the kind of carelessness committed by an ordinary person who fancies himself as very clever and more intelligent than others.

Introducing himself on his website, Holdwater published some correspondence he sent and received in his own name—taking care to omit his name before posting the letters online.

According to this correspondence, Holdwater wrote to President Jimmy Carter on April 2, 1980. This letter was forwarded to the United States Holocaust Memorial Council, an organization established by the United States Congress in October 1980. [The USHMC is the governing body of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington , DC.]

On June 2, 1980, Council Director Monroe H. Freedman answered Holdwater’s letter. One senses from the reply that Holdwater’s objections to referencing the Armenian Genocide were taken seriously. Freedman states that he lacks sufficient information on the “Turkish theses” and asks Holdwater to forward citations of relevant sources.

This, of course, is a great honor for Holdwater. Therefore, he sees no harm in publishing a facsimile of Freedman’s letter on his website, with Holdwater’s name removed. Also posted at Tall Armenian Tale is another letter he wrote, this one to the New York Times. We understand from this second letter that, on September 5, 1980, Holdwater had responded to Freedman’s June 2 letter.

I don’t know whether Holdwater is aware of this, but the Holocaust Memorial Council and the Holocaust Museum it governs are public institutions—and therefore this correspondence is available to the public. Which means, in accordance with the principle of transparency, that anyone can view the originals of Holdwater’s letters.

Once you have the text of Freedman’s letter dated June 2, 1980, and published by Holdwater, as well as the information that Holdwater wrote a reply on September 5, 1980, it is rather easy to access these documents. The Holocaust Museum must provide this information to anyone who demands it.

Yes, Mr. Murad Gümen, or, to use the English alphabet, Murad Gumen; as you see, one doesn’t have to be comic-strip detective Kerry Drake to find out who you are (Murad Gümen understands very well what I mean). Tracing the documents published by you has proved sufficient. I believe you will stop taking historians so lightly from now on. As you have understood, we are talking about a document that you yourself have also published.

All I am saying is, to prevent any distortion and alteration of the document, that the name on this document, which you effaced, is Murad Gümen. In a sense, I am rectifying the alteration you made on a document presented to the public.

As you may know, we scholars don’t particularly appreciate the alteration of documents. Such distortion is an occupation reserved for the Turkish Historical Society.

Attacking others, and insulting them, while concealing your own name, does not fit moral conduct at all, Mr. Murad Gümen. Believe me, I am still quite curious as to why you think that I, and many others in my position, do not deserve a right you so readily claim for yourself.

Dr. Akçam, a professor of history at the University of Minnesota , is the author of A Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility (2006). The present article has been edited from a two-part article written for Istanbul ‘s Agos newspaper (“Holdwater: The Mysterious American who Drives Armenians Mad,” May 18, 2007; and “Holdwater: The Golden Rule,” May 25, 2007); the translations for both parts were by Nazım Dikbaş. The July 27, 2005, interview in Yeni Şafak was conducted by Ali Murat Güven.