You thought he was a denier, but did you know he was also an urologist?

Turkey’s official chief historian Yusuf Halacoglu, who has made news at Blogian for his role in covering up the discovery and the destruction of a possible Armenian Genocide mass grave, is under fire now for what many in Turkey see as racist comments against both Armenians and Kurds.

Photo: Halacoglu

Halacoglu, the head of the governmental Turkish Historical Society, has now ridiculed himself by proclaiming at a conference that there are no Kurds in Turkey: “Kurds are converted Turkmen and Kurdish Alevis are converted Armenians.” (Halacoglu is quoted as saying in the Turkish Daily News)

Apparently, after going through the penises of PKK (a militant Kurdish group deemed as terrorist by the West) members, Halacoglu has once again discovered there has been no Armenian Genocide. He is quoted in the Turkish press as saying, “For example when some PKK members are arrested it becomes apparent that they are not circumcised.”

If a Kurd is not circumcised then he must be Armenian, thinks Halacoglu. If there are so many covert Armenians in Turkey then there has been no Armenian Genocide, thinks – or should I say hallucinates – Halacoglu. I wonder what Halacoglu could find out by looking at my penis.

It is difficult to say what is the most shocking aspect about Halacoglu’s new hallucination – denying the Kurdish identity, propagating conspiracy theories about Armenians, denying the Armenian Genocide or trying to even more dehumanize Kurds by calling them Armenians? 

Kenan Ercel, a native of Turkey now at the Economics Department at the University of Massachusetts, says that the motivations behind Halacoglu’s statements are ignored.

There is much talk and outcry around Halacoglu’s latest statements but
what gets surprisingly little attention in the midst of all the hubbub is
the motivation behind those statements, which is not so much to deny Kurds
a separate ethnic identity (he already backpedaled on that) but to
downplay the scale of the 1915 deportations. As Halacoglu stated in a TV interview yesterday (on SkyTurk), if it can be shown that hundreds of thousands of Armenians who were believed to have disappeared from Anatolia were actually still there under the guise of a different ethnicity (Alevi Kurds), then it can be proven that the deportations were no where near as widespread as they are claimed to be. In the said interview he argued that if this hidden population was accounted for, the number of Armenians living in Turkey as of 1920 would turn out to be 1.3 million! Hence, not only was there no genocide, but even the “tehcir” was very limited in scope.

As to how such a sizeable Christian population managed to meld in
(almost en masse) with a Muslim sect without being noticed by the CUP authorities and their collaborators, I’m sure Halacoglu has other fairy tales to tell.