The Moor Next Door has recently posted information on a PBS program by Bruce Feiler that talked about Mount Ararat – the national symbol of Armenia – without any reference to the Armenian people:

Isn’t it interesting how the PBS documentary Walking the Bible, which has been airing for sometime now, devoting a segment to Mount Ararat in eastern Turkey, without giving even the slightest mention to the Armenians? Mt. Ararat is seen as an Armenian national symbol (their national soccer team is even named after it), and the area around contained many Armenians before the Genocide in 1915-23. In a documentary about Christianity, isn’t it strange that a segment about the national symbol of the world’s first Christian nation would leave that nation entirely unmentioned?

The program is apparently the repeat of the same show that I wrote about two years ago.  It is amazing that PBS would repeat a show that has plainly plagiarized and then distorted phrases from a 2004 National Geographic article on Armenia by Frank Viviano.

In particular, the PBS program states – as I reported in my previous entry – that “Ararat beckons. It is officially closed by the Turks [to the Kurds].”  The phrase doesn’t make sense because Ararat and the surrounding areas are mostly populated by Kurds some of whom even attempted to establish The Republic of Ararat in the 1920s in the lands – now in Turkey – were Armenians had been massacred in.

But the phrase does make sense once you have read Viviano’s article which was written before the production of the PBS film. The Viviano article talks about how Ararat beckons to Armenians to whom the Turkish border, and access to Ararat, is officially closed.

It is not too late for PBS to investigate what appears to be either plain plagiarism or result of ignorant censorship to remove Armenian references and subsequently the citation of the National Geographic article.