Sibel Edmonds, the Turkish-American lady who has worked for the F.B.I. and alleges that the Armenian Genocide resolution was pulled off the House Floor in 2000 due to bribery by the Speaker at the time, is now saying she is ready to tell the entire story – that includes names of prominent Congress members – about government corruption that she wasn’t allowed to talk about for several years due to “national security.” She said to BradBlog.com that if any of the mainstream TVs aired her entire talk without any editing she’d be willing to tell it all.

Read BradBlog.com for further info.

But will any of the corporate mainstream networks take her up on the offer? It’d certainly be an explosive exclusive.

“I don’t think any of the mainstream media are going to have the guts to do it,” she dared them.

So whaddaya say 60 Minutes? We’ve given you scoops before that you ended up turning down — and likely later regretted. Will you be smart enough to take this one?

“You put me on air live, or unedited. If I’m given the time, I will give the American people the exact reason of what I’ve been gagged from saying because of the States Secrets Privilege, and why it is that I’m the most gagged person in the history of the United States.”

“My feeling is that none of them have the guts to do that,” she dared them, before charging, “they are all manipulated.”

Any Armenians in the mainstream media who would dare to interview Sibel Edmunds?

An Azerbaijani journalist, who is serving 2 1/2 years of prison for having challenged Azerbaijan’s official line that Armenian forces deliberatly massacred a few hundred Azerbaijanis during the Nagorno-Karabakh war in Khojalu, has been given another 8 1/2 years of prison for speculating that Azerbaijan “could support a U.S. attack on neighboring Iran.”

Fatullayev behind bars

[…]

The Court for Grave Crimes convicted Eynulla Fatullayev, the founder and editor of two independent newspapers that stopped publication this spring amid government pressure, on charges of making a terrorist threat and inciting interethnic conflict.

The article in Real Azerbaijan claimed that President Ilham Aliev could support an American military operation against Iran and listed facilities that might face Iranian bomb attacks if the nation were to back the U.S.

There is concern in mostly Muslim former Soviet republics that support U.S. military operations in Iraq or Afghanistan over the possibility that the United States could use their territory for an attack on Iran – a constant topic of rumors.

Azerbaijan has pledged that it won’t assist the U.S. but people living along the border were nervous, pointing to an American-built radar facility and the upgrading of a nearby airport.

Fatullayev, who already is serving a 2 1/2 year prison sentence on a libel conviction, denounced the verdict as politically motivated.

“That’s evidence of political pressure on me as a journalist,” he said.

Aliev, who took over from his father in a 2003 election denounced by opponents as a sham, has faced persistent criticism over the heavy-handed treatment of independent media and opposition parties.

As much as being an issue of freedom of speech, Azerbaijan’s persecution of Fatullayev is clearly not for his views on a possible attack on Iran but for having challenged Azerbaijan’s anti-Armenian rhetoric of charging Armenian forces with a massacre of Azeri civilians in 1992 in a village in Nagorno-Karabakh.

The anti-Armenianism is Azerbaijan has no boundaries, and people who challenge it in Azerbaijan pay a huge price, let’s say, at least, 10 years for now.

Another journalist is facing charges of “insulting Turkishness” in Turkey for an article titled “Turkey Has Made Mistakes.”

“The state made mistakes. When and where? Yesterday, in the East and South-East. then in Istanbul. In Maras and Sivas. Today in Trabzon, Istanbul, Mersin and in the South-East.”

These words have taken journalist Haci Bogatekin to court.

Bogatekin owns the local Gerger Firat newspaper in Adiyaman, south-eastern Turkey. Because he criticised state policies in an article entitled “Turkey Has Made Mistakes”, published in his newspaper on 10 March 2007, he is on trial for “degrading Turkishness, the Republic, state institutions or its organs” – Article 301 once again.

Today (26 September), the Gerger penal court decided to have the next hearing on 6 November, in order to allow the journalist time to present evidence and prepare his defense.

Requested legal support 

Bogatekin has requested legal support from the Press Council and has said that he will ask the Adiyaman Bar Association for help.

At the court hearing today, Bogatekin’s complaint that the indictment had been prepared “without doing any research” was rejected by the court.

Call to “keep the country clean” 

In his article, Bogatekin holds the state responsible for “the deaths of millions of Armenians and Syriac Christians in the East and South-East, after that the deaths of the Alevi in Dersim, then the Greek Orthodox in Istanbul with the September movement, and more recently the deaths of hundreds of people in Maras, Malatya, Corum and Sivas”.

He also criticised the employment policies of the state, saying “Do those who murder in the name of the state, who siphon the money out of the banks make contacts with MIT [the Turkish secret service]?

Those exacting money have become like an army which dares to direct the state. In the East, they have begun to decide on the politics. Commanding themselves, they have started to do any job that is dirty and ominous, to exploit the people…”

He ends the article by saying, “Keeping this country clean is the duty of us all. If we do not accept this duty, the consequences will be dreadful. We will not have a future.” LINK 

At least one person I know of says they are having trouble accessing the website of the Armenian National Committee of America – www.anca.org – from the republic of Turkey. Has it been blocked?

After coming across to Stormfront, a “white nationalist” hatesite, through a Google search, I realized that my Internet provider AOL has blocked it off.

I am actually very upset wit AOL’s censorship. There are plenty of racist websites out there, especially having to do with the KKK, and if AOL starts banning one it should ban others too.  Even more stupid is the excuse for the ban of the hatesite: “The page you are trying to view was linked with e-mail determined to be spam.” 

For those of us who want to research racism what are we supposed to?

Yevrobatsi (http://www.yevrobatsi.org/st/item.php?r=0&id=3330) informs in French that a Support Committee for Taner Akçam (Comité de soutien à Taner Akçam) has been set up in Europe.

Just noticed through blogs.google.com that a new blog, Akcam.info, has been set up to support Turkish historian Taner Akcam who is being targeted by ultranationalists of his kin for his scholarship on the Armenian Genocide – a holocaust that official Turkey says never happened.

The purpose of this website is to inform the public and the U.S. authorities of the dangers to Pr. Akcam’s life. Pr. Akcam is one of the first Turkish academics to acknowledge and discuss openly the genocide of the Armenians by the Turkish government in 1915. He is one of a growing number of Turkish scholars and intellectuals who are challenging Turkey’s insistent declarations that the organized slaughter of Armenians did not occur. Pr. Akcam is the victim of a lynching campaign that has an uncanny resemblance to the campaign against Hrant Dink immediately prior to his assassination on January 19, 2007. Act now before it is too late.

By Fatma Gocek, University of Michigan professor 

“Hrant Dink was a man of vision who pointed toward a better world, but, as with the prophets of old, was fated not to enter it.” Roger Smith The sentence above in Roger Smith’s essay for the “Institute for the Study of Genocide” which I quote captured extremely well what had made Hrant Dink’s assassination so tragic for me. Within that group of ours of which Hrant was such an integral part that tried and still try so hard to bring democracy to Turkey, I sincerely believe that it would have felt and meant much more to Hrant than all of us in the group to have seen that vision come true. For I think he among us all had already suffered and paid a much higher price for the lack of it than all of us put together. And we, at least I, knew that. I think it is that knowledge combined with the reality that he among us is the one who will never get to see that vision actualized makes his death so unbearable to us all.

In that group, we the ‘Turks’ (and we were and are almost all Turks, urban mostly middle and some upper class ‘white’ Turks even, as we should have been and are, since we were and are structurally a part of the majority, the power structure and therefore more capable of standing up to and taking on the blows of the ‘other’ powerful establishment Turks) had to fight this fight, but we did not and should not have expected any of the minorities of Turkey to join us, to put them in the front lines given how much they had already suffered, were suffering, had been and still were disadvantaged by the existing structure who did not and still do not give them the chances we inherently all had and still have because of who we were and are rather than what we believed and still believe in. It would not have been fair to expect that of them: that was at least what I knew to be the case sociologically from my own academic work. I personally thought what united us as a group was our vision, a vision where the playing field in our country would be made equal for everyone, where no one would receive blows from the system, especially not the minorities who at present had to receive them, unlike most of us in the group, with their hands tied behind their back. Then, there emerged Hrant from among the minorities who had the strength, the heart and the courage not only to join us, but he did so like a member of our group, as if we had already accomplished that future vision of ours and there he was to show how it was to actually start living it within our group. We/I so appreciated and cherished that.

And I think that is why we all were so devastated when he was murdered: we as a group had failed to protect him. We had all thought we could and would succeed as a group in accomplishing our vision to bring democracy to our society, to guarantee that rights applied to all citizens equally. We also assumed that in that struggle, we would be safe together as a group. I am afraid that we somehow convinced Hrant that he too was safe with us. After all, given what he and his community had already been and was going through, it was only natural that he among us would the one who needed the least amount of convincing… Yet then, he also turned out to be the only one in our group who got murdered. The rest of us were not. We all survived and had to account for his death and our survival; we also had to reconcile with the fact that he was the only one among us who was specifically chosen to be killed: there lied the immensity of the cruelty and evil that went back from the gun held by his assassin back to diffuse into Turkish society and the state.

I will always remember that shock and shame I felt when I received the news of Hrant’s murder from Turkey, when I realized, for the first time in my life, what it means to have something — probably my innocence, naivete, optimism, belief in the inherent goodness of all humans, and faith in my country — get ripped within, with the impact of the shame that I too had thought we as a group could somehow accomplish our vision, that I too had gotten caught up with all the positive changes I had observed around me and had perhaps become too impervious to the degree cruelty within the society, state and the country at large and had therefore underestimated it, and, in so doing, that I too had somehow contributed and encouraged Hrant to feel and become impervious as well, which might have in turn somehow facilitated the road leading to his murder. I think this is the doubt that lies at the root of my shame. Granted, I did talk to him on different occasions at various stages of his unfortunate illegal trial to convince him and/or his family to come to the United States, but ultimately, I think, I failed him as a friend and certainly as a scholar. I think that I, as a sociologist, should have been much more aware of the precariousness of both our and especially his situation in Turkey and should have alerted him much more to the danger surrounding him, for I should have been able to observe much bettr the danger signs in the society, state and country at large as I had been trained to do. I could not.

I think that if Hrant had had the chance to read what I have written above, he would have first addressed and demonstrated his appreciation of both my thoughts and sentiments in that unique way of his which gave direct voice to his heart, thay way which none of us will ever be able to reproduce — and that is exactly what makes him so special and why his loss leaves me so heartbroken — and he would have then made a joke to get me to move on to safer, less dangerous, more practical grounds — as he often did whenever I brought up topics of gloom and doom — and he would have asked me what I was working on, how we scholars were crucial in this process, etcetera etcetera…

Ever since January 2007 when Hrant was murdered, I have been trying to reconcile myself to the reality of Hrant’s assassination. The only way I can reconcile it all at the moment is by by my decision to continue to address, not only now but also in my future activities and academic work, the question of democracy in Turkey and especially the significance of the location of minorities in relation to it. Doing so would enable me to help actualize the vision that has now also become Hrant Dink’s legacy to us as a group, that group which survived his death and now has to forever live, keep living and reconcile, keep reconciling with that tragic reality. I think the decision I have reached is the only way I personally can at this time make my peace not only with Hrant Dink’s murder, but also with the country that so violently murdered him .

By Ahmet Altan, Gazetem.net July 9, 2007 (translated from Turkish)

I met Taner Akcam at an American university city where the winters are long and harsh.
I had heard of him many times.

He was one of the leaders of an old legendary left wing organization.
And, he did not care about any ‘title, name, or class’ of anyone, including his, as he only defined people by their ‘deeds.’

You were a man as much as your deeds.

He was joyful, humorous, and would not complain even under difficult circumstances.
At the university, he was teaching history, I, literature.

During the long winter nights, we would meet sometimes, and he would tell me about his life experiences with a sense of humour exclusive to him.

He had attempted to “democratize” his illegal leftist organization and as a result he had made himself an enemy of his own organization.

He had criticized the anti-democratic stand of the PKK, had been included in the ‘death list’ of the organization, and in an attack, one of his friends had been mistakenly killed.
He would really be moved by sorrow while talking about that.

He was an exceptionally meticulous man.

When he was telling me how he would regularly load up his luggage with detergent bottles before travelling illegally to the Bekaa Valley camp, he would foreground not the difficulties he endured, but the “entertaining contradictions of life.”

He was a leader who carried detergent cleaners, not weapons.

He was researching the deportations of the Armenians executed by the Committee of Union and Progress at that time and he was emphasizing that this amounted to ‘genocide’.

What he claimed so openly and clearly was a difficult thing to do for a Turk at that time.
But he believed in what he spoke, and he spoke what he believed.

Of course he knew that what he was talking about would get him into trouble and he lwas not ooking for trouble, but it was not in his nature to keep quiet in order to avoid trouble, it was not in his nature to shut up about things that he believed.

He would list the actions of the Ittihadists one by one.

He was earning respect with his courage and honesty.

Then I returned home.

He went to another university in the United States.

He wrote new books, he made new enemies.

I received an e-mail from Taner recently.
One line specifically was frightening:
‘First it was Hrant, and I think they put me second in line.’

I remembered Hrant’s last editorial before he died, where he wrote ‘they will kill me’.
We had learned about a murder plot –known almost by the entire state apparatus, documented in intelligence reports numerous times– only after the murder.

No one could help Hrant.

No one had the opportunity or the time to cry that ‘the murder is coming’.

And our ‘lack of awareness’ had cost Hrant his life.

Now Taner was saying, ‘they put me next in line, I guess’.

Hrant’s murder showed us that the State would condone even new murders in order to cover up the sins of the Ittihadists.

That is why alarm bells rang inside me in a more scary fashion when I read Taner’s mail.
It is obvious that ‘that voice, the instict’ which warned Hrant before his murder is now warning Taner.

And he senses the gun being aimed at him.

Are they going to kill Taner for saying ‘Armenians were subjected to genocide’?

Don’t people of our society have the right to say what they believe about our own history?

Does everybody have the obligation to speak in the same way as the state?
Is death the price to pay for not sharing the state views and theses on our history?
Which discussion on history can be punished by death?

Are you going to kill every single person who says ‘Armenians were subjected to genocide’?

If you commit this murder, will the bloodshed prove that ‘there was no genocide’?

It is the very spirit of Ittihadists that is going arounf in this country, they go on killing the Armenian, the Sunni, the Protestant, the Kurd, indiscriminately.

How much longer will this go on?
How much longer will people be killed?

This state and this society could not protect Hrant.
Let us at least protect Taner.
He is a brave and an honest man.
He uttered what was most difficult in this country. He spoke because he believed.
I believe any man who speaks his mind knowing that will put him in trouble deserves respect, regardless of what he believes in.

Death is lingering around his door now.

There are so many newspapers, so many journalists, so many intellectuals in this country; will no one speak up to protect Taner?

Never forget.

Our silence will kill Taner.

If anything happens tomorrow, we will be all complicit.

Protect a person.

Do this so that you can say ‘I am too a human being’.
If you don’t…then you carry your silence like death all your life.

A Statement by Taner Akçam

July 16, 2007

In May 2007, I revealed the identity of Murad “Holdwater” Gümen, the secretive Webmaster of Tall Armenian Tale, an extensive and influential site devoted to “the other side of the falsified Genocide” and the defamation of genocide scholars, myself included. Mr. Gümen has been a leading voice in an ongoing campaign to denounce me as a traitor to Turkey and as a terrorist who ought to be of interest to American authorities.

For the last three years, disinformation about me from Tall Armenian Tale has been disseminated all over the Internet, eventually reaching the open-source encyclopedia, Wikipedia. This campaign, which intensified after the November 2006 publication of my book, A Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility, culminated in my detention by Canadian and American border authorities last February, on suspicion of terrorism. As evidence, they showed me my vandalized Wikipedia biography.

Just one month before this incident, the assassination of Istanbul-based journalist Hrant Dink by an ultranationalist gunman had put Turkey’s intellectuals on high alert. We knew that in the months before his death, Mr. Dink had been targeted by an increasingly vicious media campaign intent on portraying him as a traitor. Among other things, Dink was pilloried for revealing the Armenian identity of Sabiha Gökçen, the adopted daughter of Turkey’s founding father, Kemal Ataturk. Leading the pack against Dink was Hürriyet newspaper, one of the most influential publications in Turkey.

In the campaign against me, disinformation from Tall Armenian Tale was copied to YouTube videos describing my “terrorist” activities. I received death threats by email. My lectures and book tour were disrupted, and poison-pen letters were sent to the hosting universities. Following my lecture on November 1, 2006, at City University of New York, I was physically assaulted.

My detention was the last straw. I challenged Mr. Gümen to stand up in public.

The unmasking of an individual who had been running a campaign of slander against me was presented to readers of Hürriyet as a criminal or unethical act. I was said to have endangered Mr. Gümen’s life.

“Murad Gümen, who has been defending Turkey for over 30 years under the assumed name ‘Holdwater,’ had his identity unmasked by Taner Akçam, supporter of the claim of a so-called genocide….Upon publication of his identity, Gümen became a target and has been the subject of a hate campaign.”—“Secret Lobbyist Deciphered,” Hürriyet, June 21, 2007

“Murad Gümen, whose identity was unmasked by Taner Akçam, has been the target of a flood of insults sent by Armenians via the Internet. Gümen, who’s been accused of racism, has had his photograph published on the Web….[Taner Akçam]’s disappeared. It has not been possible to reach Taner Akçam….Murad Gümen is a successful illustrator and film producer who lives in America.”—“Immediate Target,” Hürriyet, June 22, 2007

“Taner Akçam fled Turkey years ago. He lives overseas, in the United States at this point, and gets fed by the Armenian lobby. He vomits hate towards our country in all of his books and his speeches. Recently he unmasked the Web site that was maintained by Murad Gümen, who has been defending the Turkish position on Armenian issues in the United States, and he revealed the latter’s identity which had been kept secret until now. This individual named Taner Akçam who has spent his life living outside of the country, writing articles and giving speeches against Turkey…[T]his individual…escaped overseas, works in opposition to Turkey, betrayed his country, and serves the Armenian lobby by promoting the position that ‘there was an Armenian genocide’ all over the world!”—Emin Çolasan, “Bravo Atilla Koç! This is How You Introduce Turkey!”, Hürriyet, June 23, 2007

Hürriyet’s reportage concerns me deeply, for three reasons.

First, it bears an uncanny resemblance to the lynching mentality that was created against Dink. Having revealed the identity of a secret slanderer, I am now being denounced as a traitor who “vomits hate towards our country.”

My second cause for concern has to do with an anonymous email that I received on June 11, 2007: “Today we have started fighting you and those creatures you call your friends, within the boundaries of the law. But if we don’t get the result we’re looking for, we’ll start trying other alternative ways. It would be better for world peace and truth if sewer germs like you were taken off the planet…tomorrow is going to be much more difficult for you. Pray that the devil takes you away soon because otherwise you’ll be living a hell on earth… you think you’ve discovered who “Holdwater” is …you have gotten it all wrong. Right now the world is full of millions of Holdwaters…One day you and your wild Armenian blood brothers will drown in this sea of Holdwaters…The truth hurts…it really does. One day you are going to feel the pain so badly that when you read these lines, you’ll remember how you were.” The similarity in character between the campaign against me by Hürriyet and the language used in this threatening email is frightening.

The writer of that letter concludes, “Who am I? You’re going to find out, Taner, you’re going to find out.” Was it a coincidence that the Hürriyet campaign began just 10 days later?

Third, Hürriyet cold-bloodedly disregarded the most basic principles of journalism. Their headline on the second day of coverage proclaimed that I had “disappeared.” Readers were given the impression that I had gone into hiding the day after Hürriyet reported my unmasking of Murad “Holdwater” Gümen.

The fact is that my office address, telephone numbers, and email address are all available online. The University of Minnesota, College of Liberal Arts, the Department of History, and the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies have full-time staff. There is no record of a call, not one single email, from Hürriyet. They never bothered to contact me. They didn’t check their facts or attempt to interview me. And when I demanded a correction, the editor-in-chief ignored my letter.

Thus, in Dink’s case and also in mine, one of the most influential and widely circulated national newspapers does not hesitate to transform itself into a weapon. Once again, intellectuals and activists who dare to question the government’s “official history” are being put on notice. This shameful campaign not only endangers my life and the lives of my colleagues, my family and friends; ironically enough, the very notion of free expression is being undermined by the very institution that depends on it most: the public press.

And what is the point, after all? I published a scholarly study that deviated from the official position of the Turkish State. One should ask the Turkish authorities whether they truly believe that shooting the messenger will prove that their position on 1915 is the correct one.