"... there are other frankly well-qualified authorities in the USA, better-qualified in terms of academic record than anything to be found on the Armenian side.
Guenther Lewy (who has just retired from a Chair at Amherst) has a recent book that is clearly fair-minded ('A disputed genocide') and it does material damage to the scholarly performance of the chief diaspora historian, Dadrian. Justin McCarthy, an Ottoman demographer, can also usefully be consulted. In Paris, at the College de France, there is Gilles Veinstein, who wrote a telling summary of the whole question in L'Histoire of 1993. These are frankly in the top flight of scholars, and this subject is an extremely difficult one, requiring knowledge not just of modern Turkish but Ottoman, which is obsolete. There are other scholars who also question the 'genocide' account, for instance a young man at Harvard, Michael Reynolds, who can handle both the Ottoman archives and the records of the Russian military administration, which took over eastern Anatolia in 1915. The Russian documents, I gather, support what the Turks have claimed about 1915 - that there was a tremendous Armenian-nationalist provocation, followed by a cruel deportation of the population.
I might add that each of these men has faced vicious attacks, and attempts to stop publication - for instance, the manipulation of peer review tactics, vastly exaggerating the number and significance of slips. In the case of one celebrated American historian, Stanford Shaw at UCLA, his car was booby-trapped and his house fire-bombed."
Professor Norman Stone
23 August 2007
Norman Stone: "Famous American historian, Stanford Shaw's car was booby-trapped and his house was fire-bombed"
