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Testimony Against California Senate Joint Resolution 5 (SJR 5)

Turkish-Americans living in California are against resolution SJR 5 principally because they sincerely believe that this resolution represents a biased and untrue view of history, put together not for the purpose of commemorating the dead, but for the purpose of slandering those of Turkish descent in the furtherance of an ethnic agenda. This belief is reinforced by the clear ethnic bias of the resolution and by many statements in the resolution which can easily be refuted by those with some real knowledge of Ottoman and Turkish history.

It is the intent of this written testimony to take each item of the resolution and to describe how these statements are flawed in view of history and in view of logic. While we recognize and sincerely regret any injustices that befell the innocent segment of the Ottoman-Armenian population and have no intent of minimizing their sufferings, we also believe that the result of many intentional exaggerations, falsifications, and omissions has been to vilify Turks to portray them as bloodthirsty monsters, and Armenians as their innocent victims. Nothing could be further from the truth. We start with this quote from a book by Hassan Arfa, chief of staff of the Iranian Army 1944-46, ambassador to Turkey 1958-61:

“These Armenian volunteers, in order to avenge their compatriots who had been massacred by the Kurds, committed all kinds of excesses, more than six hundred thousand Kurds being killed between 1915 and 1918 in the eastern vilayets [provinces] of Turkey.”, The Kurds, Oxford University Press (1966), pg. 26.

1. “WHEREAS, Armenians living in their historic homeland in Asia Minor were subjected to severe persecution and brutal injustice by the Turkish rulers of the Ottoman Empire before and after the turn of the twentieth century, including widespread acts of destruction, mayhem, and murder during the period from 1894 to 1896, and again in 1909;

We must now look from the other side of the mirror to see the truth:
British records provide excellent references about the origins of the Armenian terrorism, which actually have continued to our day as ASALA and ARA. On March 28, 1894, the British Ambassador in Istanbul, Sir Philip Currie, reported to the British Foreign Office: "The aim of the Armenian revolutionaries is to stir disturbances, to get the Ottomans to react to violence, and thus get the foreign Powers to intervene." British Blue Book, No. 6 (1894) pg.57.

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