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In response to “Not an Armenian Genocide, but a Genocide of Christians.”
The title and opening line of our May 5 op-ed about the genocide in Turkey were misleading. There is no doubt that the Turks (and the Ottomans before them) committed genocide against the Armenians in three stages during the years 1894-1924. But during those years they also murdered hundreds of thousands of Greeks and hundreds of thousands of Assyrians – perhaps a million in total. And the main motivating force for all these killings was religious zeal. During the years of World War I and the first years of Ataturk’s rule, Turkish nationalist zeal was also an important component, but religion was still an important motivator for the massacres and the mass deportations. Perhaps the most precise definition for what happened during those years in Turkey is genocidal ethnic-religious cleansing.