Southern Poverty Law Center Sued for Article on the Armenian Genocide. Boohoo!!!

Guenter Lewy, notorious denier of the Armenian Genocide and other instances of genocide over the years, is reportedly suing the Southern Poverty Law Center over an article on the mechanism of the Armenian Genocide denial in the United States, aided and abetted by woe scholars suspected on being on the payroll of their Turkish paymasters from the Ankara/Istanbul axis. From the website of the Turkish American Legal Defense Fund, i guess a front for such types of lawsuits in the future:

SCHOLAR SUES SOUTHERN POVERTY LAW CENTER
FOR FALSELY ACCUSING HIM OF BEING A FOREIGN AGENT

Washington , DC- December 1, 2008: On November 17, 2008 Professor Guenter Lewy filed a defamation suit against the Southern Poverty Law Center, Inc., and writer-editor David Holthouse in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia . The suit is being supported by the Turkish American Legal Defense Fund, which seeks to preserve and promote open discourse about issues significant for Turkish Americans, including the characterization of the events bearing on the World War I deaths of Ottoman Muslims and Armenians. Among other works, Professor Lewy is author of The Armenian Massacres in Ottoman Turkey: A Disputed Genocide ( University of Utah Press , 2005), which concludes that the evidence to support the popular allegation of genocide in the Armenian case is inconclusive.

The defamation claims pivot on twin false assertions made by Defendant Holthouse in an article published in the Summer 2008 issue of Intelligence Report entitled, “State of Denial: Turkey Entices U.S. Scholars, Law Makers to Cover Up Armenian Genocide.” The first was the false statement that Professor Lewy was on the payroll of the Government of Turkey in exchange for compromising his scholastic integrity in disputing the Armenian allegation of genocide. The second was that Professor Lewy deceived his readers or audiences by failing to disclose the money he had received from the Government of Turkey to shape his view of the Armenian claim. The false statements also insinuated that Professor Lewy had violated the Foreign Agents Registration Act by failing to register with the Department of Justice as a mouthpiece for the Government of Turkey. Professor Lewy is seeking damages to clear his good name and to send a message that sham accusations of being on the take is not an acceptable substitute for reasoned and civil debate over genuine historical controversies. The climate of intimidation, coercion and worse that confronts anyone who quarrels with the Armenian view of the events of 1915 in the Ottoman Empire must end.

Professor Lewy is being represented by attorneys Bruce Fein and David Saltzman on behalf of the Turkish American Legal Defense Fund.

The PDF containing the complaint can be downloaded from here. Proceed at your own risk of being tracked by the cookies from the Turkish intelligence.

Georgia Accused of Committing War Crimes

BBC reports:

The BBC has discovered evidence that Georgia may have committed
war crimes in its attack on its breakaway region of South Ossetia in
August.

Eyewitnesses have described how its tanks fired directly into an
apartment block, and how civilians were shot at as they tried to escape
the fighting.

Jockeying for Influence in the Caucasus. Democracy be damned

In a telling opinion peace written for the Wall Street Journal western analysts show their cards. To merge the serious and the funny, Leonard Cohen and Sacha Baron Cohen, aka Borat, “Democracy is coming to the Caucasus… pause, Not!”

Western attention has lately been focused on governance in Azerbaijan, with
election monitors from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe
giving Baku a balanced progress report on democratic development. The Oct. 15
election — which the incumbent president, Ilham Aliyev, won handily with over
90% of the vote — for the first time met most international standards and
marked a genuine improvement in election conduct. There were missing elements
too, namely the lack of a competitive campaigning climate. But Western
preoccupation with the election process misses the full picture of governance in
Azerbaijan and, more importantly, ignores the geopolitical imperatives of the
region.