The OP seems to be following the standard genocide denial form:
1 - Act reasonable. Claim that you are unbiased and have no personal interest in the debate.
2 - Frame the argument as an “either or” debate. Claim that either your side is right or the other side is right. Ignore all the middle ground between your two positions.
3 - Put the burden of proof on your opponent. Insist on an absolute standard of “proven beyond all possible doubt” rather than “proven based on a preponderance of evidence”. Insist that if your oppoent can’t prove his position than yours is automatically correct.
4 - Claim that your supporters are neutral and your opponents are all biased.
5 - Nitpick over spurious details. Question whether 40000 or 50000 people died on a given date. Question whether people were shot with a rifle or a handgun. Question what street a massacre occurred on. Question what the weather was like that day.
6 - If you catch your opponent in a factual error, seize upon it and claim it disproves every other fact he’s provided. If you catch him admitted he doesn’t have a particular fact, claim that proves he doesn’t know what really happened. If he can produce documentation for every fact he cites, question the documentation and demand proof of his proof.
7 - Cherry pick your evidence. Take facts and quotes out of context if they can be made to look like they support your side. Use obscure sources so nobody can easily check the original.
8 - If you can’t deny the extent of the action, deny the intent of it. Claim that everybody died due to unforeseeable circumstances and nobody planned it.
9 - Play the sympathy card. Tell people your group also suffered in some other circumstance. Or say that people have always been biased against your group and believe the worst of them. In extreme cases, try to claim that the group that was killed may have deserved a little trouble and things just got out of hand.
10 - Spread the guilt around. Claim that everybody else, especially whatever group your audience belong to, is equally guilty, so who are they to judge? If you can try to tie them in with a part of the original holocaust (“How come you didn’t let them immigrate to your country if you wanted to save them?”) or if that’s impossible, point out some other act from their history (“Isn’t it true that your people massacred all of its natives?”)
11 - Appeal to your audience’s sense of common humanity - “You wouldn’t kill three million innocent people, would you? Of course not. Well, neither would they.” Ignore the fact that the victims died and somebody killed them.
12 - If the genocide happened recently, claim that it’s too early to really know what happened and it should be left for history to judge. If the genocide happened longer ago, claim it’s all part of history now and it’s pointless to drag it back up.
Instead let’s just all agree to leave current domestic politics out of it, unless a directly pertinent connection to the Armenian issue can be shown. Debates about voting paterns, terrorism, and the Iraq war belong in the Great Debates forum.
I don’t understand why you are offended, and I’m just as puzzled why a citation would soothe your mind. But I’m perfectly willing to have a dicussion on this point, if you’d explain your objection in more detail.
I think everyone in this particular issue will try and defend the armenians of course not to look bad, it is obvious as to how yous reply back, instead of replying with evidence yous have replied with such words as “he uses the standard genocide post” or “it is still a genocide if 500,000 were killed regardless of number”, well bostontea aint talkin about that, is he!, that is one of his arguments/issues about the topic he is speaking about, now unless people in here havnt been past the 7th grade and have a souc on one little thing he has said which has got nothing to do with the actual topic sentence he wants people to reply to they can fuck off, and some of the things people in here say are really irrelevant or don’t have enough evidence to back them up.
If you really want to no what happened visit this site: www.tallarmeniantale.com which has the most reliable info i have come across in this issue and no it is not “written all by a turk”, but by a an armenian himself, a turk and an american, so if you really want to debate about this read the site and READ IT! dont stop on the first paragraph read IT ALL!!!, it is not against armenians or against turks it simply tells the truth!
Now if someone has something to say without visiting the site and READING IT ALL, they are truly overruled in this particular debate.
Now I don’t have the immediate reaction that some other posters have to this Armenian genocide issue. Just from observing how knowledge of such events spreads, I fully expect the media to have exaggerated the side of the Armenians (albeit, to a degree that I have no way of guessing). So I hope that makes me more credible in saying:
FOR GOD’S FUCKING SAKE, LEARN TO USE A GODDAMN PERIOD!
You make yourself look like an idiot, because no matter if English was something you learned in childhood or later in life, EVERY LANGUAGE HAS SENTENCES!
Man, and then you accuse people of not having been past 7th grade.
P.S. No, wait, I do see a period. Apparently you use them to mark the ends of your paragraphs. What a novel idea.
Bostontea has spoken the best out of everyone also Askance and CalMeacham, but alex
_dubinsky speaks out of the point and about irrelevant issues and i hope an admin picks out his words, and im sorry about the swearing, its the only logical thing wen u recieve insults.
Alright, I read that and also the Wikipedia article.
The idea presented by the tallarmeniantale site is that:
Armenians and Muslims were at war, so vast numbers died just through that.
Yes, Armenians were afterwards deported from the country. But at the same time, Muslims were deported from the Russian/Armenian lands.
So, overall both sides weren’t real good, and overall it was a sucky time.
The issues with this however, and wish are made clear in the Wikipedia article are:
Yes, there was a war and bad blood and certainly people may have died, but that’s not what anyone is talking about when they refer to the genocide.
Yes, both sides deported the people of the other. However, no one is taking issue with the fact that there was deportations. The problem is that only one side made it to the border. If the Armenians hadn’t been taken to camps and burned by the thousands, killed by specially selected criminals, starved to death, or left to the whim of the populace, and had instead been deported no one would have an issue. If Turkey can show that the Muslims being deported from the Russian/Armenian territory were also being taken to camps and killed, then that’s something to bring up. But just the fact that the other side was performing “deportations” does not equal things out.
Direct personal insults are not permitted outside the BBQ Pit forum. I won’t issue a warning because I see you’ve apologized. Please be more careful in the future.