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Justin A. McCarthy is an American demographer, who is a professor of history at the University of Louisville, in Louisville, Kentucky. His areas of expertise include the histories of the Ottoman Empire and the Balkans, and he has authored several texts in those fields.

McCarthy has attracted controversy for his unorthodox view of the massacres of Armenians during the waning years of the Ottoman Empire. Most genocide scholars and Western historians label these massacres as genocide, but McCarthy views them as part of a civil war, triggered by World War I, in which equally large numbers of Armenians and non-Armenians died. McCarthy's view is representative of that found among most Turkish historians of the Ottoman period, and is similar to the conclusions drawn by a few Western scholars such as Bernard Lewis and Guenter Lewy. For his various works and speeches that seek to dispute the genocidal nature of the Armenian Genocide, he has often faced scrutiny and harsh criticism. The controversial nature of his views and works, which many critics have described as genocide denial, have made them the subject of much scholarship in themselves.

Background

McCarthy served in the Peace Corps in Turkey, from 1967-1969. He also taught at the Middle East Technical University and Ankara University during this time. He earned his Ph.D. at University of California, Los Angeles in 1978. He has also received an honorary doctorate from Boğaziçi University. He is also a board member of the Institute of Turkish Studies.

Studies

On Ottoman Empire

His studies concentrate on the demise of Ottoman Empire, which ultimately destroyed the Empire. He claims, there was not only Turks and Armenians existed, but everyone in the Empire suffered. It was the Turks and other Muslims who suffered most. He points out that the Turks did not participate in the discussions on the Armenian Question. Just recently, it is now being analyzed in Turkey. Turks also did not study the specific history of the Turks and Armenians. He claims that analysis of the events of World War I majorly analyzed by Western scholars, which has written for Turks. He states that Europeans and Americans do not read Turkish. Turks should be part of the historians of Turkey. The wall between these groups should be broken to have a better analysis of the period.

His current concentration is on the factors that caused the Ottoman loss in the East in World War I. The milestone events of Battle of Sarikamish and the Armenian Revolt.

Armenians

McCarthy does not deny that hundreds of thousands of Armenians died, but claims that "millions of Muslims" in the region were also massacred in this period. He has contended that all of those deaths during World War One were the product of intercommunal warfare between Muslims and Armenians, and did not involve an intent to commit genocide by the Ottoman Empire. In defense on his position: McCarthy is known for his active promotion, through books, articles, conferences, and interviews, of his view that the Genocide did not occur. He was one of four scholars who participated in a controversial debate hosted by PBS about the genocide.

Criticism

Donald Bloxham

Donald Bloxham praises McCarthy's work for highlighting often overlooked suffering of the Muslim populations of the Balkans during the demographic catastrophes of 1912-1923. He identifies McCarthy's work in this field as part of a wider project of undermining scholarship affirming the Armenian Genocide, by reducing it to something analogous to a population exchange. Bloxham writes that McCarthy's work "serves to muddy the waters for external observers, conflating war and one-sided murder with various discrete episodes of ethnic conflict... series of easy get-out clauses for Western politicians and non-specialist historians keen not to offend Turkish opinion."

Guenter Lewy

Another historian in the field, Guenter Lewy, while writing that Armenians caused the deaths of many Muslims, and that the numbers of deaths may be equal on both sides, maintained that those atrocities committed by Armenians were qualitatively different from those committed by Turks and Kurds. Arguing that most Armenian deaths occurred during forcible deportations, he finds these deaths inconsistent with McCarthy's civil war view because few Muslim deaths occurred in such contexts.

Armenian Assembly of America

The Armenian Assembly of America claims that McCarthy lent support to the Assembly of Turkish American Associations, which led an effort to defeat recognition of an Armenian Genocide by the U.S. House of Representatives in 1985.

Works

• McCarthy, Justin (1982). The Arab World, Turkey, and the Balkans (1878-1914). G.K. Hall. p. 309. ISBN 9780816181643.
• McCarthy, Justin (1983). Muslims and Minorities: The Population of Ottoman Anatolia and the End of the Empire. New York University Press. p. 248. ISBN 9780871509635.
• McCarthy, Justin (1990). The Population of Palestine: Population History and Statistics of the Late Ottoman Period and the Mandate. Institute for Palestine Studies Series. Columbia University Press. ISBN 9780231071109.
• McCarthy, Justin (1996). Death and Exile: The Ethnic Cleansing of Ottoman Muslims, 1821-1922. Darwin Press, Incorporated. ISBN 0878500944.
• McCarthy, Justin (1997). The Ottoman Turks: An Introductory History to 1923. Longman. ISBN 9780582256569.
• McCarthy, Justin (2001). The Ottoman Peoples and the End of Empire. A Hodder Arnold Publication. ISBN 0340706570.
• McCarthy, Justin (2003). Who Are the Turks? A Manual for Teachers (PDF). American Forum for Global Education. p. 242. ISBN 9780944675717.
• McCarthy, Justin (2006). The Armenian Rebellion at Van. University of Utah Press. ISBN 0874808707.

Awards

• Şükrü Elekdağ Award of the Assembly of Turkish American Associations
• Chairman's Education Award of the Turkish American Friendship Council
• Order of Merit of Turkey (1998)

See also

• Denial of Armenian Genocide

References

1. Justin McCarthy. Home page of another academic with whom he served in the Peace Corps.
2. University of Louisville :: The Expert Source :: Expert Details
3. For example, see Kamuran Gürün, The Armenian File: The Myth of Innocence Exposed (Nicosia and London: K. Rustem and Brother and Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1985), pp. 214-5.
4. Bernard Lewis, The Emergence of Modern Turkey, 3rd rev. ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 356.
5. Lewy, Guenter (2005). "Revisiting the Armenian Genocide". Middle East Quarterly. {{cite journal}}: Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)
6. Gultasli, Selcuk. "No Evidence of Ottoman Intent to Destroy Armenian Community". Today's Zaman.
7. ^ Mustafa Aydin, Çağrı Erhan (2004) Turkish-American Relations: Past, Present, and Future, xii
8. Bloxham, Donald. The Great Game of Genocide: Imperialism, Nationalism, and the Destruction of the Ottoman Armenians. 2005, page 214.
9. MacDonald, David B. Identity Politics in the Age of Genocide, p.121. Routledge, 2008. ISBN 0415430615.
10. "Board of Governors". Institute of Turkish Studies. 2008-11-04. Retrieved 2008-11-05.
11. ^ McCarthy, Justin (March 24,), Armenian-Turkish Conflict, retrieved 19 November 2008 {{citation}}: Check date values in: |date= and |year= / |date= mismatch (help)CS1 maint: extra punctuation (link)
12. McCarthy, Justin Let the Historians Decide, Ermeni Arastirmalari, volume 1, Ankara 2001.
13. McCarthy, Justin Death and Exile: The Ethnic Cleansing of Ottoman Muslims, 1821-1922 Darwin Press, Incorporated (March 1996), ISBN 0-87850-094-4
14. Jaschik, Scott (October 22 2007). "Genocide Deniers". {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
15. "A PBS Documentary Makes Its Case for the Armenian Genocide, With or Without a Debate". New York Times. 2006-04-17. Retrieved 2006-09-02.
16. ^ Bloxham, Donald. The Great Game of Genocide: Imperialism, Nationalism, and the Destruction of the Ottoman Armenians. 2005, page 211.
17. Lewy, Guenter. The Armenian Massacres in Ottoman Turkey: A Disputed Genocide. 2005, page 122.
18. Linenthal, Edward Tabor (2001) Preserving Memory: The Struggle to Create America's Holocaust Museum, pg. 312
19. Imber, Colin (1999)Book Review, British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, Vol 26, No. 2.

External links

• Armenian-Turkish Conflict (2005), by Justin McCarthy

• Misplaced Pages neutral point of view disputes from December 2008
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• Living people
• American historians
• Anti-Armenianism
• University of Louisville faculty
• Armenian Genocide deniers