U.S. association apologizes to renowned historian for calling him "spy of Turks"

Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) has apologized to historian Guenter Lewy for suggesting that he was "a Turkish agent" due to his opponent stance regarding the Armenian allegations on the incidents of 1915.

Releasing a statement, Alabama-based SPLC said that "it now realized that it misunderstood Professor Lewy's scholarship, was wrong to assert that he was part of a network financed by the Turkish Government, and was wrong to assume that any scholar who challenges the Armenian genocide narrative necessarily has been financially compromised by the Government of Turkey".

Commenting on the statement, Lewy said SPLC's apology cleared his reputation, moreover, it constituted a victory for free research. Guenter Lewy is an author and political scientist who is a professor emeritus at the University of Massachusetts.

His works span several topics, but he is most often associated with his 1978 book on the Vietnam War, America in Vietnam, and several controversial works that deal with the applicability of the term genocide to various historical events.

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.

In the summer 2008 issue of its Intelligence Report, the Southern Poverty Law Center reported that Guenter Lewy was part of a network of persons, financed by the Government of Turkey, who dispute that the tragic events of World War I constituted an Armenian genocide.

On November 17, 2008 Professor Guenter Lewy filed a defamation suit against the Southern Poverty Law Center and writer-editor David Holthouse in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia, supported by the Turkish American Legal Defense Fund.


/Today's Zaman/