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Pro-Armenian congressmen pressure Hillary Clinton into retracting her statement on recent French legislative bill

17 February 2012 13:57 (UTC +04:00)

Washington. Isabel Levine â€“ APA. Recently, the Armenian-American special interest groups have launched a campaign, led by Congressmen Adam Schiff (D-CA) and Robert Dold, Jr. (R-IL), to pressure the Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, into retracting her statement on the recent French legislative bill criminalizing the denial of the so-called "Armenian genocide".

APAâ€™s US correspondent reports that in their part, the Azerbaijani Americans urge their representatives not to co-sign the "Schiff-Dold" letter and to defend Secretary Clinton’s just position on freedom of expression and against legislating history.
â€œCommenting on this legislation, withheld for review by France’s Constitutional Council after clearing both chambers of the French Parliament, Secretary Clinton accurately indicated that the law was compromising free speech and that the issue is a matter of historical debate by scholarsâ€, say the Azeri Diaspora members in their letters to the elected officials.

â€œFurthermore, according to a renowned expert of the Ottoman history, Professor Bernard Lewis of Princeton University, there was no "deliberate preconceived decision of the Ottoman government" to eliminate Armenians and the claim that the inter-communal warfare atrocities were a genocide constitutes only "the Armenian version of the history". Besides Armenians, over 518,000 Turkish civilians were massacred during World War I by the paramilitaries of Armenian Revolutionary Federation supported by invading Russian forces in Eastern Anatolia. So, Secretary Clinton’s assertion that the allegations of the so-called "Armenian genocide" are a matter of historical debate by scholars is absolutely correctâ€, read the letters.