Also, biased may not necessarily mean unreliable as long as the reader knows it biased.  Yes, they may have gathered all evidence to prove or try to prove their case, but there are still letters from American, British, and German ambassadors that can't or shouldn't be dismissed.

I'm not saying the website as a whole is unreliable I'm just saying the conlusions and the hearsay presented as facts (for example the 1.5 millon killed) are unreliable. If you can sift through those than those websites can be quite useful.With respect to the population question. I just looked up the 1914 census numbers (I'll put a link but it's in Turkish) and it says in total 1.219.323 Armenians lived in the Empire.http://www.tsk.tr/8_TARIHTEN_KESITLER/8_1_Ermeni_Sorunu/konular/ermeni_faaliyetleri_pdf/Arsiv_Belgeleriyle_Ermeni_Faaliyetleri_Cilt_1.pdf

Well, as you all know this is a very sensitive and lenghty subject. More so for me because my grandmother was a Christian Armenian who converted to Islam (out of her own free will) when she married my Grandfather. I'll say the last thing first; No, I do not believe a genocide in the legal sense of the word occured against the Armenians during or after WW1. I'll explain my reasoning later but first I have to state something about the number of Armenians skiguy cited above;- Stalin famously said 1 death is a tragedy 1000000 is statistics. Now I don't intend to diminish the enormity of human suffering by saying there were not 1.5 million Armenians killed but none of the official records of the time can verify such number. According to the Ottoman official records 413.067 people were deported 56.610 of which died, the number of people that were deported is reported as 600.000 in the Catholic Encyclopedia and according to the official letter of the American Consul JB Jackson the number of Armenians subject to deportation was 486.000.Keep in mind that the total number of Armenians living in what was then the Ottoman Empire was roughly 1.5 million. Again the number of dead being 50.000 or even 5 instead of 1.5 million doesn't diminish the humanitarian tragedy but let's try to keep it within the proven facts.Article 2 of 1948 United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (CPPCG) defines genocide as "any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life, calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; [and] forcibly transferring children of the group to another group."Now, why do I think that regrettable episode was technically not a genocide. In 1915 the Ottoman Empire was in utter turmoil, It had just lost the Great War, it was under occupation and there was rebellion all over the empire. The idea of nationalism had come to the empire and the Serbs, Greeks, Bulgarians, Romanians, Armenians etc. all had recently gained or were still struggling for their independance. All of these nations had the backing of one of the western powers or Russia. The Armenians had received support for their independance cause from both France (directly) and Russia (indirectly). Scout mentions the "legitimate fears" the government had about the Armenians fighting with the Russians against the Empire. Actually these were not "legitimate fears" but actual happenings. There are records of Armenians volunteering with the Russian Army as well as Armenians forming armed gangs in rural areas which acted in coordination with the Russian army. There are also records Armenian legions who fought under the French flag.I can understand the Armenians longing for independance, they are an ancient and proud people and when the opportunity presented itself they alligned themselves with the enemies of their former rulers. For me this is perfectly understandable. What I can't understand is how can anyone expect the Ottoman empire to defend itself from an Armenian insurrection without harming its Armenian subjects? There was no "intent to destroy the Armenians" but an intent to defend the country. The Armenians living in the western part of the empire were left unmolested and continued to live as equal citizens. As I said, among these was the family of my grandmother. However in the east as a result of the abovementioned cooperation with the Russians and later with the French, the Armenian population was seen as a threat to national security and deported. I accept that during these deportations there were probably some random killings and such, but I really do not believe that there was an intent to rid the Empire of Armenians at any time. If the Ottoman Empire's actions were to be accepted as genocide; then off the top of my head; I think putting Japanese in concentration camps in WW2, the French actions in Algeria, Italian actions in Libya should also be considered genocide.Scout, with respect to your question about the Turkish Governments silence: They really are not that silent but just can't get any airtime, my guess is western media just doesn't like to be percieved as deniers. And face it, Turkey is not a popular country in the west , we are seen as barbarian, quazi-civilized muslims who should be kept at arms lenght. You prefer us to the afghans and taliban but that's about it. Look, I am not a nationalist and I did not come to this forum to blindly defend "my country". But I can not and will not ever compromise my views to be accepted, here or anywhere else. I realise the abovementioned views will be unpopular, maybe even offensive to some, but this is what I believe to have happened.

This brings us back to defining what "Good" is.

Exactly. But even if we agreed upon a definition of good when the state does something that it percieves as good it will either do something good for it (i.e. the state) or the individual. These two entities interests can not be overlapping all the time. Hence the state can not do what is good for the individual, all the time.

The problem comes when Muslims want to institute Sharia law n western society and westerners want to impose western values on Muslims, both are wrong.  This is not moral relativism, this is moral realism.  I can and do disagree with many of the tenets of Muslim tradition where they conflict with my core values.  In much the same way my values conflict with some Muslim values.  The high profile differences are the ways in which westerners and Muslims treat women, property, and religion.  I should be free to express my values in my home country and deplore what I find deplorable in others; that is tolerance. I have no right to go to a Muslim or any other country and impose my values upon them.  Conversely, they should not expect to come to my country and have my culture change because my core values are not the same.  This is a variation on the smoking in my house analogy.

This is where I don't agree with you. Imposing a set of values to another society with its own set of values shouldn't be done. Ok. But I cannot accept the cutting off of someones hand because they stole something under the heading of "tolerance", or different set of values. I believe with respect to certain inalianable rights of man there is no "other culture" or society. Culture is how spicy I eat my food, the music I listen to etc. I refuse to believe the stoning of women, oppresion of dissidents or apartheid or some other such non sense should be excused or tolerated.

Then I would ask how would you define your core values and whose core values would we take into account while determining the set of core values for a society.As I said above I'd much rather draw any such line using the basic human rights as my guide. I actually think your forefathers did a pretty good job of it with the Bill of Rights.

So have I  ;DMine is really my own personal belief system which developed thru my personal experiences. I called it deism because it most closely resembles that but I could just as easily have called it Gnostisicm. I'll try to explain myself better; I was born and raised in Turkey,to non-practicing muslim parents and a practising muslim grandparents and at a time when Turkey was virtually shut out from the rest of the world because of a coup d'etat. Then at a young age I lived in the states for a while and realized that christians were not all blood thirsty infidels who sought to kill my family and me but pretty friendly people for the most part. I even went to a Jesuit high school while there. Even as a kid when you believe everything your parents believe I could not believe that a kid - same as me- would burn in hell only because he was born to the wrong parents who were christian, jewish or whatever. That first shred of doubt always stayed with me and made it impossible for me to believe in any organised religion. Then I got into reading mostly about christian history but some about jewish and Islamic history and I came to my own conclusions which I will not share with you because again I don't wish to offend anyones beliefs. But I will say that I admire some aspects of all major religions that I've read about, while I can not accept some aspects of the same. And altough I sometimes concede that there may not be a God at all, I've never called myself an atheist as the belief in a supreme being gives me inner peace.

Just a question, don't mean to hijack a great discussion, but are the Dardenelles and Hellespont the same thing or is it not called Hellespont anymore?

They're the same place but actually they're both ancient names. Today we call it the strait of ?anakkale in Turkish.

You are right; the world is becoming a much smaller place.  Tolerance is needed even more.  Notice I do not say agreement but tolerance.  I don?t agree with everything but I do try to tolerate it.  I actually like talking to people of different viewpoints it makes my own worldview expand.  I spent a year in Iraq in 2004-2005 and I met some very interesting people.  I didn?t agree with them on everything but they did have some interesting and thought provoking things to say.  The fact that we can communicate without name calling and derogatory arguments shows that we are both tolerant.  Religion and ethnicity can be enriching and should go some way to define an individual but in the end we are all still members of the human race and that should count for something too.  I am a Catholic and American but that does not mean that I cannot have a civil conversation with someone who is not. 

I can't think of a sane, civilized person who'd disagree with this. But now we come to the real question: when does tolerance becomes intolerance by virtue of the things it tolerates. When the brits tolerate sheria is this a form of intolerance because the women concerned will not be able to "opt out" of becoming subjects to such arbitrary (in every sense of the word) legal system and thus not being able to enjoy the rights and freedoms other women of their own nationality enjoy. I can guess your answer to my hypothetical but exactly where exactly would you draw the line?ps: I really didn't mean to cause offense by the Darwinism comment, it was meant as tonge-in-cheek but I forgot to put one these  😉 at the end. Altough I consider myself deist and don't believe in organized religion of any kind I respect the institutions and what they mean to believers.

I am not a big fan of globalization if that means the watering down of traditional cultural and moral institutions.  I can live alongside those of other cultures but I don’t wan them dictating my actions any more than I want to dictate theirs.  A case in point is Sharia Law, which has recently been introduced for Muslim Britains.  I disagree with this and think that if Muslims want to live under Sharia then they should go where Sharia is the law and not try to co-opt a legal process in England that has worked well for almost 1500 years.The problem as I see it and have said before is a lack of integration.  This is worldwide.  If you move to another country you should accommodate to the society in which you live and not try to force it to accommodate itself to you.  This applies just as much to Mexicans in America as it does to Turks in Germany, Pakistanis in Britain, or Algerians in France.  It is not a matter of which culture is better overall; it is a question of toleration of norms within a larger society.

In theory I agree 100%, I mean if you want to continue living under your own cultural norms than don't go abroad. On the surface this seems to be sensible but I think the problem arises because most of the people living as foreigners do not really want to be living in the country they reside in. They are mostly there because they are either running from some sort of persecution or because of economic reasons. So they become more entranched in their old belief systems. That being said I do agree that one should conform to the basic norms of the society they live in but they should also be able to exircise basic individual freedoms within their individual sphere of life. I am not aware of any Sheria law to be applied to muslims in Britain but if that's true I find it to be moronic. The Ottomans had a multifaceted legal system, the greeks were judged according to their own rules, the armenians according to their own and the muslims according to their own.How can you even talk about a notion of justice when the penalty for a crime differs on the basis of your ethnicity.