Al Gore's holocaust-denying 'anchorman'

TAMPA, Fla. – Do you think there's a slightly different standard of behavior for liberals and Democrats than there is for conservatives and Republicans?

I ponder this thought in the closing hours of the Republican convention as I consider whether to spend the following week eavesdropping on the Democrats in Charlotte.

But I think I can answer my rhetorical question above with one stunning illustration.

I don't know whether you have heard that Al Gore is actually going to serve as "anchorman" of his ratings-challenged cable network called "Current" during the Democratic National Convention this week. Gore, of course, will explain to anyone who questions his objectivity and journalistic credentials that he once interned at the Nashville Tennessean – certainly providing all the qualifications he needs in a world in which Chelsea Clinton serves as a special correspondent for NBC News.

However, the real news at Current is not Gore. The real news is who he employs and which Current TV personalities will be joining Gore in swooning over all the Democratic personalities in Charlotte.

What you probably don't know, and what most Democrats don't care about, is that one of Al Gore's regular hosts on Current, late of MSNBC, is a holocaust-denier.

"What?" you ask. "Tell me more."

I'm talking about the host of "The Young Turks" – Cenk Uygur.

Apparently, Uygur's "Turkish pride" has short-circuited his own brain cells to the point that he actually denies the Armenian holocaust – that other great, ethnically driven genocidal catastrophe of the 20th century.

Though Uygur has not made much of his unusual (and, shall we say, historically indefensible) convictions during his time at MSNBC or Current, he's held them for a very long time, the record shows.

Back in 1999, Uygur wrote a letter to the editor of Salon disputing the Armenian genocide as a fabrication of self-deluded Armenian historians.

"I am a Turkish-American, and I am sure my views will also be looked upon with a certain wariness, but I do not subscribe to the idea that I am disqualified from objectivity by my ethnicity," Uygur wrote about an earlier article in the online magazine. "First, at the very beginning of the article, you seem to reach a conclusion – 'The central Armenian experience of the 20th century, after all, was the death of as many as 1.5 million Armenians ...' and 'Every neutral scholar agrees that the Turkish position is propaganda.'"

Like other holocaust-deniers – including those of the anti-Semitic variety – Uygur explains that the Christian Armenian deaths at the hands of the Muslim Turks was all just a matter of war propaganda – in this case World War I that brought an end to the Ottoman Empire. The U.S. was behind it all, Uyger wrote, just "as it [was] with Germany." The other problem, he said, was that there weren't enough "Turkish-Americans to combat the insinuations of savagery."

Apparently, though, in the mind of Uygur, the Armenian lobby, like the Jewish lobby, was just too powerful to overcome with the truth – that the Turks were framed.

"I once asked a professor of mine who taught a class on the laws of war and war crimes at Columbia Law School to deprogram me from all the propaganda I had received growing up Turkish," wrote Uygur of a conveniently unnamed professor. "I asked him to please find me evidence of the genocide by neutral scholars so I could know the truth. After investigating the issue, he came back and said that he could not find one non-Armenian scholar who believed this was a genocide, but since 'it looked like a duck, it walked like a duck and it talked like a duck, it must be a duck.' If that's not the product of excellent propaganda, I don't know what is."

That was 1999. But long before that, the liberal young Turk had already committed himself to debunking the "myth" of the Armenian genocide. Eight years earlier, Uygur was whitewashing the Turkish genocide while still in college. In fact, as a youth, he blamed the entire conflict on Armenian terrorists who caused "countless deaths."

Don't expect either Al Gore or any Democratic personality to challenge Uygur on his position this week.

To liberals and Democrats, some humanitarian calamities just matter more than others.