The ad is titled “Truth = Peace” and a peace sign, but its purpose is to deny that as many as 1.5 million Armenians were systematically rounded up and murdered by the Ottoman government in what is now Turkey.
The ad contains a URL for the genocide-denial group FactCheck Armenia, the unfounded arguments of which boil down to 1) It wasn’t actually that many people, and 2) The Armenians started it. The caption on the photograph refers to the ethnic cleansing as “the 1915 incident”.
A request for comment to Ab Kaan, the Turkish proprietor of Turkic Platform, as to how much he paid for the ad and how he sources his funding, was not returned. Neither Kaan nor his advocacy groups are listed in the Department of Justice’s Foreign Agents Registration Act database.
The Wall Street Journal provided to Gawker’s the following comment:
We accept a wide range of advertisements, including those with provocative viewpoints. While we review ad copy for issues of taste, the varied and divergent views expressed belong to the advertisers.
Calling the denial of an act of genocide merely “provocative” seems like an understatement, Sam Biddle concludes.
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