Research Information System
MIDDLE EAST CRITIQUE, no.2, pp.209-223, 2014 (ESCI)
This article analyzes the Orientalist discourse of demonization, exclusion and 'othering' of the Ottoman Empire and its Muslim population during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by focusing on the writings of three influential men: British Clergyman John Henry (Cardinal) Newman, British political leader William Gladstone, and American ambassador Henry Morgenthau. Even though these figures wrote at different times, their writings about the Ottoman Empire are complementary and form a continuous discourse especially in terms of constructing a specific ground of perceiving the atrocities that occurred during World War One. Although the first two had no great impact like the last one at the time they were written they constituted a great support for the latter in terms of the plausibility of the latter's arguments. As the latter is accepted as one of the main sources of the alleged genocide of the Ottoman Armenians, the paper reflects the particular writings of these three figures as one single and continuous discourse that have constituted the basic parameters of discussing and thinking about the Armenian genocide.