The French UMP (Union for a Popular Movement) Party is facing controversy following the discovery that a large part of a bill presented to the French legislature in remembrance of the Armenian genocide was plagiarized from Wikipedia. Former French President Nicolas Sarkozy is a member of the UMP.
Greens Party assistant Pierre Januel only noticed the plagiarism in a bill to recognize the Assyrian genocide because the UMP forgot to remove links from Wikipedia. He tweeted out the find with the hashtag #EpicFail.
Translation: MP Valérie Boyer plagiarizes Wikipedia to make a law without removing the links.
https://twitter.com/PJanuel/status/582550462378958848
The bill recognizes the Assyrian Genocide of 1915 “at the hands of the Ottoman Empire.” Boyer admitted she used Wikipedia, but claimed experts checked the bill before she submitted it.
“There is very little information about the genocide and we are not experts,” claimed one member of her staff. “So, rather than inventing information, we had an expert check those we had available.”
The Assyrian Genocide occurred simultaneously with the Armenian Genocide, “yet only one of the twin programmes has lived on in infamy.” However, due to the Islamic State’s (ISIS/ISIL) massacres of Assyrians, the victims of the 1915 genocide are finally receiving the remembrance they deserve. The genocide took place from 1914 to 1923, which means Turkey continued “the killing long after their empire had been dismantled.” The International Business Times reports:
“Estimates on the overall death toll vary, with some contemporary reports placing the figure at 270,000, and estimates range to as many as 750,000,” reported Dr. Israel W. Charny, the editor of two-volume Encyclopedia of Genocide and executive director of the Institute on the Holocaust and Genocide.
Charny groups the Assyrian Genocide together with the massacre of Greeks and Armenians in a “Christian Holocaust,” which he claims was “the precursor to the Jewish Holocaust in WWII.”
“To this day, the Turkish government ostensibly denies having committed this genocide” Charny adds.
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