Genocide justification
[10] According to W. Michael Reisman, "many of the individuals who are directly responsible operate within a cultural universe that inverts our morality and elevates their actions to the highest form of group, tribe, or national defense".
Jones points out that this type of genocide is less likely to be condemned and may even be welcomed, despite the torture and execution of thousands of women and children on the island.
[16] Historian Hans-Lukas Kieser points out, "To justify genocide, Talaat framed a whole discourse and set of arguments, so that the self-righteous justification for murder and destruction remained entrenched in later memoirs, politics, and historiography.
[19] In 1919, Mustafa Kemal stated: Whatever has befallen the non-Muslim elements living in our country, is the result of the policies of separatism they pursued in a savage manner, when they allowed themselves to be made tools of foreign intrigues and abused their privileges.
[20]Historian Erik Jan Zürcher comments, "All the classic elements in the defense of violent aggression are here: they asked for it, it was not really so bad and anyway, others have done the same and worse.
[21]According to Fatma Müge Göçek, "The sentiments of the Turkish state and populace toward these CUP leaders are best captured in one memoir that noted:" There were no Armenians left in east, central Anatolia and to a certain degree in the western regions.
Author Stefan Ihrig argues that, in the early 1920s, the Germans who had denied the Armenian genocide switched to justifying it after accepting the historicity of the events.
Instead, he justified the systematic murder as anticipatory self-defense against the mortal threat supposedly posed by Jews, Romani people, Communists, and others.
[32] Some Moldovan historians have claimed that the Holocaust in Romania was justified by the lack of loyalty shown by Jews to the interwar Romanian state.
Established in the early 1990s, Kangura played a pivotal role in shaping public opinion and escalating ethnic tensions in Rwanda.
The manipulation of historical figures in such imagery aimed to legitimize the Hutu victimhood narrative and fuel the genocidal ideologies that would later manifest in the tragic events of 1994.
Collusion between various media outlets, including Kangura and the radio station RTLM, strengthened the impact of these false narratives, further reinforcing dangerous ideologies that culminated in the events of the Rwandan genocide in 1994.
[37][38] Conducting interviews with Serbs in Bosnia, Janine Natalya Clark found that many interviewees endorsed the idea "that those killed in Srebrenica were combatants and therefore legitimate military targets", alongside beliefs that the massacre was exaggerated.
[43] After her December 2019 remarks in the International Court of Justice, American political scientist William Felice wrote that she used "the same arguments that organizers of genocide and ethnic cleansing deployed throughout the 20th century to validate mass murder".
[44] Physicians for Human Rights states that Myanmar "continues to justify their mass extermination [of Rohingya] as a reasonable response to 'terrorist activities.
[46] The Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP) of Myanmar's democratic government were hostile and violent in their persecution and abuse of Rohingya Muslims.
