[16][17] Donald W. Bleacher, although acknowledging that McCarthy is pro-Turkish, nonetheless called Death and Exile "a necessary corrective" to the model often posited in Western historiography, where all the victims were Christians and all the perpetrators were Muslims.
"[24] He has claimed that all of those deaths during World War I were the product of intercommunal warfare between Turks, Kurds and Armenians, famine and disease, and did not involve an intent or a policy to commit genocide by the Ottoman Empire.
"[27] Michael M. Gunter congratulated Justin McCarthy for Muslim and Minorities: "His work is clearly the best available on the subject and merits the close attention of any serious, disinterested scholar"; and "his figure" of the Armenian losses (600,000) "is probably the most accurate we have.
Historian Dennis P. Hupchick writing in the American Historical Review states of Death and Exile: The Ethnic Cleansing of Ottoman Muslims, 1821–1922 (1996): One may pick arguments with specific interpretations of events depicted in the work, but the statistical data appear generally valid.
[32]Historian Robert Olson writing in the International Journal of Middle East Studies says of the same book: Like all of the author's other works, this one offers positions that become pivots for rebuttals, disagreements, counter-arguments, different interpretations, and probably some recriminations.
When the Ottoman state failed to control the depredation of Armenians at the hands of Kurds and Circassians, it was due to lack of resources and authority; when Russian, Bulgarian and Greek soldiers declined to stop similar events against Muslim peasants, it was done deliberately.
"[36] Donald Bloxham, a University of Edinburgh historian specializing in genocide studies, states that "McCarthy's work has something to offer in drawing attention to the oft-unheeded history of Muslim suffering and embattlement...
He writes as if the CUP were just another government swept along powerlessly by an irresistible meta-historical force... [McCarthy's works] serve to muddy the waters for external observers, conflating war and one-sided murder with various discrete episodes of ethnic conflict.
[37] Bloxham writes that McCarthy's work "[serves] to muddy the waters for external observers, conflating war and one-sided murder with various discrete episodes of ethnic conflict... [A] series of easy get-out clauses for Western politicians and non-specialist historians keen not to offend Turkish opinion.
"[37] Samuel Totten and Steven L. Jacobs write that Shaw's and his adherents' (especially Lowry and McCarthy) publications have "striking similarities to the arguments used in the denial of the Holocaust: labeling the alleged genocide as a myth created for wartime propaganda, portraying the presumed victims as having been real security threats[...] discounting eye-witness accounts and survivor testimony, asserting that whatever deaths occurred were from the same causes that carried away all peoples living in the region, minimizing the number of victims," and so on.
[47] Likewise, Ronald Grigor Suny maintains that the number of Armenian genocide deniers is small (the most prominent being Shaw, McCarthy, Lowry and Lewis) but "their influence is great by virtue of pernicious alliance with the official campaign of falsification by the government of Turkey.
[41][49] In November 2013, McCarthy's three planned meetings at the Australian Federal Parliament, University of Melbourne and Art Gallery of New South Wales were canceled on the grounds of his denialist views on the Armenian genocide.
"[51] Member of Australia's Parliament, Greens spokesman on multiculturalism Richard Di Natale told the Sydney Morning Herald that "Justin McCarthy is a rallying point for those who deny the Armenian genocide.
"[52] According to Liberal member John Alexander, "revisionist Justin McCarthy has used parliamentary facilities to promote his well-documented views questioning the systematic slaughter of Armenians, Assyrians and Pontian Greeks from 1915 to 1923.