Armenian students at USC were displeased Monday by the arrival of The Young Turks, a political commentary web series that shares its name with revolutionaries who perpetuated the Armenian genocide more than 100 years ago. An episode of the series was filmed Sept. 12 in an event hosted by USC Annenberg, the first in a 12-college tour for The Young Turks (TYT).
By the time the Armenian genocide had ended, over 1.5 million Armenians were killed.
In Monday's event, the hosts of the popular web series spoke to USC students about the presidential election, student debt and the generation gap — all issues targeted to college students. By appealing to this demographic, The Young Turks aim to present news from an angle not typically seen in the media.
"We treat millennials with respect," founder Cenk Uygur said. "A lot of us are millennials and we get it. It's a show that gives people not just a different perspective but one that's an outsider perspective that they can relate to."
The Armenian Students' Association at USC found the filming — the second TYT event on campus in less than a year — to be insensitive, though they were careful to clarify that their grievances are with The Young Turks' name, not their ideas or content.
"If me and my friends started a YouTube channel and we were to be talking about environmentally clean energy and how to end world poverty, yet we called ourselves the neo-Nazis or we called ourselves ISIS or another sensitive name, I don't think USC would invite us to talk and broadcast from Annenberg, no matter how intriguing our content was," ASA events coordinator Zaven Charkchyan said.
USC Annenberg had been contacted by the media company Fusion to arrange the TYT event, according to Emily Cavalcanti, Associate Dean of Communications and Marketing. She said the school later reached out to Armenian students and the USC Institute of Armenian Studies, who protested a different TYT event last semester, to discuss the "complicated issue."
"We all agreed it's good to bring these issues," Cavalcanti said. "We definitely wanted to work with them and let them know this was happening."
Many Armenians, though, feel that simply discussing a controversy is not enough. Salpi Ghazarian, director of the USC Institute of Armenian Studies, said that having a dialogue shouldn't distract from necessary action to be taken.
"I'm hoping what will happen is the students of Annenberg, the administration at Annenberg, and throughout USC, will understand that this is a concern — a complaint — about glorifying violence. Violence by a government," Ghazarian said. "By condoning this kind of collaboration with an organization that chooses to call itself The Young Turks, that's what we're doing."
Charkchyan said that supporting and promoting The Young Turks could make the university seem hypocritical.
"In a university where we're known worldwide for our genocide awareness and prevention institute [the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research, in a university where our president is the descendant of people of Greek ancestry who were persecuted by the Ottomans," Charkchyan said, "we cannot accept a group like this known as The Young Turks to come onto our campus and broadcast themselves in a positive light."
Gabriel Kahn, a USC Annenberg professor who organized a separate TYT event last semester, said he was taken aback by the response the event received from the Armenian community. He hoped that The Young Turks as an organization would address the issue on their own as their reach grows online.
"It's sort of like the Redskins in the NFL. And now we're starting to see a growing awareness of the significance of this term, how it is in many respects incredibly inappropriate," Kahn said. "The truth is that while the Armenian students here have a very clear understanding of why they find this to be offensive, the rest of the world does not."
Uygur himself has drawn controversy for comments he made about the genocide decades ago. He did retract those statements earlier this year, but critics have still continued to contest his beliefs.
"They were right to criticize me and it is obviously an enormously important issue, so I don't have a beef with them at all," Uygur said. "That's why I retracted [my statements]. Because I think that they were right."
For many in the Armenian community, memories and stories of the genocide continue to resonate. Charkchyan's grandparents were the only survivors in their families to survive. They, like many Armenians fleeing persecution, chose to come to the United States.
"There's not a day that I wake up and I don't think that I'm lucky to be alive today just because my grandpa was a fast runner … and my grandma spoke Turkish," Charkchyan said. "This is something that's very close to every Armenian's heart. Having such a group called The Young Turks, a name that is at the root of all this pain that Armenians feel every single day, come to my university that I call my home and broadcasting and being shown in such a positive light — this is very painful for me as a student and very disappointing."
Reach News Editor James Tyner here, or follow him on Twitter.
Staff Reporter Nathan Desai contributed to this story.
Updated 7:28 p.m. Pacific Time on Sept. 12 to include additional information from The Young Turks event
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