In Ledeen’s fantastical world, where Iran is bent on conquering Kenya and where he never supported the invasion of Iraq, there is another new equally credible “revelation”: the murdered journalist Hrant Dink was Kurdish.  That would be very interesting to know, except that it is completely untrue. 

Hrant Dink was a Turkish Armenian and editor of the Turkish and Armenian language newspaper Agos, as this entry from Armeniapedia clearly shows.  His murder is a despicable outrage, but one plainly aimed at a prominent representative of the Armenian minority in Turkey because of his efforts to draw attention to the truth of the Armenian genocide.  (It is a bitter irony that Mr. Dink was known to take Diasporan Armenians to task for their preoccupation with the Turks’ guilt, whence came the “poison in the blood” line that later caused him such grief with the authorities and, now, has contributed to the motive of his assassin.)  It is fairly glaringly obvious that the late Mr. Dink was Armenian.  Not only does his first name shout it from the rooftops, and not only has every news story reporting on his death stated this basic fact numerous times, but the charge of “insulting Turkishness” of which he was convicted and his activism on behalf of awareness about the Armenian genocide were obvious indications of his background.  There are some non-Armenians in Turkey who also speak out about the genocide, but there are few Kurds among them (not least since a great many Kurds were involved in committing the genocide and most Kurds today are not eager to revisit that part of their history).  In any case, Hrant Dink was not Kurdish.  Indeed, it might be considered fairly insulting to the victims of the genocide to impose Kurdish identity on a man killed for his work in trying to gain recognition of the Armenian genocide.  Imagine calling a murdered Jewish Holocaust activist a Lithuanian or German and guess what the reaction would be. 

It is just one more sorry example of Ledeen speaking about something in the Near East without knowing the most basic information about the subject.  Pathetic.