Justin McCarthy (American historian)

Some scholarly critics of McCarthy acknowledge his research on Muslim civilian casualties and refugee numbers (19th and early 20th centuries) brought forth a valuable perspective, previously neglected in the Christian West: that millions of Muslims also suffered and died during these years. Donald W. Bleacher, although acknowledging that McCarthy is pro-Turkish, nonetheless called Death and Exile "a necessary corrective" to the model of all the conflict's victims being Christians and all the perpetrators being Muslims. However, others have accused McCarthy of exaggerating the number of Muslim victims in the Balkans.

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. On 20 November 2013 the Executive Council of Australian Jewry has released a statement raising questions about the quality of McCarthy's analysis and expressing their deep concerns of McCarthy's upcoming address in Australian Parliament. They noted that "whilst freedom of expression and academic freedom require that Professor McCarthy must be at liberty to put forward his theories, the manner in which he does so must not lapse into racial vilification". 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". 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."

McCarthy lent support to the Assembly of Turkish American Associations, which led an effort to defeat recognition of the Armenian genocide by the U.S. House of Representatives in 1985.

McCarthy served in the Peace Corps in Turkey, from 1967 to 1969, where he taught at Middle East Technical University and Ankara University. He earned his Ph.D. at University of California, Los Angeles in 1978. He later received an honorary doctorate from Boğaziçi University. McCarthy is also a board member of the Institute of Turkish Studies.

McCarthy's work has been the subject of criticism from book reviewers and a number of genocide scholars. According to Israeli historian Yair Auron, McCarthy, "with Heath Lowry, Lewis' successor in Princeton, leads the list of deniers of the Armenian genocide." "The Encyclopedia of Genocide" writes, that Stanford Shaw and McCarthy have published shoddy and desperate books claiming there was no genocide and that "the Turkish government really treated the Armenians nicely while they were deporting and killing them", and particularly, "McCarthy revises demography to suggest that there really weren't many Armenians in historic Armenia". Among other criticisms, he has been accused by Colin Imber of following a Turkish nationalistic agenda. According to the "Encyclopedia of Human Rights", in their efforts to negate the genocidal nature of the event, Lewis, Shaw, McCarthy and Lewy, most notably, "have ignored the evidence and conclusions of the massive record of documents and decades of scholarship" as well as the 1948 UN Genocide Convention's definition, and these "denialist scholars have engaged in what is called unethical practice". The historian Mark Mazower considers McCarthy's sources and, in particular, his statistics to be "less balanced" than those of other historians working in this area. McCarthy is a member of, and has received grants from, the Institute of Turkish Studies. According to historian Richard G. Hovannisian, Stanford Shaw, Heath Lowry and Justin McCarthy all use arguments similar to those found in Holocaust denial.

Justin A. McCarthy (born October 19, 1945) is an American demographer, former professor of history at the University of Louisville, in Louisville, Kentucky. He holds an honorary doctorate from Boğaziçi University (Turkey), was awarded the Order of Merit of Turkey (in 1998), and is a board member of the Institute of Turkish Studies and the Center for Eurasian Studies (AVIM). His area of expertise is the history of the late Ottoman Empire.

McCarthy also worked, especially in The Creation of Enduring Prejudice, with a focus on anti-Turkish prejudices disseminated between the beginning of the 19th century through 1922.

McCarthy agrees that a large number of Armenians were killed or died of unnatural causes during the massacres of 1915–1923, but he argues that millions of Muslims in the region were also massacred in this period and many at the "hands of Armenian insurgents and militia". 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. McCarthy has been active in publishing the results of his work and analysis, that Ottomans never had an official state sanctioned policy of genocide, through books, articles, conferences, and interviews. This has made him a target of much criticism from historians and organizations. He was one of four scholars who participated in a controversial debate hosted by PBS about the Armenian genocide in 2006. Aviel Roshwald describes McCarthy's "version of these events" as "defensively pro-Turkish."

Historian Dennis P. Hupchick writing in the American Historical Review states of Death and Exile: The Ethnic Cleansing of Ottoman Muslims, 1821–1922 (1996):