Burning issue

I read William Rubinstein's review of The Burning Tigris: A History of the Armenian Genocide (Books, August 6) with amazement.

Rubinstein not only states that there was an Armenian genocide, which is denied not only by the Turks but by scholars around the world, but also admits that this can be interpreted differently and describes the conditions that the Ottoman Turks were facing during the First World War.

The Burning Tigris is yet another book about the Armenian issue written by a misguided Armenian poet, Peter Balakian, which is one-sided, full of misrepresentations, omissions, distortion of facts and lies. There was no state-sponsored murder of the Armenian people and there was no genocide, as claimed in this book and many others.

Yuksel Oktay
Istanbul, Turkey