Talk:Great Famine of Mount Lebanon

Second citation
For this: “ Allied forces blockaded the Eastern Mediterranean, as they had done with the German Empire in Europe, in order to stranglehold the economy with the knowledge that it might lead to a profound impact on civilians in the region“ is a Masters Thesis. I’m not sure whether it’s an adequate source? Cripipper (talk) 23:44, 24 July 2020 (UTC)

The section "See Also"
modern historians have refuted the thesis of a genocide of the population of Mount Lebanon by the Ottomans; see for example
 * Linda Schilcher Schatkowski, «The famine of 1915-1918 in greater Syria», in J. Spagnolo (dir.), Problems of the modern Middle East in historical perspective, Essays in honor of Albert Hourani, Ithaca Press, Reading, 1992, 229-258.
 * Pitts, Graham Auman. “Make Them Hated in All of the Arab Countries: France, Famine, and the Creation of Lebanon.” Environmental Histories of World War I. Richard P. Tucker, Tait Keller, J.R. McNeill, and Martin Schmid, eds. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press (2018)

All the internal links that you have restored are pages that talk about crimes against humanity perpetrated by the Ottomans. They mislead the public and accredit a fase thesis. This is not neutral. There is no connection between the genocides or the deportations, and the famine of the Mount-Lebanon. JMGuyon (talk) 18:15, 28 September 2022 (UTC)


 * If the articles mislead the public please go ahead and WP:CSD them. el.ziade (talkallam) 22:16, 28 September 2022 (UTC)
 * the presence of articles on genocides in the "See also" section misleads the public : indeed, there is no connection between the great famine and a genocide.
 * I am not talking about the articles on the genocides in themselves. I haven't read them. I don't know if they mislead the reader or not, that's not the point. I don't understand WP:CSD--JMGuyon (talk) 20:25, 29 September 2022 (UTC)

No, your attempts to whitewash what happened and portray the ottomans as saintly rulers concerned for the populations they oppressed and impoverished for four hundred years is what misleads the public. The famine was intentionally exacerbated to punish the inhabitants of Mount Lebanon who sought a semi autonomy if not independence. It was accompanied by the execution of elite intellectuals just like what they did with Armenian intellectuals. No amount of lobbying will efface the fact that it was a criminal act. el.ziade (talkallam) 07:08, 30 September 2022 (UTC)
 * I have given you sources that refute the legend of a genocide in Lebanon.
 * What are your sources for considering the great famine as a genocide?
 * POV-pushing can only be determined based on sources (on fidelity to valid, academic sources)--JMGuyon (talk) 19:04, 30 September 2022 (UTC)
 * I have zero interest in arguing with you, and I prefer to invest my energy in more meaningful ways and areas. So do what you will with the article, and add a section to present your POV without cancelling others. And I will intervene as necessary. Wikipedia will eventually purge misleading edits by apologists who want to write history and whitewash atrocities. Enjoy babe. el.ziade (talkallam) 21:38, 2 October 2022 (UTC)
 * No sources, no editing.
 * I brought academic sources which refute the assimilation of the famine to a genocide. Therefore, I remove allegedly "related" articles on genocides.
 * I remind you Etiquette ("ENjoy babe"), the prohibition to make unfounded accusations, Universal Code of Conduct.--JMGuyon (talk) 08:02, 3 October 2022 (UTC)

About the reference Selim Deringil, "The Ottoman Twilight in the Arab Lands: Turkish Memoirs" : the text does not reflect the source
The reference does not say at all, p.31, that  "In response to the Allied blockade, Jamal Pasha used his own blockade in order to deliberately starve the Maronite population so they could be kept weak and unable to rebel". The reference cites a "controversial book" of ANtoine Bustani, who is a dentist (!) not a historian, who supports this "thesis". JMGuyon (talk) 15:42, 25 December 2022 (UTC)

About the reference Robert Rabil : the text does not reflect the source

 * The reference does not say at all that "Jamal Pasha used his own blockade in order to deliberately starve the Maronite population so they could be kept weak and unable to rebel".

Robert Rabil says :

"It’s debatable whether Ottoman authorities actually envisioned an engineered extermination of the Maronites. There were neither coded Ottoman instructions to murder Maronites en masse nor a fatwa by religious authorities to attack Maronites, as there had been for the Armenians. Nevertheless, the result of Ottoman policies during the First World War was the mass killing of a majority Maronite population". JMGuyon (talk) 16:02, 25 December 2022 (UTC)
 * Robert Rabil is not a specialist of the First World War, nor of Ottoman Empire. All his work focuses on the recent period, since the 2000s, on the policy of the United States in the Middle East and on the recent developments of salafism
 * Robert Rabil forgets the Blockade of the Eastern Mediterranean during World War I, more hermetic than the blockade of Germany, which caused hundreds of thousands of deaths by starvation
 * Robert Rabil writes : "According to a French intelligence report, Jamal Pasha allegedly boasted: “We have rid ourselves of the Armenians by the sword. We shall do away with the Lebanese by famine.” . First, this phrase is not attributed to Jamal Pash, but to Enver Pasha. Second, it is an apocryphal phrase coined by French propaganda during the First World War. See about this a historian who is a specialist of this period : Graham Auman Pitts, “Make Them Hated in All of the Arab Countries: France, Famine, and the Creation of Lebanon.” Environmental Histories of World War I. Richard P. Tucker, Tait Keller, J.R. McNeill, and Martin Schmid, eds. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press (2018) : « That narrative was first articulated by French diplomats and Lebanese exiles, who charged that the famine was a counterpart of the Ottoman Armenian policy; “the Armenians by the sword, the Arabs by starvation,” they quoted Enver as saying, apocryphally. See Youssef Mouawad, «Jamal Pacha, en une version libanaise: l’usage positif d’une legende noire». In Olaf Farschid, Manfred Kropp, and Stephan Dähne, eds., The First World War as Remembered in the Countries of the Eastern Mediterranean (Beirut: Orient-Institut, 2006), 432.».
 * Robert Rabil is a "recommended professor" on the website of the controversial Campus Watch Middle East Forum : https://www.meforum.org/campus-watch/campus-resources/recommended-professors

Cherry picking in Mordechai Nisan's book
Mordechai Nisan devotes less than a sentence to the Famine of Mount Lebanon. Spanning six centuries, he writes : war ravaged by the Mamluks in 1305, and the Ottomans imposed famine and starvation in Mount Lebanon in the days of World War I".

It is not a good source. Please read studies centered on this tragedy. Many of them are cited in the bibliography. JMGuyon (talk) 16:20, 25 December 2022 (UTC)

About the 8 lines Oren Barak devotes to the causes of the Great Famine
Oran Barak in these 8 lines evokes only one factor of the famine whereas there were multiple of them.

There are studies that devote whole pages to the Great famine, please avoid sources that mention famine quickly because it is not their main subject, and that do not take the time to scrutinize the multifactorial character of the starvation.

Ottoman blockade if ONE OF THE FACTORS. See bibliography, especially Linda Schilcher Schatkowski, «The famine of 1915-1918 in greater Syria», in J. Spagnolo (dir.), Problems of the modern Middle East in historical perspective, Essays in honor of Albert Hourani, Ithaca Press, Reading, 1992, 229-258, and Graham Pitts, “Make Them Hated in All of the Arab Countries: France, Famine, and the Creation of Lebanon.” Environmental Histories of World War I. Richard P. Tucker, Tait Keller, J.R. McNeill, and Martin Schmid, eds. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press (2018). JMGuyon (talk) 16:32, 25 December 2022 (UTC)

About Melanie Tanielian's dissertation : it is unpublished, and the text does not reflect the source
We read in the the Wikipedia article that the Great famine is known in Syria as the "Turkish Famine" ; the source has been truncated, and the text does not reflect it.

Melanie Tanielian writes p.7-8 : [https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4bs8383d"Christians increasingly thought and expressed their fears and suspicions that Muslim Turks deliberately caused the famine by cutting off supplies to Mount Lebanon with the sole intent of starving out the Christians. Hence, the famine is often referred to in Syria as the "Turkish Famine. Some Muslim narratives are equally exclusionary, in that they accuse Christians of collaboration with the French enemy, spying and treason in order to undermine the Ottoman state as well as Arab autonomy. Whereas there are elements of truth in both these stories, they tend to be one-sided and blind to the multiple and complex factors that contributed to the famine].

Please pay attention to the "the multiple and complex factors that contributed to the famine".

In my opinion, there is an accumulation of flaws in the sourcing which indicate a very obvious POV-pushing JMGuyon (talk) 16:52, 25 December 2022 (UTC)

Crimes against humanity category removal
Crimes against humanity is a specific legal concept. In order to be included in the category, the event (s) must have been prosecuted as a crime against humanity, or at a bare minimum be described as such by most reliable sources. Most of the articles that were formerly in this category did not mention crimes against humanity at all, and the inclusion of the category was purely original research. MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 07:49, 14 February 2024 (UTC)