A group of 43 eminent Australians, including 13 with a Jewish background, have signed a statement calling on SBS to drop a commentary style which casts doubt on the Armenian genocide, the Australian Jewish News   reported.

Lecturer Meher Grigorian, a director of the Australian Institute of Holocaust and Genocide Studies, told The AJN of widespread anguish about the broadcaster’s relcutance to describe the 1915 events as genocide.

SBS policy, formulated for the 2015 centenary, is to refer to the Armenian genocide as a “mass killing of Armenians considered by many to have been a genocide, which Turkey denies”.

He claimed the policy was developed after pressure from the Australian Turkish Advocacy Alliance (ATAA), but in a Senate Estimates hearing, SBS managing director Michael Ebeid rejected any link between ATAA and his network’s reporting policy.

However, the historical record makes it “untenable” for SBS to continue justifying its policy as “balancing community sensitivities”, said Grigorian.

The statement, whose signatories include Sydney Holocaust academics Professors Konrad Kwiet and Colin Tatz, quotes US Professor Deborah Lipstadt that “denial of genocide … is not an act of historical reinterpretation … The deniers aim at convincing innocent third parties that there is ‘another side of the story’… when there is no credible ‘other side’“.

Grigorian said SBS does not have similar policies on the Holocaust and genocides such as in Nanking (Nanjing), China before World War II and Rwanda in the 1990s, and ABC style is to recognise the Armenian genocide.

“Only one of the 43 signatories of this statement is of Armenian heritage. The rest are either experts in the Holocaust, in genocide or in human rights,” Grigorian said.