The U.S. foreign affairs committee endorsed the resolution with a 23-22 vote even though the Obama administration had urged Congress not to approve it. The resolution now goes to the full House, where prospects for passage are uncertain.

Turkey has always maintained, and rightly so based on objective investigation of the matter by unbiased historians that the Armenian toll in 1915-16 has been inflated and those killed were victims of civil war and unrest, not genocide. Turkish government has pulled its ambassador home as a protest of the U.S. congressional panel decision.

While the death of those Armenians during World War I has often been dubbed as genocide, perpetrated by the Ottoman Turks, it should be noted that the Ottoman Empire was a distant memory since 1908 after the Young Turks, run by the Freemasons, had taken effective control of the falling Caliphate. It was its Committee of Unity and Progress (CUP) that entered the war on Germany's side in 1914. Those Freemasons had little, if any, love for Islam or the old Ottoman Caliphate. To most Muslims, those secular fundamentalist - Young Turks were traitors.

Yusuf Halacoglu, president the Turkish Historical Society (TTK), estimates that with the deportations (excluding inter-ethnic violence) a total of 56,000 Armenians perished during the period due to war conditions, and less than 10,000 were actually killed.

Almost all Turkish intellectuals, scientists and historians accept that many Armenians died during the conflict, but they do not consider these events to be genocide. A number of Western academics in the field of Ottoman history, including (late) Bernard Lewis (Princeton University), Heath Lowry (Princeton University), Justin McCarthy (University of Louisville), Gilles Veinstein (College de France), and Stanford Shaw (UCLA) have expressed serious doubts as to the genocidal character of the events. They offer the opinion that the weight of evidence instead points to serious inter-communal warfare, perpetrated by both Muslim and Christian irregular forces, aggravated by disease and famine, as the causes of suffering and massacres in Anatolia and adjoining areas during the First World War.