semantic obfuscation

Due to an email glitch I learned at the last minute that today I was to join a lunch in honor of a visiting Turkish parliament member. Found myself next to a colleague from another department who embarked on a denial of the Armenian genocide. Well, let's be more clear. He concurred that something bad had happened in 1915 but insisted that it was irresponsible to term this 'genocide' because it did not meet the legal definition. He then veered off into a bizarre narrative about how Turks would be happy to admit to the event but not on those terms. Really, he opined, it was "more like what happened in Bosnia, ethnic cleansing." Oh, OK. No problem.