but pan-Turkists were angered by the Turkish government's inaction because they believed that it was wasting a golden opportunity to achieve the goals of pan-Turkism. Criticism Pan-Turkism is often perceived as being a new form of Turkish imperial ambition. Some view the young Turk leaders who believed that they could reclaim the prestige of the Ottoman Empire by espousing the pan-Turkist ideology as racist and chauvinistic.Robert F. Melson, "The Armenian Genocide" in Kevin Reilly (Editor), Stephen Kaufman (Editor), Angela Bodino (Editor) "Racism: A Global Reader (Sources and Studies in World History)", M.E. Sharpe (January 2003). pg 278: "Concluding that their liberal experiment had been a failure, CUP leaders turned to Pan-Turkism, a xenophobic and chauvinistic brand of nationalism that sought to create a new empire based on Islam and Turkish ethnicity ... It was in this context of revolutionary and ideological transformation and war that the fateful decision to destroy the Armenians was taken." Pan-Turkist views on Armenian history Clive Foss, professor of ancient history at the University of Massachusetts Boston, critically notes that in 1982: The Armenian File in the Light of History, Cemal Anadol writes that the Iranian Scythians and Parthians are Turks. According to Anadol, the Armenians welcomed the Turks into the region; their language is a mixture with no roots and their alphabet is mixed, with 11 characters which were borrowed from the ancient Turkic alphabet. Foss calls this view historical revisionism: "Turkish writings have been tendentious: history has been viewed as performing a useful service, proving or supporting a point of view, and so it is treated as something flexible which can be manipulated at will". He concludes, "The notion, which seems well established in Turkey, that the Armenians were a wandering tribe without a home, who never had a state of their own, is of course entirely without any foundation in fact. The logical consequence of the commonly expressed view of the Armenians is that they have no place in Turkey, and they never did. The result would be the same if the viewpoint were expressed first, and the history were written to order. In a sense, something like this seems to have happened, for most Turks who grew up under the Republic were educated to believe in the ultimate priority of Turks in all parts of history, and ignore the Armenians all together; they had been clearly consigned to oblivion." Pan-Turkist views in