Roma in the Nazi era, in a manner indicative of "the priorities of latter-day scholarship, about the way that the murder of the Jews has been promoted to obscure so much of the rest of the Nazi record of atrocity". "Were American Indians the Victims of Genocide?" In September 2004, Lewy published an essay in Commentary entitled "Were American Indians the Victims of Genocide?": "[E]ven if some episodes can be considered genocidal—that is, tending toward genocide—they certainly do not justify condemning an entire society." The paper is highly critical of Ward Churchill, particularly in regards to his attributing the word "genocide" to the destruction of American Indian civilization. Lewy dismissed as bogus Churchill's assertion that the United States Army intentionally spread smallpox among American Indians by distributing infected blankets in 1837. Views on the Armenian genocide The Armenian Massacres in Ottoman Turkey: A Disputed Genocide Lewy's book The Armenian Massacres in Ottoman Turkey: A Disputed Genocide was published in 2006 by University of Utah Press after it was rejected by eleven publishers. In the book, Lewy argues that there is insufficient evidence of the Young Turk regime organizing the massacres of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire. In Lewy's view, they have not been proven to have been governmentally organized. About the number of Armenian victims, Lewy argues that it "can only be estimated, because no death statistics for this period exist"; calculating the total losses of Ottoman Armenians between 1914 and 1919, Lewy uses the figure of 1,750,000 individuals for the pre-war population in the whole Ottoman Empire, figure used by historians like Charles Dowsett and Malcolm E. Yapp, then estimate the number of survivors in 1919 to around 1,108,000, making an average of several estimations, including the tabulation of George Montgomery (American official in the Paris Peace Conference in charge of Near East) and the figure of the Armenian National Council of Constantinople; so, Lewy estimates the total losses for World War I to around 642,000. Lewy's position that there is insufficient evidence to prove that the Armenians were victims of genocide is in contrast to the view of most historians and genocide scholars. The reception of the book was negative overall, with several scholars criticizing the book for factual errors and cherry-picking sources to fit Lewy's thesis. The sociologist Taner Akçam published a lengthy review of Lewy's work, criticizing his methodology and lack of familiarity with the workings