looks like a genocide, quacks like a genocide...

France has initiated a parliamentary bill to make it a crime to deny the Armenian genocide of 1915 and now Turkey is stamping its foot and giving Europe the evil eye. I'm aware that I can sometimes be appallingly uninformed and simplistic when it comes to political history, but --why can't the Turks just own up to their episode and everyone can move on? Germany's managed to! Twice! One can't be a Holocaust Denier, why can one be a Genocide Denier? Why do the Turks make it a criminal act to even speak about it in Turkey, but cry loss of freedom of speech with this bill? And (and!) the EU doesn't even require Turkey to acknowledge 1915 for its proposed membership, but Turkey is issuing blustery warnings anyway. Perhaps someone can explain this to me?

And another issue is why the US, UK and Israel acknowledge something went on but its sorta, maybe what other people might call "genocide." According to the BBC:

In May 1915, the Armenian minority, two or three million strong, was forcefully deported and marched from the Anatolian borders towards Syria and Mesopotamia (now Iraq). Many died en route...
Whether or not the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Armenians during World War I amounted to genocide is a matter for heated debate. Some countries have declared that a genocide took place, but others have resisted calls to do so.

Perhaps for the US what happened in Asia Minor sounds a wee bit too familiar. (If displacing and death-marching an entire ethnic community is genocide, that opens a whole other can of worms...). So what is the UK's and Israel's issue?