The Forgotten Genocide: Why It Matters Today

by Raymond Ibrahim

….April 24, marks the “Great Crime,” that is, the Armenian genocide that took place under Turkey’s Islamic Ottoman Empire, during and after WWI.  Out of an approximate population of two million, some 1.5 million Armenians died. If early 20^th century Turkey had the apparatuses and technology to execute in mass—such as 1940s Germany’s gas chambers—the entire Armenian population may well have been annihilated.  Most objective American historians who have studied the question unequivocally agree that it was a deliberate, calculated genocide:

More than one million Armenians perished as the result of execution, starvation, disease, the harsh environment, and physical abuse.  A people who lived in eastern Turkey for nearly 3,000 years [more than double the amount of time the invading Islamic Turks had occupied Anatolia, now known as “Turkey”] lost its homeland and was profoundly decimated in the first large-scale genocide of the twentieth century.  At the beginning of 1915 there were some two million Armenians within Turkey; today there are fewer than 60,000….  Despite the vast amount of evidence that points to the historical reality of the Armenian Genocide, eyewitness accounts, official archives, photographic evidence, the reports of diplomats, and the testimony of survivors, denial of the Armenian Genocide by successive regimes in Turkey has gone on from 1915 to the present.

Indeed, evidence has been overwhelming.  U.S. Senate Resolution 359 from 1920 heard testimony that included evidence of “[m]utilation, violation, torture, and death [which] have left their haunting memories in a hundred beautiful Armenian valleys, and the traveler in that region is seldom free from the evidence of this most colossal crime of all the ages.”  In her memoir, Ravished Armenia, Aurora Mardiganiandescribed being raped and thrown into a harem (which agrees with Islam’s rules of war).  Unlike thousands of other Armenian girls who were discarded after being defiled, she managed to escape. In the city of Malatia, she saw 16 Christian girls crucified: “Each girl had been nailed alive upon her cross, spikes through her feet and hands, only their hair blown by the wind, covered their bodies.”  Such scenes were portrayed in the 1919 documentary film Auction of Souls, some of which is based on Mardiganian’s memoirs.

What do Americans know of the Armenian Genocide?  To be sure, some American high school textbooks acknowledge it.  However, one of the primary causes for it—perhaps the fundamental cause—is completely unacknowledged: religion.  The genocide is always articulated through a singularly secular paradigm, one that deems valid only those factors that are intelligible from a modern, secular, Western point of view, such as identity politics, nationalism, and territorial disputes. As can be imagined, such an approach does little more than project Western perspectives onto vastly different civilizations of different eras, thus anachronizing history.

War, of course, is another factor that clouds the true face of the Armenian genocide.  Because these atrocities occurred during WWI, so the argument goes, they are ultimately a reflection of just that—war, in all its chaos and destruction, and nothing more.  Yet Winston Churchill, who described the massacres as an “administrative holocaust,” correctly observed that “The opportunity [WWI] presented itself for clearing Turkish soil of a Christian race.”  Even Adolf Hitler had pointed out that “Turkey is taking advantage of the war in order to thoroughly liquidate its internal foes, i.e., the indigenous Christians, without being thereby disturbed by foreign intervention.”

It is the same today throughout the Muslim world, wherever there is war: after the U.S. toppled Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, the nation’s Christian minority were first to be targeted for systematic persecution resulting in more than half of Iraq’s indigenous Christian population fleeing their homeland.  Now that war has come to Syria—with the U.S. supporting the jihadis and terrorists—the Christians there are on the run for their lives.

There is no denying that religion—or in this context, the age-old specter of Muslim persecution of Christian minorities—was fundamental to the Armenian Genocide….

….Finally, to understand how the historic Armenian Genocide is representative of the modern day plight of Christians under Islam, one need only read the following words written in 1918 by President Theodore Roosevelt—but read “Armenian” as “Christian” and “Turkish” as  “Islamic”:

the Armenian [Christian] massacre was the greatest crime of the war, and the failure to act against Turkey [the Islamic world] is to condone it… the failure to deal radically with the Turkish [Islamic] horror means that all talk of guaranteeing the future peace of the world is mischievous nonsense.

Indeed, if we “fail to deal radically” with the “horror” currently being visited upon millions of Christians around the Islamic world—which in some areas has reached genocidal proportions—we “condone it” and had better cease talking “mischievous nonsense” of a utopian world of peace and tolerance.

Put differently, silence is always the ally of those who would commit genocide.  In 1915, Adolf Hitler rationalized his genocidal plans, which he implemented some three decades later, when he rhetorically asked: “Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?”

And who speaks today of the annihilation of Christians under Islam?

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Turkey’s Erdoğan and the Zenith of Hypocrisy

By Steven Simpson

….Probably the most well-known war crime that Turkey engaged in was the slaughter – if not genocide  - perpetrated against the Armenians in the first two decades of the 20^th century.  In fact, the Turks were already slaughtering Armenians in the late 19^th century in what has come to be known as “the Hamidian massacres.”  Estimates of the slaughter range from hundreds of thousands to millions.  In any event, Turkey has consistently and constantly denied that such crimes against the Armenians took place.  Turkey is so sensitive to the charge of genocide that when the U.S. Congress in 2010 finally passed a resolution condemning this crime, Turkey threatened “serious consequences” to the “partnership” between America and Turkey.  Ironically, Barack Obama, who had the audacity to say back in 2007 that “nobody is suffering more than the Palestinian people,” sought to stop the congressional resolution on the Armenian genocide.

 

Continuing with Turkish war crimes, and the hypocrisy of the neo-Ottoman crypto-Sultan Erdoğan, there were the massacres and expulsions of the Greeks from their ancestral homelands.  This is another Turkish crime against humanity that is little-known, and even less spoken or written about.  ”The Pontian Genocide” took place between the years of 1916 and 1922.  Again, estimates vary in the casualty rate, but the slaughter could have been as close to 1,000,000 Greeks killed.  This doesn’t even take into account the surviving 1.5 million Greeks who lived in Asia Minor (Anatolia) for millennia before being expelled by the Turks to European Greece during this era.

 

Finally, there are the Kurds.  If there was ever an authentic Middle Eastern minority of Muslims that deserves a nation-state, it is the Kurds.  While Islamist governments in Iran and Turkey (as well as the Arab world) talk about “Islamic solidarity” when it comes to the so-called “Palestinians,” there is not even a syllable of talk regarding the plight of the Kurds.  The Kurds have been killed and suppressed by Arab, Persian, and Turk for centuries, all of whom see the legitimate aim of the Kurds to establish their own state as a threat to the status quo of continuous Arab, Persian, and Turkish imperialism.

 

While the Kurds are spread out over Syria, Iraq, Iran, and Turkey, it has been in the last country that the Kurds have basically been written out of history by the Turks.  The Turkish quest to deny any semblance of a Kurdish existence has been so bizarre that Turkey even banned the Kurdish language during the years 1983-1999 and routinely referred to them as “mountain Turks.”  To this day, Turkey routinely crosses the Syrian and Iraqi borders to fight against “Kurdish terrorists.”

 

This background on Turkish war crimes is just a brief sketch of the brutal actions that Turkey has committed over the decades (if not centuries).  The next time the arrogant, bellicose, and venomous Erdoğan along with his fellow Islamists lectures Israel about “crimes against humanity,” they should look in the mirror and admit to true war crimes.

 

Indeed, Israel – and America, for that matter – would do history a great justice if they reminded Turkey in the strongest language possible, of the Turks’ bloody crimes against their own minorities, instead of sitting back and allowing Turkey to pontificate about Israel’s nonexistent “crimes against humanity.”  Continued silence will only strengthen bullies and thugs like Erdoğan, lend credence to his outlandish slander, and allow Turkey to continue to rewrite history in its own image.

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‘The GENEX’ – Hollywood to bring the Armenian Genocide by Muslims to the big screen in 2015, the 100-year anniversary

WARNING: Graphic photos and video, highly disturbing- proceed with caution.

From BareNakedIslam

Armenia Now  Plans for a new movie called ‘The Genex,’ dedicated to the centennial of the Armenian Genocide have been revealed, with a number of Hollywood stars expected to be involved in the production.

Armenian director Artak Sevada reportedly plans the screening of the movie on April 24, 2015 when Armenians around the world will be marking the 100th anniversary of the start of the Ottoman Empire’s genocidal policy during World War I that resulted in the killings and deportations of some 1.5 million Armenians….

“Shame on Turkey, shame on Turkey….”

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Ankara’s Unacknowledged Genocide

by Efraim Karsh

It is commonplace among Middle East scholars across the political spectrum to idealize the Ottoman colonial legacy as a shining example of tolerance. “The multi-ethnic Ottoman Turkish Empire,” wrote American journalist Robert Kaplan, “was more hospitable to minorities than the uni-ethnic democratic states that immediately succeeded it … Violent discussions over what group got to control which territory emerged only when the empire came to an end, after World War I.”…

…While there is no denying the argument’s widespread appeal, there is also no way around the fact that, in almost every particular, it is demonstratively wrong. The imperial notion, by its very definition, posits the domination of one ethnic, religious, or national group over another, and the Ottoman Empire was no exception. It tolerated the existence of vast non-Muslim subject populations in its midst, as did earlier Muslim (and non-Muslim) empires—provided they acknowledged their legal and institutional inferiority in the Islamic order of things. When these groups dared to question their subordinate status—let alone attempt to break the Ottoman yoke—they were brutally suppressed, and none more so than the Armenians during World War I….

….The Armenian population in western Anatolia and in the metropolitan districts of Istanbul was somewhat more fortunate as many people were transported in trains—although grossly overcrowded—for much of the deportation route, rather than having to straggle along by foot. In Istanbul, deportations commenced in late April when hundreds of prominent Armenians were picked up by the police and sent away, most of them never to be seen again; some five thousand “ordinary” Armenians soon shared their fate. Though the majority of the city’s 150,000-strong community escaped deportation, Armenians were squeezed out of all public posts with numerous families reduced to appalling poverty. Deportations in Ankara began toward the end of July; in Broussa, in the first weeks of September; and in Adrianople, in mid-October. By early 1916, scores of deportees, thrown into a string of concentration camps in the Syrian desert and along the Euphrates, were dying every day of malnutrition and diseases; many others were systematically taken out of the camps and shot.[12]

The Ottoman authorities tried to put a gloss of legality and innocence on their actions. The general deportation decree of May 27, 1915, for example, instructed the security forces to protect the deportees against nomadic attacks, to provide them with sufficient food and supplies for their journey, and to compensate them with new property, land, and goods necessary for their resettlement. But this decree was a sham. For one thing, massacres and deportations had already begun prior to its proclamation. For another, as is overwhelmingly borne out by the evidence, given both by numerous firsthand witnesses to the Ottoman atrocities and by survivors, the rights granted by the deportation decree were never followed.

Consider the provisions for adequate supplies for the journey and compensation for the loss of property. After the extermination of the male population of a particular town or village, an act normally preceding deportations, the Turks often extended a “grace period” to the rest of the populace, namely, women, children, and the old and the sick, so they could settle their affairs and prepare for their journey. But the term normally given was a bare week, and never more than two, which was utterly insufficient for all that had to be done. Moreover, the government often carried away its victims before the stated deadline, snatching them without warning from streets, places of employment, or even their beds. Last but not least, the local authorities prevented the deportees from selling their property or their stock under the official fiction that their expulsion was to be only temporary. Even in the rare cases in which Armenians managed to dispose of their property, their Muslim neighbors took advantage of their plight to buy their possessions at a fraction of their real value.[13]

Nor did the deportees receive even a semblance of the protection promised by the deportation decree. On the contrary, from the moment they started on their march, indeed even before they had done so, they became public outcasts, never safe from the most atrocious outrages, constantly mobbed and plundered by the Muslim population as they straggled along. Their guards connived at this brutality. There were, of course, exceptions in which Muslims, including Turks, tendered help to the long-suffering Armenians, but these were very rare, isolated instances.

Whenever the deportees arrived at a village or town, they were exhibited like slaves in a public place, often before the government building itself. Female slave markets were established in the Muslim areas through which the Armenians were driven, and thousands of young Armenian women and girls were sold in this way. Even the clerics were quick to avail themselves of the bargains of the white slave market.

Suffering on the deportation routes was intense. Travelers on the Levantine railway saw dogs feeding on the bodies of hundreds of men, women, and children on both sides of the track, with women searching the clothing of the corpses for hidden treasure. In some of the transfer stations, notably Aleppo, the hub where all convoys converged, thousands of Armenians would be left for weeks outdoors, starving, waiting to be taken away. Epidemics spread rapidly, chiefly spot typhus. In almost all cases, the dead were not buried for days, the reason being, as an Ottoman officer cheerfully explained to an inquisitive foreigner, that it was hoped the epidemics might get rid of the Armenians once and for all.[14]

As the deportees settled into their new miserable existence, they were forced to work at hard labor, making roads, opening quarries, and the like; for this, they were paid puny salaries, which effectively reduced them to starvation; work in the neighboring villages that could earn them some livelihood was strictly forbidden. Water was normally brought to the camps by trains; no springs were to be found within a radius of miles. The scenes at the arrival of the water trains, by no means a regular phenomenon, were heartbreaking. Thousands of people would rush toward the stopping place, earth-jars and tin cans in hand, in a desperate bid for their share of this elixir of life. But when at long last the taps were opened, people would often be barred from filling their vessels, having to watch the precious water running out on the sun-baked ground.

Independent estimates of the precise extent of Armenian casualties differ somewhat, but all paint a stark picture of national annihilation. In his official report to the British parliament in July 1916, Viscount Bryce calculated the total number of uprooted Armenians during the preceding year as 1,200,000 (half slain, half deported), or about two thirds of the entire community. Johannes Lepsius, the chief of the Protestant Mission in the Ottoman Empire who had personally witnessed the atrocities and had studied them thoroughly, put the total higher, at 1,396,000, as did the American Committee for Armenian and Syrian Relief, which computed the number of deaths at about 600,000 and of deportees at 786,000. Aaron Aaronson, a world-renowned Zionist agronomist who set up the most effective pro-Anglo-French-Russian entente intelligence network in the Middle East during World War I, estimated the number of deaths at between 850,000 and 950,000.[15]

Genocide or “Collateral Damage”?

Turkey has never acknowledged any wrongdoing vis-à-vis the Armenians….

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Turkey slams France for hate speech for including Armenian Genocide in textbooks

By Robert Spencer

Pamela Geller says it: “Truth is the new hate speech.” This is the same thing that happens on a daily basis to counter-jihadists who dare to point out how Islamic jihadists use the texts and teachings of Islam to justify violence, hatred and supremacism: they are smeared with the charge of promoting “hate,” when in fact all they are doing is pointing out hate. Turkey’s ongoing denial of the Armenian Genocide is consistent with an unbroken Islamic supremacist pattern: never, ever admit wrongdoing; never, ever take responsibility for actions that cause harm; never, ever acknowledge that jihad actions (such as the Armenian Genocide) cause immeasurable suffering to human beings; always, always instead blame the kuffar who have the temerity to point out the wrongdoing.

“Turkey slams France for promoting hate speech with genocide initiative,” by Ali Aslan Kilic in Today’s Zaman, August 27 (thanks to Lachlan):

The chairman of the Turkish Parliament’s powerful education committee has accused the French government of planting the seeds of hate with its move to include the so-called “Armenian genocide” in history and geography books used in French secondary schools.Nabi Avcı, chairman of the National Education, Culture, Youth and Sports Commission, told Today’s Zaman in a phone interview on Monday that “the erosion of French culture and moving to the radical right in French politics that started with [former president Nicolas] Sarkozy continues to have a negative impact on the French education system.”

“I just hope that sensible French intellectuals will raise their voices against this kind of provocative move that will plant seeds of hate into minds of young people in France,” he added….

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