Posted on 09/16/2014 11:19:28 AM PDT by Mount Athos
Last night, my brief sound bite during a Sean Hannity panel alluded to the timeless Koranic injunction to wage jihad war against Jews and Christians, specifically, Koran 9:29, for the purpose of forcibly imposing a Sharia-based Islamic order upon them. This reference was followed by a graphic, modern historical manifestation of this eternal Islamic “imperative”: the 1915-19 jihad genocide of the Armenian, Assyro-Chaldean, and Syrian Orthodox Christian communities of Anatolia, and northern “Mesopotamia,” i.e., modern Iraq, by the last Caliphate — the Ottoman Caliphate.
Notwithstanding the recent horrific spate of atrocities committed against the Christian communities of northern Iraq by the Islamic State (IS/IL) jihadists, the Ottoman jihad ravages were equally barbaric, depraved, and far more extensive.
Occurring primarily between 1915-16 (although continuing through at least 1919), some one million Armenian and 250,000 Assyro-Chaldean and Syrian Orthodox Christians were brutally slaughtered or starved to death during forced deportations through desert wastelands.
The identical gruesome means used by IS/IL to humiliate and massacre its Christian victims were employed on a scale that was an order of magnitude greater by the Ottoman Muslim Turks, often abetted by local Muslim collaborators (the latter being another phenomenon which also happened during the IS/IL jihad campaign against Iraq’s Christians).
Tragically 2/3 of Muslims from Morocco to Indonesia — hardly a “fringe minority of extremists” — support the eternal Islamic “ideal” to re-create a Caliphate.
The wrenching descriptions included below should make plain to all decent, sober-minded persons why any “Caliphate movement” must be confronted, and crushed.
Reverend K. Balakian’s eyewitness narrative Hai Koghota (The Armenian Golgotha) — recounted the harrowing details of a particular slaughter at Yozgat, its Islamic religious motifs unexpurgated. Balakian quotes a Turkish gendarme who confirmed the Ottoman government’s sanction of this explicit act of mass-murderous jihad:
During the time we were searching the women, the government officials of Yozgat sent police officers to all the surrounding Turkish villages and in the name of holy jihad invited the Muslim population to participate in this sacred religious obligation … Thus, when we arrived at the designated site, the mass of people was waiting. The government order was clear: all were to be massacred, and nobody was to be spared. Therefore, in order to prevent any escape attempt, and to thwart any secret attempts of sympathizers intent on freeing them, I had the eighty police soldiers encircle this hill, and I stationed guards at every probable site of escape or hiding. Then I had the [Muslim] police soldiers announce to the people [Muslim men] that whoever wished to select a virgin girl or young bride could do so immediately, on the condition of taking them as wives and not with the intention of rescuing them. Making a selection during the massacre was forbidden. Thus about 250 girls and young brides were selected by the people and the police soldiers.
Balakian himself interjects:
Then the captain did something striking. Before continuing to tell his story of the actual massacre, he closed his eyes; in the special manner of performing ablutions, he raised his hands to his face and ran them down his white beard as if washing up. And muttering a few prayers, he turned to and said to me, “May Allah not show such death as this to anybody” … “Did you shoot them dead or bayonet them to death?” I [Balakian] asked. “It’s wartime, and bullets are expensive. So people grabbed whatever they could from their villages — axes, hatchets, scythes, sickles, clubs, hoes, pickaxes, shovels, — and they did the killing accordingly.
Regarding this particular massacre, Balakian laments:
It is impossible for me to convey what happened to those 6,400 defenseless women, virgins, and brides as well as suckling infants. Their heartrending cries and doleful pleas brought down the deaf canopies of heaven. The police soldiers in Yozgat (and Boghazliyan) who accompanied us would even boast to some of us about how they had committed tortures and decapitations, cut off and chopped up body parts with axes, and how they had dismembered suckling infants and children by pulling apart their legs, or dashing them on rocks.
Balakian’s overarching eyewitness assessment of the jihad genocide of the Armenians, includes these summary observations:
The interior minister and chief executioner, Talaat [one of the Ottoman Turk “triumvirate” of rulers during the genocide], had given orders by telegram throughout the disintegrating Ottoman Empire, even as far as the most remote villages, to take the Armenians outside of the cities and towns, into the mountains and valleys, and mercilessly massacre them. He had also ordered that the remaining old women and children be marched along routes deliberately made longer, then annihilated by being left in the deserts of Der Zor without bread, water, or even a final resting place.
More than one million Armenian city dwellers and peasants were savagely slaughtered and made to choke quietly on their own blood. Tens of thousands of Armenian males, lashed together with string or rope, were mercilessly butchered along all the roads of Asia Minor, or massacred with axes, like tree branches being pruned. The executioners were deaf to the crying and weeping of these wretched victims, even to their pleas to shoot them so that they might escape the torment: the order had come from on high and the jihad against the Armenians truly had been proclaimed. Yes, it was necessary to mercilessly slaughter them until not a single Armenian was left within the confines of the Ottoman Empire.
Riveting upon the Assyrian, Chaldean, and Syrian Orthodox Christian populations of northern Iraq (then Mesopotamia), and eastern Anatolia, historian David Gaunt’s pioneering 2006 study described their horrific plight under the Ottomans in 1915. Gaunt noted that “an intense extermination of the Christians was completed in a short period between June and September 1915.” Most of the 250,000 eventually slaughtered during the years between 1914 and 1919 were killed in this compressed four-month time frame. After describing the “concrete details” of what he characterized as the “Ottoman ethnic and religious wars and the full scale of religiously-inspired massacres,” Gaunt concluded with this summary assessment which conveyed the sheer horror and depravity of these jihad ravages:
The degree of extermination and the brutality of the massacres indicate extreme pent-up hatred on the popular level. Christians, the so-called gawur [also giaour or ghiaour] infidels, were killed in almost all sorts of situations. They were collected at the local town hall, walking in the streets, fleeing on the roads, at harvest, in the villages, in the caves and tunnels, in the caravanserais [an inn with a central courtyard], in the prisons, under torture, on the river rafts, on road repair gangs, on the way to be put on trial. There was no specific and technological way of carrying out the murders like the Nazis’ extermination camps. A common feature was those killed were unarmed, tied up, or otherwise defenseless. All possible methods of killing were used: shooting, stabbing, stoning, crushing, throat cutting, throwing off of roofs, drowning, decapitation. Witnesses talk of seeing collections of ears and noses and of brigands boasting of their collections of female body parts. The perpetrators not only killed but humiliated the victims…In several instances, decapitated heads of well-known Christians, such as Hanne Safar of Midyat and Ibrahim the Syriac priest of Sa’irt were used as footballs…In Derike, the Syriac Catholic priest Ibrahim Qrom had his beard torn off and was then forced to crawl on all fours with a tormentor on his back, while others kicked him, stabbed him, and finally cut him to pieces.
Virtually every deportation caravan and village massacre was accompanied by serial mass rape of the women. Young girls were abducted as sex slaves and children as household servants. Even when they were not killed outright, the women were often stripped of their clothes. The homes of Christians were broken into, plundered, furniture smashed, windows, and doors removed, set on fire. Sometimes a survivor had little to return home to. The number of perpetrators of the local massacres was staggering. Apparently the local officials….or the local politicians…had no difficulty in motivating the populace for extermination. The officials established death squads from middle-aged Muslim men. National Assembly deputies…agitated among the Kurdish tribes and even managed to get notorious outlaws…to cooperate in return for loot, adventure, and a promise of amnesty. On a few occasions, Muslim women were present, for instance…at the public humiliation of Christian dignitaries, but mostly the perpetrators were males. There were literally thousands of perpetrators, most of them locals.
R.O.P. my arse.
The West missed a huge opportunity at the end of WWI to hold the Ottoman leaders to account, just as we did the Nazis in WWII. A new government, with a revived Constantinople, could have been established - and history, and even many of the Turks themselves, would have accepted it as reasonable victor’s justice.
Moslems are the eternal savages, the forever beasts of humanity.
Islam must be destroyed.
Awful, and Unfortunately there’s no reason to think that the jihadist crimes of this century won’t surpass those of the last one.
I grew up hearing these stories.
Nukes and poison gas should be on the table. The wealth accumulated through the sale of oil should be confiscated, and then the entire Muslim world should be quarantined. We do not need their oil. If we didn’t have a Muslim terrorist in the White House, we could be energy-independent.
That would have required an invasion of Turkey and the deaths of hundreds of thousands more Triple Entente (and American) troops. No one was up for more blood-letting. They were all fought out.
FReepers in the Boston area should visit the Armenian Museum of America.
65 Main Street | Watertown, MA 02472 | (617) 926-2562
https://www.armenianmuseum.org/index.html
Permanent Genocide Exhibit
2nd Floor
The exhibit is a stunning visual narrative of the events of the 1915-1923 Genocide, and the continuing aftermath and denial by the Turkish government over generations. The exhibit’s texts and overall design were created by an Armenian Museum committee: Haig Der Manuelian (Chairman), Dr. Barbara Merguerian, Gina Hablanian, Gary Lind-Sinanian, and Arakel Almasian, assisted by a number of outside consultants. The striking wall graphics were designed by Ed Malouf of Content Design Collaborative. The visitor will find a chronological narrative of the tragic events leading up to World War 1, the years of Genocide (1915-1923), and the continued denial to the present.
The official opening of the exhibit in May 2011 was marked by a ribbon-cutting ceremony, performed by the first Armenian Ambassador to the United States (1993-1999), Rouben Shougarian.
It wasn’t a Caliphate. It was a nominally secular government. The Sultan was a figurehead effectively under house arrest.
Some of those guys weren’t even Muslim.
The old Ottoman system was cruel and arbitrary and not averse to slavery, despotism and the occasional massacre, but the Young Turks went a stage further, as they took the 19th century nationalist ideologies to an extreme. They were happy to consider final solutions. They were more Hitler than Mohammad.
I.e., they were getting rid of inconvenient minorities for nationalist reasons, not religious ones, though the reasons why the various minorities were not with the program were indeed religious, on their part. For the Young Turks, if one was not a Turk, or wanted to be thought of as a Turk, and was not with the “we are all Turks’ program, one was a problem.
Islam as a religion and an ideology is despicable, but there are other despicable ideologies.
The article is seriously off.
And FWIW, the perpetrators of most of this were the neighbors of the victims. Real Tutsi-Hutu stuff.
And as a matter of interest, the Kurds were the main enthusiastic participants, though not the instigators.
I favor the restoration of the Sultan and Caliph, for 3 reasons:
1) Johnny Turk was very good at sorting out Arabs. Take a few heads, take a few more scrotums, and more than a few beautiful women. The vilayet wuold be quiet for 50 years.
2) The Sultan of Turkey was not, and would not be, from the tribe of al-Saud. ‘Nuf said.
3) The Topkapi Palace’s GPS coordinates can be easily programmed into the guidance system of the Trident-D5 SLBM, in case the Sultan gets any grand ideas.
moozlums want to murder you and your family. Some moozlums will do so as soon as they can. Some moozlums will bide their time and eventually do it. Other moozlums will never do it, but will support those who do. Choose your poison.
Gallipoli
On 25 April 1915, British/ANZAC offensive failed. The Turkish commander charging counteroffensive was certain Mustafa Kemal, who got promoted to colonel because of this. It was the beginning of his stellar career.
For those who did not recognize the character, he was later known as Mustafa Kemal Pasha a.k.a. Ataturk .
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anzac_Day
"Gallipoli Campaign
In 1915, Australian and New Zealand soldiers formed part of an Allied expedition that set out to capture the Gallipoli Peninsula to open the way to the Black Sea for the Allied navies. The objective was to capture Constantinople, the capital of the Ottoman Empire, which was an ally of Germany during the war. The ANZAC force landed at Gallipoli on 25 April, meeting fierce resistance from the Ottoman Army commanded by Mustafa Kemal (later known as Atatürk).
What had been planned as a bold strike to knock the Ottomans out of the war quickly became a stalemate, and the campaign dragged on for eight months. At the end of 1915, the Allied forces were evacuated after both sides had suffered heavy casualties and endured great hardships. The Allied casualties included 21,255 from the United Kingdom, an estimated 10,000 dead soldiers from France, 8,709 from Australia, 2,721 from New Zealand, and 1,358 from British India."
Precisely. Turkish Jews were left untouched because they had no secessionist tendencies. The Turks similarly massacred rebellious Kurds, who are Muslims, for having such tendencies.
2nd Amendment: It’s not just for self defense against criminals....
ping
Give Obama time. He’s working on it.
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