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Vatican City, Mar 20, 2015 / 11:14 am (CNA/EWTN News).- Ahead of Pope Francis’ Mass commemorating the 100th anniversary of the Armenian genocide, newly released historic documents confirm the Holy See’s broad commitment to helping the Armenian people at a time when few others would. The Italian Jesuit-run magazine La Civiltà Cattolica stressed that newly published documents “prove how the Holy See, always informed about events, had not remained passive, but was strongly committed to face the issue” of the Armenian Genocide. “Benedict XV was the only ruler or religious leader to voice out a protest against the ‘massive crime’.”...

The human rights lawyer represents Armenia in the ECHR - but what happened in 1915 when up to 1.5m Armenians were killed, and why do Turks deny it was a genocide? Amal Clooney, the human rights lawyer, has taken on another controversial case - the Armenian genocide. Mrs Clooney is part of a team representing Armenia in a case she opens on Wednesday in which a Turkish politician was convicted by Switzerland for denying the genocide in 1915 ever took place. Doğu Perinçek, chairman of the Turkish Workers' Party, described the genocide of up to 1.5 million Armenians - a...

Iran’s Christian Armenian minority is storming the gift shops in Tehran, buying them out of all their ornaments, Santa figures and pine trees to hang in their stores and homes, the Jerusalem Post reports. As Christians all over the world geared up for Christmas this week, so too were Iranians preparing to celebrate the festive holiday in all its glory. Iran’s Christian Armenian minority in particular ...

The Urartians established a kingdom around Lake Van in eastern Anatolia but failed to deal with severe winter conditions, especially snow, in an effective way, said Professor Veli Sevin on Wednesday, according to archaeological findings... Urartu was an ancient kingdom in eastern Anatolia centered in the mountainous region around Lake Van that existed from about 1,000 B.C. until 585 B.C. It stretched from northern Mesopotamia through the southern Caucasus, including parts of present-day Armenia up to Lake Sevan. The name Urartu is actually Assyrian, a dialect of Akkadian, and was given to the kingdom by its chief rivals to the...

The first character is the sampi, as it was used (briefly) in the Ionic alphabet as a sibilant. The first question to answer is whether it should be separated from the numerical sampi at all... The second question is what the phonetic value of sampi was... Jeffery (1990:39)... also suspects that sampi was originally borrowed from Carian, and used to express the Carian sibilant in loanwords... In the pre-Hellenic language of Lemnos (possibly related to Etruscan), it is used, but Jeffery has no idea what it sounded like. In the older inscriptions of the non-Hellenic language of Phrygia (related...

An Armenian Apostolic church constructed in memory of the victims of the 20th century Armenian genocide was “rigged and dynamited” on Sunday by forces loyal to the Islamic State of Iraq and al Sham (ISIS), according to reports from Syria’s government news agency. The Armenian Holy Martyrs Church in Der Zor, located in the Syrian desert 280 miles northeast of Damascus, was constructed in memory of the victims of the 1916 Armenian genocide and consecrated in 1991. The site was chosen because Der Zor is believed to have housed death camps in which an estimated 150,000 to 400,000 Armenians were...

When Armenian-Americans voiced their anger over Turkey’s role in the incursion into Kessab last spring, US authorities merely expressed “concern” about the well-being of Armenians and Christian minorities. Despite the community’s insistence that Turkey was directly involved in allowing the al Qaeda-affiliated Al Nusra rebels to freely enter Kessab, the US State Department was reticent in fingering its NATO ally. Fast forward to today when the Obama Administration is leading a fragile coalition against the Islamic State for Iraq and Syria, an off shoot of Al Nusra known as ISIS, and Turkey is, once again, rejecting American access to its...

Perhaps the most astounding development in the wake of the Gaza incursion was the revelation that Turkey had suddenly discovered that there is such a thing as “the conscience of humanity.” Those were the very words used by that country’s foreign minister Ahmet Davutoglu. They surfaced during the endless ranting and raving by him and Turkey’s pathetic farce of a prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan against Israel. The other astounding development is that Erdogan actually used the word “genocide.” It’s been a century now since the Turks committed genocide against the Armenians and until this day, although the event was...

Wednesday April 24th marks the 99th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide. That day also marks another year that’s gone by where the Turkish government has not recognized the slaughter of 1.5 million Armenians as a genocide. ... The Armenian Genocide was one of the most compelling human rights crises of World War I. Many historians talk about how what happened in 1915 perhaps helped inspire Adolf Hitler, three decades later, to carry out the atrocities of World War II. In a speech where Hitler was preparing to invade Poland, he is quoted saying: “Who, after all, speaks of the annihilation...

the genocide officially began on April 24, 1915, when over 200 Armenian community leaders were apprehended and later executed in Turkey during the reign of the Ottoman Empire. Over the next eight years, approximately one and a half million Armenians were killed. The political party in power in Turkey during this time, commonly referred to as the Young Turks, carried out the killings. ... Haig Aintablian, president of the Armenian Students’ Association, spoke about his personal experience with the genocide, in which some of his family were victims. “My [great-grandmother] was personally in the Armenian Genocide,” Aintablian said. “I heard...

Turkey will have to acknowledge the Armenian Genocide sooner or later, deputy foreign minister Shavarsh Kocharyan said after his visit to Tsitsernakaberd Genocide Memorial ... Parliament speaker Eduard Sharmazanov named the international recognition of the Genocide among key priorities in Armenia's foreign policy. "Unless the international community recognizes and condemns this crime against humanity, they'll always be a risk of repetition of such atrocities in future," .. He further slammed Turkey's denialist policy and urged Ankara to follow Germany's suit in apologizing to Jewish people and recognizing the Holocaust.

Far from being repentant of the Armenian Genocide, Turkey, under the leadership of Prime Minister Erdogan, is again targeting Armenians; is again causing their death and dislocation.In the early morning hours of March 21, al-Qaeda linked Islamic jihadis crossed into Syrian territory from the Turkish border and launched a jihad on the Christian/Armenian town of Kessab. Among other thing, “Snipers targeted the civilian population and launched mortar attacks on the town and the surrounding villages.”  Reportedly eighty people were killed. The jihadis later made a video touring the devastated town; no translation is needed, as the main phrase shouted throughout is...

The Kurdish Democratic Party (PYD), a branch of Partiya Karkerên Kurdistan (PKK), recently declared that they want to form a Kurdish autonomy in northern Syria... is there any place for Assyrians? Is there room in a future ruled by Kurds, considering what happened in northern Iraq? Analysts I talked to are optimistic and see a difference from the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) in north Iraq. Assyrians make up about 30% of al-Jazeera's population and should have better conditions, they say. But the biggest threat to Assyrians is emigration, since many are fleeing to seek a better life in the West....

The Turkish prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has apologised for the killing of more than 13,000 Kurds by the Turkish military in the late 1930s. He is the first Turkish leader to make the apology. The killings occurred when the army crushed a Kurdish rebellion in Dersim, using aerial bombings and poison gas. The apology comes at a time of tension between Turkey and its minority Kurdish population. Mr Erdogan made the unexpected apology during a meeting of party officials in the Turkish capital Ankara. "If there is need for an apology on behalf of the state, if there is...

Many ethnic Armenians who read ex-US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's recently published memoirs ...are spitting fire over her descriptions of her battles with the US-based Diaspora Armenian lobby. Both in 1991 as a presidential aide (to then US President George Bush) and in 2007 as secretary of state (under then President George W. Bush), Rice worked to defeat the congressional push for recognizing the World-War I-era slaughter of ethnic Armenians by Ottoman Turks as genocide. ... Sassounian charged that Rice had behaved as "a spineless official of a banana republic" by allegedly caving in to Turkish interests.

'Arab Spring': The chilly cruel winter reality of Arab racism and Islamic bigotry Not that ethnic racism and religious bigotry weren't rampant before the so-called "Arab spring" sprung about. But the intolerance tide seems to be only worsening, and without an Arab dictator to "hold" various factions together, vulnerability expand, risks rise. --- RELIGIOUS BIGOTRY: As the D.B. puts it: "Violence Against Egypt's Copts in an Intolerant Arab Spring.. The elephant in the room of the Arab Spring is now the mistreatment of minority communities—Christians and others—across the Arab world." FPM asks: Hillary Clinton Promises to Save Egypt's Christians? ......

MK Aryeh Eldad (National Union) responded to Turkey's intention to expel the Israeli ambassador by calling for reciprocity. "The law of reciprocity – and the ‘law’ of the Middle East – require immediate expulsion of the ambassador to Turkey, filing a suit on behalf of the commandos who were injured - and the State of Israel for expenses incurred - as a result Turkey's negligence in preventing the flotilla from sailing illegally, and immediate cessation of the supply and maintenance of military contracts with Turkey ". MK Eldad added that during the first week after the Knesset holiday he will...

WASHINGTON—Fearing mounting losses at the European Court of Human Rights and recent adoption of Congressional legislation calling attention to its repression of Christian communities, the Turkish Government issued a decree this weekend which would return Christian and Jewish religious properties confiscated after 1936, reported the Armenian National Committee of America. “Erdogan’s decree, clearly prompted by increased Congressional scrutiny of Turkey’s repression of its Christian minority and successive losses at the European Court of Human Rights, would return less than one percent of the churches and church properties confiscated during the Armenian Genocide and the decades that followed it,” said ANCA...

Armenian Americans -- many right here in the Los Angeles area -- are calling Kobe Bryant's endorsement deal with Turkish Airlines "Kobe's direct flight to inhumanity." The Armenian Youth Federation says it's considering protests at Staples Center if Bryant doesn't back down or at least issue some type of statement recognizing the Armenian Genocide, when approximately 1.5 million Armenians in the Ottoman Empire were killed. Bryant has talked about the endorsement deal, telling CNBC, "I've never been to Turkey, but all the guys on the team who have been keep saying (that) it's one of the hottest places to go....

Turkey Condemned for Civil Rights Abuses Hundreds of Lebanese of Armenian descent have clashed with security forces in Lebanon during a protest against Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's visit. Demonstrators shouted anti-Turkish slogans Thursday and tore down posters of Mr. Erdogan to protest Turkey's refusal to recognize the World War I-era killings of Armenians by Ottoman Turks as genocide. Prime Minister Erdogan was in a different part of the country as the protest erupted in Beirut's Martyrs Square. His two-day visit to the country has included meetings with top officials on strengthening trade and strategic relations. Armenians say...