Interesting-I was just on another thread saying I don’t have any first-hand knowledge of what things are like in Turkey, but I had heard from people stationed over there during the Cold War that it was an interesting place, and the people were more “urbane” and modern than many muslim countries.
But I believe things have changed since then...you would know better than I would.
My grandfather was Armenian, and when we were little kids, I remember him saying things like “You act like that and I’ll let the Turks get you!” (usually said with wide protruding eyes!)
I didn’t understand the reference to the Turks at the time.
I know exactly what you mean, it sounds like you have read Dr. Peter Hammond’s book “Slavery, Terrorism, and Islam: The Historical Roots and Contemporary Threat”.
OTOH, with your life experiences, you probably thought that out on your own.
We kids could go wandering and if we got too far from where taxi drivers and soldiers(in their roles as police then) knew the American family lived we would get a ride home in a taxi or a jeep, sometimes with a bakery en passant and we would get a pastry.
I met a woman where I worked 19 years ago who was Turkish on a long visa and working as night clerk at a very large condo complex on the beach where I was a security guard. When I talked to her she asked me how much Turkish I remembered and I had a couple of phrases and a few names of things and she began too pull at my memory until after three months or so I was actually speaking with her in Turkish. She knew my old neighborhood in Nis(h)antas(h) and told me Yeni Yol street was now a part of the grounds of the American Hospital which was on the other side of the back wall two meters from our house.
When the riots hit, an Armenian woman my mother knew took refuge in our house until the army decided their end had been accomplished and the riots got turned off. The riots were specifically anti Greek but memories are long.
P.S. I used to write stuff on Xanga before it got its lunch eaten by the vastly inferior Facebook and once someone put up an old picture of a street car on a street with tall old buildings lining it and labeled as an old San Francisco scene. I looked at it and recognized it as an Istanbul scene from the 50s and had, in fact seen that scene from the same angle more than once. I could even visualize my father driving the jeep assigned to him at the consulate on that street just as it is in the that picture.
Sorry to make a travelogue of this but good memories return.