Posted on 04/25/2013 5:16:46 AM PDT by SJackson
- FrontPage Magazine - http://frontpagemag.com -
The Forgotten Genocide: Why It Matters Today
Posted By Raymond Ibrahim On April 25, 2013 @ 12:30 am In Daily Mailer,FrontPage | 9 Comments
A still frame from the 1919 documentary film Auction of Souls, which portrayed eye witnessed events from the Armenian Genocide, including crucified Christian girls.
Yesterday, April 24, marks the Great Crime, that is, the Armenian genocide that took place under Turkeys Islamic Ottoman Empire, during and after WWI. Out of an approximate population of two million, some 1.5 million Armenians died. If early 20th century Turkey had the apparatuses and technology to execute in masssuch as 1940s Germanys gas chambersthe entire Armenian population may well have been decimated. 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 Mardiganian described being raped and thrown into a harem (which agrees with Islams 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 Mardiganians 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 itperhaps the fundamental causeis 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 thatwar, 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 nations Christian minority were first to be targeted for systematic persecution resulting in more than half of Iraqs indigenous Christian population fleeing their homeland. Now that war has come to Syriawith the U.S. supporting the jihadis and terroriststhe Christians there are on the run for their lives.
There is no denying that religionor in this context, the age-old specter of Muslim persecution of Christian minoritieswas fundamental to the Armenian Genocide. Even the most cited factor, ethnic identity conflict, while legitimate, must be understood in light of the fact that, historically, religioncreedaccounted more for a persons identity than language or heritage. This is daily demonstrated throughout the Islamic world today, where Muslim governments and Muslim mobs persecute Christian minoritiesminorities who share the same ethnicity, language, and culture, who are indistinguishable from the majority, except, of course, for being non-Muslims.
If Christians are thus being singled out todayin our modern, globalized, humanitarian ageare we to suppose that they werent singled out a century ago by Turks?
Similarly, often forgotten is the fact that non-Armenians under Turkish hegemony, Assyrians and Greeks for example, were also targeted for cleansing. The only thing that distinguished Armenians, Assyrians, and Greeks from Turks was that they were all Christian. As one Armenian studies professor asks, If it [the Armenian Genocide] was a feud between Turks and Armenians, what explains the genocide carried out by Turkey against the Christian Assyrians at the same time?
Today, as Turkey continues moving back to reclaiming its Islamic heritage, so too has Christian persecution returned. If Turks taunted their crucified Armenian victims by saying things like Now let your Christ come and help you, just last January, an 85-year-old Christian Armenian woman was repeatedly stabbed to death in her apartment, and a crucifix carved onto her naked corpse. Another elderly Armenian woman was punched in the head and, after collapsing to the floor, repeatedly kicked by a masked man. According to the report, the attack marks the fifth in the past two months against elderly Armenian women, one of whom lost an eye. Elsewhere, pastors of church congregations with as little as 20 people are targeted for killing and spat upon in the streets. A 12-year-old Christian boy was beaten by his teacher and harassed by students for wearing around his neck, and three Christians were satanically tortured before having their throats slit for publishing Bibles.
Outside of Turkey, what is happening to the Christians of today from one end of the Muslim world to the other is a reflection of what happened to the Armenian Christians of yesterday. We can learn about the past by looking at the present. From Indonesia in the east to Morocco in the west, from Central Asia in the north, to sub-Sahara Africathat is, throughout the entire Islamic worldMuslims are, to varying degrees, persecuting, killing, raping, enslaving, torturing and dislocating Christians. See my new book, Crucified Again: Exposing Islams New War on Christians for a comprehensive account of one of the greatestyet, like the Armenian Genocide, little knownatrocities of our times.
Here is one relevant example to help appreciate the patterns and parallels: in Muslim-majority northern Nigeria, Muslims, led by the Islamic organization, Boko Haram (Western Education is Forbidden) are waging a bloody jihad on the Christian minorities in their midst. These two groupsblack Nigerian Muslims and black Nigerian Christiansare identical in all ways except, of course, for being Muslims and Christians. And what is Boko Harams objective in all this carnage? To cleanse northern Nigeria of all Christiansa goal rather reminiscent of Ottoman policies of cleansing Turkey of all Christians, whether Armenian, Assyrian, or Greek.
How does one explain this similar pattern of Christian persecutionthis desire to be cleansed of Christiansin lands so different from one another as Nigeria and Turkey, lands which share neither race, language, nor culture, which share only Islam? Meanwhile, the modern Islamic worlds response to the persecution of Christians is identical to Turkeys response to the Armenian Genocide: Denial.
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 Rooseveltbut 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 worldwhich in some areas has reached genocidal proportionswe 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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more p.c. b.s. from the media and academia, denying the islamic terror that is islam....
As apt a subject for a movie as "Lawrence of Arabia," it has been optioned many times as the basis of a blockbuster script. But, each time the really big movie project surfaces, the State Department at the urging of our Turkish allies, has quashed it. Several lo-bux minor films have been produced, but went nowhere.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Forty_Days_of_Musa_Dagh
www.youtube.com/watch?v=n2V4Ti0RetA
Read it or watch the video for a true appreciation of what Muslims have in mind for all of us.
Wait a minute. They didn’t have TV in those days, so it didn’t happen on TV. Therefore, it didn’t happen. Neither did the Holocaust of the Jooos! nor Genghis Khan’s campaign of conquest, rape, pillage and plunder. Nothing happened before the invention of TV. That’s why Islam is the Religion of Peace./s
I wish people who use the word “decimated” would bother to learn the TRUE meaning of the word.
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True. My math tells me the Turk Pig Butchers killed 3/4 of the Armenian population in the Ottoman Empire.
Muslims are swine - all of them. I wish they all had only one neck.
Before that, I assumed the Armenians were a separate Muslim group.
Only a couple years before that was the first time I realized that the Biafra genocide in Nigeria during the 1960’s was also largely a Muslim on Christian slaughter.
I read history almost every day.
The only explanation I can think of for my not understanding the religious basis of those two genocides is that historians deliberately obfuscate the religious facts.
Somewhere I have a pic of myself with an Armenian in Tbilisi outside of an Armenian church. Even the Georgians have not been overly kind to the Armenians.
Why the ?’s
You’re right. It was a quote, and I suspect most people understand it as a serious act of killing. But genocide would be the appropriate term, also misunderstood. Beyond the dead, Christian culture no longer exists in the region as it did for millenia. A grave loss. IMO the most successful genocide, Muslim ejection of Jews from North Africa to Iran. Millenia old communities, engaged in the secular life of their nations. Gone, without a peep from the post Hitler world. How would the world look if the Islamic nations from Morroco to Iran still had politically and economically significant Jewish and Christian populations. Minority populations, but by their existance significant.
Why would you, it’s not discussed that way. They’re killing Christians all over Africa as we speak, few care, few discuss it, rarely is it reported in the press as Muslim on Christian violance.
Meant to include you in post 13.
Thank you for posting that, I’ve seen it but couldn’t find the link. It’s relevance is obvious.
I came of age in the 1960’s and the Biafra genocide was a major news story for about two years.
From memory.....
A large share of the 3 million dead were from starvation and child disease deaths caused by refugee issues and systematic terror and the extreme logistic difficulties in Africa.
As I recall, the UK was the Nigerian colonial power, and violence started almost immediately after Independence and the UK presence disappeared.
The Muslims were in the north part of Nigeria, and were much poorer and less Westernized.
In the south, and especially along the coast, people were much more prosperous and Westernized and many were Christian.
The port cities, as I recall, were actually in the slave trade for close to 300 years.
It would be an error to claim that this war was strictly Muslim versus Christian.
It's more accurate to say it was a Muslim war against non-Muslims.
Southern Nigeria has many ethnic groups and many religions.
But it's possible that Christians had the highest death toll.
I have no recollection of how or when this was all resolved.
I really hadn't thought about Biafra for years until Muslims and others recently started attacking Nigeria's oil industry, which I think is almost completely offshore.
I read a summary of the Biafra conflict at one of the Conservative blogs, and I realized for the first time that much of it was Muslims slaughtering Christians, something completely absent from the news reports 40 years ago.
Don’t understand comment.
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