Last Friday, April 24, we remembered how exactly 100 years ago the last historic Muslim caliphate, the Ottoman Empire, tried to cleanse its empire of Christian minorities — Armenians, Assyrians, and Greeks — even as we stand by watching as the new caliphate, the Islamic State, resumes the genocide.
And in both cases, the atrocities were and are being committed in the name of Islam.
In November, 1914, during WWI, the Ottoman caliphate issued a fatwa, or Islamic decree, proclaiming it a “sacred duty” for all Muslims to “massacre” infidels — specifically naming the “Christian men” of the Triple Entente, “the enemies of Islam” — with promises of great rewards in the afterlife.
The same Koran verses that the Islamic State and other jihadi outfits regularly quote permeated the Ottoman fatwa, including: “Slay the idolaters wherever you find them — seize them, besiege them, and be ready to ambush them” (9:5) and “O you who have believed! do not take the Jews and the Christians for friends; they are but friends of each other; and whoever among you takes them for a friend, then surely he is one of them” (5:51) — and several other verses that form the Islamic doctrine of Loyalty and Enmity.
Many Muslims still invoke this doctrine; it commands Muslims to befriend and aid fellow Muslims, while having enmity for all non-Muslims (one Islamic cleric even teaches that Muslim husbands must hate their non-Muslim wives, while enjoying them sexually).
As happens to this very day, the Muslims of the Ottoman caliphate, not able to reach or defeat the stronger infidel — the “Christian men” of Britain, France, and Russia — satiated their bloodlust on their Christian subjects. And they justified the genocide by projecting the Islamic doctrine of Loyalty and Enmity onto Christians — saying that, because Armenians, Assyrians, and Greeks were Christian, they were naturally aiding the other “Christian men” of the West.
As happens to this day under the new caliphate — the Islamic State — the Ottoman caliphate crucified, beheaded, tortured, mutilated, raped, enslaved, and otherwise massacred countless “infidel” Christians. The official number of Armenians killed in the genocide is 1.5 million; hundreds of thousands of Greeks and Assyrians each were also systematically slaughtered (see this document for statistics).
(Although people often speak of the “Armenian Genocide,” often forgotten is that Assyrians and Greeks were also targeted for cleansing by the Ottoman caliphate. The only thing that distinguished Armenian, Assyrian, and Greek subjects of the caliphate from Turkish subjects was that the three former were 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?”)
Henry Morgenthau, the U.S. ambassador to the Ottoman Empire and personal witness of the atrocities, attested that “I am confident that the whole history of the human race contains no such horrible episode as this.” He added that what the Turks were doing was “a carefully planned scheme to thoroughly extinguish the Armenian race.” In 1918, Morgenthau wrote in Red Cross Magazine:
Will the outrageous terrorizing, the cruel torturing, the driving of women into the harems, the debauchery of innocent girls, the sale of many of them at eighty cents each [today the Islamic State sells enslaved Christians and Yazidis for as little as $43], the murdering of hundreds of thousands and the deportation to, and starvation in, the deserts of other hundreds of thousands, the destruction of hundreds of villages and cities, will the willful execution of this whole devilish scheme to annihilate the Armenian, Greek and Syrian [or Assyrian] Christians of Turkey – will all this go unpunished?
Because this genocide of Christians is usually articulated through a singularly secular paradigm — one that recognizes only those factors deemed intelligible from a modern Western point of view, one that never uses the words “Christian” and “Muslim” but rather “Armenian” and “Turk” — few are able to connect these events from a century ago to today.
War, of course, is another factor that clouds the true face of the genocide. Because it occurred during WWI, so the argument goes, it is ultimately a reflection of just that — war, in all its chaos and destruction, and nothing more. This has been the stance of all successive Turkish governments. Turkish President Erdogan, who staunchly denies that his ancestors committed genocide against Christians by arguing that they were just wartime casualties, also absurdly accused China of committing “genocide” in 2009, when less than 100 Muslim Uighurs were killed in clashes with Chinese security.
War was — and, as shall be seen, still is — a pretext to sate jihadi barbarity. Winston Churchill, who described the genocide as an “administrative holocaust,” correctly observed that “the opportunity [of World War I] presented itself for clearing Turkish soil of a Christian race.” Talaat Pasha, one of the Ottoman Empire’s “dictatorial triumvirate” during WWI, 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.”
A century later, consider how Christian minorities today are still being systematically decapitated, crucified, tortured, raped, and enslaved — also under the pretext of war. In every Arab nation the U.S. has helped oust (secular) autocrats — Iraq, Libya, Syria — indigenous Christian minorities have been massacred by the jihadi elements that were once contained by Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gaddafi, and Bashar Assad (read here for details).
The Islamic State’s recent slaughter of some 30 Christian Ethiopians in Libya — and two months earlier, 21 Christian Egyptians — is merely the latest serving of Christian persecution in post “Arab Spring” Libya.
Nor is this limited to the Arab world. In Muslim-majority northern Nigeria, Muslims, spearheaded by the Islamic organization Boko Haram, are waging a savage jihad on the Christian minorities in their midst. Boko Haram’s stated goal is to cleanse northern Nigeria of all Christians — a goal that should be reminiscent by now.
But even in non-war-torn nations, from Indonesia in the east to Morocco in the west, from Central Asia in the north, to sub-Sahara Africa — in lands of different races, colors, languages, politics and economics, in lands that share only a Muslim majority — Christians are, to varying degrees, being eradicated. Indeed, in Turkey today, even indigenous Turks who convert to Christianity are regularly persecuted and sometimes slaughtered in the name of Islam. See my book, Crucified Again: Exposing Islam’s New War on Christians, for a comprehensive account of what may eventually culminate into the Genocide of the 21st century.
There is no denying that religion — or in this context, the age-old specter of Muslim persecution of Christian minorities — was fundamental to the genocide of Armenians, Greeks, and Assyrians. Even the most cited factor, ethnic identity conflict, while legitimate, must be understood in light of the fact that, historically, religion sometimes accounted more for a person’s identity than language or heritage — certainly it did for Muslims, in context of Loyalty and Enmity. This is daily demonstrated throughout the Islamic world today, where Muslim governments, mobs, and jihadis persecute Christian minorities — minorities who share the same ethnicity, language, and culture as Muslims, but not religion — often in retaliation to the West (just as the Ottomans, as seen, were also “retaliating” to the Triple Entente).
Finally, to understand how the Ottoman Genocide of Christians is representative of the modern-day plight of Christians under Islam in general, the Islamic State in particular, 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 according to the United Nations — 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 1939, on the eve of World WWII, Hitler rationalized his genocidal plans against the Jews, when he reportedly asked: “Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?”
And who speaks today of the ongoing annihilation of Christians under Islam?
Excellent piece Raymond. In the UK Ed Miliband is planning to outlaw Islamophobia. So we will not even be allowed to fear Islam before we are massacred in its name.
Love UK. ..but time for the visitors to rethink. Could be the continuing influx of Muslims will replace the ‘dollar’s spent by tourists/visitors in France and UK; and so we will not be missed; but I doubt it. Do wonder if tourism down as of late – or not. . .
Examineislam is a funny name because 2 billion muslim livin on planet earth right now if you examine them all this makea you an even bigger killer than jihadists plus seeing 2 billion people same with jihadists is an even bigger fun.
The wild beast out of the sea, that had suffered a blow to a head…a death stroke…comes back, to the amazement of the world. And it proceeds again to kill all who will not worship it.
islam suffered a blow when the caliphate was no more…but there is a new caliphate…the wild beast has emerged and is slaughtering all who will not worship it and its image.
(Revelation 13)
Meantime; how many those who speak for Christianity; remain silent? How many Catholics/Christians. . .felt the earth ‘shudder’ as a huge piece of St. Peter’s Rock broke loose this week, from ‘Christendom’, as the Pope not only recognized a ‘Palestinian State’; but Abbas as an Angel of Peace.
Revelations appear to be ‘just that’. . .forewarned we are; but not forearmed.
Raymond, Brilliant analysis you have made!
Turkish cleansing resulted in totally 4 million deleted: from end 19th century until 1915/1925. It comprised about 20-25% of country’s population, nearly all of which mainly Christians.
About 2,5 million were ‘finished’ in one way or another, about 1,5 million were banished, expelled, exchanged.
Cables by the minister of interior Talat explicitly commanded district governors not to leave more that 10% Armenian minority in each town, village. In 1934, a settlement law was passed, according to which each town, village was ordered not to allow over 10% minority. So, cleansing of Assyrians, Greeks and others have been carried out in and about 1915 in a comprehensive ‘project’ together with Armenians.
No other islamic country at the time brought its Christian population at such level. Including Syria and Iraq, Iran and others as well.
At last, in 2015, the new state of islam and caliphate, tends to ‘bring’ ‘its’ Christians in Syria and Iraq to a lower level…
Meanwhile, in Turkey they are already less than 0,5% of population.
Pictures of corpses and beheaded in 1915 are similar to the ones in 2015:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armenian_Genocide#/media/File:Armenian_Genocide_heads_decapitated.jpg
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armenian_Genocide#/media/File:Armenianbitlischurch.jpg
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armenian_Genocide#/media/File:Iskrinewspapertortured.jpg
I’ve pointed out on other sites that the picture of a row of girls being crucified is a still from the 1919 film ‘Ravished Armenia.’ In fact, the reality which inspired it is even more horrific: in the wiki article about Aurora Mardigarian, on whose memoirs the film was based, she says the girls were impaled on sharpened stakes.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aurora_Mardiganian
The similarities are just shocking…and the world just looks on and lets it happen.
No doubt; why ‘Bibles’ are increasingly viewed by State as ‘threat’ – and Christians targeted for carrying them. . .and worse; believing. . . The truth is a threat. . .and only one way the Left; and the Muslim-appeasing Left, for that matter; deal with truth of anything.
We invite these parasites into America. Diversity is our downfall.
Yes; it was never, of course, diversity, that made America great; but rather, America’s Freedom and the promise embedded. We could celebrate ‘diversity’. ..until those who came here not because of ‘who’ we are – but rather, in spite of who we are – arrived; and brought the home they escaped from, with them.
Let’s remind Raymond some “genocides.”
In the Morea shall no Turk be left
“Everywhere, as though at a preconcerted signal, the peasantry rose, and massacred all the Turks—men, women and children—on whom they could lay hands.
In the Morea shall no Turk be left.
Nor in the whole wide world.
Thus rang the song which, from mouth to mouth, announced the beginning of a war of extermination… Within three weeks of the outbreak of the revolt, not a Muslim was left, save those who had succeeded in escaping into the towns.”
Source: W. Alison Phillips, in “The War of Greek Independence 1821 to 1833,” New York, 1897, p. 48.
The Jews were Massacred along with the Turks
The main body of the book mentioned below is the diary of Errikos Sevillias (a Jew who was born in Athens in 1901 and suffered during the Nazi invasion of Greece). Nikos Stavroulakis translated the book into English and wrote an introduction. In his Introduction, Stavroulakis gives a brief history of Jews in Greece. The following excerpts are taken from the Introduction.
Introduction, Historical Outline (by Nikos Stavroulakis), page viii:
By the third quarter of the 15th century the Ottoman Empire had supplanted the Byzantine. Ottoman policy toward minorities was based on Islamic Law, which recognized both Jews and Christians as a separate millet (nation) with religious and, to an extraordinary extent, legal autonomy within their own communities. This tolerant millet system encouraged the immigration of Jews from Europe who had been feeling the brunt of Christian persecution, notably, in the late 15th century, in Spain. This immigration was welcomed by the Ottomans because of the economic stimulation it brought. In 1492 when Ferdinand and Isabella proclaimed the Edict of Expulsion for the Jews of Spain, Sultan Beyazid II proclaimed that Jews from Spain would be welcome in the Ottoman Empire, and over 20,000 Sephardic or Iberian Jews arrived in Thessaloniki the same year. Soon afterwards 36,000 Jews left Sicily, many of them to settle in the Balkans.
Within a generation a Judea-Spanish culture had been transplanted to many centers in the Ottoman Empire. This was not always done smoothly. Many of the Sepharadim were Marranos, Jews who had converted to Christianity in the 14th century, thereby being able to participate in much of Europe’s cultural and intellectual life. Their reconversion to Judaism was sometimes difficult, and their pride and sense of cultural superiority caused friction in their dealings with Romaniot Jews. Whatever the difficulties, the former Romaniot communities of Constantinople, Edirne (Adrinople), Thessaloniki, and Rhodes were forced by the weight of numbers and cultural superiority to adopt not only the minhag but also the language of the newcomers. A new, and certainly one of the most exciting periods of Balkan Jewry began. In 1497 the first book printed in Constantinople was published in Hebrew, well over two hundred years before the first Greek books were printed in Balkans. Some Jews, notably Joseph Nasi (1520-1579) during the reigns of Suleiman the Magnificent and Selim II, rose to high positions in the Ottoman service.
The Greek War of Independence brought disaster to the Jewish communities in the Peloponnesos, where the revolution erupted in 1821. The Jews, because of their close association with the Ottoman administration, were massacred along with the Turks. The Jewish communities of Mistras, Tripolis, and Kalamata were decimated; the few survivors moved north to settle in Chalkis and Volos, still under Ottoman rule. Patras lost its ancient Jewish community, which was refounded only in 1905.
Page xi (second paragraph):
The absence of Jews in Athens immediately following the Greek War of Independence is ominous, indicating that they either fled or were massacred as were the Turks.
Source: Athens-Auschwitz (by Errikos Sevillias), Translated and Introduced by Nikos Stavroulakis, Lycabettus Press, P.O. Box 17091, 100 24 Athens, Greece, 1983.
The following article by Dean Kalimniou is very relevant:
Take for example, one of the early successes of the revolution, the capture of Navarino in the summer of 1821. After a long siege and through the mediation of General Gordon, it was agreed that the unarmed muslims in the town would give up their property and be offered safe passage to Egypt. When the surrender took place however, it soon became apparent that the Greeks had neither the intention nor even the means of providing this promised secure passage. When the gates of the city finally opened, a Greek priest, Phrantzis bore witness to an appalling crime:
“Women, wounded with musketballs and sabre-cuts, rushed to the sea, seeking to escape, and were deliberately shot. Mothers robbed of their clothes, with infants in their arms plunged into the sea to conceal themselves from shame, and they were them made a mark for inhuman riflemen. Greeks sized infants from their mother’s breasts and dashed them against rocks. Children, three and four years old, were hurled living into the sea and left to drown. When the massacre was ended, the dead bodies washed ashore, or piled on the beach, threatened to cause a pestilence…”
This was not an isolated occurrence. A month later, in September, a combined force led by Kolokotrones and Petrobey Mavromihalis captured Tripolitsa. Historian W Alison Philips tells a horrific tale of mutilation and slaughter:
“For three days the miserable inhabitants were given over to lust and cruelty of a mob of savages. Neither sex nor age was spared. Women and children were tortured before being put to death. So great was the slaughter that Kolokotronis himself says that, from the gate to the citadel his horse’s hoofs never touched the ground. His path of triumph was carpeted with corpses. At the end of two days, the wretched remnant of the Mussulmans were deliberately collected, to the number of some two thousand souls, of every age and sex, but principally women and children, were led out to a ravine in the neighboring mountains and there butchered like cattle.”
Based on the accounts of one hundred European officers who were present at the scene, and did nothing to intervene, William St. Clair wrote:
“Upwards of ten thousand Turks were put to death. Prisoners who were suspected of having concealed their money were tortured. Their arms and legs were cut off and they were slowly roasted over fires. Pregnant women were cut open, their heads cut off, and dogs’ heads stuck between their legs. From Friday to Sunday the air was filled with the sound of screams… One Greek boasted that he personally killed ninety people. The Jewish colony was systematically tortured… For weeks afterwards starving Turkish children running helplessly about the ruins were being cut down and shot at by exultant Greeks… The wells were poisoned by the bodies that had been thrown in…”
Although the total estimates of the casualties vary, the Turkish, Muslim Albanian and Jewish population of the Peloponnese had ceased to exist as a settled community after the early massacres. ..According to historians W. Alison Phillips, George Finlay, William St. Clair and Barbara Jelavich, massacres of Turkish civilians started simultaneously with the outbreak of the revolt.. Finlay has claimed that the extermination of the Muslims in the rural districts was the result of a premeditated design and it proceeded more from the suggestions of men of letters, than from the revengeful feelings of the people. St. Clair wrote that: “The orgy of genocide exhausted itself in the Peloponnese only when there were no more Turks to kill.”
Source: Dean Kalimniou, NKEE (Melbourne’s Neos Kosmos English Edition Newspaper), Saturday 6 April 2013.
The following passage from Professor Stanford J. Shaw’s book is relevant and points to events in later times:
Page 205:
“Those Jews who survived these assaults in Southeastern Europe fled particularly to Salonica, whose Jewish population increased substantially as a result, from 28,000 in 1876 to 90,000 in 1908, more than half the total population, though even there increased persecution by local Greeks led many Jews to flee elsewhere in the Ottoman Empire, particularly to the great port of Izmir. Despite all the pressure from Ottomans and foreign Jews alike, the ritual murders and other assaults by Christians on Jews went on and on. Greek efforts to decimate the Jewish population of Salonica culminated in 1912 and 1913, following Greek conquest of Salonica during the first Balkan War, when many of its Jews, were either killed or terrorized into leaving…”
Source: ‘The Jews of the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Republic,’ New York University Press, New York (1991).
And, let’s take a brief look at The Muslim Holocaust in the Caucasus:
Muslim mortality in the Caucasus 1914-1921: 410,000
Muslim refugees from the Caucasus 1914-1921: 270,000
How and why?
Source: Rachel A. Bortnick, “The Jewish Times”, June 21, 1990:
“A more appropriate analogy with the Jewish Holocaust might be the systematic extermination of the entire Muslim population of the independent republic of Armenia (which lasted from 1918 to 1920), which consisted of at least 30-40 percent of the population of that republic. The memoirs of an Armenian army officer who participated in and eye-witnessed these atrocities was published in the U.S. in 1926 with the title ‘Men Are Like That.’ Other references abound.”
Source: “Men Are Like That” by Leonard Ramsden Hartill. The Bobbs-Merrill Company, Indianapolis (1926). (Memoirs of an Armenian officer who observed the Armenian genocide of the Muslims), p. 202:
“This war quickly developed into one of extermination. Horrible things happened, things that words can neither describe nor make you understand. The memory of scenes I witnessed and of incidents in which I participated still makes me feel sick. But war is always horrible, for it liberates all the fear and hate and deviltry that are in men…We now proceeded to solve the Tartar problem in Armenia. We closed the roads and mountain passes that might serve as ways of escape for the Tartars, and then proceeded in the work of extermination. Our troops surrounded village after village. Little resistance was offered. Our artillery knocked the huts into heaps of stones and dust, and when the villages became untenable and the inhabitants fled from them into the fields, bullets and bayonets completed the work. Some of the Tartars escaped, of course. They found refuge in the mountains, or succeeded in crossing the border into Turkey. The rest were killed. And so it is that the whole length of the border-land of Russian Armenia from Nakhitchevan to Akhalkalaki, from the hot plains of Ararat to the cold mountain plateaus of the north, is dotted with the mute mournful ruins of Tartar villages. They are quiet now, those villages, except for the howling of wolves and jackals that visit them to paw over the scattered bones of the dead.”
Regarding the Armenian massacres of Muslims in Erivan and Nahcivan, Admiral Bristol wrote:
“I know from reports of my own officers who served with [Armenian general] General Dro that defenseless villages were bombarded and then occupied, and any inhabitants that had not run away were brutally killed, the village pillaged, and all the livestock confiscated, and then the village burned. This was carried out as a regular systematic getting-rid of the Moslems.”
Let’s see what expert historians say, shall we?
Professor Stanford J. Shaw writes:
For the most part, then, Jews and Christians lived as prosperous minorities in the classical Islamic empires of the Umayyads of Damascus and Spain and the Abbasids of Baghdad, preserving their religions and freedoms within their own religiously-based communities and paying a special poll tax called harac [haraj] or cizye [jizya] in return for the protection of the Muslim rulers and exemption from military service while living with great comfort and prosperity. There were limitations, there were some marks of discrimination, so that one could say that Jews and Christians were not as equal as Muslims, but compared to the active persecution to which Jews were subjected in the Christian lands of Europe, the world of Islam was paradise for them [31].
[31] On the Jews in Islamic Spain in particular see Eliyahu Ashtor, The Jews of Moslem Spain (Philadelphia, 1973).
Source: Stanford J. Shaw (Professor of Turkish History, University of California Los Angeles), Christian Anti Semitism in the Ottoman Empire, Belleten, C. LIV, 68 (1991).
Professor Justin McCarthy (Professor of History, University of Louisville) writes:
“For religious and practical reasons the Ottoman government protected the religious freedom and religious autonomy of its people. .. For more than five hundred years religious communities kept their faiths and their identities. In contrast to the religious persecution in Europe in the same period, the Ottoman practice of religious toleration is especially noteworthy… Nowhere in the long history of the Ottoman Empire is there any example of a government plan to make all the population Muslims.”
Source: Justin McCarthy and Carolyn McCarthy, Turks and Armenians, Washington DC, 1989, pp. 14-15.
Greek author-historian Nikos Stavroulakis writes:
“By the third quarter of the 15th century the Ottoman Empire had supplanted the Byzantine. Ottoman policy toward minorities was based on Islamic Law, which recognized both Jews and Christians as a separate millet (nation) with religious and, to an extraordinary extent, legal autonomy within their own communities. This tolerant millet system encouraged the immigration of Jews from Europe who had been feeling the brunt of Christian persecution, notably, in the late 15th century, in Spain.”
Source: Athens-Auschwitz (by Errikos Sevillias), Translated and Introduced by Nikos Stavroulakis, Lycabettus Press, P.O. Box 17091, 100 24 Athens, Greece, 1983.
Professor Bernard Lewis (a British-American historian specializing in oriental studies and history of Islam) writes of jihad as a distinct “religious obligation”, but suggests that “it is a pity” that people engaging in terrorist activities are not more aware of their own religion:
“Muslim fighters are commanded not to kill women, children, or the aged unless they attack first; not to torture or otherwise ill-treat prisoners; to give fair warning of the opening of hostilities or their resumption after a truce; and to honor agreements. … At no time did the classical jurists offer any approval or legitimacy to what we nowadays call terrorism. Nor indeed is there any evidence of the use of terrorism as it is practiced nowadays.”
Source: Bernard Lewis and Buntzie Ellis Churchill, Islam: The Religion and the People, Wharton School Publishing, 2008, p. 151.
In Lewis’ view, the “by now widespread terrorism practice of suicide bombing is a development of the 20th century” with “no antecedents in Islamic history, and no justification in terms of Islamic theology, law, or tradition.” (p. 153)
He further comments that “the fanatical warrior offering his victims the choice of the Koran or the sword is not only untrue, it is impossible” and that “generally speaking, Muslim tolerance of unbelievers was far better than anything available in Christendom, until the rise of secularism in the 17th century.” (p. 146)
You seem to forget that during this genocide the young turks regime was composed of masonic crypto jews who were hell bent on punishing the greeks as well as armenians
Good reminder to be realistic about our coming future……..
I curse Islam and spit on their filthy pedophile fake prophet Mohammad. A pig is greater than Allah because every infidel can send a Muslim to hell by throwing pig flesh at them.