JIHAD DENIAL AND ARMENIAN GENOCIDE REMEMBRANCE
Andrew Bostom
de-remembrance/
The Center for Security Policy, under security analyst Frank Gaffney’s
[2] bold and thoughtful leadership, is launching a 10-part, web-based
video course [3] (key findings summarized here [4]), today, April 24,
2012, entitled, “The Muslim Brotherhood in America: The Enemy Within.”
Today , appropriately, also marks the 97th anniversary of the date
officially commemorated as the start of the Armenian Genocide-a jihad
genocide-April 24, 1915. Persistent jihad denial by U.S. policymaking
elites across the intervening century-a mindset so egregiously [5]
delusive [6] at present it reflects mindslaughter [7]-is the tragic,
shared living legacy of these superficially disparate, but intimately
related phenomena, both animated by canonical Islam.
The Armenian genocide is formally commemorated each April 24th because
on that date [8] in 1915, the Turkish Interior Ministry issued an order
authorizing the arrest of all Armenian political and community leaders
suspected of anti-Ittihadist or Armenian nationalist sentiments. In
Istanbul alone, 2345 such leaders were seized and incarcerated,
and most of them were subsequently executed.
The majority were neither nationalists, nor were they involved in
politics. None were charged with sabotage, espionage, or any other
crime, and appropriately tried. As the intrepid Turkish author Taner
Akcam recently acknowledged [9], .Under the pretext of searching
for arms, of collecting war levies, or tracking down deserters,
there had already been established a practice of systematically
carried-out plunders, raids, and murders [against the Armenians]
which had become daily occurrences.
Within a month, the final, definitive stage of the process which
reduced the Armenian population to utter helplessness, i.e., mass
deportation, would begin.
Historian Bat Ye’or [10] places the continuum of massacres from the
1890s through the end of World War I, in an overall theological and
juridical context, as follows: The genocide of the Armenians was
the natural outcome of a policy inherent in the politico-religious
structure of dhimmitude. This process of physically eliminating
a rebel nation had already been used against the rebel Slav and
Greek Christians, rescued from collective extermination by European
intervention, although sometimes reluctantly.
The genocide of the Armenians was a jihad. No rayas [non-Muslim
dhimmis] took part in it. Despite the disapproval of many Muslim
Turks and Arabs, and their refusal to collaborate in the crime, these
massacres were perpetrated solely by Muslims and they alone profited
from the booty: the victims’ property, houses, and lands granted to
the muhajirun [“holy warrior” jihadists], and the allocation to them
of women and child slaves. The elimination of male children over the
age of twelve was in accordance with the commandments of the jihad
and conformed to the age fixed for the payment of the jizya. The four
stages of the liquidation- deportation, enslavement, forced conversion,
and massacre- reproduced the historic conditions of the jihad carried
out in the dar-al-harb from the seventh century on.
Chronicles from a variety of sources, by Muslim authors in particular,
give detailed descriptions of the organized massacres or deportation
of captives, whose sufferings in forced marches behind the armies
paralleled the Armenian experience in the twentieth century.
Grigoris Balakian, a leading Armenian priest of his era who was in fact
arrested April 24, 1915, managed to escape and compile his personal
memoir of the years 1914-1918, the monumental Armenian Golgotha [11],
originally published in 1922, but only available in full English
translation since 2009. Balakian’s first hand narrative confirms the
jihad motivation for the genocide.
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.
The recently published Judgment at Istanbul [12] features the
conclusions of the Ottomans’ own post World War I (Nuremberg-like)
Military Tribunals which long ago established the facts of
a centrally organized mass murder committed against the Empire’s
Armenian population. Judgment at Istanbul [12] also includes Winston
Churchill’s contemporaneous reaction to the genocidal events.
It is worth observing that when responding to the calamity of
the wartime Armenian experience, Winston Churchill, the foremost
contemporary British statesman, did not limit himself to merely
castigating the mass murder in question in terms that in contemporary
legal language are coterminous with “genocide.” He used, for example,
such language as “a crime” resulting from a “deliberate policy”
that was “planned and executed,” with the result that “the clearance
of a race from Asia Minor was about as complete as such an act on a
scale so great, could well be.” At the operational level, however,
Churchill, in “a final attempt to break through the Turkish defenses
at Dardanelles,” ventured to offer the War Cabinet an inordinate plan
that is rarely mentioned, much less discussed, in history books.
Namely, he proposed to the Cabinet in December 1915 that poison gas
be used against the Turkish defenders, in part in retaliation for the
“massacre of the Armenians” that was then still going on.
A combination of official diplomatic correspondence, and private
memoirs-most notably the diaries of Henry Morgenthau [13], the U.S.
ambassador to Turkey from 1913 to 1916, an extended report by American
consul Leslie Davis [14] in Harput, Turkey, from 1915 to 1917, and
the recently published United States Official Records [15] on the
Armenian Genocide, 1915-1917-provides lucid, often repellently detailed
historical accounting of what the U.S. government knew regarding the
Ottoman Empire and the Armenian genocide. These materials are perhaps
the most salient examples of the evidence, as per the language of
various House and Senate resolutions, “documented in the United States
record,” which support [16] the formal U.S.
recognition of the Armenian genocide as proposed in these Congressional
resolutions.
The wartime reports [8] from German and Austro-Hungarian officials,
Turkey’s World War I allies, as well as earlier British diplomatic
reports dating back to 1890, confirm the independent U.S. evidence
that the origins and evolution of the genocide had little to do with
World War I “Armenian provocations.” Contemporary accounts [8] by
European diplomats written from 1890 through the of World War I era,
also demonstrate that these genocidal massacres were perpetrated in
the context of a formal jihad [8] waged against the Armenians because
they sought the equal rights promised to them, but never granted, under
various failed schemes to reform the discriminatory system of Ottoman
Islamic Law (Sharia). A widely disseminated 1915 Ottoman Fatwa [8]
entitled “Aljihad”(brought to the U.S. Consul’s attention in Cairo),
for example, clearly sanctioned religiously motivated jihad violence.
And in his eloquent Wednesday 8/22/07 column [17] “No Room to Deny
Genocide” the Boston Globe’s Jeff Jacoby emphasized the nexus between
the jihad genocide of the Armenians, the contemporary depredations
of jihad, and the dangers of denial: And at a time when jihadist
violence from Darfur to Ground Zero has spilled so much innocent blood,
dissimulation about the jihad of 1915 [emphasis added] can only aid
our enemies.
Moreover the various “strategic rationales” and arguments which
continue to be put forth by the Obama [18] and earlier administrations
to oppose formal U.S. recognition of the Armenian genocide -the
U.S.-Turkish alliance, the Turkish-Israeli alliance, the vulnerability
of Turkey’s vestigial Jewish minority-appear wanting and hackneyed in
light of burgeoning evidence which undermines their basic credibility.
The strategic futility and moral bankruptcy of this ongoing U.S.
policy of jihad genocide denial was underscored by the findings from
a lengthy U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF)
report [19] just issued March, 2012.
The report [19] recommended that the U.S. government designate Turkey
as one of the world’s 16 most egregious violators of religious freedom,
sharply downgrading Turkey’s status from a prior “watch” list country,
to the worst offender’s category, designated “Countries of Particular
Concern.” Specific offenses cited, included: * interfering with
“minority religious communities’ affairs; societal discrimination
and occasional violence against religious minorities; limitations on
religious dress; and Antisemitism in Turkish society and media.”
* denying “non-Muslim communities the rights to train clergy, offer
religious education, and own and maintain places of worship.”
* continuing longstanding policies that “threaten the survivability
and viability of minority religious communities in Turkey.”
* restricting the religious freedom of “the Greek, Armenian, and Syriac
Orthodox Churches, the Roman Catholic and protestant Churches, and
the Jewish community” * regarding Turkish-occupied northern Cyprus,
Turkey “supports numerous arbitrary regulations implemented by local
Turkish Cypriot authorities.[which] limit the religious activities
of all non-Muslims living in northern Cyprus, deny these religious
communities the right to worship freely and restore, maintain,
and utilize their religious properties, and threaten the long-term
survival of non-Muslim religious communities in the area.”
The USCIRF report further suggested [19] that the U.S. government
prompt Turkey to “abolish Article 301 of the Turkish Penal Code which
restricts the freedom of thought and expression and negatively affects
the freedom of religion or belief.” (Not mentioned by the USCIRF report
was the fact that this negation of freedom of thought and expression
was in accord with the mainstream dictates [20] of Islam’s Sharia-as
articulated, for example, in the Cairo Declaration, to which Turkey
is a signatory.) In addition, the report also acknowledged [19]
that “even starting a discussion on genocide [i.e., jihad genocide
[8]] of Christians that occurred 100 years ago is a criminal offense
in Turkey.”
These abuses are the tragic legacy of jihad denial abetted by a uniform
present era US policy which fails to recognize the jihad genocide
of the Armenians, and gives the Muslim Turks predictable impunity to
continue imposing less cataclysmic expressions of Sharia-sanctioned
discrimination and ethnic cleansing against non-Muslims. Concluding
somberly, the USCIRF noted [19], Every year that passes without
substantial religious reform places these minorities in greater peril
and helps seal their fate. In the Arab Spring, Turkey holds itself out
to be an Islamist model. But it is no model for religious freedom. We
have waited for ten years for the AKP to make a real difference in
the Christians’ fate. We can no longer sit by and just –Watch.
This somber USCIRF conclusion provides a useful segue back to today’s
release of the CSP’s web-based seminar [3] “The Muslim Brotherhood
in America: The Enemy Within.”
The World War I era collapse of the Ottoman Turkish Empire-punctuated
by the convulsive jihad genocide of the Armenians-was soon followed by
formal dismantling of the Islamic Caliphate system that had been under
their aegis for almost a half millennium. Restoration of this recently
dismantled Caliphate was a primal motivation of Hasan al-Banna when
he founded the Muslim Brotherhood in the late 1920s-a dream shared
by tens of millions of Muslims who comprised the global umma then,
and perhaps hundreds of millions, now [21]. Al-Banna’s and the
Muslim Brotherhood’s vision [22] was steadfastly Islamic-hence its
deep resonance with the timeless aspiration of the Muslim masses to
establish a transnational Muslim Caliphate via jihad [23].
Quoting the Qur’anic verse [2:193] “And fight them till sedition is no
more, and the faith is God’s,” the Muslim Brothers urged their fellow
Muslims to restore the bygone greatness of Islam, and to re-establish
the Islamic empire.[T]hey even called for the restoration of “former
Islamic colonies” in Andalus (Spain), southern Italy, Sicily, the
Balkans, and the Mediterranean islands.
What the CSP’s timely seminar [3] makes plain is the odious “vision”
of Al-Banna’s myriad Muslim Brotherhood affiliated heirs-concordant
with the timeless aspiration of jihad to submit the entire world to
the totalitarian Sharia-now extends to the Americas. Central to the
CSP’spresentation is a document [24] whose contents were revealed
during the Texas Holy Land Foundation jihad-terrorism funding trial.
This internal Muslim Brotherhood statement dated May 22, 1991 was
written by an acolyte of the Brotherhood’s major theoretician,
lionized Qatari cleric, popular Al-Jazeera television personality,
and head of the European Fatwa Council Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi [25].
Entitled “An Explanatory Memorandum On the General Strategic
Goal for the Group In North America,” the document [24] is indeed
self-explanatory.
The Ikhwan [Muslim Brotherhood] must understand that their work in
America is a kind of grand jihad in eliminating and destroying the
Western civilization from within and “sabotaging” its miserable
house by their hands and by the hands of the believers so that it
is eliminated and God’s religion is made victorious over all other
religions.
Eight decades earlier, a strikingly concordant Weltanschauung
was articulated openly by Sheik Abd-ul-Haq, a “progressive” Muslim
Young Turk, writing in a Parisian Muslim review, (Le Mecherouttiete,
edited by Sherif Pasha, Paris; cited here [26], pp. 241-42), during
August, 1912: Yes! The Musulman religion is in open hostility to
all your world of progress. Understand, you European observers,
that a Christian, whatever his position may be, by the mere fact
of his being a Christian is regarded by us as a blind man lost to
all sense of human dignity. Our reasoning with regard to him is as
simple as it is definitive. We say: the man whose judgment is so
perverted as to deny the existence of a one and only God, and to
make up gods of different sorts, can only be the meanest expression
of human degradation; to speak to him would be a humiliation for
our intelligence and an insult to the grandeur of the Master of the
Universe. The presence of such miscreants among us is the bane of
our existence; their doctrine is a direct insult to the purity of
our faith; contact with them is a defilement of our bodies; any
relation with them a torture to our souls. Though detesting you,
we have condescended to study your political institutions and your
military organization. Over and above the new weapons that Providence
procures for us through your agency, you have yourselves rekindled,
the inextinguishable faith of our heroic martyrs. Our Young Turks,
our Babis, our new Brotherhoods, all our sects, under various forms,
are inspired by the same idea; the same necessity of moving forward.
Towards what end? Christian civilization? Never! Islam is the one great
international family. All true believers are brothers. A community
of feeling and of faith binds them in mutual affection. It is for
the Caliph to facilitate these relations and to rally the Faithful
under the sacerdotal standard.
Ongoing denial of these jihad aspirations has characterized continuous
Western policy failures for the past century. Now, as the illuminating,
uncompromised CSP seminar [3] reveals, the tragic legacy of jihad
denial has allowed jihadism to metastasize, and threaten our own most
cherished U.S. institutions and freedoms.
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de-remembrance/ URLs in this post:
[1] Image:
[2] Frank Gaffney’s:
[3] course:
[4] here:
[5]
egregiously:
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[6]
delusive:
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[7]
mindslaughter:
863/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1292100619&sr=1-3
[8] date:
[9]
acknowledged:
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20with%20sabotage,%20espionage,%20or%20any%20other%20crime,%20and%20appropri
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Akcam%20recently%20acknowledged,
[10] Bat
Ye’or:
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[11] Armenian Golgotha:
[12] Judgment at
Istanbul:
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[13] Henry Morgenthau:
[14] consul Leslie
Davis:
p/0892414588/ref=sr_1_1/102-8993833-1476108?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1187972901&s
r=8-1
[15] United States Official Records:
[16]
support:
[17]
column:
no_room_to_deny_genocide/
[18]
Obama:
bly-urge-affirmation-of-genocide-as-clinton-statement-draws-ire/
[19]
report:
[20] mainstream dictates:
[21] now:
[22]
vision:
ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1306699072&sr=1-2-spell
[23]
jihad:
f=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1306699485&sr=1-1
[24]
document:
Team-B-Report-Web-285-308.pdf
[25] Yusuf
al-Qaradawi:
ing%E2%80%9D-and-the-treason-of-the-intellectuals/
[26] here:
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