*Syria: Armenian Christians Pressured to Convert to Islam*
January 10, 2014
Raymond Ibrahim
[image: yh]
Arabic language websites
reported earlier this
week that the al-Qaeda-linked Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant –
which, throughout the course of the war against the Assad government
has committed any number of atrocities, from decapitating `infidels’
to burning churches – has successfully `forced’ two Armenian Christian
families to convert to Islam.
A video accompanies some of these reports. In it, what appears to be
an elderly Armenian man stands alongside an Islamic cleric who
announces the Christian man’s conversion to Islam – to thunderous
cries of `Allahu Akbar!’ In his exultation, the cleric makes
exuberant statements like `You see, we have no honor without Islam –
without proclaiming aloud that `There is no god but Allah and Muhammad
is his prophet!’ (Without the religious jargon, this is simply another
way of saying, `Only by joining our team can you ever escape
dishonor,’ the lot of all non-Muslim, subhuman
`infidels.’
)
The cleric also adds that, because the man is the head of his
household, his Christian wife and children are all now Muslim as well
– `all praise to Allah!’ Naturally, if they reject their new Islamic
identity, they become `apostates,’ a crime punishable by death.
The rather flippant and sarcastic text that accompanies this video
points out the obvious:
*After decades of peaceful coexistence between the various religions
of Syria, and after decades of living under the moderate form of
Levantine Islam =85 these two Armenian families were none too keen on
entering Islam or learning of its eminence – except at the hands of
DAASH [al-Qaeda-linked Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant], which
has been presenting a `rosy’ picture of Islam and Muslims, by way of
chopping heads, whipping people, and general repression. Thus did
these two Christian Armenian families finally enter Islam, `willingly’
– but only at the hands of DAASH.*
In other words, it’s `curious,’ to say the least, that Christians who
for generations lived amid moderate Muslim majorities in Syria but
opted to remain Christian, are now `suddenly’ attracted to Islam – and
at the hands of a jihadi organization that has been bombing churches,
kidnapping and beheading Christians, and even teaching children to
slaughter
Christians
wherever they may be found.
Sound like genuine conviction to you? Maybe things like the 2012 news
that `a family of Armenian Christians was found murdered, and all
members of the family horribly
decapitated’
in Syria is compelling these Armenian families into seeing the
`wisdom’ of embracing Islam?
Here we reach an important but overlooked historical point. While
many Christians, past and
present,
have indeed willingly embraced
martyrdom – the sword,
death – rather than recant Christ for Muhammad, the majority of born
Christians, when faced with converting to Islam or dying, have opted
for the former. Indeed, call it a lack of idealism or a lack of
faithfulness, when faced with converting to the `winning team’ of
Islam or simply being third-class subjects (*dhimmis*), many nominal
Christians throughout the centuries have opted for the former.
That is precisely how and why the so-called `Islamic world’ – the
majority of which was almost entirely Christian before the Islamic
conquests
– came into being: a fact Western people were once well acquainted
with, before the current age of political correctness and
alternate
realities fell upon us.
Update:
New information has just emerged concerning the recent killing of a
young Armenian man, Minas, for refusing to convert to Islam, again at
the hands of the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (so much for
their claims that they do not threaten Christians to convert).
He was reportedly killed in one of ISIL’s dungeons in Aleppo, north
Syria, which has a notable Armenian minority.
According to
iNews,
`Minas and his father were held in ISIL’s prison for 115 days,
according to one activist, and his accusation was that he refused to
submit [to Islam, i.e., convert].’
iNews adds that activists from the region sent the accompanying
picture, saying it is of the slain Minas. Others confirm that the
picture is of a slain Armenian in Syria, but not of Minas. In any
case, the man appears to be wearing the garments of the Armenian
Evangelical Church of Aleppo.
The same report mentions other Christian Armenians slaughtered,
including one who reportedly had `his head chopped off and placed in a
biscuit box.’
[image: 1604578_281885301963359_1172783412_n]
Raymond Ibrahim a Middle East and Islam specialist, is author of *Crucified Again: Exposing
Islam’s New War on Christians and The Al Qaeda Reader (2013).
*
His writings have appeared in a variety of media, including the *Los
Angeles Times*, *Washington Times*, *Jane’s Islamic Affairs Analyst*, *Middle
East Quarterly*, *World Almanac of Islamism*, and *Chronicle of Higher
Education; *he has appeared on MSNBC, Fox News, C-SPAN, PBS, Reuters,
Al-Jazeera, NPR, Blaze TV, and CBN. Ibrahim regularly speaks publicly,
briefs governmental agencies, provides expert testimony for Islam-related
lawsuits, and testifies before Congress. He is a Shillman Fellow at the
David Horowitz Freedom Center, an Associate Fellow at the Middle East
Forum, and a Media Fellow at the Hoover Institution, 2013. Ibrahim’s
dual-background – born and raised in the U.S. by Coptic Egyptian parents born
and raised in the Middle East – has provided him with unique advantages, from
equal fluency in English and Arabic, to an equal understanding of the
Western and Middle Eastern mindsets, positioning him to explain the latter
to the former.
[image: ]Déjà
Vu and Paranoia in the Deep
StateHow
long can Turkey’s democratically elected leader rule by
tyranny-of-the-majority?
BY James Traub
JANUARY 10, 2014
[image: ]
At a moment when the revolutionary convulsions of the Middle East are
dissolving into chaos and renewed authoritarianism, the one stable
democracy in the region — Turkey — is twisting its bed sheets in a
nightmare of corruption, conspiracy, and state repression. Only a few years
ago, Turkey preened as the model for a new age of Middle Eastern
enlightenment; now democratic rule seems endangered there, as it is
throughout the region.
The events that have consumed Turkish political life began Dec. 17, when
police in Istanbul arrested 18 people on corruption charges in a dawn raid.
Among those detained were construction magnates who supported the Justice
and Development Party (AKP) of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and the
sons of three of Erdogan’s ministers. Rumor had
itthat
Recep’s son, Bilal, would be next. Erdogan responded by firing some of
his ministers and shuffling others — and by getting rid of hundreds of
police officers and prosecutors who were responsible for the probe.
Additional fraud investigations led to new arrests; those prosecutors were,
in turn, dismissed. Erdogan is now seeking to gain control over the
judiciary in a brazen violation of Turkey’s separation of powers.
The drama has unfolded as a kind of shadow play. Turks are extraordinarily
attuned to the supposed machinations of a “deep
state
.” In years past, this expression referred to military and intelligence
figures who were said to pull secret strings, and who had overthrown
civilian governments on three separate occasions. Over the years, Erdogan
has sapped, confronted, and ultimately smashed the power of the military.
Now a new cabal is said to be pulling the levers of power: followers of
Fethullah Gulen, a moderate Islamist leader based in the United States who
has had a falling-out with Erdogan and whose followers in the police and
the judiciary are said to be wreaking their revenge. A column by a scholar
at a pro-regime think tank bore the
headline,
“Turkey’s Parallel State Strikes Back,” and called for the “Gulen Movement”
to be dismantled.
When I was reporting in Ankara and Istanbul a few years ago, I heard as
much about the Gulenists, who were said to be here, there, and everywhere,
as I did about the deep state. And as with the military, the shadows
reflect very real substance. Gulen’s followers, many of them successful
professionals, control major media properties and occupy prominent slots in
public service. They can be roughly compared to Freemasons, whose habits of
secrecy, and whose self-evident success, make them fertile sources of
paranoia (or once did). Turkey is now having its anti-Gulenist moment, as
the United States once had its fervent, if short-lived, anti-masonry
movement.
As journalistic shorthand, the story of Islamist versus Islamist is both
entertaining and plausible. Erdogan really had split with Gulen, whose
growing power he may have feared. In November, the prime minister had
signed legislation which would have forced the
closingof
almost all of the 3,100 prep schools Gulen operates in Turkey. The
raids
came the following month. Many Turks, encouraged by the regime, connected
the dots. The problem with this neo-deep-state explanation is that the
investigations had begun months earlier, and in any case the allegations of
political corruption seem all too well-founded. Turkish politics runs on
black money, especially from the construction industry. What’s more, Yavuz
Baydar, a columnist for the English-language *Today’s Zaman*, says that
while Gulenists dominate the upper ranks of the police, they do not control
the judiciary. (The Zaman Group, which owns the newspaper, is itself
Gulenist, though the English-language paper is generally considered
independent.)
Even if the Gulenists are getting their revenge, they are only turning on
Erdogan a tool he has been quite effective in wielding in the past. The
final nail in the coffin of Turkish military power came in the form of
spectacular investigations and trials of the most senior military officers,
starting in 2007, for allegedly conspiring to overthrow the state. The
so-called Ergenekon trials depended on the “heavy use of fabricated
evidence,” as Sinan Ulgen, a former diplomat and scholar now at the
Carnegie Endowment in Brussels, puts it. At the time, said Ulgen, the AKP
not only remained silent, but “attacked people who were criticizing the
legal process and categorized them as putschists.” Now, the party has
retrospectively turned on the prosecutors: Erdogan’s chief of staff wrote
in a recent columnthat
the military had been the victim of the same “plot” which was now
engulfing the AKP. Gulenist justice, in short, was just fine so long as the
victims were the regime’s rivals.
Among the prosecutors that Erdogan has summarily fired is Zekeriya Oz, the
deputy prosecutor of Istanbul — famed as the chief man behind Ergenekon.
Stories of Oz’s own alleged corruption have begun to
circulatein
the media. Yet graver than the mass firings and reassignments, whose
number is said to have reached 2,000, is Erdogan’s attempt to subordinate
the judiciary by re-writing the laws governing the Supreme Council of
Judges and Prosecutors, a body which the government had reformed only three
years ago in order to comply with European Union standards. Erdogan wants
the body to report to the justice minister, and thus to the government. The
E.U. has admonishedthe
Turkish government not to compromise the independence of the
investigations.
In this fast-moving, opaque, and tangled tale, the ultimate narrative is
not Erdogan versus Gulen or even cops versus robbers; it’s the government
against democracy. After 11 years in office, Erdogan has become utterly
intolerant of independent voices or of autonomous institutions. “If you
don’t like him,” as Hakan Altinay, a Brookings scholar in Istanbul, puts
it, “you must be a traitor, an Alawite, or a ‘White Turk'” (a secularist).
Turks have lived with this constricting reality for several years now; the
rest of the world learned of it last summer when Erdogan sought to crush
peaceful protests in Istanbul’s Gezi Park, and accused his critics of
harboring various bizarre foreign agendas.
Turkey is no police state, but criticizing the government, Erdogan, or the
AKP is becoming more dangerous all the time. Last year, the state
jailed40
journalists, making it the world’s leading jailer of the press for the
second year in a row. Turkish journalists feel that the vise is steadily
closing. After we spoke, Yavuz Baydar sent me the following email: “As we
communicate, access to the video portal Vimeo is banned in Turkey. More
censor assaults to Internet is to be expected, since it is the only free
domain left under the circumstances. This horrible déjà vu never ends.”
This is the kind of message one used to get from the Middle East before the
Arab Spring. It’s a vivid reminder that Turkey’s democratic transition is
both incomplete and subject to serious reversal. Erdogan rules through the
kind of tyranny-of-the-majority which populist leaders use to dominate
democratic states with weak checks and balances. That rule, in turn,
depends on winning electoral majorities, as he has done. The prime minister
was able to depict the vast crowds in Gezi Park as urban elitists. He will
continue using this rhetoric unless and until the public deals him an
electoral blow.
And that may happen. Erdogan’s constitutional tenure as prime minister is
ending, and he hopes to be elected president later this year. Before then,
on March 30, Turkey is holding nationwide municipal elections, which are
widely seen as a referendum on Erdogan’s leadership. The AKP controls the
government of both Ankara and Istanbul. Until Dec. 17, says Sinan Ulgen,
“both races were going to be won easily by the AKP.” Now both, and
especially Ankara, are seen as open. In short, Turks have a chance to
decide how much they care about an independent judiciary, a free press, and
autonomous institutions. That is how democracies renew themselves.
ADEM ALTAN/AFP/Getty Images