FrontPageMagazine.com, CA
Nov 22 2004
Turkey’s Dark Past
By Gamaliel Isaac
FrontPageMagazine.com | November 22, 2004
On November 16, 2004, Frontpage magazine posted an article from the
New Europe Review, by Mustafa Akyol, titled “European Muslims and the
Quest for the Soul of Islam.” In the article Akyol argued that a new
more tolerant interpretation of Islam should be constructed and that
“A great deal of shariah laws — like killing of apostates, stoning of
adulterers, seclusion of women, compulsory prayer, required dress
code, punishments for drinking or even possessing alcohol — have
simply no basis in the Qur’an.” He wrote that Turkey has an Islamic
heritage free of anti-Westernism and anti-Semitism and argued that it
will benefit the West if Turkey is admitted into the European Union.
Does Turkey have an Islamic Heritage Free of anti-Westernism and
anti-Semitism?
The statement of Mr Akyol that Turkey has an Islamic Heritage free of
anti-westernism and anti-semitism is inaccurate. We need only look at
Turkey’s long history of conquest of Western countries and
persecution of conquered westerners.
In the 14th century Turkey conquered Hungary, Bulgaria, Macedonia,
and Romania. Turkey was stopped only as it lay seige to Vienna. For
hundreds of years thereafter Turks oppressed and engaged in periodic
slaughters of their Christian subjects. In his history of Islam, The
Sword and The Prophet, Serge Trifkovic wrote about the history of the
Turkish oppression of the Armenian Christians as follows:
“The Ottomans lurched from outrage to outrage. Regular slaughters of
Armenians in Bayazid (1877), Alashgurd (1879), Sassun (1894),
Constantinople (1896), Adana (1909) and Armenia itself (1895-96)
claimed a total of two hundred thousand lives, but they were only
rehearsals for the genocide of 1915. The slaughter of Christians in
Alexandria in 1881 was only a rehearsal for the artificial famine
induced by the Turks in 1915-16 that killed over a hundred thousand
Maronite Christians in Lebanon and Syria. So imminent and
ever-present was the peril, and so fresh the memory of these events
in the minds of the non-Moslems, that illiterate Christian mothers
dated events as so many years before or after “such and such a
massacre.” Across the Middle East, the bloodshed of 1915-1922 finally
destroyed ancient Christian communities and cultures that had
survived since Roman times-groups like the Jacobites (Syrian
Orthodox), Nestorians (Iraqi Orthodox), and Chaldaeans (Iraqi
Catholic)…
The burning of the Greek city of Smyrna and the massacre and
scattering of its three hundred thousand Christian inhabitants is one
of the most poignant – if not, after the vast outrages of the 20th
century, the bloodiest – crimes in all history. It marked the end of
the Greek community in Asia Minor. On the eve of its destruction,
Smyrna was a bustling port and commercial center. It was a genuinely
civilized, in the old-world sense, place. An American consul-general
later remembered a busy social life that included teas, dances,
musical afternoons, games of tennis and bridge, and soirees given in
the salons of the highly cultured Armenian and Greek bourgeoisie.
Sic gloria transit: sporadic killings of Christians, mostly
Armenians, started as soon as the Turks overran it on September 9,
1922. Within days, they escalated to mass slaughter. It did not “get
out of hand,” however, in the sense of an uncontrolled chaos
perpetrated by an uncommanded military rabble. The Turkish military
authorities deliberately escalated it. The Greek Orthodox Bishop
Chrysostomos remained with his flock. “It is the tradition of the
Greek Church and the duty of the priest to stay with his
congregation,” he replied to those begging him to flee. The Moslem
mob fell upon him, uprooted his eyes and, as he was bleeding, dragged
him by his beard through the streets of the Turkish quarter, beating
and kicking him. Every now and then, when he had the strength to do
so, he would raise his right hand and blessed his persecutors. A Turk
got so furious at this gesture that he cut off his hand with his
sword. He fell to the ground, and was hacked to pieces by the angry
mob. The carnage culminated in the burning of Smyrna, which started
on September 13 when the Turks put the Armenian quarter to torch and
the conflagration engulfed the city. The remaining inhabitants were
trapped at the seafront, from which there was no escaping the flames
on one side, or Turkish bayonets on the other. This was the end of
Christianity in Asia Minor, whose history goes back to events
recorded in the New Testament itself.”
Marjorie Housepian in her book The Smyrna Affair, quoted a missionary
eyewitness who said the Turkish Muslims actually enjoyed massacring
the Armenian Christians. He said:
“The slaughter of the Armenians was a joy to the Turks, a massacre
was heralded by the blowing of trumpets and concluded by a
procession. Accompanied by the prayers of the mullahs and muezzins,
who from the minarets implored the blessings of Allah, the slaughter
was accomplished in admirable order according to a well arranged
plan. The crowd, supplied with arms by the authorities, joined most
amicably with the soldiers and the Kurdish Hamidieh on these festive
occasions. The Turkish women stimulated their heroes by raising a
gutteral shriek of their war cry, the Zilghit, and deafening the
hopeless despair of their victims by singing their nuptial songs. A
kind of wild cannibal humour seized the crowd…the savage crew did
not even spare the children.”
The Turks have committed atrocities against other minorities as well,
The Tower of skulls of Chele Kula shown below, is a monument to the
Turkish savagery against the Serbs in the early 1800s
Lest we think “Well that was ancient history”, as recently as 1974
Turkey invaded Cyprus. Just as the Romans renamed Israel, Palestine
in order to erase the memory of the Jewish State, the Turks have
renamed all the cities and towns in Cyprus. They have also destroyed
concrete evidence of the Christian and Greek history of the area of
Cyprus under their control. According to an article in the Guardian
(‘The Rape of northern Cyprus’, 5.6.1976)
“…The vandalism and desecration are so methodical and so widespread
that they amount to institutionalized obliteration of everything
sacred to a Greek […] In some instances, an entire graveyard of 50
or more tombs had been reduced to pieces or rubble no larger than a
matchbox…we found the chapel of Ayios Demetrios at Ardhana empty
but for the remains of the altar plinth, and that was fouled with
human excrement[…] At Syngrasis […] the broken crucifix was
drenched in urine.. At Lefkoniko […the interior of Gaidhouras
church…] was overlooked by an armless Christ on a smashed
crucifix.. Tombs gaped open wherever we went… crosses bearing the
pictures of those buried beneath […] had been flattened and
destroyed.”
Cypriots who oppose the Turks are treated severely; in 1996 the Greek
Cypriot demonstrator, Anastasios (Tasos) Isaak, was beaten to death
by the Turkish occupation forces. According to the Greek Cypriot
Magazine Selides. August, 1996, one thousand six hundred and nineteen
Greek Cypriots and Greeks who were taken as prisoners of war during
the Turkish invasion of Cyprus are still missing.
The Turkish Heritage of Anti-Semitism
Although there have indeed been periods when Turkey has been more
tolerant of Jews than Christian Europe, Mustapha Akyol’s claim that
Turkey has an Islamic heritage free of anti-semitism is false. Andrew
Bostom, in his article Turkish “Tolerance of Jews”, A Sobering
Historical Assessment” quotes Professor Maoz who wrote that:
“Like their Christian fellow subjects, the Jews were inferior
citizens in the Muslim-Ottoman state which was based on the principle
of Muslim superiority. They were regarded as state protégés (dhimmis)
and had to pay a special poll tax (jizya) for that protection and as
a sign of their inferior status. Their testimony was not accepted in
the courts of justice, and in cases of the murder of a Jew or
Christian by a Muslim, the latter was usually not condemned to death.
In addition, Jews as well as Christians were normally not acceptable
for appointments to the highest administrative posts; they were
forbidden to carry arms (thus, to serve in the army), to ride horses
in towns or to wear Muslim dress. They were also not usually allowed
to build or repair places of worship and were often subjected to
oppression, extortion and violence by both the local authorities and
the Muslim population.”
Professor Tudor Parfitt in his comprehensive study of the Jews of
Palestine during the 19th century wrote about the Turkish oppression
of the Jews of Palestine as follows:
“…Inside the towns, Jews and other dhimmis were frequently attacked,
wounded, and even killed by local Muslims and Turkish soldiers. Such
attacks were frequently for trivial reasons: Wilson [in British
Foreign Office correspondence] recalled having met a Jew who had been
badly wounded by a Turkish soldier for not having instantly
dismounted when ordered to give up his donkey to a soldier of the
Sultan. Many Jews were killed for less. On occasion the authorities
attempted to get some form of redress but this was by no means always
the case: the Turkish authorities themselves were sometimes
responsible for beating Jews to death for some unproven charge. After
one such occasion [British Consul] Young remarked: ‘I must say I am
sorry and surprised that the Governor could have acted so savage a
part- for certainly what I have seen of him I should have thought him
superior to such wanton inhumanity- but it was a Jew- without friends
or protection- it serves to show well that it is not without reason
that the poor Jew, even in the nineteenth century, lives from day to
day in terror of his life’.”
During World War I in Palestine, the embattled Young Turk government
actually began deporting the Jews of Tel Aviv in the spring of 1917 –
an ominous parallel to the genocidal deportations of the Armenian
dhimmi communities throughout Anatolia. A Reuters press release
regarding the deportation states that:
” on April 1 [1917] an order was given to deport all the Jews from
Tel Aviv, including citizens of the Central Powers, within
forty-eight hours. A week before, three hundred Jews were expelled
from Jerusalem: Jamal Pasha [one of the triumvirate of Young Turk
supreme leaders, Minister of the Navy, and commander of the Fourth
Army in the Levant] declared that their fate would be that of the
Armenians; eight thousand deportees from Tel Aviv were not allowed to
take any provisions with them, and after the expulsion their houses
were looted by Bedouin mobs; two Yemenite Jews who tried to oppose
the looting were hung at the entrance to Tel Aviv so that all might
see, and other Jews were found dead in the Dunes around Tel Aviv.”
It was not clear why the slaughter did not occur. One hypothesis put
forth by the British Zionist movement suggested that the advance of
the British army (from immediately adjacent Egypt) and its potential
willingness “..to hold the military and Turkish authorities directly
responsible for a policy of slaughter and destruction of the Jews”
may have averted this disaster.
Turkish hostility to the Jews during World War II led them to refuse
to allow Jews to flee Hitler into Turkey. In one instance 769 Jews
packed an old, dilapidated cattle boat called the Struma and made it
to the shores of Turkey. The Turks denied them entry and eventually
towed them out to sea where they sank.
The Pro-Western Leanings of Turkey
Although it is wrong to say, as Mustapha Akyol did, that Turkey has a
pro-Western heritage, the fact that Turkey has been a member of the
NATO alliance since 1952 and has a democratic government suggests
that there are influential people with pro-Western and pro-democratic
sentiments in Turkey. Unfortunately the influence of Turkey’s great
Westernizing leader Kemal Ataturk is waning, and there is growing
pro-fundamentalist Islamic sentiment in Turkey. The Pew Research
Center’s Global Attitudes Survey from March this year noted that “in
Turkey “as many as 31 percent say that suicide attacks against
Americans and other Westerners in Iraq are justifiable.” The growing
pro-Islamist sentiment in Turkey is the reason why the Turkish army
has been forced more than once to overthrow democratically elected
Islamic leaders who might have turned Turkey back into a Shariah
state. The recent election of Mr. Erdogan as Prime Minister of Turkey
raises such concerns again. Before his election, Mr. Erdogan was
convicted of inciting religious hatred because of a speech he gave at
a political rally in 1998. Under Erdogan’s leadership Turkey is
trading with Iran despite U.S. calls to isolate Iran. It is possible
that Turkey’s membership in the NATO alliance has less to do with
pro-Western sentiment than with fear of Russia and eagerness to
benefit from the generous military and economic aid from the United
States that comes with being an American ally. Likewise the desire of
Turkey to join the European Union is based on hopes that such a move
would help the Turkish economy.
The Missing Step Toward Islamic Tolerance
In his article, Mr. Akyol outlined a series of steps for Muslims and
the West to take to reduce Islamic militance and to encourage
tolerance among Muslims. One of those steps was for France to allow
Muslim girls to wear head scarves in French public schools. This
suggestion ignores the reason France had to impose this rule to begin
with. Muslims were intimidating both Muslim and non-Muslim girls into
wearing head scarves against their will. Although Mr. Akyol may be
right that further Muslim militance may result from the French law,
the French law was made necessary by Muslim militance to begin with.
Mr. Akyol outlined a series of steps for Muslims to take to reduce
Islamic militance but he left out the most important step which is
that Muslims should acknowledge that the attacks on infidels that
they have committed in the name of Islam are wrong. U.S. ambassador
James Gerald wrote that “The principles of Justice are more important
than oil or the railroads” and that “the Turks should not be accepted
into the society of decent nations until they show sincere repentance
for their crimes.”
Another step Mustapha Akyol listed was to replace Shariah with a new
interpretation of Islam. He wrote, “A great deal of shariah laws —
like killing of apostates, .. have simply no basis in the Qur’an.”
While reform of Islam is indeed essential, the killing of apostates
has a basis in the Koran. The command to “Slay the idolaters wherever
you find them, and take them captives and besiege them and lie in
wait for them in every ambush. ” is from the Koran ( 9:5). So is the
command: “Smite ye above their necks and smite all their finger tips
of them. (8:12)”. This command is undoubtedly treated as religious
grounds by those who commit the many recent beheadings in Iraq.
Should Turkey be Admitted into the European Union?
There is one overriding reason to be concerned about admitting Turkey
into the European Union, and that is the potential effect of Turkish
membership on the Muslim population of European countries which are
already having serious problems as a result of their large Islamic
populations. If Turkey joins the EU, a significant percentage of
Turkey’s over 60 million Muslims may enter Europe. Furthermore, many
millions of Muslims from other Islamic countries are likely to use
Turkey as their gateway to Europe. Once they attain legal status in
Turkey, these Muslims from other Islamic countries will be free to go
anywhere in Europe.
Bat Yeor in an article in frontpagemagazine (Arafat’s Legacy for
Europe 11/16/04) wrote that
“Islamist terror from within and without is overwhelming Europe.
Today it is not uncommon to hear Europeans express their disgust for
Europe and their wish to emigrate. Europe, they say, is dead and has
no future.”
It may be that it is already too late for Europe. The countries of
Europe are slowly becoming subjugated to hostile rapidly growing
Muslim populations. Bat Yeor in an article in frontpagemagazine
(Arafat’s Legacy for Europe 11/16/04) wrote that
“Islamist terror from within and without is overwhelming Europe.
Today it is not uncommon to hear Europeans express their disgust for
Europe and their wish to emigrate. Europe, they say, is dead and has
no future.”
In its jealousy of American power and determination to create a
counter-power, France, with support from Germany, has looked to ally
itself with Islamic countries in order to help create that
counterweight to the United States. On October 26, 2004, France and
Germany stood behind Turkey’s campaign to join the European Union.
Admitting the Turkish Trojan Horse may give them the power to counter
the United States but the price they will pay will be further
subjugation to a growing hostile European Muslim population.
–Boundary_(ID_x3+h0Kcph/FkbrYLvLbegg)–