THE FORGOTTEN GENOCIDE — AND WHY IT MATTERS TODAY
Assyrian International News Agency AINA
April 24 2013
Today, April 24, marks the “Great Crime,” that is, the Armenian
genocide that took place under Turkey’s 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 mass–such as 1940s
Germany’s gas chambers–the 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
Islam’s rules of war). Unlike thousands of other Armenian girls who
were discarded after being defiled, she survived. 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,”
she wrote. “Only their hair blown by the wind covered their bodies.”
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 it–perhaps the fundamental cause–is 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
that–war, 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
nation’s Christian minority were first to be targeted for systematic
persecution resulting in more than half of Iraq’s indigenous Christian
population fleeing their homeland. Now that war has come to Syria–with
the U.S. supporting the jihadis and terrorists–the Christians there
are on the run for their lives.
There is no denying that religion–or in this context, the age-old
specter of Muslim persecution of Christian minorities–was 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, religion–creed–accounted more for a person’s
identity than language or heritage. This is daily demonstrated
throughout the Islamic world today, where Muslim governments and
Muslim mobs persecute Christian minorities–minorities 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 today–in our modern,
globalized, “humanitarian” age–are we to suppose that they weren’t
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 a cross 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
Africa–that is, throughout the entire Islamic world–Muslims
are, to varying degrees, persecuting, killing, raping, enslaving,
torturing and dislocating Christians. See my new book, Crucified
Again: Exposing Islam’s New War on Christians for a comprehensive
account of one of the greatest–yet, like the Armenian Genocide,
little known–atrocities 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 groups–black Nigerian Muslims and black Nigerian
Christians–are identical in all ways except, of course, for being
Muslims and Christians. And what is Boko Haram’s objective in all this
carnage? To cleanse northern Nigeria of all Christians–a 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
persecution–this desire to be cleansed of Christians–in 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 world’s response to the persecution of
Christians is identical to Turkey’s 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 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–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 1915, Adolf Hitler rationalized his genocidal plans,
which he implemented some three decades later, when rhetorically asked:
“Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?”
And who speaks today of the annihilation of Christians under Islam?
By Raymond Ibrahim Human Events
Raymond Ibrahim is author of Crucified Again: Exposing Islam’s New
War on Christians. He is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz
Freedom Center and an Associate Fellow at the Middle East Forum.
http://www.aina.org/news/20130424124614.htm