HOW MY FAMILY SURVIVED THE CALIPHATE
World News Daily WND
Sept 23 2014
David Kupelian tells harrowing story of Christians, jihadists and
genocide
David Kupelian
Two things compel me to share the following personal family story
about what happens to Christians living under an Islamic caliphate.
First, I was watching my friend Sean Hannity’s recent Fox News special
on the Islamic State, during which many in his “audience of experts”
had good and insightful things to say. But toward the end, noted Islam
scholar Andrew Bostom made the following statement. Taking his cue
from another guest’s reference to the precedent for today’s “Islamic
State” caliphate set by the original seventh-century caliphate of
Muhammad and his successors, Bostom noted:
We have a much more recent precedent – and it’s an ugly precedent. In
1915 – it makes IS look like amateurs – at the collapse of the Ottoman
caliphate, a very bona fide caliphate, slaughtered a million Armenians
in a jihad, slaughtered another 250,000 Syriac Orthodox Christians
and Assyrians, with the same level of brutality – beheadings,
eviscerations, humiliations, creation of harams, sexual slavery. This
is part of a relatively recent history. We’re only coming up on the
100th anniversary next year of the Armenian Genocide. That’s the
precedent that we should be worried about, not the 7th century.
Andrew’s comments plunged me into memories of all the stories I heard
growing up, told by family members who had survived the Armenian
Genocide.
Second, though little discussed in the West, Middle East news
agencies are now reporting that ISIS just destroyed the Armenian
Genocide Memorial Church in Der Zor, Syria, which housed the remains
of Armenian Genocide victims. Der Zor, where hundreds of thousands
of Armenians miserably perished a century ago, is referred to by many
as the Auschwitz of the Armenian Genocide.
Now let me get to my story, which I think is extremely relevant at
this particular time.
My dad, when he was only three years old, was basically sentenced to
death. The Turkish government during the chaotic, waning days of the
Ottoman caliphate was engaged in a deliberate campaign to force him,
his baby sister and his mother, along with hundreds of thousands of
other Armenians, into the Syrian Der Zor desert, where they would die
of starvation, disease or worse – torture and death at the hands of
brutal soldiers or roving bandits.
Islamic Turkey’s gruesome, premeditated genocide of the Christian
Armenian population in that country had been ongoing for decades,
with up to 300,000 Armenians massacred during the mid-1890s under
the caliph, Sultan Abdul Hamid II.
But now it was 1915, considered the peak of the Armenian Genocide,
and my dad, then just a toddler, was caught in the middle of it,
along with his mother and sister. Those not butchered outright –
the men were often killed immediately – were driven into the Der Zor
desert, east of Aleppo, to perish. My father’s father, a doctor,
had been pressed into the Turkish army against his will to head a
medical regiment, to tend to the Turkish soldiers’ injuries.
“One of my earliest recollections, I was not quite three years old
at the time,” my dad told me shortly before he died in 1988, was that
“the wagon we were in had tipped over, my hand was broken and bloody,
and mother was looking for my infant sister, who had rolled away. The
next thing I remember after that, mother was on a horse, holding my
baby sister, and had me sitting behind her, saying, ‘Hold on tight,
or the Turks will get you!'”
The three of them rode off on horseback, ending up in Aleppo, one of
the gateways to the desert deportation and certain death. Once there,
my grandmother, Mary, always a daring and resourceful woman, realized
what she needed to do.
After asking around to find out who was in charge, she bluffed her way
into getting an audience with Aleppo’s governor-general. Since her
Armenian husband was in the service of the Turkish army – albeit by
force – she played her one and only card, brazenly telling the governor
general, “I demand my rights as the wife of a Turkish army officer!”
“What are those rights?”
“I want commissary privileges and two orderlies,” she answered.
“Granted.”
In this way, by masquerading as a Turkish officer’s wife, Mary bluffed
her way out of certain death, saving not only her own life and those of
her son and daughter, but also the lives of her husband’s two brothers,
whom she immediately deputized as orderlies. The group then succeeded
in sneaking several other family members out of harm’s way, and my
grandmother kept them all from starving by obtaining food from the
commissary. Thus was my family spared, although little Adolphina,
my father’s infant sister, was unable to survive the harshness of
those times and died shortly thereafter.
As for my grandfather, Simeon Kupelian, after a bloody battle between
the Turks and the British, he and the other doctors, all Armenians,
tended to the Turkish wounded as best they could – that was their job.
Immediately after this, a squadron of Turkish gunmen came and killed
them all, including my grandfather. Such is the logic of demons.
On returning to their beautiful home in Marash in southern Turkey a
couple of years later, Mary and son, Vahey, who was then about six
years old, found it had been ransacked. Their fine tapestries had
been pulled off the walls, ripped and urinated on. Everything that
could be carried out had been stolen, and everything else had been
deliberately broken. Everything. Every pane of glass in the French
doors was broken, even handles on drawers were destroyed.
Ultimately, the hardships and ever-increasing dangers of their life
led my dad and grandmom to do what millions of persecuted people
have done over the last few hundred years. They made the long voyage
to the one country that welcomed them and offered them freedom and
an opportunity for a new life – the most blessed nation on earth,
their promised land: America.
So that’s my father’s side of the family.
But on my mother’s side, the sword of Muhammad was just as merciless.
During this same era, my great-grandfather, a Protestant minister
named Steelianos Leondiades, was traveling to the major Turkish city
of Adana to attend a pastors’ conference. Today, Incirlik Air Base,
used by the U.S. Air Force, is just five miles east of Adana. But
back then, under the caliph, Abdul-Hamid II, ethnic cleansing was the
order of the day. Here’s how my grandmother, Anna Paulson, daughter
of Steelianos, told the story:
“Some of the Turkish officers came to the conference room and told
all these ministers – there were 70 of them, ministers and laymen
and a few wives: ‘If you embrace the Islamic religion, you will all
be saved. If you don’t, you will all be killed.'”
My great-grandfather, acting as a spokesman for the ministers’ group,
asked the Turks for 15 minutes so they could make their decision,
according to my grandmother’s account. During that time, the ministers
and their companions talked, read the Bible to each other and prayed.
In the end, none of them would renounce their Christian faith and
convert to Islam.
“And then,” Anna recalled, “they were all killed.
“They were not even buried. They were all thrown down the ravine.”
The only reason we know any details of this particular massacre,
she said, is that one victim survived the ordeal.
“One man woke up; he wasn’t dead,” my grandmother said. “He woke up
and got up and said, ‘Brethren, brethren, is there anybody alive here?
I’m alive, come on, let’s go out together.'”
As one published history of the “Adana Massacres” puts it:
The annual convention of the Armenian Evangelical Union of Cilicia was
to take place during the week of April 11, 1909, in Adana. Pastors
and delegates from various churches set out for Adana on April 12,
not knowing that they and their many friends were to be martyred. On
the dawn of April 13, 1909, the massacre of the Armenian Evangelical
leadership took place.
My great-grandfather and his fellow massacred Christians – and there
were many, many others also butchered in Adana – were martyrs, real
ones. But today, we most often hear the word martyr used to describe
jihadist zombies who commit unspeakable mass atrocities against
innocents while dementedly chanting “Allahu Akhbar, Allahu Akhbar,
Allahu Akhbar” (“Allah is greatest”) to drown out what little is left
of their conscience.
That’s not martyrdom. It’s terrorism, genocide, metastasizing madness,
hell on earth. Welcome to life in the glorious caliphate.
Although my father and grandmothers passed down these vivid
recollections to us in the comfort of warm, safe suburban homes,
worlds apart from the nightmares of their youth, their painful
psychological scars remained ever fresh.
Allow me to quote the U.S. ambassador to Turkey at the time, Henry
Morgenthau, whose published memoirs exposed the horrors he witnessed
firsthand during the 20th century’s first genocide. Incredibly, he
described how Turkish officials bragged to him about their nightly
meetings where they would enthusiastically share the latest torture
techniques to use on the Armenians:
Each new method of inflicting pain was hailed as a splendid discovery,
and the regular attendants were constantly ransacking their brains
in the effort to devise some new torment. He told me that they even
delved into the records of the Spanish Inquisition and other historic
institutions of torture and adopted all the suggestions found there.
I’ll spare you the details, except to say that Morgenthau, father of
FDR’s treasury secretary of the same name, summed up the “sadistic
orgies” of the Armenian genocide by declaring: “Whatever crimes the
most perverted instincts of the human mind can devise, and whatever
refinements of persecution and injustice the most debased imagination
can conceive, became the daily misfortunes of this devoted people. I
am confident that the whole history of the human race contains no
such horrible episode as this.”