Thursday, April 24, 2008

24 April 1915-1923, Armenian Genocide


“Who remembers the Armenians?" -- Adolph Hitler
The Islamofascists marched the Armenian Christians to Damascus... coincidence?
April 24th marks the commemoration of the Armenian Genocide by the Ottoman Empire between 1915 and 1923. More than 1.5 million Armenians died in this period.
Lest we forget, Andrew G. Bostom of American Thinker:


The Jihad Genocide of the Armenians
Dadrian’s scholarship is characterized by a unique combination of painstaking, tireless research in the face of unseemly and well financed resistance, brilliant innovation (for example, his use of Austrian and German diplomatic sources free of either Armenian or Turkish biases), and, most remarkable of all in this era, an intellectual honesty oblivious to political correctness.

Regarding this latter point, specifically, Dadrian has always been unafraid to identify the uniquely Islamic institution of jihad as a critical etiologic factor in the Armenian genocide. Indeed, the most revealing interlude of that April 2nd evening, for me, was his blunt recapitulation of a massacre as depicted in Reverend K. Balakian’s eyewitness narrative Hai Koghota (The Armenian Golgotha)—the major literary work [1] affecting Dadrian’s decision to study the genocide. In a 2003 essay collection [2], Dadrian recounted the harrowing details of this particular slaughter, its Islamic religious motifs unexpurgated. Six thousand four hundred Armenian children, young girls, and women from Yozgad, were decamped by their Turkish captors at a promontory some distance from the city. Then,
To save shell and powder, the gendarmerie commander in charge of this large convoy had gathered 10,000-12,000 Turkish peasants and other villagers, and armed with “hatchets, meat cleavers, saddler’s knives, cudgels, axes, pickaxes, shovels”, the latter attacked and for some 4-5 hours mercilessly butchered the victims while crying “Oh God, Oh God” (Allah, Allah). In a moment of rare candor, this gendarmerie commander confided to the priest-author, whom he did not expect to survive the mass murder, that after each massacre episode, he spread his little prayer rug and performed the namaz, the ritual of worship, centered on prayer, with a great sense of redemption in the service of Almighty God.
Amassed painstakingly by Dadrian, the primary source evidence from these German and Austro-Hungarian officials- reluctant witnesses- leads to this inescapable conclusion: the anti-Armenian measures, despite a multitude of attempts at cover-up and outright denial, were meticulously planned by the Ottoman authorities, and were designed to destroy wholesale, the victim population.
Just to be specific... the motivation for the Genocide:
The renowned Ottomanist, Roderick Davison, has observed that under the Shari'a (Islamic Holy Law) the “..infidel gavours [“dhimmis”, “rayas”]" were permanently relegated to a status of "inferiority" and subjected to a “contemptuous half-toleration”. Davison further maintained that this contempt emanated from “an innate attitude of superiority”, and was driven by an “innate Muslim feeling”, prone to paroxysms of “open fanaticism”.
...
Committee of Union and Progress, Sheik Abd-ul-Hack, a “progressive” Young Turk, made this revealing declaration writing in a Parisian Muslim review, (Le Mecherouttiete, edited by Sherif Pasha, Paris), in 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.
During the reign of Sultan Abdul Hamid, the Ottoman Turks massacred over 200,000 Armenians between 1894-96. This was followed, under the Young Turk regime, by the Adana massacres of 25,000 Armenians in 1909, and the first formal genocide of the 20th century, when in 1915 alone, an additional 600,000 to 800,000 Armenians were slaughtered. [26] The massacres of the 1890s had an “organic” connection to the Adana massacres of 1909, and more importantly, the events of 1915. As Dadrian argues, they facilitated the genocidal acts of 1915 by providing the Young Turks with “a predictable impunity.” The absence of adverse consequences for the Abdul Hamid massacres in the 1890s allowed the Young Turks to move forward without constraint.
...
Contemporary accounts from European diplomats make clear that these brutal massacres were perpetrated in the context of a formal jihad against the Armenians who had attempted to throw off the yoke of dhimmitude by seeking equal rights and autonomy.
...
Yet ninety years after the events of April 24, 1915, the Turkish government persists in its denials of the Armenian genocide, abetted by a well-endowed network of unsavory political and pseudo-academic sycophants operating with the imprimatur of morphing geostrategic rationales—formerly, “Turkey as a bulwark against Communism”, and now, “Turkey as a bulwark against radical Islam”.
A book to buy:
Professor Deborah Lipstadt, the renowned Holocaust scholar, and author of Denying the Holocaust, and History on Trial (which recounts her crushing defeat of Nazi-sympathizer David Irving’s “libel” suit), in conjunction with twelve other leading genocide scholars, elucidated the corrosive immorality of genocide denial in this 1996 statement:
Denial of genocide—whether that of the Turks against the Armenians or the Nazis against the Jews—is not an act of historical reinterpretation. Rather, it sows confusion by appearing to be engaged in a genuine scholarly effort. Those who deny genocide always dismiss the abundance of documents and testimony as contrived or coerced, or as forgeries and falsehoods. Free speech does not guarantee the deniers the right to be treated as the “other” side of a legitimate debate when there is no credible “other side”; nor does it guarantee the deniers space in the classroom or curriculum, or in any other forum. Genocide denial is an insidious form of intellectual and moral degradation…
Dr. Bostom is an Associate Professor of Medicine and author of the forthcoming, The Legacy of Jihad on Prometheus Books

Remember that Lebanon was carved from Syria to be a "Christian Enclave" to protect them from the Muslims. Now 200,000 Christians are dead... and we see what would happen if Israel, the Jewish enclave, didn't defend itself.
Cross Posted at DANEgerus

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