How Many Christians Are there In Lebanon?
NewtonG7
then the Christian population has fallen drastically. Are the Greek
Orthodox now more than the Maronites? Does anyone know the exact or
estimated percentage of Christians in Lebanon?
Alain Chammas
wrote:
I don't believe there are any less christians in Lebanon today than there
were in 1932, as your phrase implies, but their share of the total
lebanese population is certainly smaller (less than 50% if you don't count
the emigres, which you shouldn't).
Regards,
KAROUNI A
: The last census (unless I am wrong) was administered under France. Since
: then the Christian population has fallen drastically. Are the Greek
: Orthodox now more than the Maronites? Does anyone know the exact or
: estimated percentage of Christians in Lebanon?
There is no new statistics since longtime. However, the last few decades
have seen two phenomenas:
1) A fast increase of the muslim population. This increase started with
departure of Turkey from Lebanon (Turkey has stopped the life of
muslims especially the Shiites by taking their children to the army)
and by persecuting the Shiites. Today the Shiites are at least 45% of
the population.
2) A steady if not a decrease in the rest of the population, christians,
druze. Christians have been allowed more freedom of movement during
turkish colonialism, and their flow of imigration to Europe and
North/South America has always been very active. The 1975 civil war
sent even more peoples out.
The christian population would be around 25%.
I do not think it was any significant change in the proportion
Orthodox/Maronites.
I think the lebanese population outside lebanon is hard to track. But it
may be divided 50/50 between muslims and christians. I feel it is
decreasing due to more birth control influence (we make less children that
the local population). I feel (I may be wrong that more and more lebanese
are returning home).
I wish you can provide us with some rationality, why would the Orthodox
population pass the Maronite.
This is just a statistcal talk.
Joseph Mouhanna
> NewtonG7 (newt...@aol.com) wrote:
> : The last census (unless I am wrong) was administered under France. Since
> : then the Christian population has fallen drastically. Are the Greek
> : Orthodox now more than the Maronites? Does anyone know the exact or
> : estimated percentage of Christians in Lebanon?
>
> There is no new statistics since longtime. However, the last few decades
> have seen two phenomenas:
>
> 1) A fast increase of the muslim population. This increase started with
> departure of Turkey from Lebanon (Turkey has stopped the life of
> muslims especially the Shiites by taking their children to the army)
> and by persecuting the Shiites. Today the Shiites are at least 45% of
> the population.
This is why the Shiite population increased in Lebanon? Ya Jaafar, once
more you take historical events that unified the Lebanese population
and attempt to use them in a sectarian fashion. Suffice it to say that
the entire Lebanese population suffered greatly under Turkish rule
and that they various Lebanese groups worked collectively against the
Turks.
>
> 2) A steady if not a decrease in the rest of the population, christians,
> druze. Christians have been allowed more freedom of movement during
> turkish colonialism, and their flow of imigration to Europe and
> North/South America has always been very active. The 1975 civil war
> sent even more peoples out.
"Christians were allowed more freedom of movement during Turkish
colonialism", this actually translates into the following: more
than 50% of the Christian populaion was starved to death under
Turkish rule and that pushed large numbers of Christian Lebanese
to flee Lebanon (under fire) to North and South America (mostly).
I've heard many stories of people taking makeshift rafts from
Lebanon to Cyprus to escape. This is your definition of "freedom
of movement". I'm glad that your vision is not at all clouded
by that sectarian sludge that contributed to the 1975 war in
Lebanon which unlike what you claim was anything but civil and
some Lebanese even think of it as a fight for survival against
the foreign powers that tried to destroy Lebanon for their own
gain, and later against some Lebanese groups who took advantage
of the situation to settle old scores.
> The christian population would be around 25%.
You don't know that for a fact and you don't know that Shiites
make up 45% of the Lebanese population. You're taking some wild
guesses. No one knows for sure what the distribution is today.
The fact is that no one really knows how many people live in
Lebanon and how many live overseas. As far as the Lebanese
government is concerned (per my civil records or Sijill al
Noufous), I am still living and voting in Batroun, when in
reality, I am a US citizen and have been voting in Washington
State for more than 8 years.
> I do not think it was any significant change in the proportion
> Orthodox/Maronites.
How do you know ya Jaafar?
> I think the lebanese population outside lebanon is hard to track. But it
> may be divided 50/50 between muslims and christians. I feel it is
> decreasing due to more birth control influence (we make less children that
> the local population). I feel (I may be wrong that more and more lebanese
> are returning home).
The fact is that you do not have a clue, and let's just leave it at
that. No one is capable of keeping statistics on this sort of stuff.
> I wish you can provide us with some rationality, why would the Orthodox
> population pass the Maronite.
That is not what this person said. His was a question. Your answer
response however had no connection with reality.
> This is just a statistcal talk.
Your answer and statistical facts are worlds apart.
Joseph
Abou-Arz
Ala...@infobahnos.com says...
>were in 1932, as your phrase implies, but their share of the total
>lebanese population is certainly smaller (less than 50% if you don't count
>the emigres, which you shouldn't).
>
>Regards,
With the diaspora included, the statistics change quite drastically.
According to the World Lebanese Cultural Union, ther are roughly 5 million
people of Lebanese Christian desent in Brazil alone. I would'nt doubt it
either from my experiances from my last trip down there. Many of them, even
fourth and fifth generation immagree's have kept a place in thier hearts for
thier culture and heritage. This can be attributed to the strength, hard
work, and power of the Lebanese and Syrian Christian institutions there that
have maintained our histories and traditions. Good work down there guys,and
keep up the good work if anyone of my old buddies are reading me down there.
KAROUNI A
: This is why the Shiite population increased in Lebanon? Ya Jaafar, once
: more you take historical events that unified the Lebanese population
: and attempt to use them in a sectarian fashion. Suffice it to say that
: the entire Lebanese population suffered greatly under Turkish rule
: and that they various Lebanese groups worked collectively against the
: Turks.
What is this stuff of collective work against the turcs...?
Who dared to do it...just legends...The christians were fully free under
Turkey, and the Sunnites were collaborating with with the colonialist...
Let us face it...Give me one example of any lebanese entity who tried to
oppose Turkey...Bring Facts mot mith.
:
: >
: > 2) A steady if not a decrease in the rest of the population, christians,
: > druze. Christians have been allowed more freedom of movement during
: > turkish colonialism, and their flow of imigration to Europe and
: > North/South America has always been very active. The 1975 civil war
: > sent even more peoples out.
: "Christians were allowed more freedom of movement during Turkish
: colonialism", this actually translates into the following: more
: than 50% of the Christian populaion was starved to death under
: Turkish rule
Why..if they had their own governors: Motasarref ?
:
: > The christian population would be around 25%.
: Joseph
I was just talking and making some guesses based on some facts.
You sheeply accused me of secterianism...Thanks..
Yalin Ekici
> 1) A fast increase of the muslim population. This increase started with
> departure of Turkey from Lebanon (Turkey has stopped the life of
> muslims especially the Shiites by taking their children to the army)
> and by persecuting the Shiites. Today the Shiites are at least 45% of
Excuse us? Where in the world did you dig up the above historical garbage?
In the basement _Armenian Church_? Thanks for the multiple laughs. What is
next? The denial of the _Azeri Genocide_? The denial of the _Bosnian Genocide_?
_The Independent_ London, 12/6/92
_Painful Search_
The gruesome extent of February's killings of Azeris by Armenians
in the town of Hojali is at last emerging in Azerbaijan - about
600 men, women and children dead.
The State Prosecutor, Aydin Rasulov, the cheif investigator of a
15-man team looking into what Azerbaijan calls the "Hojali
Massacre", said his figure of 600 people dead was a minimum on
preliminary findings. A similar estimate was given by Elman
Memmedov, the mayor of Hojali. An even higher one was printed in
the Baku newspaper Ordu in May - 479 dead people named and more
than 200 bodies reported unidentified. This figure of nearly 700
dead is quoted as official by Leila Yunusova, the new spokeswoman
of the Azeri Ministry of Defence.
FranCois Zen Ruffinen, head of delegation of the International
Red Cross in Baku, said the Muslim imam of the nearby city of
Agdam had reported a figure of 580 bodies received at his mosque
from Hojali, most of them civilians. "We did not count the
bodies. But the figure seems reasonable. It is no fantasy," Mr
Zen Ruffinen said. "We have some idea since we gave the body bags
and products to wash the dead."
Mr Rasulov endeavours to give an unemotional estimate of the
number of dead in the massacre. "Don't get worked up. It will
take several months to get a final figure," the 43-year-old
lawyer said at his small office.
Mr Rasulov knows about these things. It took him two years to
reach a firm conclusion that 131 people were killed and 714
wounded when Soviet troops and tanks crushed a nationalist
uprising in Baku in January 1990.
Officially, 184 people have so far been certified as dead, being
the number of people that could be medically examined by the
republic's forensic department. "This is just a small percentage
of the dead," said Rafiq Youssifov, the republic's chief forensic
scientist. "They were the only bodies brought to us. Remember the
chaos and the fact that we are Muslims and have to wash and bury
our dead within 24 hours."
Of these 184 people, 51 were women, and 13 were children under 14
years old. Gunshots killed 151 people, shrapnel killed 20 and
axes or blunt instruments killed 10. Exposure in the highland
snows killed the last three. Thirty-three people showed signs of
deliberate mutilation, including ears, noses, breasts or penises
cut off and eyes gouged out, according to Professor Youssifov's
report. Those 184 bodies examined were less than a third of those
believed to have been killed, Mr Rasulov said.
"There were too many bodies of dead and wounded on the ground to
count properly: 470-500 in Hojali, 650-700 people by the stream
and the road and 85-100 visible around Nakhchivanik village," Mr
Manafov wrote in a statement countersigned by the helicopter
pilot.
"People waved up to us for help. We saw three dead children and
one two-year-old alive by one dead woman. The live one was
pulling at her arm for the mother to get up. We tried to land but
Armenians started a barrage against our helicopter and we had to
return."
There has been no consolidation of the lists and figures in
circulation because of the political upheavals of the last few
months and the fact that nobody knows exactly who was in Hojali
at the time - many inhabitants were displaced from other villages
taken over by Armenian forces.
_The Independent_ London, 12/6/92
Photographs: Liu Heung / AP
Frederique Lengaigne / Reuter
Aref Sadikov sat quietly in the shade of a cafe-bar on the
Caspian Sea esplanade of Baku and showed a line of stitches in
his trousers, torn by an Armenian bullet as he fled the town of
Hojali just over three months ago, writes Hugh Pope.
"I'm still wearing the same clothes, I don't have any others,"
the 51-year-old carpenter said, beginning his account of the
Hojali disaster. "I was wounded in five places, but I am lucky to
be alive."
Mr Sadikov and his wife were short of food, without electricity
for more than a month, and cut off from helicopter flights for 12
days. They sensed the Armenian noose was tightening around the
2,000 to 3,000 people left in the straggling Azeri town on the
edge of Karabakh.
"At about 11pm a bombardment started such as we had never heard
before, eight or nine kinds of weapons, artillery, heavy
machine-guns, the lot," Mr Sadikov said.
Soon neighbours were pouring down the street from the direction
of the attack. Some huddled in shelters but others started
fleeing the town, down a hill, through a stream and through the
snow into a forest on the other side.
To escape, the townspeople had to reach the Azeri town of Agdam
about 15 miles away. They thought they were going to make it,
until at about dawn they reached a bottleneck between the two
Azeri villages of Nakhchivanik and Saderak.
"None of my group was hurt up to then ... Then we were spotted by
a car on the road, and the Armenian outposts started opening
fire," Mr Sadikov said. Mr Sadikov said only 10 people from his
group of 80 made it through, including his wife and militiaman
son. Seven of his immediate relations died, including his
67-year-old elder brother.
"I only had time to reach down and cover his face with his hat,"
he said, pulling his own big flat Turkish cap over his eyes. "We
have never got any of the bodies back."
The first groups were lucky to have the benefit of covering fire.
One hero of the evacuation, Alif Hajief, was shot dead as he
struggled to change a magazine while covering the third group's
crossing, Mr Sadikov said.
Another hero, Elman Memmedov, the mayor of Hojali, said he and
several others spent the whole day of 26 February in the bushy
hillside, surrounded by dead bodies as they tried to keep three
Armenian armoured personnel carriers at bay.
As the survivors staggered the last mile into Agdam, there was
little comfort in a town from which most of the population was
soon to flee.
"The night after we reached the town there was a big Armenian
rocket attack. Some people just kept going," Mr Sadikov said. "I
had to get to the hospital for treatment. I was in a bad way.
They even found a bullet in my sock."
Victims of massacre: An Azeri woman mourns her son, killed in the
Hojali massacre in February (left). Nurses struggle in primitive
conditions (centre) to save a wounded man in a makeshift
operating theatre set up in a train carriage. Grief-stricken
relatives in the town of Agdam (right) weep over the coffin of
another of the massacre victims. Calculating the final death toll
has been complicated because Muslims bury their dead within 24
hours.
Yalin Ekici
''An appropriate analogy with the Jewish Holocaust might be the
systematic extermination of the entire Muslim population of the
independent republic of Armenia which consisted of at least 30-40
percent of the population of that republic.''
(The Jewish Times - June 21, 1990)
Michel Najem
>NewtonG7 (newt...@aol.com) wrote:
>: The last census (unless I am wrong) was administered under France. Since
>: then the Christian population has fallen drastically. Are the Greek
>: Orthodox now more than the Maronites? Does anyone know the exact or
>: estimated percentage of Christians in Lebanon?
>There is no new statistics since longtime. However, the last few decades
>have seen two phenomenas:
> departure of Turkey from Lebanon (Turkey has stopped the life of
> muslims especially the Shiites by taking their children to the army)
> and by persecuting the Shiites. Today the Shiites are at least 45% of
Ya Karouni why only the Shiia? Walaw we all know that the Turks
stopped the life of all Lebanese. One example is my Grandfather he was
taken by force to war and never came back. And by the way he is Maronite.
Karouni you started your post with "There is no new statistics since
longtime" so please tell me from where you got this 45%?
>2) A steady if not a decrease in the rest of the population, christians,
> druze. Christians have been allowed more freedom of movement during
> turkish colonialism, and their flow of imigration to Europe and
> North/South America has always been very active. The 1975 civil war
> sent even more peoples out.
Maybe that is why they used to tell them "Ashmil". If they were allowed to
more freedom would you please tell me why the hell Christians left the
country by thousands during the Turkish rule? By the way the Maronite church
in Brooklyn celebrating the memory of the first Maronite who came 100
years ago to this City. 1996-100=??? tell me Karouni you are good in numbers
as I noticed.
>The christian population would be around 25%.
if you did let us know or let the Lebanese government knows beause I am
sure they will make you a hero.
>I do not think it was any significant change in the proportion
>Orthodox/Maronites.
>I think the lebanese population outside lebanon is hard to track. But it
>may be divided 50/50 between muslims and christians. I feel it is
>decreasing due to more birth control influence (we make less children that
>the local population). I feel (I may be wrong that more and more lebanese
>are returning home).
>I wish you can provide us with some rationality, why would the Orthodox
>population pass the Maronite.
your search for those numbers that you gave, imet rji3it sa'alto the same
question.
>This is just a statistcal talk.
Michel (wlik wein rahit el signature wein rah ja@far?? Rah ya3mil statistics
la el number taba3 el Lebanese yalli 3am yihtiri' din imon bi Liberia)
Murat Kutan
Michel Najem <X4...@CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU> wrote:
>Ya Karouni why only the Shiia? Walaw we all know that the Turks
>stopped the life of all Lebanese. One example is my Grandfather he was
Thanks for the multiple laughs. Tell us _Najem_, were you high on grass
in the basement of _Armenian Church_ when you driveled the above garbage.
The following observations by Westerners were written in French.
"If Turks had behaved like Christians to use force to convert to Islam the
nations which they brought under their power, to which no one could have
opposed, today there would be no Eastern problem. But Turks did not do so.
They obeyed the word of the Koran to permit everybody "to worship in their own
way" centuries before Frederick the Great pronounced his famous dictum. Thus,
in an age when the Christian Europe itself shed Christian blood and when
people in Europe enjoyed inflicting inhuman tortures upon those whose beliefs
differed from theirs, the Ottoman Empire became the sole country where the
inquisition did not exist, where deaths at the stake were unheard of and
where accusations of witchcraft were not made. And the barbarian (!) Turkey
was the only country where the Jews persecuted and chased away everywhere
by the Christians, could find asylum. These facts demonstrate that Muslim
countries provided spiritually far better living conditions than Christian
countries."[1]
"The Turks, who are a conquering nation, did not Turkify the nations that came
under their rule; instead, they respected their religions and traditions. It
was a stroke of luck for Romania to live under Turkish rule instead of
Russian or Austrian rule. Because otherwise there would not have been a
Romanian nation today" (Popescu Ciocanel).
"Turks rule over people under their administration only externally, without
interfering with their internal structures. On account of this, the autonomy
of minorities in Turkey is better and more complete than any in the most
advanced European countries."[2]
"...human beings hate each other on account of religious differences. This flaw
is older than Islam and Christianity. But there has never been any examples
of this adjuration in Turkey because Turks never oppress anybody on account
of his religion. If enmity on the basis of religion had been such a case of
simple contempt among us too, or if it did not keep translating itself into
action, many nations in our Europe would probably have considered themselves
happy!" (A. de Mortraye).[3]
"Turkey never became a scene for religious terror or for the cruelty of the
inquisition. On the contrary, it served as an asylum for the unfortunate
victims of Christian fanaticism. If you look into history, you will see that
in the fifteenth century thousands of Jews who were expelled from Spain and
Portugal found such a good asylum in Turkey that their descendants have been
living there very calmly all through these approximately three hundred years,
and are only forced to defend themselves in some countries against the
cruelty of Christians, especially that of the Orthodoxes. No Jew is able to
appear in public during Easter celebrations in Athens, even today. In Turkey,
however, if the Israelites are insulted by the Greek and Armenian communities,
local courts immediately take them under their protection."
"In that vast and calm country of the sultan, all religions and nations are
living together peacefully. Although the mosque is superior to the church and
the synagogue, it does not replace them. Because of this, the Catholic sect is
more free in Istanbul and Smyrna compared with Paris and Lyon. In addition
to the fact that no law in Turkey prohibits the open-air ceremonies of this
sect, neither does any law imprison its cross in the church. While the
dead are being taken to the graves, a long line of priests bear processional
candles and chant Catholic hymns. When all the priests in all the churches in
the Galata and Beyoglu districts go into the streets and form clerical
processions during the Eucharist celebrations, chanting hymns and bearing
their crosses and religious banners, a detachment of soldiers escorts them
which forces even the Turks to stand in respect around the group of
priests." (A. Ubicini).[4]
[1] Ah. Djevat, "Yabancilara Gore Eski Turkler," 3rd ed. (Istanbul, 1978),
pp. 70-71.
[2] Ibid., p.91.
[3] Ibid., pp. 214-215.
[4] Ibid., pp. 215-216.
Murat Kutan
<<We have never denied the Armenian crime of genocide
inflicted upon 2.5 million Muslim people between 1914
and 1920.>> {A. Zahorian -- 'Voices of Agonies', p. 91}
Joseph Mouhanna
> Joseph Mouhanna (jose...@chinook.halcyon.com) wrote:
>
> : This is why the Shiite population increased in Lebanon? Ya Jaafar, once
> : more you take historical events that unified the Lebanese population
> : and attempt to use them in a sectarian fashion. Suffice it to say that
> : the entire Lebanese population suffered greatly under Turkish rule
> : and that they various Lebanese groups worked collectively against the
> : Turks.
>
> What is this stuff of collective work against the turcs...?
> Who dared to do it...just legends...The christians were fully free under
> Turkey, and the Sunnites were collaborating with with the colonialist...
> Let us face it...Give me one example of any lebanese entity who tried to
> oppose Turkey...Bring Facts mot mith.
You're on SCL for one of two purposes: learn or defend an agenda and
facts be damned. Which category do you belong to? Lebanon's history
is full of princes who led their people (from all sects) in resisting
the Ottoman empire, and there was at least one popular uprising
against the Ottomans in which people from all sects joined. The fact
that hundreds of thousands of Lebanese from all sects died at the
hands of the Ottomans should also give you a clue that this resistance
against the Ottoman empire was a cause that Lebanese from all sects
rallied behind. I did not say "collective work" as you claimed, which
is quite different from agreeing on the same issue. Some people
of course collaborated with the occupier, you will find a few in
every crowd, but given the small number of Beik's, I'd say and
given that the overwhelming majority of the population lived below
the poverty level and that hundreds of thousands even starved to
death, I'd say that the number of collaborators was somewhat small.
These are the facts.
> : > 2) A steady if not a decrease in the rest of the population, christians,
> : > druze. Christians have been allowed more freedom of movement during
> : > turkish colonialism, and their flow of imigration to Europe and
> : > North/South America has always been very active. The 1975 civil war
> : > sent even more peoples out.
>
> : "Christians were allowed more freedom of movement during Turkish
> : colonialism", this actually translates into the following: more
> : than 50% of the Christian populaion was starved to death under
> : Turkish rule
>
> Why..if they had their own governors: Motasarref ?
Who governed them is irrelevant. Learn your history. At one point,
more than half the Lebanese population was starved to death. The
Christians of Lebanon fled in the tens of thousands to North and South
America mostly. I don't know how to argue a point with someone who
makes such outrageous claims without checking some historical
reference first.
> : > The christian population would be around 25%.
>
> : You don't know that for a fact and you don't know that Shiites
> : make up 45% of the Lebanese population. You're taking some wild
> : guesses. No one knows for sure what the distribution is today.
> : The fact is that no one really knows how many people live in
> : Lebanon and how many live overseas. As far as the Lebanese
> : government is concerned (per my civil records or Sijill al
> : Noufous), I am still living and voting in Batroun, when in
> : reality, I am a US citizen and have been voting in Washington
> : State for more than 8 years.
>
> : > I do not think it was any significant change in the proportion
> : > Orthodox/Maronites.
>
> : How do you know ya Jaafar?
>
> : > I think the lebanese population outside lebanon is hard to track. But it
> : > may be divided 50/50 between muslims and christians. I feel it is
> : > decreasing due to more birth control influence (we make less children that
> : > the local population). I feel (I may be wrong that more and more lebanese
> : > are returning home).
>
> : The fact is that you do not have a clue, and let's just leave it at
> : that. No one is capable of keeping statistics on this sort of stuff.
>
> : > I wish you can provide us with some rationality, why would the Orthodox
> : > population pass the Maronite.
>
> : That is not what this person said. His was a question. Your answer
> : response however had no connection with reality.
>
> : > This is just a statistcal talk.
>
> : Your answer and statistical facts are worlds apart.
>
> : Joseph
>
> I was just talking and making some guesses based on some facts.
> You sheeply accused me of secterianism...Thanks..
Your guesses are based on fantasy not facts. I am not accusing
you of sectarianism, I am actually giving stating an obvious
conclusion that anyone can make after reading your post. What
else do you call it? your written words betray you ya Jaafar.
"sheeply" is your position, and "cheaply" is how you treat
the memory of the hundreds of thousands of Lebanese who died
at the hands of the Ottomans.
Joseph
Elie Wardini
>
> Michel Najem <X4...@CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU> wrote:
>
> >Ya Karouni why only the Shiia? Walaw we all know that the Turks
> >stopped the life of all Lebanese. One example is my Grandfather he was
>
> Thanks for the multiple laughs. Tell us _Najem_, were you high on
rubbish deleted
> Murat Kutan
Murat Kutan, Please spare us you rubbish. I have manged to ignore you
when you post your propaganda on SCL. Now you seem to want to join in
the discussion and seemingly with much to say. Please, stop you cross
postings and stop your misinformation. There are surely a whole bunch of
people on SCL who will testify to your misuse of the net. Please again,
spare us, and yourself.
--
Elie Wardini
e-mail: e.d.w...@easteur-orient.uio.no
I.Ballouz
WElie Wardini wrote:
There is a way to chase him out. I for months used to return his and
his friends e-mails without any comment. They used to e-mail more
article and I would then add these posts and e-mail them back again..and so
on.
It lasted for months, until they had enough and contacted the
post-master here in the University. I had to stop.
But masny of you don't have post-masters to worry about. Yallah, you
know whet to do. It might take time, but you will eventually
succeed.
nancy dergham
: > 1) A fast increase of the muslim population. This increase started with
: > departure of Turkey from Lebanon (Turkey has stopped the life of
: > muslims especially the Shiites by taking their children to the army)
: > and by persecuting the Shiites. Today the Shiites are at least 45% of
: Excuse us? Where in the world did you dig up the above historical garbage?
: In the basement _Armenian Church_? Thanks for the multiple laughs. What is
: next? The denial of the _Azeri Genocide_?
: The denial of the _Bosnian Genocide_?
Karouni,
You finaly made this guy write something of his own instead of posting
things, that he downloaded from the internet, that he never read.
You should ask him what he means when he wrote "us."
Congratulation Jaafar, you got on his nerve!
Not that the information you gave is worth reading. What was good about it
is that, it caused a side effect that "I guess" nobody was expecting.
: _The Independent_ London, 12/6/92
................. What ever
: Yalin Ekici
..................What ever
: (The Jewish Times - June 21, 1990)
I just kept his name and sources just to make him feel better.
Joseph Mouhanna
[...................]
> Karouni,
> You finaly made this guy write something of his own instead of posting
> things, that he downloaded from the internet, that he never read.
> You should ask him what he means when he wrote "us."
> Congratulation Jaafar, you got on his nerve!
> Not that the information you gave is worth reading. What was good about it
> is that, it caused a side effect that "I guess" nobody was expecting.
You may notice that he only contributed a few words, including
the name of the person he is responding to. The rest of his
post is canned. This is probably an improved form of the
software robot that this guy uses. It identifies any posts
with things like t*u*r*ki*sh and a*r*me*n*ia*n in them
and forwards to his newsreader, where he can pretend that
he is responsindg. I'm afraid that I contributed to this
by having forgotten to scramble certain majic words in my
reponse to Jaafar.
Oh well...
Joseph
Yalin Ekici
derg...@matrix.newpaltz.edu (nancy dergham)
>: Excuse us? Where in the world did you dig up the above historical garbage?
>: In the basement _Armenian Church_? Thanks for the multiple laughs. What is
>: next? The denial of the _Azeri Genocide_?
>: The denial of the _Bosnian Genocide_?
>Karouni,
>You finaly made this guy write something of his own instead of posting
>things, that he downloaded from the internet, that he never read.
I am flattered. However, please stop making excuses for Armenians'
criminal and genocidal actions. The real question to be answered by
the Armenians is: When will the puppet Russian Armenian government
pay for their crime of genocide they cold-bloodedly perpetrated
against the defenseless Muslim and Jewish people in 1914? When will
the Armenians stop slaughtering innocent Azeri women, children and
elderly people in superficially formed Russian Armenia and Karabag?
Please spell them out for us.
_The Times_ 3 March 1992
MASSACRE UNCOVERED
By ANATOL LIEVEN
More than sixty bodies, including those of women and children,
have been spotted on hillsides in Nagorno-Karabakh, confirming
claims that Armenian troops massacred Azeri refugees. Hundreds
are missing.
Scattered amid the withered grass and bushes along a small valley
and across the hillside beyond are the bodies of last Wednesday's
massacre by Armenian forces of Azerbaijani refugees.
In all, 31 bodies could be counted at the scene. At least another
31 have been taken into Agdam over the past five days. These figures
do not include civilians reported killed when the Armenians stormed
the Azerbaijani town of Khodjaly on Tuesday night. The figures also
do not include other as yet undiscovered bodies
Zahid Jabarov, a survivor of the massacre, said he saw up to 200
people shot down at the point we visited, and refugees who came
by different routes have also told of being shot at repeatedly and
of leaving a trail of bodies along their path. Around the bodies
we saw were scattered possessions, clothing and personnel documents.
The bodies themselves have been preserved by the bitter cold which
killed others as they hid in the hills and forest after the massacre.
All are the bodies of ordinary people, dressed in the poor, ugly
clothing of workers.
Of the 31 we saw, only one policeman and two apparent national
volunteers were wearing uniform. All the rest were civilians,
including eight women and three small children. Two groups,
apparently families, had fallen together, the children cradled
in the women's arms.
Several of them, including one small girl, had terrible head
injuries: only her face was left. Survivors have told how they
saw Armenians shooting them point blank as they lay on the ground.
Yalin Ekici
''An appropriate analogy with the Jewish Holocaust might be the
systematic extermination of the entire Muslim population of the
independent republic of Armenia which consisted of at least 30-40
percent of the population of that republic.''
Yalin Ekici
jose...@chinook.halcyon.com (Joseph Mouhanna)
>You may notice that he only contributed a few words, including
>the name of the person he is responding to. The rest of his
>post is canned.
Thanks for the compliment and the empty words. Was I supposed
to learn something substantive from this? _Muamma_.
>This is probably an improved form of the
>software robot that this guy uses. It identifies any posts
>with things like t*u*r*ki*sh and a*r*me*n*ia*n in them
>and forwards to his newsreader, where he can pretend that
>he is responsindg. I'm afraid that I contributed to this
>by having forgotten to scramble certain majic words in my
>reponse to Jaafar.
And, we all thought that you were responding to the following
publicly available source. Darn.
_Newsweek_ (November 29, 1993, p. 50)
_Armenians occupy a quarter of Azerbaijan's territory, and
they've displaced almost a million Azerbaijani civilians.
Friends of Armenia's powerful lobby in Washington, including
the U.S. Government are suddenly a bit aghast. 'What we see
now is a systematic destruction of every village in their
way' says a senior state department official. It's vandalism._
Murat Kutan
Elie Wardini <e.d.w...@easteur-orient.uio.no> wrote:
>> Michel Najem <X4...@CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU> wrote:
>>
>> >Ya Karouni why only the Shiia? Walaw we all know that the Turks
>> >stopped the life of all Lebanese. One example is my Grandfather he was
>>
>> Thanks for the multiple laughs. Tell us _Najem_, were you high on
>rubbish deleted
And, you expect us to take your pseudo-scholar garbage seriously?
'Greek Atrocities in the Vilayet of Smyrna (May to July 1919), Edited
Documents and Evidence of English and French Officers,' Published by
The Permanent Bureau of the Congress at Lausanne, Lausanne, Imprimerie
Petter, Giesser & Held, Caroline, 5 (1919).
pages 40-41:
<< VIOLATED MOSQUES
All the mosques and religious institutions of Manissa, numbering
about 150, have been violated by the Greek army, their doors were
forced in and their floors torn up, their carpets stolen or soiled,
their windows broken and their inside walls defaced. The worst
damaged mosques of the town are the following:
Servili mesdjid
Tchatal djami
Kenzi djami
Mouradie
Ak mesdjid
Ayvaz Pacha djami
The convents Kenzi, and Kabak Hadje
Gune Djami
Dilchikar
Dere mesdjid
Nifli Zade
Hodjdja-djlar
The school of Theology Sinan and the cemetery Thchatal Kabristan,
are violated, defiled and deteriorated.>>
page 53:
<< VILLAGES DESTROYED
The following villages of Bergamo, one of the richest and most
prosperous regions in the world, are completely burned and
destroyed by the Greek hordes:
Kirikly
Kalarga
Djame-Keuy
Eminly
Mouhadjir
Baba-Keuy
Hamzaly
Korkally
Eyry-Keuy
Yenidje
Kizil-Tchoukour
Kodja-Oba
Merkez-Kozak
Aladjalar
Achaghi-Kiriklar
Rechadiye
Tepeleni
Chakran
Eyri-Gueul
Boz-Keuy
Djoumali
Tchenguelly. >>
Murat Kutan
"I.Ballouz" <cca...@ccsun.strath.ac.uk> wrote:
>There is a way to chase him out. I for months used to return his and
>his friends e-mails without any comment. They used to e-mail more
>article and I would then add these posts and e-mail them back again..
>and so on.
And, you thought that your illegal actions would go unpunished? Aren't
you sad that you don't live in Lebanon? Now, when you have finished
with your illegal actions, I'd suggest you address the publicly
available _non-Muslim_ scholarly sources. Will you? No, I take that
back. Just, stick around.
Source: Stanford J. Shaw (Professor of Turkish History, University of
California Los Angeles), 'Christian Anti Semitism in the Ottoman
Empire,' Belleten, C. LIV, 68 (1991).
page 1078:
<<Things were no better in Byzantium. Byzantine Jews were nominally free to
follow their own faith, but just as the Romans had reduced Jews to no more
than subject status, so also Byzantines excluded Jews from rights of full
citizenship. The motives of Romans were mainly political; but Byzantines
were moved also by religious reasons as well. From their absolute
conviction, taught by the Greek Orthodox Church, that the Jews were
condemned by God for rejecting his Word and for the Unforgivable Crime
of killing Jesus Christ, it was logical to conclude that the Jews ought to
be punished by God's new chosen people, the Christians, by being subjected
to various restrictions.
Byzantine leaders demanded on numerous occasions that Jews be removed
from Constantinople and the Empire altogether, and several expulsion
orders were issued. Judaism actually was outlawed and Jews ordered
forcibly converted at least five times, by Emperor Heraclius in 632,
in 680 in an effort to secure a united front against Islamic attacks,
by Leo III in 721-723, by Basil I in 873-874, and by Romanos I in 930.
Jews were allowed to seek 'salvation' through conversion, but even those
who did convert were suspected of potential acts of blasphemy and were
therefore subjected to periodic persecution, as was later the case in
Spain. Legends of Jewish moneylenders took on the negative dimensions
of the later Shylock traditions. In church services Jews were normally
referred to as 'the accursed', but they could benefit from divine guidance
to baptism, as opposed to other non-Christians who could be converted
only by the sword. There were also passion plays and the like which played
on the popular prejudice. All these religious traditions and folklore
accounts influenced the Orthodox urban neighbors of Jews, causing a great
deal of persecution and conflict [15].
Those Jews who lived in Byzantium were subjected to various legal
restrictions, severely limiting even minor details of their religious
activities, excluding them from most of the privileges of citizenship
while imposing all sorts of intolerable burdens. Theodosius II (408-450)
excluded Jews from all offices of honor and prohibited them from building
new synagogues, although he did allow them to repair old ones. Soon after-
wards, during a battle between parties in the chariot races at Rome, many
Jews were murdered, their synagogues burned, and their bodies thrown into
the fire.
Justinian (527-565) was the first emperor to set a precedent for inter-
ference with the social and religious practices of Judaism, in 553 even
going so far as to dictate that Greek and Latin translations of the
Old Testament should be used in Jewish religious services in hope that
this would convince some Jews to convert. He forbad the use of the phrase
'our God is the one and only God' in Jewish services because he considered
this to be blasphemy against the Christian Holy Trinity, and he outlawed
the reading of sayings of Isaiah promising consolation for the downtrodded
people of Judaism. He went on to forbid the observance of religious
services during Passover, forbad the celebrating of Passover at the same
time as Easter, and ordered end to the baking of unleavened bread [16].
He even placed spies in synagogues during services to watch out for any
violations of his rules, though he soon found they could not prevent
secret praying of the disputed passages at other times of day when the
spies were not present. He also imposed many disabilities on Jewish
citizens, prohibiting them from testifying against Christians in court
and restricting them to minor positions in bureaucracy. As a result of all
this, when his armies attacked Naples, its Jews gave up their property and
even their lives joining in defence of the city against the Byzantines.
Heraclius (610-641) was the first emperor to convert the Jews to
Christianity by force, and other emperors did the same between the
eighth and tenth centuries. After the Vandals destroyed the Jewish
synagogue in the late fifth century, the Byzantines refused to allow
it to be restored, and soon after Heraclius died, the Church prevented
the survivors and newly arriving Jewish immigrants from building new
synagogues to meet their religious needs. Basil I (867-886) first tried
to convert the Jews by persuasion, inviting rabbis to debate to defend
their faith and offering them benefits if they accepted defeat. He then
had recourse to bribery, providing gifts to those who agreed to convert.
After that failed, in 884 he ordered all Jews converted to Christianity,
and though this effort was abandoned under his immediate successors,
the pressure continued, and most Byzantine theologians and church leaders
protested vigorously when those who had converted under pressure during
the preceding regime were allowed to return to Judaism. Emperor Romanos
Lucapenus, in about 935, again ordered the forcible conversion of all
Jews of Byzantium, leading to the murder of hundreds of Jews and the
desecration of many synagogues throughout the Empire.
To the Greek Orthodox Church, Jews were absolute filth, whose touch was
considered to be contaminating. Christians who had any contact with Jews
had to be excommunicated.
Thus the Quinisext Council of 692 declared that 'Whatever remnant of pagan
or Jewish perversity is mixed with the ripe fruit of the truth must be
uprooted like a weed...Neither clergyman nor layman may partake of the
unleavened bread of the Jews, associate with them, accept medical treatment
from them, or bathe with them. Should anyone attempt to do it, if a
clergyman, be defrocked, if a layman excommunicated.' [17]>>
[15] Steven Bowman, The Jews of Byzantium (Alabama Press, 1985), 34-36.
[16] Byzantine Empire, EJ [Encyclopaedia Judaica] IV, 1550-1552.
Joshua Starr, The Jews of Byzantine Empire, 4-6, 212-213.
Philip P. Argenti, The Religious Minorities of Chios: Jews and Roman
Catholics (Cambridge, 1970), 39-63.
Abraham Galante, Histoire des Juifs d'Istanbul depuis la prise de cetle
ville en 1453 jusqu'a nos jours (Istanbul, 1941-42), 39.
[17] Joshua Starr, The Jews of Byzantine Empire (Athens, 1939), 89.
Murat Kutan
Michel Najem <X4...@CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU>
>>Thanks for the multiple laughs. Tell us _Najem_, were you high on grass
>>in the basement of _Armenian Church_ when you driveled the above garbage.
>Kutan this is my first and last reply to you because I will not enter
>as we say in Lebanese a "Jadal Bizante".
Good strategy. If my position was as weak as yours, I'd probably adopt
it myself.
>First I don't smoke grass maybe you do.
You sure sound like one who is on _nargile_, though.
>Second what the Armenian Church has to do with it? Where is your
>respect to other religion?
Here you descend into total inanity. Never heard of the role of _Armenian
Church_ in their extermination of millions of Muslims and Sephardic Jews?
_Azeri Genocide_? _Jewish Holocaust_? No wonder you have trouble putting
forward any worthwhile arguments.
>But I should have expected that from a guy who is defending the Turkish
>empire.
Proudly. Thanks to all of them who saved our lives, provided a safe haven
for millions of our people who were utterly decimated and back-stabbed by
cowardly nations and made us live as free as bird again.
>Listen Kutman
_Kutan_. Suffering from a severe case of myopia?
>we will never forget the 300 hundreds years of your occupation.
>It was you the Turks that destroyed the Middle East.
I have to ask in all seriousness. How can someone as obviously
historical revisionist, fool and ignorant like you manage to
live in this world today; to even be capable of operating an
abacus?
Professor Stanford J. Shaw, 'The Jews of the Ottoman Empire and the
Turkish Republic,' New York University Press, New York (1991).
page 188:
<<The invading armies of Russia and Austria as well as the revolting
nationalists and, later, successfully established independent Christian
states, committed systematic genocide against Jews and Muslims throughout
the nineteenth century, despite Great Power admonitions to the contrary
in the treaties of Paris (1858) and Berlin (1878),...>>
page 188:
<<...As the peoples of Southwestern Europe achieved their independence,
their Muslim and Jewish minorities were systematically persecuted and
massacred, and those who survived were driven beyond the ever-shrinking
boundaries of the retreating Ottoman Empire in a kind of slaughter which
had not been seen since the dispersal of the Jews from Palestine centuries
earlier.
This sort of genocide had begun as long before as the late sixteenth
century, with the Rumanian Principalities taking the lead, as united
Rumania did subsequently during the later years of the nineteenth
century. In 1579 the ruler of Moldavia, Peter the Lame, banished its
Jews because of their competition with its Christian merchants. When
Prince Micheal the Brave revolted against the Ottomans in the Rumanian
principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia in 1593, he ordered the massacre
of all the Jews as well as Turks in Bucharest. Many Jews immigrated to
Rumania in the late seventeenth century as a result of the Chmielnicki
massacres in Poland and the Ukraine, but this added to Rumanian popular
anti-Semitism, with the encouragement of the Cossacks, who at times
invaded the Pricipalities and murdered Jews and Muslims alike. Greek
Orthodox churches in Rumania declared all Jews to be heretics, forbad
all relations with them on pain of excommunication, and refused to allow
their testimony to be accepted in courts. After the Ottomans regained
control and turned the Pricipalities over to the Istanbul-based Greek
Phanariotes, Jews were re-admitted with special charters, exempting them
from taxes and providing special places for temples, cemeteries and the
like, but this enraged the Rumanian masses even more. They became
particularly hostile to the Jews because of their defense of the Ottomans
who protected them. Ritual murder charges and anti-Semitic tracts led to
anti-Jewish riots in Bucharest in 1801. When Russian forces occupied the
Principalities in 1806-12, therefore, Jews again were subjected to intense
persecution. The Jews of Ruscuk fled across the Danube after the Russian
'liberators' had burned their synagogue and the rest of the Jewish quarter
to the ground. After the Russians left, most of the refugees returned,
only to be subjected to similar violence both by the Russian troops and
the local Rumanian population in 1811, and again in 1828.
This sort of slaughter continued well into the nineteenth century. When
the Greeks revolted against Ottoman rule many Greek volunteers coming from
Russia and the Principalities to join in the effort slaughtered and
plundered the Jewish communities along their paths as they went through
Moldavia and Wallachia toward Greece. During the Russian occupation
of the Principalities between 1835 and 1856, Jews were actively persecuted
on the Russian model, with laws denying them citizenship, forbidding them
from settling in the countryside, leasing land, or establishing factories
in the urban communities, all because of the prevailing belief that they
had exploited the Rumanians during the centuries of Ottoman rule.>>
page 191 (last paragraph):
<<Persecution of Jews was most virulent during the later years of the
nineteenth century in Rumania, which had a population of 134,168 Jews
in 1871, in a predominantly Orthodox country. Jews as well as Muslims
were massacred, persecuted and driven out as part of the process by which
independence was achieved [22]. Jews were forbidden to own property and
to acquire nationality, though they were at times able to get around
these rules through bribery and the use of third parties. Jews unable
to find work were often expelled from one town after the other until
they finally were huddled together into dirty and insanitary ghettos
in the larger towns and cities, where they were despised by the Rumanians
as dirty and unsanitary menaces to public health. In 1866, during the
course of anti-Semitic demonstrations organized by the police, the
principal Jewish synagogue in Bucharest was demolished and the Jewish
quarter plundered by Rumanian nationalist mobs. The new Rumanian
constitution restricted citizenship to Christians. Thousands of Jews
were expelled from villages, and Jews who were not citizens were expelled
from the country. Large number of Jewish refugees from Russia,
particularly from the southern provinces and Crimea, came to Rumania
in 1865 as a result of persecutions resulting from the Crimean War.
In 1867, as a result of this new Jewish emigration, local police
arrested Jews in the streets, dragging them off to prison in chains.
Self-organized popular courts organized house-to-house searches, tried
and sentenced their jewish captives and deported them. The anti-Semitic
press, for the most part operated by unemployed Rumanian teachers,
incited the Orthodox masses against the Jews, saying that the latter
had stolen their property, with British protests against these outrages
being rejected by Prince Carol and the government, which stated blandly
that there were no such persecutions.>>
page 194:
<<The Rumanian reaction to the Treaty of Berlin was far stronger, and
its anti-Semitism far more severe and lasting. After 1885 Rumanian
Jews were excluded from the professions. In 1893, Rumanian Jews were
expelled from all public schools, and many Jewish political leaders
and journalists were summarily expelled from the country, even those
who had participated actively in the Rumanian War for Independence.
They were not allowed to be lawyers, teachers, chemists, railroad
officials, doctors in state hospitals, army officers or stock brokers
and they were forbidden from selling commodities controlled by government
monopolies, such as tobacco, salt and alcohol, causing 41,754 jews, out
of a total of 262,348, to emigrate between 1899 and 1905 [25].>>
page 210:
<<..It was Jews and Muslims against the Christians, with the Jews extremely
grateful for the protection provided by the Ottoman government.
The AIU [Alliance Israelite Universelle, Paris] reported in 1893:
'There are but few countries, even among those which are considered
the most enlightened and the most civilized, where Jews enjoy a more
complete equality than in Turkey. H.M. the Sultan and the government
of the Porte display toward Jews a spirit of largest toleration and
liberalism. In every respect, Abdul-Hamid proves to be a generous
sovereign and a protector of his Israelite subjects...The unflinching
attachment of Jews to His Person and to the Empire is the only way
in which they can express their gratitude. Thus, the Sultan as well as
his officials know that Jews are among the most obedient, faithful and
devoted subjects of Turkey.' [49]>>
page 211:
<<....Abdul Hamid II admitted large numbers of Jewish refugees from
Rumanian persecution [54] and Russian pogroms [55] almost as soon as
the latter began on a large scale in 1881, and continued to admit them
in large numbers during the remaining years of his reign, showing very
clearly that whatever were his reasons for opposing Jewish settlement
in Palestine, anti-Semitism as such was not among them.>>
[22] Rumanian persecution of its Jews is described in detail in Carol Iancu,
Les Juifs en Roumanie, 1866-1919 (University of Provence, France, 1978).
[25] BAIU [Bulletin de l'Alliance Israelite Universelle] no. 29, Annee 1904,
(Paris, 1904), pp.53-55.
[49] BAIU no.18 (1893), pp.38-39.
[54] Fresco (Istanbul) to AIU (Paris), 1 August, 19 August and 30 August
1900 (AIU Archives II-C-8). El Tiempo, 20 May 1900.
[55] AIU Archives I C 7.
Raman
>
> > c4...@jupiter.sun.csd.unb.ca (KAROUNI A) writes:
> > 2) A steady if not a decrease in the rest of the population, christians,
> > druze. Christians have been allowed more freedom of movement during
> > turkish colonialism, and their flow of imigration to Europe and
> > North/South America has always been very active. The 1975 civil war
> > sent even more peoples out.
>
> "Christians were allowed more freedom of movement during Turkish
> colonialism", this actually translates into the following: more
> Turkish rule and that pushed large numbers of Christian Lebanese
> to flee Lebanon (under fire) to North and South America (mostly).
> I've heard many stories of people taking makeshift rafts from
> Lebanon to Cyprus to escape. This is your definition of "freedom
> of movement". I'm glad that your vision is not at all clouded
> by that sectarian sludge that contributed to the 1975 war in
> Lebanon which unlike what you claim was anything but civil and
> some Lebanese even think of it as a fight for survival against
> the foreign powers that tried to destroy Lebanon for their own
> gain, and later against some Lebanese groups who took advantage
> of the situation to settle old scores.
Oh gee, Turks starving more than 50% of the Lebanese Christian
population to death, I'm so surprised! You mean like they massacred
millions of Assyrian, Armenian, and Greek Christians. The Turks, as
a nation, are a vermin, pure and simple. Ever since they arrived
from Mongolia, they have done nothing but murder, rape, pillage,
etc., etc... If the Turks were not Moslem, they would be murdering
plenty of Moslems too, I assure you.
Raman
Raman
> ...what is next
> The denial of the _Bosnian Genocide_?
>
> ''An appropriate analogy with the Jewish Holocaust might be the
> systematic extermination of the entire Muslim population of the
> independent republic of Armenia which consisted of at least 30-40
> percent of the population of that republic.''
> (The Jewish Times - June 21, 1990)
If the Armenians did not take such actions, they would be met with
the same fate, I assure you. An even more appropriate analogy with the
Jewish Holocaust would be the Assyrian Holocaust and the Armenian Holocaust.
Why doesn't the Jewish Times report that, what's their agenda?
The Assyrians were driven, under fire, from their ancestoral
homelands in southeastern Turkey and northern Iraq by the Turks and Kurds
in 1918. Two thirds of the Assyrian nation perished at the
murderous hands of the Turks and Kurds. It was a Kurd named Simco, with
his murderous gang, who murdered Mar Shimmun, the Patriarch of the Assyrian
Church of the East, who had come with a small group of his men
to Simco's village to discuss peace. After murdering him, Simco left this
devout and respected man's naked and mutulated corpse to rot. It was a group
of Armenians who took Mar Shimmun's naked body and buried it in their church.
What business is the "Bosnian Holocaust" to you, anyway? It doesn't take a
genius to figure out that the only reason, is that they are Moslem, just
like yourself! The Serbian/Bosnian struggle goes back to the days of the
Ottoman empire. The Serbians and Armenians have learned a very strong lesson.
And that is, "Do unto the Turks before the Turks do unto you", get it, you thick
skulled neanderthal. Why don't you tell your people to get the hell out
of north Iraq, the ancestoral land of the Assyrians, who live their till
this day. Before, Saddam Hussein, sends Ali "Kimyawi" to scorch their ass
again.
Murat Kutan
c4...@jupiter.sun.csd.unb.ca (KAROUNI A)
>So, according to some, Turkey forced the christians into its army..hard to
>believe.
It is, however, just that: fiction.
>So, according to some, it was really (not only in movies) a resistance
>agianst Turkey...hard to believe (Only Abou Ahmad in SAFARBARLEK)..
_Movie making_ is grace under pressure, I must admit.
>So, according to some, Morat, Turkey was a civilised colonial force who
>never massacred, killed, tortured, raped, persecuted...
There is no point arguing about easily verified facts. Humane behavior
and tolerance of Turks was a legend even 500 years ago when they accepted
tens of thousands of Jews from Spain who were fleeing from the Spanish
Inquisition. Again, many Jewish families escaping from Dro the Armenian,
the architect of the Armenian extermination of 2.5 million Muslim people
in 1914, and Hitler's Nazi Germany took refugee in Turkiye during the
1940's. Same is true for Palestinians, Bosnians and Azeris. Remember,
Ottoman Empire and its people have unselfishly given home, protection,
and freedom to the Jews and Muslims over the centuries, including to
thousands and thousands of them during the Second World War (then Turkey).
Here is a partial list:
"History of the Jews in the Islamic Countries," chapters in Parts I and II,
Jarusalem, Zalman Shazar Center for Jewish History, 1986.
Baron, Salo W., "A Social and Religious History of the Jews," New York,
Columbia University Press, Vols. III, V, XVIII.
Benardete, Mair Jose, "Hispanic Culture and Character of the Sephardic
Jews," New York, Sepher-Hermon Press, 2nd corrected edition, 1982 (original
publication 1953).
Lewis, Bernard, eds., "Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Empire," New York,
Holmes & Meier, 1982, Vol. I, The Central Lands.
"La Turquie dan les Archives des Grand Orient de France: les loges ...,"
in Jean-Louis Bacque-Graumont and Paul Dumont, eds., Economie et Societes
dans L'Empire Ottoman, Paris, Centre National De La Reserche Scientifique,
1983.
Inalcik, Halil, "Turkish-Jewish Relations in the Ottoman Empire," 1982.
Sevilla-Sharon, Moshe, "Turkiye Yahudileri, Tarihsel Bakis," Jerusalem, The
Hebrew University, 1982.
Source: John Dewey: "The New Republic," Vol. 40, Nov. 12, 1928, pp. 268-9.
"Happy the minority [Jews] which has had no Christian nation to protect it.
And one recalls that the Jews took up their abode in 'fanatic' Turkey
when they were expelled from Europe, especially Spain, by Saintly Christians,
and they have lived here for centuries in at least as much tranquility and
liberty as their fellow Turkish subjects, all being exposed alike to the
rapacity of their common rulers. To one brought up, as most Americans have
been, in the Gladstonian and foreign-missionary tradition, the condition of
the Jews in Turkey is almost a mathematical demonstration that religious
differences have had an influence in the tragedy of Turkey only as they
were combined with aspirations for a political separation which every
nation in the world would have treated as treasonable. One readily
reaches the conclusion that the Jews in Turkey were fortunate..."
He also stated that:
"they [Armenians] traitorously turned Turkish cities over to the Russian
invader; that they boasted of having raised an army of one hundred and
fifty thousand men to fight a civil war, and that they burned at least
a hundred Turkish villages and exterminated their population."
Source: "The Book of the Just - The Silent Heroes Who
Saved Jews from Hitler" by Eric Silver, 1992,
[Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London]
Selahattin Ulkumen, the thirty-year-old Turkish Consul in
Rhodes, had reason to take German threats seriously even
before he saved forty-two of the Greek island's Sephardi Jews
from deportation to Auschwitz. By February 1944, Rhodes was
the only Turkish mission still functioning in Axis-controlled
territory. After Italy, which had ruled the Dodecanese chain
since 1912, withdrew from the war in September 1943, the
German army moved in. Turkey, which had remained neutral for
the first four years of hostilities, started political and
military talks with the British. The Germans feared that a
second front would be opened through the Aegean Sea with the
help of the Turks. They played the bully.
"Our representation was closed in Bulgaria and Greece (Ulkumen
explained in Tel Aviv forty-six years later). All our missions
were closed at the demand of the Germans. They also asked us
to close the consulate in Rhodes. Turkey objected. We said if
you insist that we close the consulate in Rhodes, we shall
close your consulate in Smyrna. They didn't agree. Rhodes was
the only consulate left to us in Axis-controlled territory.
There was a very nervous atmosphere with the Germans in
Rhodes. They wanted to intimidate Turkey. On 18 February
1944, two German planes bombed the consulate building. My wife
was very seriously injured. She died six or seven months later
after giving birth to our son."
On 20 July 1944, the Gestapo ordered all of the island's 1,800
Jews to report to military headquarters for registration. They
were descended from Jews expelled from Spain in 1492. Although
they had lived under the Turkish and Italian Empires, they
continued to speak Ladino, a Jewish dialect of medieval
Spanish. The Jews of Rhodes were tightly knit community,
living in their own quarter of the old, Crusader town. Some
had sought spouses among fellow Sephardim on the Turkish
mainland. Ulkumen heard that all the Jews, regardless of
nationality, were being herded together. A handful were
Turkish citizens. He realized that they were to be sent to
concentration camps:
"I went to the commander - General von Kleeman - and asked him
to release forty-two Turkish citizens, who were Jewish by
religion. Where a Turk was married, for example an Italian, I
said for humanitarian reasons that the whole family was
Turkish. I succeeded in saving forty-two persons. Not all of
them were Turkish. I don't know how many were not Turks. If I
could, I would have saved more Jews, but it was beyond my
competence. The forty-two were released, but the other Jews
were conducted to Auschwitz.
"The German commander said that, according to Nazi laws, all
Jews in their eyes were Jewish and had to go to concentration
camps because Germany needed more manpower. I knew what their
real purpose was - to kill them in the gas chambers. I
objected. I said that, according to Turkish law, we didn't
differentiate between whether a citizen was Jewish, Christian
or Muslim. According to Turkish law, all citizens are equal. I
convinced him. I said that I would advise my Government and
that it would cause an international incident. Then he
agreed."
Asked how much he had to fear, from the Germans or his own
Government, Ulkumen answered that he had acted out of
conscience. That had been enough.
Of more than 1,700 Jews transported from Rhodes to Auschwitz,
only 161 returned. Most of them subsequently settled in
Israel. A square in the old Jewish quarter was renamed Platia
Evreon Martyron (Square of the Hebrew Martyrs). The light,
airy synagogue became a place of pilgrimage, but seldom of
prayer. Matilda Turiel and her two sons were among the forty-
two saved by the Consul. She had been born in Turkey, but had
married a Jew from Rhodes who held Italian citizenship and had
acquired his nationality. Having taken her husband, the
Germans ordered her to come with her sons to Gestapo
headquarters. If she refused, her husband would be killed.
Ulkumen, whom she had never met before, intercepted them on
the way and urged them not to enter the building. He took up
their case. The family survived and settled in New York.
Matilda Turiel flew to Jerusalem in June 1990, when the former
Consul became the first Turk, and one of the rare Muslims, to
be honoured by Yad Vashem.
At the beginning of August 1944, Turkey severed diplomatic and
economic relations with Germany. Ulkumen and his wounded wife
interned. The Germans would not let them leave, but moved them
to the Greek mainland. He returned to Turkey on 8 May 1945.
"Until then," he said, "I hadn't heard any news, but then I
heard that all the Turkish Jews had escaped from Rhodes to the
Turkish mainland. The forty-two had not been touched."
After the war, Ulkumen continued his diplomatic career,
serving in Europe, then as Consul-General in Beirut and
Cairo. Afterwards, he was Deputy Secretary-General of CENTO,
the now forgotten Central Treaty Organization. His son
followed him into the foreign service and became a United
Nations official in Geneva. Selahattin Ulkumen, who retired to
Istanbul at the age of sixty-five, never remarried.
Asked whether anything in his personal history impelled him to
risk life and liberty to save Jews, he told me, "I didn't
know the Rhodes Jews. I had had no dealings with them. In
Turkey I had Jewish friends, in the university. I didn't make
any differentiation whether they were Jews or Muslims. I
didn't ask what their religion was. I had no special ties
with Jews. I only had humanitarian feelings to every human
being. If they had been black people, I would have done the
same thing."
Walter F. Weiker, 'Ottomans, Turks and the Jewish Polity: A History
of the Jews of Turkey,' The Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs,
University Press of America (1992). ISBN 0-8191-8644-9.
pp.251-252:
''..Turkey welcomed Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany, including
at least forty professors who were particularly useful in the 1930s
reform of Istanbul University, as well as doctors, entrepreneurs and
a variety of other individuals. In this sphere as well, Turkey also
allowed itself to be a transit point for sizeable numbers of Jews
seeking to go to Palestine. An activity in which the Jews of Turkey
had a great part was frequently to restock the supplies of ships
going to Palestine even when Turkish authorities refused to let the
passengers disembark. At least 1200 refugees on numerous small ships
were given supplies to enable them to continue on their journeys.
Other exemplary actions were those of then-Turkish consul in Marseilles
Necdet Kent, who intervened vigorously to save Turkish Jews there who
had actually been loaded into freight cars by the Germans, and by
Turkish consul-general in Rhodes Salahattin Ulkumen, who acted
similarly there in 1943 [80].''
[80] For a summary, see Jerusalem Post, International Edition,
April 23, 1988.
INTERCOM, International Studies and Overseas Programs at University
of California, Los Angeles; Vol. 15, No. 7; 15 January 1993. Pages 1-5.
An interview with Stanford J. Shaw (History), who recently
completed two books: The Jews of the Ottoman Empire and the
Turkish Republic, and Turkey and the Holocaust: Turkey's Role in
Rescuing Turkish and European Jewry from Nazi Persecution,
1933-45. Shaw chairs the undergraduate interdepartmental degree
program in Near Eastern Studies and has organized the Program for
the Study of Ottoman and Turkish Jewry. He is affiliated with the
G. E. von Grunebaum Center for Near Eastern Studies.
Editor: How did you come to write these two books on Turkey and
European and Turkish Jews?
Shaw: Basically, I'm an Ottoman historian, but I'm also Jewish.
I've spent twenty-five years studying Ottoman history, and as
time went along, whenever I found materials on the Ottoman Jews,
I collected them. But I never did anything with them until a
couple of years ago, when I suddenly realized that 1992 was the
500th anniversary of the Jews being expelled from Spain and
coming to Turkey. Then the Sephardic Temple down on Wilshire
Avenue invited me to give a series of three lectures on Ottoman
Jewry. These lectures were greatly appreciated, and I became
motivated to undertake further research to develop a book, The
Jews of the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish) Republic. This book
is quite different from the works of most Jewish historians, who
tend to look at the Jews in any country more from the viewpoint
of the Jews and the Jewish community, and rely mainly on Jewish
sources. I view my subject as an Ottoman historian, and I
approach the Jews of the Ottoman Empire largely from the point of
view of Ottoman society, using largely Ottoman sources. After I
finished this book and sent it to the press, I came across
additional documents relating to Turkish Jews during World War
II. In the completed book, I had said that Turkey had done a good
deal to rescue the Jews during World War II, but I did not
actually have many details. Then I found a batch of documents in
the Foreign Ministry archive relating to actions taken by Turkish
diplomats to help the Jews before and during the Holocaust. It
was too late to add this new information to the book in press, so
I decided to write a second book. I conducted further research,
mainly in the archives of the Foreign Ministry in Ankara and the
Turkish Embassy and Consulate in Paris. The result was the second
book, Turkey and the Holocaust, which details how Turkey helped
rescue Jews from the Nazis.
- How exactly did they do this?
The story takes place over a number of years. The book presents
the material in three parts, first of which deals with the period
before the Holocaust. When the Nazis came to power in Germany in
1933, they immediately started dismissing Jews and anti-Nazi
Germans from universities, hospitals, scientific institutes, and
the like. Turkey at that moment was just beginning the process of
reforming its universities, and it saw in these Jews, who were
being fired from their positions in Germany, a good source of new
talent to help modernize the Turkish universities. Within three
months after the Nazis started dismissing these Jews, Turkey
arranged to take many of them in. They were brought to Turkey and
were given appointments as professors in the Turkish
universities, as heads of scientific institutes, and as medical
personnel in hospitals. About 300 to 500 major Jewish professors
came to Turkey in the 1930s. Ernst Reuter, a German political
scientist, spent the war years teaching political science in
Turkey. After World War II, he was mayor of Berlin during the
Berlin Airlift. Fritz Neimark, a major German Jewish economist,
came to Turkey and helped establish a modern school of economics
in Istanbul. A man named Reichenbach, who was rescued from the
Nazis by Turkey and spent the war years in Turkey, eventually
came to UCLA, where he became a professor of philosophy. Other
German Jewish emigres engaged in cultural activities in Turkey.
One such was Karl Ebert, who had been a leading theatrical
producer in Berlin until he was expelled by the Nazis. He went to
Turkey, where he organized the Turkish National Theater and the
Turkish National Opera Company in Ankara, with the help of Paul
Hindemuth. So the first section of the book covers this first
phase, when Jews were being persecuted in Germany and rescued by
Turkey. Oddly enough, the German emigres, when they were in
Turkey, did not seem to think too badly of Germany. They regarded
themselves more as Germans than Jews, and they did not join in
the anti-Nazi activities of the local Turkish Jewish community. I
even found letters from the Nazi representatives to Turkey
praising these German Jewish refugees for their work in promoting
the idea of German culture. Even though these people had been
persecuted by the Nazis and rescued by the Turks, they shared the
Nazis' feelings of Aryan racial superiority over the Turks. The
second part of the book deals with the Holocaust, which began in
1940 when the Nazis occupied France. In Europe at that time, and
especially in France, there were about 20,000 Turkish Jews. They
had migrated to Europe for various reasons from about the turn of
the century onward. Most of them had settled in Europe during the
Turkish war for independence after World War I, when Greece was
threatening to overrun Turkey. The Greeks had persecuted the Jews
throughout the nineteenth century, and the Jews feared what might
happen to them if the Greeks took over in Turkey. Many Jews fled
to France during the 1920s and 1930s. Many also abandoned their
Turkish citizenship and became French citizens. Suddenly the
Nazis invaded France in 1940 and started introducing all sorts of
anti-Jewish laws. The Turkish Jews soon found that it was not
worth very much to be a French Jew, but that it was worth a lot
to be a Turkish Jew.
- How so?
Turkey remained neutral through most of World War II. It retained
its embassies and consulates in all the Nazi-occupied countries
until it finally entered the war on the side of the Allies at the
end of 1944. During the war, therefore, Turkey was in a position
to defend its citizens against anti-Jewish measures, and the
actions that Turkish diplomats took form the second chapter of
the book. Turkish diplomats who were stationed in France in
particular intervened to protect Jews of Turkish citizenship from
the Nazis. For those Turkish Jews who had retained their Turkish
citizenship, there was generally no problem. If they were
arrested and sent to a concentration camp, the Turkish diplomats
would communicate with the commanders of the camp and other
officials and say in effect: "These people are Turkish citizens.
You can't do this to them." And the Turkish Jews would be
released. If their businesses were confiscated, the Turkish
diplomats would protest and the businesses would be restored.
The Nazis in general wanted to keep the friendship of Turkey.
They hoped to be able to use Turkey as a gateway for an invasion
of the Middle East, and they also wanted to obtain chromium and
manganese from Turkey. In order to keep Turkish friendship, they
usually accepted these interventions on behalf of Turkish Jews.
The Turkish diplomats sometimes went to the concentration camps
to secure the release of Turkish Jews. At times they even boarded
trains hauling Turkish Jews to Auschwitz for extermination and
succeeded in getting them off the train. Most of the foreign Jews
were sent to a concentration camp at a place called Drancy in
Paris, and that's where most of the intercession by Turkish
consuls took place.
The greater problem came with the Turkish Jews who had abandoned
their Turkish citizenship and had become French citizens. The
consuls couldn't declare that these people were Turkish citizens
because they were not. My book includes photographs of Jews
lining up in front of the Turkish consulate, either to get
passports to return to Turkey or to get a restoration of their
Turkish citizenship. This was a bureaucratic matter, so
processing the application would take some time. In the meantime
it was a real emergency, because the Nazis would arrest Jews on
the streets for almost nothing. The Nazis would even arrest them
if they had radios or telephones in their apartments, because
radios and telephones were forbidden to Jews. To take care of
these former Turkish Jews, the Turkish diplomats invented a
document called gayri muntazem vatandash, or "irregular fellow
citizen." The document said in effect "This person is a former
Turkish citizen who has applied for the restoration of his
Turkish citizenship. In the meantime we would appreciate it if
you would treat him as if he were a Turkish citizen." The
diplomats wrote the document in Turkish and put their seals on
it. Since the Nazis could not read Turkish, on the whole they
accepted these papers as certificates of citizenship. By this
means, the Turkish diplomats were able to rescue many Jews who
had relinquished their Turkish citizenship.
Actually the Nazis were of two minds about the Turkish defense of
Jews. On the one hand the Nazi Foreign Ministry, which wanted to
retain the friendship of Turkey, was in favor of accepting these
interventions. On the other hand, Himmler and Eichmann wanted all
Jews exterminated. At times Himmler and Eichmann were able to
prevail and some of the Turkish Jews were sent off to Auschwitz
before the Turkish consuls could do anything.
- Do you have statistics on how many Turkish Jews were rescued?
There were about 20,000 Turkish Jews in Europe before world War
II, about 10,000 of whom were living in France. Most of the
information in this section of the book relates to the situation
in France. I have published the letters that the Turkish consuls
sent to the Nazi officials and the letters that came back in
reply. Generally the Nazis said that if the Turkish consul would
present documents certifying that arrested individuals are
Turkish citizens, and promise to send them out of France, the
Nazis would release them from the concentration camp. The Turkish
consuls also organized special trains to take Turkish Jews from
Nazi-occupied territory back to Turkey. These trains ran
regularly in 1943 and 1944. The Nazis gave the Turkish Jews visas
so they could pass out of Nazi territory, but the trains were
often held up by the Nazi-influenced governments of Eastern
Europe - Croatia, Serbia, and Bulgaria - because these
governments really didn't want the Jews to escape. As a result of
the Turkish consuls' efforts, about 3,000 to 4,000 of the Turkish
Jews in France were saved. Another 3,000 were sent off to
Auschwitz, where most of them died. The remaining 3,000 either
escaped across the border into Spain or fled to the area of
southern France occupied by the Italians, who treated Jews much
better than the Nazis did. At the end of 1943, however, Italy
fell out of the war, and that was the end for those Jews as well.
Incidentally, the Turkish diplomats in Nazi-occupied Greece also
worked to rescue Jews in that country.
- The second part of your book then deals with Turkish diplomats
acting to rescue Jews of Turkish citizenship or Turkish origin
from Nazi persecution.
Yes, and there is an aside I might add here: In their
interventions on behalf of Turkish Jews, the Turks cited their
treaty with Germany which stated that Turkish citizens in German
territory would be treated the same as German citizens in Turkey.
On that basis the Turks maintained that the Nazis could not
discriminate against Turkish citizens who are Jews. The Nazis
claimed (and the Vichy government agreed) that they were not
discriminating because they were treating all Jews equally.
Turkey protested, saying, "You are dividing our citizens
according to religion, but the Turkish constitution requires that
all citizens be treated equally, regardless of religion.
Therefore, you cannot single out Turkish Jews." American consuls
in Paris, by contrast, accepted the Nazi argument and told
American Jews who were being persecuted by the Nazis that they
couldn't do anything about it, because the American Jews were
being treated the same as other Jews. The third part of the book
takes place in Turkey, which was the principal center during the
Holocaust for activities aimed at the rescue of Eastern European
Jews. The kwish Agency, an organization established by Jews in
Palestine to help resettle Jews to Palestine, set up an office in
Istanbul in 1940 under the leadership of Chaim Barlas. Other
Jewish organizations in Palestine, especially the kibbutzes, also
sent representatives to Istanbul to set up headquarters. These
groups first tried to contact Jews in Eastern Europe to find out
what was happening. Today we know about the Holocaust, but at
that time people didn't know what was going on. They didn't
imagine the Nazis could do the things they were doing. And so the
first step was to get information, and the Turkish government let
them use the Turkish mails to send letters to their relatives and
friends in Eastern Europe. The Jewish organizations found out
what was happening when they received replies. Later on when the
Nazis began to intercept such letters, the Jews received
assistance also from the Vatican nuncio, Angelo Roncali, who
served as the Vatican representative in Istanbul from 1935 to
1944 and later became Pope John XXIII. As the Vatican
representative during the war, he used the facilities of the
Catholic Church to supplement what the Turkish government was
doing to assist Jewish agencies in contacting Jews in Eastern
Europe. With the cooperation of the Turkish government, these
agencies then sent hard currency, food, clothing, and even
railroad and steamship tickets to Jews in Czechoslovakia,
Bulgaria, Romania, and Hungary. They weren't able to help much in
Poland because by then the Nazis had wiped out almost all the
Polish Jews. Whenever possible the rescue agencies arranged for
the Jews to get out of Eastern Europe either by train through the
so called Orient Express route to Istanbul, or by boat through
the Black Sea to Istanbul.
Turkey was not eager for all these refugees to remain within its
borders during the war, because it was being blockaded and was
suffering terrible shortages of food and clothing. The
government, therefore, facilitated the movement of the
non-Turkish Jewish refugees from Turkey to Palestine, either by
the Taurus Express Railroad through the mountains to Syria and
Palestine, or by small boats across the eastern Mediterranean
from southern Turkey to Palestine. These efforts were bitterly
opposed not only by the Nazis, but also by the British, who did
not want any more Jewish immigration to Palestine because they
feared it would hurt their relations with the Arabs. The British
constantly pressured the Turkish government to stop this traffic
and send those Jews back. In a few cases the Turkish government,
yielding to British pressure, did send the boats back. For
example, in one incident, the steamship Struma, with some 700
Jewish refugees from Romania, was sent back by the Turkish
government as a result of the intervention of the British
ambassador. When that ship was sunk by a Soviet submarine, all
were lost except one person. Nevertheless, all told, the Turkish
government allowed no fewer than 100,000 Eastern European Jews to
pass through Turkish territory and move on to Palestine during
the Second World War. The Turkish authorities also provided these
refugees with facilities and money, and gave them permission to
send money and food out of the country.
- Many of these Jews who passed through Turkey may still be
living in Israel.
Yes, and their children. But let's return for a moment to the
first group, the Turkish Jews who came from Europe. They did not
go on to Palestine; they stayed in Turkey. It was the
non-Turkish, Eastern European Jews who passed through Turkey en
route to Palestine. Their story is very interesting.
- And you have rescued it from obscurity.
Many studies have been made of the Holocaust, but most of them do
not focus on the Eastern European or Middle Eastern Jews. Most of
the scholarship has centered on the Western European Jews, of
whom 6 million were massacred by the Nazis. My study deals with a
much smaller number of people. I have tried to round out the
picture, and I hope my book will persuade other scholars to
undertake further investigations in the history of Eastern Jews.
When it comes to numbers, the German Jews were also relatively
small in number. Most of the millions slain were Polish Jews. The
rescue of 100,000 Eastern European Jews may not seem so
significant compared with the total of 6 million who were
murdered, but it meant a lot to those who were saved.
About three-fourths of the book consists of documents -
translations of many documents. They are included because the
story is not well known. Not only are people in the West unaware
of the courageous actions of the Turkish diplomats; even the
people of Turkey did not know the story. I felt that they would
not fully understand this remarkable achievement unless they
could see the documents.
- What languages are used in the documents?
Most of them are in Turkish or French; some are in Hebrew. There
is a great deal of material in Hebrew about the organization of
the boats going to Palestine, the passengers, and so on, but I
did not go into those details extensively. I describe mostly what
Turkey did, so most of my documents are in Turkish or French. A
few documents are in English. The Jewish groups in Istanbul did
not necessarily cooperate with one another to rescue Jews; in
fact, they often fought with one another. They took turns trying
to get the Turkish government to deport rival groups. For
example, some of the kibbutz groups felt that the Jewish Agency
was run by Western European Jews who were interested only in
helping Western European Jews. Finally, in 1944, President
Roosevelt sent a personal representative, Ira Hirschman, who had
been an executive of Bloomingdale's department store in New York
City, and Hirschman managed to reconcile their differences. The
documents related to his mission are in English.
I also obtained many documents from Serge Klarsfeld, a Holocaust
historian in France, who mainly worked on the French Jews. (His
father was killed by the Nazis.) He gave me materials he had
gathered in the German archives on the Turkish Jews, so I didn't
personally consult the German archives. I believe that much more
can be learned from the German archives, and I hope someone
someday will make the effort.
- This new book fits in well with your teaching, doesn't it?
Right. I'm giving a course on the history of the Jews of the
Ottoman Empire. I first gave the course two years ago. In
addition to research, writing, and teaching, I've been actively
involved in the commemoration of the 500th anniversary of the
coming of the Jews to the Ottoman Empire. Among other things, I
helped organize a large international conference on the subject
which was held in Istanbul in 1992.
- Now that your books are finished and the conference has taken
place, what do you plan to do next?
I'm working on two new books. One is a history of the Turkish War
for Independence, which took place after World War I, during the
years 1918 to 1923. The Turks warded off the efforts of the
victorious European powers to occupy Turkey and end its
independence. The second book is a study of Sultan Abdul Hamid
II, the last major sultan, who ruled from 1876 to 1909. He was an
important modernizer in his own way, although he also suppressed
all sorts of political movements.
Stanford J. Shaw received a B.A. in History and an M.A. in
British History. He then shifted to Near Eastern History, earning
a second M.A. and a Ph.D. at Princeton. As a doctoral candidate
at Princeton, he spent two years abroad, studying at the School
of Oriental and African Studies, University of London; the
University of Cairo, the American University at Cairo, and the
University of Istanbul. He taught at Harvard before coming to
UCLA in 1966. His postdoctoral research has been supported by the
John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the American Research Institute
in Turkey, the Social Science Research Council, the National
Endowment for the Humanities, the Fulbright Program, and ISOP. He
has received honorary degrees from Harvard University and
Bosporus University, Bebek, Istanbul, Turkey, and medals of honor
for lifetime contributions to the fields of Islamic and Turkish
studies from the Center for Research in Islamic History, Art, and
Culture in Istanbul and from the American Friends of Turkey in
Washington, D.C. In addition to undertaking many professional
service activities and public lectures in both the United States
and Turkey, Shaw has also produced eight books and one edited
volume. His History of the Ottoman Empire and Modem Turkey (2
vols.) has been published in many editions (six editions or
reprints from 1977-1991), and translated into Turkish (1983,
1991) and French (1984). His book The Jews of the Ottoman Empire
and the Turkish Republic (MacMillan, London, and New York
University Press, 1992) will be published in Turkish translation
by the Turkish Historical Society, Istanbul. His Turkey and the
Holocaust: Turkey's Role in Rescuing Turkish and European Jewry
from Nazi Persecution, 1933-1945 will be published by Macmillan
Publishers, London, and New York University Press in 1993. A
pamphlet summarizing the book was published in Ankara, Turkey, in
1992.
>To this one, let me say: Turkey was the dirtiest vermine we have ever
>seen.
You are indeed amusing.
HIRHURIM - The Jewish Magazine of Brandeis University
(Massachusetts). Vol. 1, No: 2, Spring 1992
FROM FLIGHT to FREEDOM - THE SPANISH INQUISITION and LIFE in TURKEY
Andrew Sackser
Throughout history the children of Israel have suffered at hands
of others. A people set apart from their neighbors by their
faith, countless. Jews have often had to pay for this faith with
their lives. There was, however, one haven where Jews did not
suffer the large-scale persecution characterizing their entire
existence. This haven was Turkey. For over five hundred years
Jews have flourished there, enjoying relatively uninterrupted
freedom and safety that has only been rivaled in America. This
year marks the quincentennial anniversary of the ingathering of
Jews to Turkey, and highlights one of the brighter chapters in
Jewish history.
The massive flight of Jews to Turkey in 1492 was the result of an
expulsion order from the Spanish monarchy of Ferdinand and
Isabella. This was perhaps the worst tragedy faced by the Jews in
the Middle Ages. Jews had existed in Spain for hundreds of years.
Under the Moorish occupation of the country they fared well,
excelling in the sciences and even rising high in the political
sphere. Unfortunately for Spain's Jews, however, infighting and
dissolution left the Moors vulnerable to the ascent of Christian
power on the peninsula. At first the Jews lived as well under
Christians as they had under the Moors. Tolerance continued to be
the norm, and Jews maintained their civil privileges. As in
previous golden ages, this prosperity and good fortune came to an
end.
The year 1391 saw a significant increase in persecution. Taking
advantage of the current political instability, the virulently
anti-Semitic priest Ferdinand Martinez hailed in a reign of
terror unprecedented in Spanish history. Inflamed by his rhetoric
of hate, angry mobs ran amok through the Jewish quarters of
cities such as Seville, Cordova, and- Barcelona. Homes were
destroyed, possessions stolen and houses of worship burned or
converted to churches. Thousands of defenseless men, women, and
children were brutally slaughtered. Those who survived did so by
undergoing forced conversions. Those few who did not convert were
either burnt or put to the sword. A small minority, who escaped
the carnage unscathed, did so only because they were passed by
during the frenzied slaughter.
The Jews who were forced to accept the baptism on the pain of
death wereby no means converted in spirit. Many continued to
secretly practice their religion. In public they donned the
clothing and mannerisms of the gentile, while in their homes they
practiced the faith (of their fathers and passed the law on to
their children. Called Marranos, meaning accursed, by the
Spanish, these unfortunates were at the same time outcasts from
Spanish society and forbidden from returning to Jewish society.
Although they were theoretically able to live and prosper as
gentiles, they were met with as much bigotry and persecution as
their openly practicing brethren.
The Marranos, and indeed all the Jews of Spain, were dealt their
harshest blow in the infamous Spanish Inquisition. The
Inquisition had been established hundreds of years before to gain
control over heretics and dissenters within the Church. Following
the unification of Aragon and Castille, Ferdinand and Isabella
allowed its resurgence in Spain.. Special tribunals were set up
to try and persecute the Marranos. Usually the possession of
wealth or power coveted by the state or Church was enough to have
one brought before the Inquisition. Once brought into this
terrible ordeal, there was no escape. Seized in the name of the
Inquisition, the victims were shut away in dungeons and tortured
for days on end. The inquisitors forced the Marranos to confess
their heresies. Real or imagined, the victims would confess to
anything as their tortured bodies were burned with irons, pierced
with metal wedges and torn on the rack. In a perverse sense of
mercy, those who repented were strangled before being burnt.
Presiding over this gruesome affair was the Grand Inquisitor
Thomas de Torquemada. He was followed by many others. All told,
some thirty-two thousand innocents were put to death during the
Inquisition's horrible course. The King had little problem in
slaying perhaps the most learned and productive of his subjects.
This was an economic, not a moral campaign, and the Inquisition
gave him the means to take all that the Marranos had at once
rather than fleece them over time.
This was one of the darkest hours in Jewish history. The Jewish
community of Spain, the most vibrant of its day, was reduced to
shambles. Then, in 1492 came the expulsion order from Ferdinand
and Isabella. It was an extreme measure, designed to eliminate a
powerful class of people whom the Crown blamed for the country's
problems. The Jews who were thrown out from Spain were not
allowed to take anything of value with them. All of their
property was seized by either the Church or the State. Penniless
and stateless, they were forced out of their homes.
Those emigrants-by-force had nowhere to go. England had already
expelled its own Jews, and anti-Jewish fanaticism was rampant
throughout the rest of Europe. Some found haven in Portugal,
others in Italy. A small minority even sought refuge in the New
World. But the vast majority of Spain's outcasts had nowhere to
go, and no one to turn to. That is, until Bayezid II, Sultan of
the Ottoman Empire, officially welcomed the Spanish Jews into his
realm. Specifically, he ordered his provincial governors not to
refuse the Jews entry, and to extend them courtesy.
His act of charity saved thousands who would have otherwise
perished. The Sultan took in the Jews for a number of reasons. He
saw them as a productive and learned people who had much to offer
his growing empire. Furthermore, the fanatical anti-Semitism
native to Europe did not exist in the Muslim East. Under Islam
there was a tolerance for "The People of the Book" that had no
parallel in the West. Islamic tradition stipulates that Jews, and
other monotheists, had the right to protection of their lives,
property and religious life, provided that they accepted Muslim
rule and paid a special monetary tribute to the state. Unlike
most of his Western counterparts, the Ottoman ruler recognized
that, freed from violent persecution, the Jews could contribute
much to long-term prosperity and growth. The new immigrants were
settled throughout the empire, and the Sultan used them to
populate areas where loyal and productive subjects were needed.
For the first time, many Spanish Jews found that they were not
outcasts, but rather accepted members of Turkish society. This
was not only due to the extreme tolerance exhibited by the Turks,
but to the fact that the Ottoman Empire was a conglomerate of
many diverse people and cultures. The Jews had a place for
themselves within the "millet system." This was a system afforded
to minorities which provided them a limited self-government under
rabbinic authority. The Turkish system was one which gave the
Jews a great deal more freedom than they had known in Europe. And
despite several restrictive measures, they were free from the
horrible tyranny and persecution that had previously plagued
them.
Having finally found a home for themselves, the Spanish Jews
settled down within the Ottoman empire. Synagogues were built and
religious centers were established in many major cities. Despite
contributing to Ottoman society, the Jews were able to maintain
their own culture within the millet. Ladino, a Spanish dialect
with Hebrew influences, was preserved as the language of the
community. Schooled and raised in their own language, academic
and religious scholarship rose to new heights that rivaled the
achievements of Jews in prechristian Spain. The Ottoman system
was one that let these achievements be rewarded. Several
distinguished scholars and financiers were able to rise to the
higher echelons of society. There were Jewish doctors and
economists in the Sultan's court, and even several Jews who held
key political posts.
Jewish culture grew along with the Empire, and flourished during
the 16th and 17th centuries when the Empire was at its peak. The
Empire, however, was rapidly losing ground to Europe as
stagnation and internal disputes sapped its energies. Even in
hard times the Jews managed to survive. The usual pattern of
scapegoating and persecution that took place in Europe was
noticeably lacking in these times of decline. It was during this
period when the Sultan reportedly declared, "I distinguish my
Muslim subjects in the Mosque, my Christian subjects in the
Church, and my Jewish subjects in the Synagogue, but there is no
other difference among them. My love and justice for all of them
is very strong and they are all my true children."
As the empire fell apart there were several major events which
impacted on the Jewish community. Most important was the
secularization that was beginning to takeplace. In a vain effort,
the central government tried to integrate the various minorities
who were beginning to fall under the spell of nationalism. This
official declaration of equality had its draw-backs. The Jews, in
a move towards equality, were forced to relinquish their limited
self-rule and privileges existing under the millet system.
Despite this, the empire was still a safe haven. The Ottoman
Empire crumbled in World War I as the victorious Allies carved up
its remaining holdings in Europe and the Middle East. The Turks,
however, still had to wage a bitter war of independence to insure
control over Anatolia. Unlike most minorities, the Jews supported
Turkey in its War for Independence. Following the war, Turkey
made a concerted effort to catch up with the West. Part of this
campaign was the adoption of a constitution making Turkey a
secular republic. Now, for the first time, the Jews were legal
first-class citizens with all the rights and responsibilities of
Muslims. During the inter war years many Turkish Jews found their
fortune taking a turn for the worse as Muslims reasserted control
in both the public and private spheres. Despite this negative
setback tolerance remained very high, and many Jews soon found
Turkey to be a refuge from the rising tide of Nazism.
Because Turkey retained its neutral status during World War II,
its Jews were spared the ravages of the Holocaust. This was no
easy task, since Turkey was surrounded by Nazi-controlled Europe
and Arab states with pro-Nazi sympathies. There is even the case
of the Turkish consul on the island of Rhodes, who in the summer
of 1944 saved forty-two jews from the death camps. Risking his
own life, Consul Selahattin Ulkumen placed as many Jews as
possible under the protection of the Turkish flag. He then
remained behind to protect those bad saved. With the suspension
of diplomatic ties in August 1944, Mr. Ulkumen was arrested by
the Nazis. The Jews made it to Turkey, and many lived long enough
to see the retired diplomat receive the honor of Hassid Umot
Ha'olam from Yad Vashem in 1990.
After the war, many Jews left Turkey for the new state of Israel.
Unlike many other Muslim countries, Turkey was quick to recognize
the Jewish state, and did not experience the wave of
anti-Semitism that swept the surrounding Arab states. A one-year
ban on emigration, coupled with a post-war economic downturn,
prompted many to leave in 1949 when the border was re-opened. One
quarter made aliyah to Israel, half emigrated to North America
and France, and one quarter, mainly the wealthy, remained behind.
Today, there are roughly 27,000 Jews remaining in Turkey. With so
many of their co-religionists gone, the Jews of Turkey are
finding it hard to maintain their Jewish identity. As a result,
the few left behind have consolidated their communities by
banding together in Istanbul and several other cities. The Jewish
community of Istanbul, by far the largest, is vibrant and content
to stay put. Whatever anti-Semitism remained ceased to be
actively expressed, at least in public life. While it may be true
that the general population harbors no ill feeling towards the
Jews, the rising tide of Islamic fundamentalism has many Jews
worried. Their worst fears were, realized when in September 1986
an Arab terrorist squad attacked the Neve Shalom Synagogue in
Istanbul. Before blowing themselves up, the attackers used hand
grenades and automatic weapons to murder defenseless worshipers.
Fortunately, thereaction of the Turkish public was one of
outrage.
Despite their acceptance by the overwhelming majority of the
Islamic community, Turkey's Jews know that they been extremely
lucky to have enjoyed over 500 years of peace and harmony. This
peace, uninterrupted until the recent attack on Neve Shalom, has
lasted far longer than any other peace in Jewish history. It is
with pride that both Turks and Jews will celebrate this year as
the 500th anniversary of peaceful coexistence.
Murat Kutan
Raman <ra...@sprynet.com> wrote:
>> ''An appropriate analogy with the Jewish Holocaust might be the
>> systematic extermination of the entire Muslim population of the
>> independent republic of Armenia which consisted of at least 30-40
>> percent of the population of that republic.''
>> (The Jewish Times - June 21, 1990)
>If the Armenians did not take such actions, they would be met with
>the same fate, I assure you. An even more appropriate analogy with the
You are indeed an entertaining clown, I must admit. I will not disbelieve
your illusions if you are able to share with us the name of the drug you
are on. Do you still claim that there is no reference to the Armenian
butchery of 2.5 million Muslims and Sephardic Jews in 1914 in the works
of 'Robert Dunn'?
Robert Dunn, _World Alive, A Personal Story_
Crown Publishers, Inc., New York (1952).
_Memoirs of an American officer who witnessed the
Armenian genocide of 2.5 million Muslim people_
p. 361 (fourth paragraph).
_Armenian corpses came next, the first a pretty Muslim child with
straight black hair, large eyes. She looked about twelve years old.
She lay in some stubble where meal lay scattered from the sack
she'd been toting. The bayonet had gone through her back, I judged,
for blood around was scant. Between the breasts one clot, too small
for a bullet wound, crusted her homespun dress.
The next was a Muslim boy of ten or less, in rawhide jacket and
knee-pants. He lay face down in the path by several huts. One arm
reached out to the pewter bowl he'd carried, now upset upon its
dough. Steel had jabbed just below his neck, into the spine.
There were Muslim grownups, too, I saw as I led the sorrel around.
Djul was empty of the living till I looked up to see beside me Dro's
[Armenian architect of the genocide of 2.5 million Muslim people - ye]
German-speaking colonel. He said all Muslims who had not escaped were
dead._
Sahak Melkonian, _Preserving the Armenian Purity_ 1920
_In Soviet Armenia today there no longer exists a single Turkish
soul. It is in our power to tear away the veil of illusion that
some of us create for ourselves. It certainly is possible to severe
the artificial life-support system of an imagined 'ethnic purity'
that some of us falsely trust as the only structure that can support
their heart beats in this alien land._
A. Lalayan, _Revolutsionniy Vostok (Revolutionary East)_
No: 2-3, Moscow, 1936.
-One of the architects of the Armenian genocide
of 2.5 million Muslim people_
_I killed Muslims by every means possible. Yet it is
sometimes a pity to waste bullets for this. The best
way is to gather all of these dogs and throw them into
wells and then fill the wells with big and heavy stones,
as I did. I gathered all of the women, men and children,
threw big stones down on top of them. They must never live
on this earth._
_The Armenians did exterminate the entire Muslim population
of Russian Armenia as Muslims were considered inferior to
the Armenians by the prominent leaders of the Dashnaks._
_Mikael Kaprilian_ 1919
Leonard Ramsden Hartill, _Men Are Like That_ The Bobbs-Merrill
Company, Indianapolis (1926).
_Memoirs of an Armenian officer who participated in the Armenian
genocide of 2.5 million Muslim people_
_Foreword:_
_For example, we were camped one night in a half-ruined Tartar
mosque, the most habitable building of a destroyed village, near
the border of Persia and Russian Armenia. During the course of
evening I asked Ohanus if he could tell me anything of the history
of the village and the cause of its destruction. In his matter of
fact way he replied, Yes, I assisted in its sack and destruction,
and witnessed the slaying of those whose bones you saw to-day
scattered among its ruins._
p. 218 (first and second paragraphs)
_We Armenians did not spare the Muslims. If persisted in, the
slaughtering of Tartars, the looting, and the rape and massacre
of the helpless become commonplace actions expected and accepted
as a matter of course.
I have been on the scenes of massacres where the dead lay on the
ground, in numbers, like the fallen leaves in a forest. Muslims
had been as helpless and as defenseless as sheep. They had not died
as soldiers die in the heat of battle, fired with ardor and courage,
with weapons in their hands, and exchanging blow for blow. They had
died as the helpless must, with their hearts and brains bursting
with horror worse than death itself._
Leonard Ramsden Hartill, _Men Are Like That_ The Bobbs-Merrill
Company, Indianapolis (1926).
_Memoirs of an Armenian officer who participated in the Armenian
genocide of 2.5 million Muslim people_
p. 15 (second paragraph)
_The Tartars [Muslims] were, for the most part, poor. Some of them
lived in villages and cultivated small farms; many of them continued
in the way of life of their nomadic forefathers. They drove their
flocks and herds from valley to valley, from plain to mountain, and
from mountain to plain, following the pasturage as it changed with
the seasons. They ranged from the salt desert shores of the Caspian
Sea far into the mighty Caucasus Mountains. Even the village Tartars
are a primitive people, only semicivilized.
I can see now that we Armenians frankly despised the Tartars, and,
while holding a disproportionate share of the wealth of the country,
regarded and treated them as inferiors._
p. 20 (second paragraph)
_Our men armed themselves, gathered together and advanced on the
Tartar section of the village. There were no lights in the houses
and the doors were barred, for the Tartars suspected what as to
happen and were in great fear. Our men hammered on the doors, but
got no response; whereupon they smashed in the doors and began a
carnage that continued until the last Tartar was slain. Throughout
the hideous night, I cowered at home in terror, unable to shut my
ears to the piercing screams of the helpless victims and the loud
shouts of our men. By morning the work was finished._
Leonard Ramsden Hartill, _Men Are Like That_ The Bobbs-Merrill
Company, Indianapolis (1926).
_Memoirs of an Armenian officer who participated in the Armenian
genocide of 2.5 million Muslim people_
p. 109 (second paragraph).
_The method of execution was for an Armenian government 'mauserist'
to walk up behind the condemned Muslim in his home or on the street,
place a pistol to the back of his head and blow out his brains.
This simple way of getting rid of those who were undesirable in
the view of the Armenian government and soon became a common way
of paying debts._
Murat Kutan
Raman <ra...@sprynet.com> wrote:
>Who's to say that the Bosnians are not the same vermin from which
>they got their religion from, the Turks. Can you blame the Serbians
I see. So, that is why your Armenian grandparents had to slaughter
2.5 million defenseless Muslims and Sephardic Jews in Russian Armenia
and Eastern Anatolia. Once again, all we get is more idiocy which
merely demonstrates the utter historical garbage of the _Armenian
Church-SDPA_. No wonder the Roman poet Petroni's definition of an
Armenian is:
_Armenians too are human beings, but at home they walk on
their fours._
The Russian poet Lermantof's definition has yet another approach:
_You are a slave, and a coward. You are an Armenian._
On the other hand, the Russians, who have had considerable
relations with the Armenians hold a somewhat different opinion
about the Armenians:
_The Armenians are in fact a despicable community, without any
significant value. These people can only continue their survival
by exploiting others._
In the Special Collection at Stanford Hoover Library, donated by
Georgia Cutler, the letter dated Nov. 1, 1943 states that
_Prescot Hall wrote a large volume to prove that Armenians were
not and never could be desirable citizens, that they would
always be unscrupulous merchants._
In September 16, 1920, Major General W. Thwaites, Director of
Military Intelligence, wrote to Lord Hardinge, Under-Secretary
of State for Foreign Affairs:
_...it is useless to pretend that the Armenians are satisfactory
allies, or deserving of all the sympathy to which they claim._[1]
[1] F.O. 331/3411/158288.
_Armenian woman is a constipated biped with a backache._
(Don Spencer)
_Armenian women should not go a day without a bath_.
(Samuel Davis)
_Armenian woman ain't nothing but 'hair' misspelled._
(Brad Ellison)
_Armenians have been on more laps than a napkin._
(Alexandre Antoniades)
_E. Chantre_ writes as follows on the subject of the ethnological
and Anthropological characteristics of the Armenian people.
_The Armenians in Russia may be characterized as follows: Almost
all of them are brachycephalic or leptocephalic, very dark...The
Armenians are descended from various elements and from a very mixed
race...They are almost always short-headed...dark hair, dark eyes,
very often a hooked nose and a rather wide mouth._
According to J. Deniker: The Armenians are descended from various
elements and from a very mixed race. As a race Armenians belong to
the Indo-Afghan-Assyrian-Turkic family.
Professor Rene Vernont writes as follows: The Armenians are a mixture
of Turk, Kurds and Mongols.
Investigations carried out by N. Kossovitch on the links between
Armenian blood groups and their anthropological characteristics
led him to the conclusion that the Armenians did not form a
distinct race.
Similar observations made about Armenians have been compiled in
an intriguing book by A. Vefa. Several copies of his work can be
found in _Van and Erzurum Muslim Holocaust Museums_ dedicated to
2.5 million Muslim and Jewish people exterminated by the Armenians
in Russian Armenia and Eastern Anatolia in 1914.
Murat Kutan
Raman <ra...@sprynet.com> wrote:
>Oh gee, Turks starving more than 50% of the Lebanese Christian
>population to death, I'm so surprised! You mean like they massacred
>millions of Assyrian,
This is indeed amusing as if there is such people. You mean those
criminals who raped, tortured, back-stabbed and decimated millions
of defenseless Muslim and Jewish people in 1914?
>Armenian,
Now, the _soap opera_ is getting better. Hmmm. Now, are you calling Armenians
_pathological liars_ about their slaughtering of 2.5 million Muslims and
Sephardic Jews?
Source: Hovannisian, Richard G.: Armenia on the Road to Independence, 1918.
University of California Press (Berkeley and Los Angeles), 1967, p. 13.
"The addition of the Kars and Batum oblasts to the Empire increased the
area of Transcaucasia to over 130,000 square miles. The estimated population
of the entire region in 1886 was 4,700,000, of whom 940,000 (20 percent) were
Armenian, 1,200,000 (25 percent) Georgian, and 2,220,000 (45 percent) Moslem.
Of the latter group, 1,140,000 were Tatars. Paradoxically, barely one-third
of Transcaucasia's Armenians lived in the Erevan guberniia, where the
Christians constituted a majority in only three of the seven uezds. Erevan
uezd, the administrative center of the province, had only 44,000 Armenians
as compared to 68,000 Moslems. By the time of the Russian Census of 1897,
however, the Armenians had established a scant majority, 53 percent, in the
guberniia; it had risen by 1916 to 60 percent, or 670,000 of the 1,120,000
inhabitants. This impressive change in the province's ethnic character
notwithstanding, there was, on the eve of the creation of the Armenian
Republic, a solid block of 370,000 Tartars who continued to dominate the
southern districts, from the outskirts of Ereven to the border of Persia."
(See also Map 1. Historic Armenia and Map 4. Administrative subdivisions of
Transcaucasia).
In 1920, '0' percent Muslim.
_The Armenians did exterminate the entire Muslim population
of Russian Armenia as Muslims were considered inferior to
the Armenians by the prominent leaders of the Dashnaks._
_Mikael Kaprilian_ 1919
Leonard Ramsden Hartill, _Men Are Like That_ The Bobbs-Merrill
Company, Indianapolis (1926).
_Memoirs of an Armenian officer who participated in the Armenian
genocide of 2.5 million Muslim people_
p. 202 (first and second paragraphs)
_We closed the roads and mountain passes that might serve as
ways of escape for the Tartars and then proceeded in the work
of extermination. Our troops surrounded village after village.
Little resistance was offered. Our artillery knocked the huts
into heaps of stone and dust and when the villages became untenable
and inhabitants fled from them into fields, bullets and bayonets
completed the work. Some of the Tartars escaped of course. They
found refuge in the mountains or succeeded in crossing the border
into Turkey. The rest were killed. And so it is that the whole
length of the borderland of Russian Armenia from Nakhitchevan to
Akhalkalaki from the hot plains of Ararat to the cold mountain
plateau of the North were dotted with mute mournful ruins of
Tartar villages. They are quiet now, those villages, except for
howling of wolves and jackals that visit them to paw over the
scattered bones of the dead._
>and Greek Christians.
No kidding. Sorry for kicking their tender butt...How about those _mini
skirts_ in soldiers?
Professor Stanford J. Shaw, 'The Jews of the Ottoman Empire and the
Turkish Republic,' New York University Press, New York (1991).
page 190 (second paragraph):
<<When Venice occupied the island of Chios in 1694, its Jewish population
was either massacred or deported and all Jewish communal and personal
property was stolen by the native Greek population, leaving those Jews
who returned in utter poverty and reduced to begging, no longer able to
compete with the Greeks in trade or commerce.>>
page 190 (third paragraph):
<<Jews living in Greece and the Rumanian principalities suffered terribly
because of their support for Ottoman rule. When the Greek nationalist
movement Philike Etairia started its uprising in Wallachia and Moldavia
during the spring of 1821, hundreds of Jews and Muslims were killed by
the Greeks who lived there as well as by native Wallachs [14]. During
the height of the Greek revolution, five thousand Jews were massacred
in Morea along with most of the Muslim population, numbering about
twenty thousand in all [15]. In Tripolizza alone 1,200 Jews were
massacred along with uncounted Turks [16]. Reverend John Hartley,
after describing the carnage, concluded 'Thus did Jewish blood, mingled
with Turkish, flow down the streets of captured city. The sons of Isaac
and the sons of Ishmael, on this as well as on every occasion during the
Greek Revolution, met with common fate. Their corpses were cast out of the
city, and, like the ancient sovereign of Judah, they received no burial
superior to that of an ass.' [17] Jewish communities on the islands of
Sparta, Patras, Corinthos, Mistra, and Argos were wiped out by bands of
Greek rebels along with those of Thebes, Vrachori, Attica and Epirus [18].
The surviving Jews fled to the island of Corfu, where Jews who had fled
from Italy, and the Iberian Peninsula had lived in peace and prosperity
under the Venetian rule since the twelfth century, though divided into
rival Greek and Italian communities. It was not long, however, before
it too fell victim to the Greek Revolution, leading to savage repression
and massacres of Jews, forcing the surviving members of the two communities
to come together for self-defense for the first time. Throughout the years
of Greek revolution, Greek nationalists went from town to town on the
mainland and from island to island in the Agean, exterminating all the
Jews and Muslims they could find, many along the roads as they desperately
fled to safety in what was left of the Ottoman Empire. Contemporary
accounts relate that the Greeks left the murdered Jews and Muslims lying
exposed so their bodies could be torn apart by the buzzards [19]. Most of
the Jews who survived these massacres fled across the Agean in small boats
to Izmir, thus starting its rise as one of the leading centers of Ottoman
Jewish life during the nineteenth century. Only in Northern Greece,
particularly in the areas of Janina and Salonica, were the Jews and the
Turks able to successfully resist the Greek assaults, thus saving their
populations from massacre as well [20]. During the remainder of the 19th
century, particularly during the Greek-Turkish war in 1897, those Jews
who remained in Greece in the areas of Athens, Chalkis, Larissa, Corfu
and Crete suffered severe persecution and massacre, forcing thousands
more to emigrate into Ottoman territory, particularly to Salonica and
Izmir [21].>>
page 193 (last paragraph):
<<The inclusion in the Treaty of Berlin of stipulations providing
protection for the Jewish and Muslim minorities in Southeastern Europe
stimulated more popular anti-Semitic and anti-Muslim hysteria in all
the countries involved, with blood-libel accusations once again being
used as pretexts for attacking and ravaging Jewish quarters as well as
for new tactics for boycotting Jewish shopkeepers, merchants and
professionals, a movement which was quickly adapted by the Christian
millets in the major cities of the Ottoman Empire. Because the Bulgarians,
Rumanians and Greeks correctly regarded the Jews as supporters of the
Turks, both Jews and Turks were expelled from these countries in equally
atrocious and brutal manners. Their property was plundered and their
homes and shops taken over without compensation, while the survivors
fled in desperation to Edirne and Istanbul. While official statements
subsequently were issued granting equal rights to Jews, little was done
in fact and they continued to be persecuted regularly well into the
twentieth century.>>
page 194 (last paragraph):
<<Things were not much better elsewhere in Southeastern Europe or the
Greek islands of the Agean and the eastern Mediterranean. In 1891 the
Jews on Corfu were subjected to severe persecution by local Greeks due
to the revival of the old ritual murder accusations [26]. Many of
those who survived found refuge in Ottoman territory with the help of a
popular subscription drive carried out in Istanbul under leadership of
the Banque Camondo. In 1881 and 1884, and again in 1892 and 1903,
thousands of Jews came to Ottoman territory as a result of pogroms
in Russia which went on between 1881 and 1921 with only slight periods
of respite. In 1899 Jewish families arrived in Istanbul in flight from
persecution in Vidin, in independent Bulgaria.
The conquest of Ottoman Thrace and Macedonia by Greek and Bulgarian
forces during the Balkan Wars (1912-13), including Salonica, Corlu,
and Edirne, was followed by general attacks on Jews, their synagogues,
homes and shops, in both countries [27], resulting in a renewed exodus
toward Istanbul and beyond. Two reports from Salonica graphically
described the situation caused by the invading armies:
'All the self-interested justifications of the newspapers of Europe,
all the lies which they have used to cover up the truth, can never
destroy the impression of the terrible anguish which has marked the
entry of the Greeks in Salonica. A week of terror and horror one can
never easily forget. The Hellenes now cruelly feel today all the
damage that the explosion of hatred by the (Greek) population has done
to their cause. The mob has shown itself odious and the government
weak...The incompetence of the Greek administration and the horrors
inflicted by the soldiers has put them in a terrible situation. The
consuls guaranteed the absolute safety of the Muslims, but sixty of
them were massacred in a single night....'[28]
'It wasn't only irregulars (Comitacis) who massacred, pillaged and
burned. The soldiers of the Army, the Chief of Police, and the high
civil officials took an active part in the events at Serres. Out of
6,000 houses, 4,000 were burned. Almost 1,200 shops were consumed by
flames and destructive bombs. The (Jewish) population lost all, and
without even anything to wear is in despair. Everyone wants to
emigrate...'[29]
page 196:
<<As a result of these assaults, massacres, and forced deportations from
the independent countries of Southeastern Europe, the Ottoman Empire
received literally thousands of Jewish refugees who joined the Muslims
who survived the persecution, flooding into the Empire...>>
[14] Shlomo Rozanes, Korot Hayehudim Beturkiyah Vebeartzot Hakedem:
Hadorot Haachronim (Jerusalem, 1945), pp.42-44, cited Yitzchak Kerem,
'The Influence of Anti-Semitism on Jewish Immigration Patterns from
Greece to the Ottoman Empire in the 19th Century', pp.2, 14.
[15] Maxime Raybaud, Memoires sur la Grece, pour servir a l'histoire de la
Guerre de l'Independence (2 Vols, Paris, 1824), pp.5-19; Galante,
Turcs et Juifs (Istanbul, 1932), 76-77.
[16] Rev. T.S. Hughes, Travels in Greece and Albania (2nd edn, 2 vols,
London, 1830), II, 194-95.
[17] Rev. John Hartley, Researches in Greece and the Levant (London, 1831),
207, quoted in Yitzchak Kerem, 'Jewish Immigration Patterns from Greece
to the Ottoman Empire in the Nineteenth Century', published paper
delivered at the Comite International d'Etudes Pre-Ottomanes et Ottomanes,
VIII Symposium, 'Decision-Making and the Transmission of Authority
in the Turkic System', University of Minnesota, Minneapolis,
Minnesota, 14-19 August 1988, p.4.
[18] Hartley, ibid., pp.206-7, William Martin Leake, Travels in Northern
Greece (2 Vols, London, 1835) II, 231-32, 609; Errikos Sevillas,
Athens-Auschwitz (Athens, 1983), p.ix, quoted in Kerem, ibid., p.14.
[19] Documented in Kerem, ibid., pp.14-19. Pearl L. Preschel, The Jews
of Corfu (Greece), Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, New York University,
1984. Goerge Finlay, History of the Greek Revolution (London, 1861),
172, 179-86; See also 'Greece', EJ VII, 876-77.
[20] Yoannina Vasdraveli, Ee Thessaloniki: Kata Ton Agona Tis Aneksantizias
(Salonica, 1946), pp.19-35; Yitzchak Kerem, An Outline of the History
of Jews of Selonica (in Hebrew) (Museum of Kibbutz Lahoma, Getaot, 1985),
p.21, quoted in Kerem, ibid., p.15.
[21] Kerem, ibid., pp.8-12, 'The Persecution of the Jews', Times (London),
16 May 1891; A. Ablagon to AIU, 19 October 1898, AIU, Grece VIII.B.34,
Schaki (Larissa) to AIU, 23 August/4 September 1893, BAIU, Grece,
Deuxieme Serie, no.18, 1er et 2e Semestre, 1893; Elia Fraggi (Larissa)
to AIU, 5 June 1874, AIU Grece, I.C.22; Larissa AIU represantatives
to AIU, 23 June/5 July 1897, AIU, Grece II.B.16; Jewish Community of
Canea leaders in Samos to AIU, 3 March, 1897, AIU, Grece VIII.B.35.
[26] Pearl L. Preschel, The Jews of Corfu (Greece), Unpublished Ph.D.
dissertation, New York University, 1984.
[27] Leon Sciaky, Farewell to Salonica: Portrait of an Era (New York, 1946);
Edgar Morin, Vidal et les Siens (Paris, Seuil, 1989), 55-67; Paul Dumont,
'The Social Structure of the Jewish Community of Salonica at the end of
the nineteenth century', Southeastern Europe V (1979), 33-72; Galante,
Turcs VIII, 18-21; Rodrigue, pp.178-80.
[28] A. Cohen, Ecole Secondaire Moise Allatini, Salonica, to AIU, Paris,
no.7745/7, 4 December 1912, in AIU Archives I C 49.
[29] Mizrahi, President of AIU at Salonica, to AIU (Paris), no.2704/3,
25 July 1913. In AIU Archives (Paris) I C 51.
( AIU = Alliance Israelite Universelle, Paris. )
Murat Kutan
Raman <ra...@sprynet.com> wrote:
> The Kurds deserve everything that is coming to them. It was
> the Kurds who allied themselves with the Turks to murder two
Sure blame the victims for your criminal grandparents' genocidal actions.
To be exact, 900,000 Kurdish people were slaughtered by the Armenians in
Russian Armenia and Eastern Anatolia between 1914 and 1916 (see below
Kurdish scholars).
'Kill Turks and Kurds wherever you find them and in
whatever circumstances you find them. Turkish children
also should be killed as they form a danger to the
Armenian nation.' (Hamparsum Boyadjian - 1914)[1]
[1] M. Varandian, "History of the Dashnaktsutiun," p. 85.
Source: Hassan Arfa, "The Kurds," (London, 1968), pp. 25-26.
"When the Russian armies invaded Turkey after the Sarikamish massacres
of 1914, their columns were preceded by battalions of Armenian Army,
both from the Caucasus and from Turkey. One of these was commanded by
a certain Andranik, a blood-thirsty adventurer. These Armenians committed
all kinds of murders, more than six hundred thousand Kurds being killed
by the Armenians between 1915 and 1916 in the eastern vilayets of Turkey."
Well, again, this is a gross underestimation of the _total_ number
of Kurdish people massacred by the Armenians in Russian Armenia
and Eastern Anatolia. First off, _Arfa_ would fail to address the
Armenian genocide of more than 300,000 Kurdish people in Russian
Armenia as his book would solely focus on the Armenian extermination
of the Kurdish people in Eastern Anatolia between _1914 and 1916_.
Secondly, he would ignore the murder of 250,000 Kurdish people by
the Armenians in six _vilayets_ between 1917 and 1919. I would
strongly recommend the following scholarly sources regarding the
_total_ number of Kurdish people massacred by the Armenians in _both_
Russian Armenia and Eastern Anatolia between 1914 and 1920.
_Struggle for Transcaucasia_ by Feruz Kazemzadeh, Yale University
Press, New Haven, Conn., 1951
(Osmanli Devleti, Dahiliye Nezareti); _Aspirations et Agissements
Revolutionnaires des Comites Armeniens avant et apres la proclamation
de la Constitution Ottomane,_ (Istanbul, 1919).
----; _Ermeni Komitelerinin Amal ve Hareket-i Ihtilaliyesi: Ilan-i
Mesrutiyetten Evvel ve Sonra,_ (Istanbul, 1920).
(Osmanli Devleti, Harbiye Nezareti); _Islam Ahalinin Ducar Olduklari
Mezalim Hakkinda Vesaike Mustenid Malumat,_ (Istanbul, 1919).
Turkozu, H. K. (ed.); _Osmanli ve Sovyet Belgeleriyle Ermeni Mezalimi,_
(Ankara, 1982).
Newt...@msn.com
return, and be counted in the consensus.
Francois
Michel Boufadel
>Joseph Mouhanna wrote:
>>
>> > c4...@jupiter.sun.csd.unb.ca (KAROUNI A) writes:
>> > 2) A steady if not a decrease in the rest of the population, christians,
>> > druze. Christians have been allowed more freedom of movement during
>> > turkish colonialism, and their flow of imigration to Europe and
>> > North/South America has always been very active. The 1975 civil war
>> > sent even more peoples out.
>>
>> "Christians were allowed more freedom of movement during Turkish
>> colonialism", this actually translates into the following: more
>> than 50% of the Christian populaion was starved to death under
>> Turkish rule and that pushed large numbers of Christian Lebanese
>> to flee Lebanon (under fire) to North and South America (mostly).
>> I've heard many stories of people taking makeshift rafts from
>> Lebanon to Cyprus to escape. This is your definition of "freedom
>> of movement". I'm glad that your vision is not at all clouded
>> by that sectarian sludge that contributed to the 1975 war in
>> Lebanon which unlike what you claim was anything but civil and
>> some Lebanese even think of it as a fight for survival against
>> the foreign powers that tried to destroy Lebanon for their own
>> gain, and later against some Lebanese groups who took advantage
>> of the situation to settle old scores.
>> Joseph
>
>population to death, I'm so surprised! You mean like they massacred
>a nation, are a vermin, pure and simple. Ever since they arrived
>from Mongolia, they have done nothing but murder, rape, pillage,
>etc., etc... If the Turks were not Moslem, they would be murdering
>plenty of Moslems too, I assure you.
>
>Raman
It seems that you are an ignorant person full of hate. I am among the
people who insists on learning from history and to never forget facts
that shaped us. However, you have to put things in historical perspective.
t
Going back to the time of arrival of turks, tell me which angelic dynasty
was rulling before they arrived. And if you do not know, there is a
LARGE difference between the Ottoman Empire which was based on Califa
and todays Turkey.
Michel
M
Yalin Ekici
Raman <ra...@sprynet.com>
>The Turks, as a nation, are a vermin, pure and simple.
Is that why your criminal grandparents massacred defenseless Muslim
women, children and elderly people in Eastern Anatolia in 1914? No
wonder your Nazi parents also participated in the extermination of
the European Jewry.
Christopher Walker, _Armenia_ New York (St. Martin's Press), 1980.
This generally pro-Armenian work contains the following information
of direct relevance to the Nazi Holocaust:
1) Dro (the Butcher), the former dictator of ex-Russian/Soviet Armenia
and the architect of the Armenian genocide of 2.5 million Muslims in
Russian Armenia and Eastern Anatolia, the most respected of Nazi Armenian
leaders, established an Armenian Provisional Republic in Berlin during
World War II;
2) this _provisional government_ fully endorsed and espoused the social
theories of the Nazis, declared themselves and all Armenians to be members
of the Aryan _Super-Race_;
3) they published an Anti-Semitic, racist journal, thereby aligning
themselves with the Nazis and their efforts to exterminate the Jews;
and,
4) they mobilized an Armenian Army of up to 30,000 members which fought
side by side with the Wehrmacht.
_San Francisco Chronicle_ (December 11, 1983)
(Editor's Mailbox - Section B)
_We have first hand information and evidence of Armenian
atrocities against our people (Jews). Members of our family
witnessed the murder of 148 members of our family near Erzurum,
Turkey, by Armenian neighbors, bent on destroying anything and
anybody remotely Jewish and/or Muslim...Armenians were in league
with Hitler in the last war, on his premise to grant themselves
government if, in return, the Armenians would help exterminate
Jews. Armenians were also hearty proponents of the anti-Semitic
acts in league with the Russian Communists._
Signed Elihu Ben Levi, Vacaville, California.
Yalin Ekici
Yalin Ekici
Raman <ra...@sprynet.com>
>Why doesn't the Jewish Times report that, what's their agenda?
They don't report _Jewish murdering of 16 million Nazi Armenians
and Germans_ and _your figment of imagination_, either. Poor soul.
BTW, were unaware that _Dro the Butcher_ and _Hitler_ were Muslim.
No wonder, the Nazi Armenian publication in Germany, Hairenik (an
official mouthpiece for the ex-Soviet Armenian Government), carried
statements as follows:[*]
_Sometimes it is difficult to eradicate these poisonous elements [the
Jews] when they have struck deep root like a chronic disease, and when
it becomes necessary for a people [the Nazis] to eradicate them in an
uncommon method, these attempts are regarded as revolutionary. During
the surgical operation, the flow of blood is a natural thing._[**]
[*] James G. Mandalian, _Dro, Drastamat Kanayan,_ in the 'Armenian
Review,' a Quarterly by the Hairenik Association, Inc., Summer:
June 1957, Vol. X, No. 2-38.
[**] Quoted by James Mandalian: _Who Are The Dashnags?_ Boston,
Hairenik Press, 1944, pp. 13-4.
_These European Armenians, with headquarters in Berlin, appealed
to, and bargained with Hitler's emissaries for an 'independent'
Armenian state. That they had to bootlick Nazi masters goes without
saying. That, as potential officials of a puppet Nazi state, they
would have assumed the infamous roles of the Paveliches, Antonescus,
Lavals, Tisos or Vidkun Quislings was also a foregone conclusion.
Once committed to it, there was no alternative to the price for
'independence' except subservience to Hitler._[*]
[*] Arthur Derounian under the pseudonym 'John Roy Carlson,'
_Armenian Affairs_ a Quarterly Journal of Armenian Studies,
Winter 1949-50, p. 18.
Yalin Ekici
Raman <ra...@sprynet.com>
>Who's to say that the Bosnians are not the same vermin from which
>they got their religion from, the Turks. Can you blame the Serbians
>for identifying the Bosnians with the Turks and its attrocities
>against Christian Serbians and Croatians. Do you think, for a minute,
I've already started to like that beacon of _Armenian Church_ fraud
who is desperately trying to cover up his criminal grandparents' genocidal
actions against the defenseless Muslim and Sephardic Jewish people. Let
us start off with _Turkish 101_.
NEW GENOCIDE IN BOSNIA-HERZEGOVINA
During World War II, Bosnians were subjected to the worst geno-
cide in their history. Over 120,000 Muslims were slaughtered.
Women were molested, raped, tortured, disfigured and mutilated.
Little Children were smashed against rocks and burned alive.
Young, old and frail men were hacked to death.
Today, history is being repeated. This time to punish the people
of Bosnia-Herzegovina for the mere reason that they opted for in-
dependence from the Serbian dominated Yugoslav Federation and
claimed their birth right to self-rule and self-determination.
While the whole world, under the "NEW WORLD ORDER", watches this
naked aggression against the innocent men, women and children,
the atrocities continue during which
* City of sarajevo is besieged
* Concentration camps are established
* Thousands of people are forcibly transported to these camps in
cattle cars
* Forced deportation of civilians continues
* people are forced to sign documents renouncing their property
* Thousands of innocent civilians have been maimed and killed
* Thousands have taken asylum as strangers in strange places
* Tens of Thousands have become displaced in their own country
* Convoys carrying orphans children are shelled
* Mourners in graveyards are targeted and killed
There are chilling similarities between the events of 1942 and
1992, then and now. A new genocide of the Bosnians is in the mak-
ing. Don't watch this genocide, the tide of human misery, in
silence. The innocent civilians in Bosnia-Herzegovina immediately
need your moral, material and financial support.
HCI is dedicated to help these innocent victims in their dismal
plight. Your generous contribution to this worty cause is ur-
gently needed. HCI guarantees you TAX DEDUCTIBLE donations to
reach the needy through its most efficient, established and reli-
able contacts.
Act now. Be part of this humble, humanitarian effort. Please
donate generously to
HCI - Bosnia Fund
P.O. Box 3984, Station C
Ottawa, Ont. CANADA
K1Y 4P2
Tel: (613) 234-4585
Fax: (613) 234-4775
Charitable Registration No. 0576488-09
This article was written by Rachael Pine, director of international
programs at the center for reproductive Law and Policy, NY.
These are some excerpts from the article.
"... At least 40 young Muslim women from a small Bosnian town have
reported that Serbian soldiers raped them - sometimes repeatedly,
sometimes in groups - indicating they were under direct orders to do so.
One Croatian physician estimated that hundreds if not thousands of women
share this fate. Now in refugee centers and hospitals in Bosnia and
Croatia, these women have lost their families, their homes, their
futures. Many believe they have been spoiled for marriage and motherhood
- no longer virgins in a culture that condemns premarital sex and
ostracizes even those who have been forced into sexual encounters. Still
others will face the further disgrace of rape-induced pregnancy. Most
will not come forward, finding public shame too costly a price for the
slim chance at a legal abortion under the restrictive laws and attitudes
of former Yugoslav republics.
One example, reported on USA TODAY'S front page, is the case of 17-year
old Marianna, who was raped by guards in a Serbian detention camp as
many as 10 times a day. During the rapes, she was reportedly told, "Now
you will have Serbian babies for the rest of your life." After escaping
this torture, she laymotionless in a hospital in Zagreb, Croatia, unable
to eat and in "total shock". Her doctor was described as saying an
abortion would be "murder", though he indicated the hospital would
arrange for an adoption.
Marianna is not alone. Physicians at her hospital confirmed that
hospital committees refuse abortion requests even for these women because
there is no "proof" that the women have been raped. But the absence of
"proof" is itself a consequence of prolonged detention, designed to
ensure the success of "ethnic cleansing" through forced impregnation.
Serb Learnt Rape and Murder - A Report by Richard Beeston The Times (UK)
(14/12/92)
===========================
Borislav Herak delivered his gruesome confession of murder, rape and butchery
in a clipped and awkward monotone which is as painful to watch as his story is
to hear.
He learned hand-to-hand combat using live pigs and was taught how to throw
them, hold them down and slit their throats. Later he was told to practise
on Bosnian prisoners of war and rape and kill young Bosnian women.
"I did it because I had no choice, I had to obey orders," said the captured
Serb fighter, whose deeds and his mitigation of them are chillingly reminiscent
of the last time war crimes were committed in central Europe, half a century
ago. The account of his six months service with Serbian forces north of
Sarajevo is expected next month to be the basis for the war crimes trial of
the conflict in the former Yugoslavia, when he will be charged with genocide,
mass murder, rape and looting under Article 41 of the Yugoslav criminal code.
His eyewitness testimony, the first by a participant in the notorious
"ethnic cleaning", should also offer a unique insight into how Serb forces
killed tens of thousands of Muslim and Croat Bosnians and drove hundreds
of thousands from their homes in the past eight months of fighting.
The most disturbing episodes of Mr Heraks's activities began in June,
soon after he left his home in Sarajevo and joined the Biochanska
Serb Militia where he received his basic training. The first hint
of the sort of work expected of him emerged when he and other Bosnian
Serb volunteers were shown a demonstration of hand-to-hand combat
using pigs. Soon afterwards, in the village of Donja Bioca, he was
ordered to repeat the exercise on Bosnian Muslims, Mr Herak, 21,
said in an interview at Sarajevo's Victor Bubanj military prison.
He killed three prisoners with a 6in hunting blade, an episode he
recounted in a detached, almost dispassionate fasion: "They did not
resist, but one of them told me he had a wife and two children. His
name was Ahmed Ziad Osman." Mr Herak volunteered the information
readily and insisted that he had not been coerced or mistreated during
his captivity. Professor Aida Hasimbegovic, a clinical psychologist,
said he displayed no severe psycological problems that would make him
unfit to stand trial.
That impression was confirmed when he described in a clear manner the grim
saga of how his unit took part in the "cleansing" of the Muslim village
of Ahatovic, north of Sarajevo, last summer. This time he used a Kalash-
nikov rifle to shoot 20 civilians and the joined other Serbs in looting
homes.
"The order was that nobody should stay alive, we should kill everybody,"
he said, adding that the instructions had come down the Serbian chain
of command from the area commander in the town of Ilijas. "We did not
have any choice. He told us what had to be done, and we did it."
In probably the most gruesome episode, he said that Serb fighters
were encouraged to rape young Bosnians at a prison turned military
brothel where inmates were killed to make way for newcomers.
"They told us for the sake of Serbian morale that we should go to
the prison at the Sonja Motel in Vogosca where there were 80 to 90
girls", he said, speaking through an interpreter. "I went about 10
times in all, maybe two or three times a week. I was told by Miro
Vukovic, [the Serbian Commander of the brothel] to take the girls
away and kill them because there was no room to keep them or enough
food to feed them.
"I raped the girls in the motel and then took them to the Zuc hill
[north of Sarajevo], shot them and hid their bodies. I raped 10 girls
in their twenties and killed six of them," he said, identifying
the victims by name - Anissa, Fatima, Maira, Sabina and Senada.
He insisted that he was forced to act against his will because of
the threat of punishment by his superiors. He added that Serb commanders
continually told their men that Bosnian troops were performing worse
against Serbian civilians and that they were in a fight for their
survival.
What makes his account disturbing is the clear impression that his actions
were by no means an isolated but part of a widespread practise. The prospect
of trial and execution did not daunt the young prisoner, who said that
he looked forward to the judgement because he could no longer live with
what he had done. But he doubted it would have any impact in preventing
further brutalities.
"All I know is that while I am here sitting and talking, these same horrors
are going on somewhere else," he said.
Yalin Ekici
Raman <ra...@sprynet.com>
> The Kurds deserve everything that is coming to them. It was
>the Kurds who allied themselves with the Turks to murder two
>thirds of the Assyrian nation in 1918. The Assyrians were the
Now, this is a novelty. Your statement that _Armenians did not
massacre Kurds_ is just as ridiculous as the claim that Muslims/Jews
ever murdered an innocent Armenian civilian.
Fortunately, the method of today's _Armenian revisionists,_ the
deniers of the Armenian extermination of 2.5 million Muslims and
Sephardic Jews, has often been analyzed (see Prof J. C. Hurewitz,
Prof B. Lewis, Prof P. Golden, Prof T. Naff, Prof R. Jennings,
Prof H. Reed, to name a few).
Still, that blind spot is typical of historical revisionists and
Muslim/Jewish Holocaust apologists and those who try to cover up
and apologize for the unspeakable Armenian crimes.
For the record, 'davudoglu the crook alike':
1. Armenians exterminated 2.5 million Muslim and Sephardic Jewish
people in Russian Armenia and Eastern Anatolia between 1914 and 1920.
2. Armenians fully participated in the extermination of the European
Jewry in 1941.
3. Armenians exterminated 1.3 million Azeri people between 1988 and
1993 and 25% of Azeri soil is now occupied by the Russian Armenian
Government.
4. Armenians are in the process of exterminating the entire Muslim
population of Karabag.
I am really sorry if those facts bother you.
And, as a human being, I assert my view that the creation of fascist
puppet Russian Armenia was a crime against humanity.
Now, what is next? Denying the publicly available _U.S. Archival Material_
about the Armenian slaughtering of 2.5 million Muslims and Jews?
_Bristol Papers_, General Correspondence: Container #32: Bristol
to Bradley Letter of September 14, 1920.
_I have it from absolute first-hand information that the
Armenians in the Caucasus attacked Tartar (Muslim) villages
that are utterly defenseless and bombarded these villages
with artillery and they murder the inhabitants, pillage the
village and often burn the village._
"U.S. Library of Congress" _Bristol Papers_ - General
Correspondence Container #34.
_While the Dashnaks [x-Russian Armenian Government] were in
power they did everything in the world to keep the pot boiling
by attacking Kurds, Turks and Tartars; by committing outrages
against the Moslems; by massacring the Moslems; and robbing and
destroying their homes. During the last two years the Armenians
in Russian Caucasus have shown no ability to govern themselves
and especially no ability to govern or handle other races under
their power._
Joseph Mouhanna
> Joseph Mouhanna wrote:
[.........................]
> etc., etc... If the Turks were not Moslem, they would be murdering
> plenty of Moslems too, I assure you.
That was the Ottoman empire. This was more than 75 years
ago, and yes the Ottoman Empire did not discriminate much
in Lebanon between Christians and Muslims when it came to
starving people and other atrocities. The only problem
with the Turkish governments since WW1 is that they are
too embarrassed by all the stuff that was done before, so
they want to pretend that it never happened.
Maan M. Hamze
>That was the Ottoman empire. This was more than 75 years
>ago, and yes the Ottoman Empire did not discriminate much
>in Lebanon between Christians and Muslims when it came to
>starving people and other atrocities. The only problem
>with the Turkish governments since WW1 is that they are
>too embarrassed by all the stuff that was done before, so
>they want to pretend that it never happened.
A good point Joseph. That is the problem with lots of states. They
just want to forget their "rosy" histories, and rewrite everything
that is based on what "beautiful guys they are." That is why I made
sure in another posting to say that the Ottoman Empire played a
progressive role up to the 17th century. After that, I'll leave it to
your imagination!
Maan M. Hamze
http://leb.net/~mmhamze
mmh...@mail.utexas.edu
Joseph Mouhanna
[.....................]
> A good point Joseph. That is the problem with lots of states. They
> just want to forget their "rosy" histories, and rewrite everything
> that is based on what "beautiful guys they are." That is why I made
> sure in another posting to say that the Ottoman Empire played a
> progressive role up to the 17th century. After that, I'll leave it to
> your imagination!
I've been to T*urkey several times. I've never run into
anyone like the fanatics that pop up on SCL and harrass
other groups with their warped view of history. Like
I said before, those who are less than 85 years of age
do not know much about the crimes of the O*t*t*oman
empire as their governments over the years erased that
chapter of their bloody history. Some people I discussed
this with (closer to my age) think that there was a war
and Turkey lost and the victims were all soldiers.
This is somewhat similar to the situation in Israel today.
You have a new generation of Israelis who were not
connected to the events of 1948. They are taught about
civilization and morals in their schools, but sue to
the lack of accountability, they have major problems
understanding how they also bear responsibility for
the violence taking place around them today.
Joseph
Raman
>
> Raman <ra...@sprynet.com> wrote:
>
> >Oh gee, Turks starving more than 50% of the Lebanese Christian
> >population to death, I'm so surprised! You mean like they massacred
> >millions of Assyrian,
>
> This is indeed amusing as if there is such people. You mean those
> criminals who raped, tortured, back-stabbed and decimated millions
> of defenseless Muslim and Jewish people in 1914?
You are not only a criminal of the worst kind, but also a liar.
The Assyrians of the Hakkiari region in Turkey and in north Iraq who
were envolved in the struggle of 1914-1918, numbered in the hundreds
of thousands. After centuries of massacres by the Turks and Kurds.
Here are some facts about your ancestors, the Kurds, and Arabs murdering,
torturing, and defiling Assyrian Christians throughout history. First,
a warning, the following may be dangerous to your already paranoidal
and schitsophrenic personality, read at your own risk. You are a Mongol
obsessed with violence which has been and will be your downfall.
1295 A.D. Kazan Khan, a mongol ruler, orders the demolition of
churches in Mesopotamia. Mar Yabhalaha, Patriach of the Assyrian
Church, is imprisoned and tortured by Arabs; the church of Mar Shalita
is destroyed. Here is a description of how the Holy Patriach was
treated: The Catholicos [Patriarch] was buffeted the whole night long
by those who had seized him. And in respect of the venerable men who
were with him, the Arabs tied some of them up naked with ropes; others
cast aside their apparel and took to flight, and others cast
themselves down from high places and perished. And they suspended the
Catholicos by a rope, head downwards, and they took a cloth used for
cleaning and they put ashes in it, and tied it over his mouth, and one
prodded him in the breast with a skewer, saying, 'abandon this faith
of yours so that you will not die; become a Muslim and you shall be
saved'. And then a great tumult took place, and the peoples of the
Arabs came with a great rush to destroy the great church of Mar
Shalita, the holy martyr, and they destroyed it.
1310 A.D. Arabs, with the help of the Mongols, capture Arbela and
massacre all of the inhabitants that could not be sold as slaves. Here
is a description of the event: 'And they [Assyrians] went out at
daybreak on the Sabbath, with their sons, and daughters, and wives,
without any weapon, and without a sword, and without a knife, and when
the wicked people of the Arabs saw that they had come down, they were
filled with a fierce passion, and they drew their swords, and they
slew them from the greatest of them to the least, without pity and
without fear'. Of those who held out in the fortress: 'Famine
vanquished them completely! Widows stretched out their hands and wept,
and there was none to bind up what was broken. And there was
absolutely no one to bury the dead. Who was there who had strength
enough to dig a grave? Orphans died on the dung heaps. Others fell
down dead in their houses and dried up, and others hurled themselves
down from the wall, and those who were below received them on
their swords, and hacked them to pieces. Their visages are blacker
than ashes, and they cannot be recognized. Their skins have shrunk on
their bones, and have dried up, and become like wood. Far happier are
those who have been slain by the sword than those who have been slain
by hunger'.
1369-1400 A.D. Timurlane, a Turkish tribal leader, "a fanatical
Muhammadan who was bitterly opposed to everything Christian". In 1393
Timurlane the Muslim attacked the Assyrian city of Tikreet, and the
entire city was devastated and all of inhabitants killed. He continued
to march north, plundering and murdering thousands of Christians along
the way.
1020-1025 A.D. During the Patriarchate of Mar Ishuyabh IV, Kurds
attacked Edessa and carried off 3000 captives.
1072-1092 A.D. During the Patriarchate of Mar Abdisho II, the
soldiers of Sultan Toghrel Beg sacked the monastery of Kamul and
killed 20 monks.
1258 A.D. Although Hulaku Khan spared the Christians of Baghdad when
he sacked the city, he was persuaded by some Arabs that the Assyrians
of Tikreet were disloyal. Consequently, one of every twenty men was
put to death and his children were taken prisoner.
1285 A.D. Arabs and Kurds attack Arbela, killing, looting and
destroying the houses of the Assyrian inhabitants. Isa Bar Mokates
(an Assyrian), the governor of Arbela, is hanged by his feet and
burned alive.
How do you suppose the Assyrians killed millions of Jews and Moslems?
Firstly, there were only a few jewish villages in the Hakkiari region,
the country where modern Assyrians lived amongst the Turks and Kurds.
Secondly, the Assyrians envolved in the struggle of 1914-1918 could not have
possibly killed millions of Moslems, because they themselves numbered only
hundreds of thousands, including women and children. So your logic fails here,
but I'm not surprised, you are a Turk, a Mongol. You who pulls out fake
reference after reference from your posterior, because you cannot formulate
your own logical thoughts. Where are your references for your kidergarten
level statements. Your repetitive posts of propoganda are typical of a guilt
ridden type personality. It is you and your kind who are criminal,
you poor excuse for a human beign, who even denies the existence of another
living people. You are a liar, you cannot deny that the massacre of two
thirds of the Assyrian nation happened in 1914-1918. Why do you think
the Assyrians left Hakkiari in 1918, their home for centuries, where
they lived as an independant nation.
>
> >Armenian,
>
> Now, the _soap opera_ is getting better. Hmmm. Now, are you calling Armenians
> _pathological liars_ about their slaughtering of 2.5 million Muslims and
> Sephardic Jews?
No, I'm calling you a pathetic liar, and a racist, and an ignorant Mongol.
The Armenians defended themselves against violent moslems who have nothing on their
minds except to exterminate Christians, jihad. If Armenia, today, is defending
itself from a violent breed of people such as yourself, good for them.
> >and Greek Christians.
>
> No kidding. Sorry for kicking their tender butt...How about those _mini
> skirts_ in soldiers?
Oh, that's so appropriate coming from someone from Turkey, the homosexual
capital of the world.
> Murat Kutan
>
> <<We have never denied the Armenian crime of genocide
> inflicted upon 2.5 million Muslim people between 1914
> and 1920.>> {A. Zahorian -- 'Voices of Agonies', p. 91}
Do you really take pride in the fact that Israel sides with your people
because Israel knows that your kind will never amount to anything,
and therefore, will never be a threat to Israel. But then again,
I shouldn't expect too much from you.
Raman
Murat Kutan
jose...@chinook.halcyon.com (Joseph Mouhanna) wrote:
>I've been to T*urkey several times. I've never run into
>anyone like the fanatics that pop up on SCL and harrass
>other groups with their warped view of history. Like
You almost fooled us. During the First World War and the ensuing
years - 1914-1920, the Armenians through a premeditated and systematic
genocide, tried to complete its centuries-old policy of annihilation
against the Turks and Kurds by savagely murdering 2.5 million Muslims
and Jews and deporting the rest from their 1,000 year homeland.
The attempt at genocide is justly regarded as the first instance
of Genocide in the 20th Century acted upon an entire people.
This event is incontrovertibly proven by historians, government
and international political leaders, such as U.S. Ambassador Mark
Bristol, William Langer, Ambassador Layard, James Barton, Stanford
Shaw, Arthur Chester, John Dewey, Robert Dunn, Papazian, Nalbandian,
Ohanus Appressian, Jorge Blanco Villalta, General Nikolayef, General
Bolkovitinof, General Prjevalski, General Odiselidze, Meguerditche,
Kazimir, Motayef, Twerdokhlebof, General Hamelin, Rawlinson, Avetis
Aharonian, Dr. Stephan Eshnanie, Varandian, General Bronsart, Arfa,
Dr. Hamlin, Boghos Nubar, Sarkis Atamian, Katchaznouni, Rachel
Bortnick, Halide Edip, McCarthy, W. B. Allen, Paul Muratoff and many
others.
J. C. Hurewitz, Professor of Government Emeritus, Former Director of
the Middle East Institute (1971-1984), Columbia University.
Bernard Lewis, Cleveland E. Dodge Professor of Near Eastern History,
Princeton University.
Halil Inalcik, University Professor of Ottoman History & Member of
the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, University of Chicago.
Peter Golden, Professor of History, Rutgers University, Newark.
Stanford Shaw, Professor of History, University of California at
Los Angeles.
Thomas Naff, Professor of History & Director, Middle East Research
Institute, University of Pennsylvania.
Ronald Jennings, Associate Professor of History & Asian Studies,
University of Illinois.
Howard Reed, Professor of History, University of Connecticut.
Dankwart Rustow, Distinguished University Professor of Political
Science, City University Graduate School, New York.
John Woods, Associate Professor of Middle Eastern History,
University of Chicago.
John Masson Smith, Jr., Professor of History, University of
California at Berkeley.
Alan Fisher, Professor of History, Michigan State University.
Avigdor Levy, Professor of History, Brandeis University.
Andreas G. E. Bodrogligetti, Professor of History, University of California
at Los Angeles.
Kathleen Burrill, Associate Professor of Turkish Studies, Columbia University.
Roderic Davison, Professor of History, George Washington University.
Walter Denny, Professor of History, University of Massachusetts.
Caesar Farah, Professor of History, University of Minnesota.
Tom Goodrich, Professor of History, Indiana University of Pennsylvania.
Tibor Halasi-Kun, Professor Emeritus of Turkish Studies, Columbia University.
Justin McCarthy, Professor of History, University of Louisville.
Jon Mandaville, Professor of History, Portland State University (Oregon).
Robert Olson, Professor of History, University of Kentucky.
Madeline Zilfi, Professor of History, University of Maryland.
James Stewart-Robinson, Professor of Turkish Studies, University of Michigan.
.......so the list goes on and on and on.....
The Turkish historic homeland, emptied of its native population
until today, remains occupied by the Soviet Armenian Government.
Pursuing a long-range plan, the x-Soviet Armenian Government with
that brutal action, sought to exterminate its Muslim population
once and for all, the closing chapter on the Turkish and Kurdish
Question.
- Of particular importance, we would like to stress the responsibility
that the x-Soviet Union has towards the Muslim people and the Turkish
and Kurdish Case, given the fact that x-Soviet Union has helped the
x-Soviet Armenian Government in their extermination of the Muslim
people.
Murat Kutan
Raman <ra...@sprynet.com> wrote:
>> >Oh gee, Turks starving more than 50% of the Lebanese Christian
>> >population to death, I'm so surprised! You mean like they massacred
>> >millions of Assyrian,
>>
>> This is indeed amusing as if there is such people. You mean those
>> criminals who raped, tortured, back-stabbed and decimated millions
>> of defenseless Muslim and Jewish people in 1914?
>You are not only a criminal of the worst kind, but also a liar.
Forgive me if my questions look like from kindergarden, 'davudoglu
the crook alike' of_ Armenian Church-SDPA_, however, I am really new
about the _Armenian Church-SDPA_ circus area. So, please help. Now,
are you suggesting that _U.S. Archives_ are controlled by the Turks?
Are you implying that the entire _non-Muslim_ scholarly world is
controlled by the Turks? When will the cowardly Armenians pay for
their crime of genocide they perpetrated against 2.5 million Muslims
and Sephardic Jews in 1914? Anxiously awaiting...
John Dewey, _The Turkish Tragedy_ The New Republic, Volume 40,
November 12, 1928, pp. 268-269.
_Armenians boasted of having raised an army of one hundred and
fifty thousand men to fight a civil war, and that they burned
at least a hundred Muslim villages and exterminated their
population._
G. Hamelin, _Les Armees Francaises au Levant_ February 2, 1919,
Vol. 1, p. 122.
_Armenians burned and destroyed many Muslim villages in their
advance and practically all Muslim villages in their retreat
from Marash._
Basar, H. K. (ed.); _Muslim and Russian Documents on the Genocide
Committed by the Armenians Against the Muslims_
1981.
p. 22.
_The atrocities and massacres which have been committed for a long time
against the Muslim population within the Armenian Republic have been
confirmed with very accurate information, and the observations made by
Rawlinson, the British representative in Erzurum, have confirmed that
these atrocities are being committed by the Armenians. The United States
delegation of General Harbord has seen the thousands of refugees who came
to take refuge with Kazim Karabekir's soldiers, hungry and miserable,
their children and wives, their properties destroyed, and the delegation
was a witness to the cruelties. Many Muslim villages have been destroyed
by the soldiers of Armenian troops armed with cannons and machine guns
before the eyes of Karabekir's troops and the people. When it was hoped
that this operation would end, unfortunately since the beginning of
February the cruelties inflicted on the Muslim population of the region
of Shuraghel, Akpazar, Zarshad, and Childir have increased. According
to documented information, 28 Muslim villages have been destroyed in the
aforementioned region, more than 60,000 people have been slaughtered,
many possessions and livestock have been seized, young Muslim women
have been taken to Kars and Gumru, thousands of women and children who
were able to flee their villages were beaten, raped and massacred in the
mountains, and this aggression against the properties, lives, chastity
and honour of the Muslims continued. It was the responsibility of the
Armenian Government that the cruelties and massacres be stopped in order
to alleviate the tensions of Muslim public opinion due to the atrocities
committed by the Armenians, that the possessions taken from the Muslims
be returned and that indemnities be paid, that the properties, lives,
and honour of the Muslims be protected._
Avetis Aharonian, _From Sardarapat to Sevres and Lausanne_
Armenian Review, Vol. 16, No. 3-63, Autumn,
Sep. 1963, pp. 47-57.
p. 52 (second paragraph).
_Your three Armenian chiefs, Dro, Hamazasp and Kulkhandanian are
the ringleaders of the bands which have destroyed Muslim villages
and have staged massacres in Zangezour, Surmali, Etchmiadzin, and
Zangibasar. This is intolerable. Look - and here he pointed to a
file of official documents on the table - look at this, here in
December are the reports of the last few months concerning ruined
Muslim villages which my representative Wardrop has sent me. The
official Tartar communique speaks of the destruction of 300 villages
by the Armenians._
p. 54 (fifth paragraph).
_Yes, of course. I repeat, until this massacre of the Muslim is
stopped and the three chiefs are not removed from your military
leadership I hardly think we can supply you arms and ammunition._
_It is the armed bands led by Dro, Hamazasp and Kulkhandanian who
during the past months have raided and destroyed many Muslim villages
in the regions of Surmali, Etchmiadzin, Zangezour, and Zangibasar.
There are official charges of massacres by the Armenians._
Doc. Dr. Azmi Suslu, _Russian View on the Genocide Committed by
the Armenians Against the Muslims_ 1987,
pp. 45-53.
_The killings were organized by the doctors and the employers, and
the act of killing was committed solely by the Armenian Army. More
than eighty thousand unarmed and defenceless Muslims have been massacred
in Erzincan and Erzurum. Large holes were dug and the defenceless
Muslims were slaughtered like animals next to the holes. Later, the
murdered Muslims were thrown into the holes. The Armenian who stood
near the hole would say when the hole was filled with the corpses:
'Seventy dead bodies, well, this hole can take ten more.' Thus ten
more Muslims would be cut into pieces, thrown into the hole, and when
the hole was full it would be covered over with soil.
The Armenians responsible for the act of murdering would frequently
fill a house with eighty Muslims, and cut their heads off one by one.
Following the Erzincan massacre, the Armenians began to withdraw
towards Erzurum... The Armenian Army among those who withdrew to
Erzurum from Erzincan raided the Moslem villages on the road, and
destroyed the entire population, together with the villages._
A. Rawlinson, _Adventures in the Near East_
Jonathan Cape, 30 Bedford Square, London, 1934
(First published 1923) (287 pages).
_Memoirs of a British officer who witnessed the
Armenian genocide of 2.5 million Muslim people_
p. 184 (second paragraph)
_I had received further very definite information of horrors
that had been committed by the Armenian soldiery in Kars Plain,
and as I had been able to judge of their want of discipline by
their treatment of my own detached parties, I had wired to Tiflis
from Zivin that 'in the interests of humanity the Armenians should
not be left in independent command of the Moslem population, as,
their troops being without discipline and not under effective control,
atrocities were constantly being committed, for which we should with
justice eventually be held to be morally responsible'_