As the world continues to look on in dismay at the barbaric atrocities
committed against Christian minorities by the Islamic State -- the
self-proclaimed new “caliphate” -- today, April 24, marks the genocide
of Armenian and other Christian minorities by Turkey’s Islamic Ottoman
Empire, the last caliphate.
Most
American historians who have examined the question agree that what the Armenians experienced was a deliberate, calculated genocide:
More than one million Armenians perished as the result of
execution, starvation, disease, the harsh environment, and physical
abuse. A people who lived in eastern Turkey for nearly 3,000 years [that
is, 2,500 years before the Islamic Turks invaded and occupied Anatolia,
now known as “Turkey”] lost its homeland and was profoundly decimated
in the first large-scale genocide of the twentieth century. At the
beginning of 1915 there were some two million Armenians within Turkey;
today there are fewer than 60,000.
One-and-a-half million Armenians were eradicated. If early 20
th century
Turkey had had the apparatuses and technology to execute in mass --
such as 1940s Germany’s gas chambers -- the entire Armenian population
could well have been annihilated.
The atrocities suffered by Armenian and other Christian minorities are
too long to list. As occurs under the current caliphate -- the Islamic
State -- the Muslims of the Ottoman caliphate abducted, raped, and
slaughtered or sold countless Christian women and children on the Muslim
slave markets.
Armenian Christians were also sadistically tortured -- as Christians are today under the Islamic State.
On
FrontPage Magazine, Lloyd Billingsley writes:
Torture squads would apply red-hot irons, tear off flesh with hot
pincers, then pour boiled butter into the wounds. The soles of the feet
would be beaten, slashed, and laced with salt. Dr. Mehmed Reshid
tortured Armenians by nailing horseshoes to their feet and marching them
through the streets. He also crucified them on makeshift crosses.
The Muslims hacked Armenians to pieces and dashed infants on the
rocks before their mothers. They burned bodies not for sanitary reasons
but in search of gold coins they believed the Armenians had swallowed.
The Muslims also tore apart the victims’ feces in the search for gold.
U.S. consul Leslie Davis, a former attorney and journalist, documented
the Islamic zeal.
“We could all hear them piously calling upon Allah to bless them in
their efforts to kill the hated Christians,” Davis wrote. “Night after
night this same chant went up to heaven and day after day these Turks
carried on their bloody work.” Around Lake Goeljik, Davis wrote,
“thousands and thousands of Armenians, mostly innocent and helpless
women and children, were butchered on its shores and barbarously
mutilated.”
In her memoir,
Ravished Armenia,
Aurora Mardiganian described being raped and thrown into a harem --
akin to the experiences of today’s non-Muslims under Islamic State authority.
Unlike thousands of other Armenian girls who were killed after being defiled, she managed to escape. She recalls seeing
16 Christian girls crucified
in Malatia: “Each girl had been nailed alive upon her cross, spikes
through her feet and hands, only their hair blown by the wind, covered
their bodies.”
Because there is no dearth of evidence concerning the historical
reality of the Armenian Genocide, 44 U.S. States have recognized it.
South Dakota, which recently joined the list,
passed a resolution in February 2015 calling on
Congress and the president of the United States to formally and
consistently recognize and reaffirm the historical truth that the
atrocities committed against the Armenian, Greek, and other Christians
living in their historical homelands in Anatolia constituted genocide
and to work towards equitable, stable, and durable Armenian-Turkish
relations.
Turkey, of course, continues to deny that its forbears ever committed any genocide. As a group of American academics
wrote back in 1995,
Despite the vast amount of evidence that points to the historical
reality of the Armenian Genocide -- eyewitness accounts, official
archives, photographic evidence, the reports of diplomats, and the
testimony of survivors -- denial of the Armenian Genocide by successive
regimes in Turkey has gone on from 1915 to the present.
Nor is the Islamic government of Turkey alone in denying the genocide.
President Obama still refuses to acknowledge it -- even though when he
was running for office in 2008
he professed his:
firmly held conviction that the Armenian Genocide is not an
allegation, a personal opinion, or a point of view, but rather a widely
documented fact supported by an overwhelming body of historical
evidence. The facts are undeniable…. [A]s President I will recognize
the Armenian Genocide…. America deserves a leader who speaks truthfully
about the Armenian Genocide and responds forcefully to all genocides. I
intend to be that president.
Since taking office, Obama has refused to stand by his word. On
Tuesday, April 21, the White House announced that it would again, for
the seventh year since Obama’s pledge, not use the word “genocide,”
thereby disappointing many human rights activists.
Writes the
New York Times:
The president’s continued resistance to the word stood in contrast
to a stance by Pope Francis, who recently called the massacres “the
first genocide of the 20th century” and equated them to mass killings by
the Nazis and Soviets. The European Parliament, which first recognized
the genocide in 1987, passed a resolution last week calling on Turkey to
“come to terms with its past.”
The Armenian National Committee of America responded by saying: “The
president’s surrender represents a national disgrace. It is a betrayal
of the truth, and it is a betrayal of trust.” The Armenian Assembly of
America said “His failure to use the term genocide represents a major
blow for human rights advocates.”
But the president’s actions are consistent in other ways. Put
differently, it is no marvel that Obama denies the genocide of Armenian
and other Christian minorities at the hands of Muslims from a century
ago, when one considers that he denies the rampant Muslim persecution of
Christians taking place under --
and often partly because of -- his leadership today.
Raymond Ibrahim, a regular contributor to The Commentator, is author of Crucified Again: Exposing Islam’s New War on Christians
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