April 24th Commemorates 1.5 mil Armenians killed by Muslims
[ Bible Probe ]Posted by Bible Probe on July 01, 2005 at 09:24:53:
This bitter dispute is rooted in a violent period of world history, as Europe and much of the Middle East was torn apart by World War I, in the declining years of the Ottoman Empire.
Before the Nazi slaughtered 6 million Jews, before the Khmer Rouge killed 1.7 million of their fellow Cambodians, before Rwandan Hutus killed 800,000 ethnic Tutsis, the Armenians of Turkey endured mass slaughter of 1.5 million of its people at the hands of the Ottoman Turks. The centuries of Turkish rule reduced Asia Minor, the epicenter of western civilization and Christendom, into a bloody Islamic cesspool which culminated in a genocide by Turks against Armenian and Greek populations.
The Armenian Genocide, occurred when 2 million Armenians living in Turkey were eliminated from their historic homeland through forced deportation and massacres by the Turks. As Turkish authorities forced them out of eastern Turkey, Armenians say they lost 1.5 million people in 1915-23, during and after World War I. Turkey says the death count is inflated and that the deaths were a result of civil unrest. To this day Turkey denies the Armenian genocide, but history cannot be hidden or rewritten.
Even Adolf Hitler cited the killing of the Armenians as a precedent for his own slaughter of the Jews two decades later.
"Kill without mercy!" the Nazi leader told his military on the eve of the Holocaust. "Who today remembers the annihilation of the Armenians?"
For three thousand years, a thriving Armenian community had existed inside the vast region of the Middle East bordered by the Black, Mediterranean and Caspian Seas. The area, known as Asia Minor, stands at the crossroads of three continents; Europe, Asia and Africa. Great powers rose and fell over the many centuries and the Armenian homeland was at various times ruled by Persians, Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, Arabs and Mongols. Following the advent of Christianity, Armenia became the very first nation to accept it as the state religion. A golden era of peace and prosperity followed which saw the invention of a distinct alphabet, a flourishing of literature, art, commerce, and a unique style of architecture. By the 10th century, Armenians had established a new capital at Ani, affectionately called the "city of a thousand and one churches." In the eleventh century, the first Turkish invasion of the Armenian homeland occurred. This began several hundred years of rule by Muslim Turks. By the sixteenth century, Armenia had been absorbed into the vast and mighty Ottoman Empire. At its peak, this Turkish empire included much of Southeast Europe, North Africa, and almost all of the Middle East.
The decision of Genocide:
The decision to annihilate the entire Armenian population came directly from the ruling triumvirate of ultra-nationalist Young Turks. The actual extermination orders were transmitted in coded telegrams to all provincial governors throughout Turkey. Armed roundups began on the evening of April 24, 1915, as 300 Armenian political leaders, educators, writers, clergy and dignitaries in Constantinople (present day Istanbul) were taken from their homes, briefly jailed and tortured, then hanged or shot. In May of 1915 claiming that the Armenians were untrustworthy, the Minister of Internal Affairs (Talaat) ordered their deportation to relocat1on centers in the deserts of Syria and Mesopotamia.
Above, Turkish soldiers posing proudly with the decapitated heads of Armenian community leaders, 1915
Above, Turkish soldiers proudly posing with bodies of their Christian victims. To these Muslims, the "Christians were like animals to be hunted."
Above, Heads of Christians, traditionally treated like trophies by the Turks.
As 24 April draws near, I note continuous denials that this massacre occurred in Turkish newspapers and web sites.
Turkey's Continuous Denial:
The Turkish denial in the past several decades of this evil Genocide is interesting, yet not unexpected since Islam itself is a religion of denial and lies.
The Turks forget that they themselves have confessed in earlier times--so again, this denial in the past few decades is in keeping with and is symptomatic of Islam.......
Turkish Prime Minister Damat Ferid Pasha placed the blame squarely on the Young Turk Party. Mustafa Kemal Pasha {Ataturk} said {in a 1926 interview with a Swiss reporter that} the Young Turks "should be made to account for the lives of millions of our Christian subjects who were ruthlessly driven en masse from their homes and massacred. . . ."
The Armenian Genocide was witnessed by hundreds of American missionaries in the Ottoman Empire but especially in Anatolia, which was the traditional Armenian homeland. These missionaries worked among the Armenians and have testified to their destruction by the Ottoman government.
The Genocide was also witnessed by American and European consular officials, stationed in the areas inhabited by the Armenians, who reported it to the ambassadors in Istanbul. Also, there were indeed with many European military advisers with important posts in the Turkish army at the time.
The American Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, Henry Morgenthau, Sr., confronted the Young Turk leaders, and then he telegraphed the American Secretary of State calling the Turkish action an attempt at "racial extermination."
The Armenian Genocide was well-reported in the American press, and the U.S. Senate held hearing which affirmed its reality.
President Woodrow Wilson agreed to draw the boundaries of a free Armenia and sent a message to Congress asking for permission to establish a U.S. mandate over the new state.
[I ask this] "Not only because it [the mandate] embodied my own convictions and feeling with regard to Armenia and its people, but also, and more particularly, because it seemed to me to be the voice of the American people expressing their deep sympathies. At their hearts, this great and generous people [the Americans] have made the case of Armenia their own.
The American people raised millions of dollars to aid the victims of the Genocide. Our older citizens will remember aid to the "starving Armenians."
President Herbert Hoover wrote in his Memoirs:
Probably Armenian was known to the American school child in 1919 only a little less than England ... of the staunch Christians who were massacred periodically by the Mohammedian Turk, and the Sunday School collections of over fifty years for alleviating their miseries. . . .
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