The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America’s Response by
Peter Balakian

IHC Review
22 Aug 05

The First World War made it clear the old idea that `war is politics
by another means’ is outdated in the 20th century. In the case of
Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, war meant extermination. Speaking to
his top generals days before invading Poland in September 1939, Adolf
Hitler praised the virtues of power and brutality, referring to how
easy it had been to destroy defenseless people like the
Armenians. `Who today, after all, speaks of the annihilation of the
Armenians?’ he asked. Under the cover of war, Muslim Turks (with
German help) completed the massacre of Christian Armenians begun in
the 1890s. On the eve of WW II, Hitler was readying his own apparatus
of death for annihilating the Jews of Europe, knowing he could do so
with impunity.

This book deals at length with U.S. government involvement (or the
insufficiency thereof, depending on one’s point of view) in supporting
fellow-Christian Armenian victims. It brings to light President
Woodrow Wilson’s proposal to extend United States dominion and
protection over the Armenian Republic. At Wilson’s insistence, Henry
Morgenthau, a wealthy Jewish-American lawyer, financier and supporter
who helped Wilson win the election, was appointed in 1913 American
Consul in Istanbul. Reluctant to accept the post at first, he was
convinced by Rabbi Stephen Wise that a Jew in that position could be
of great help not only to the sizeable Jewish community in Turkey, but
also to the Zionists in Palestine, which was under Turkish rule at the
time.

Deutsche Bank financed and German engineers built the railway systems
in the Ottoman empire, Germany’s most important foreign
project. Better-educated Armenians made up the main work force
operating the railways, which `introduced into modern history railway
transport of civilian populations as part of the plan of race
extermination.’ The Armenian workers were thus initially spared, but
eventually they too were swept up in the all-embracing Armenian
genocide. There is a close parallel between the two genocides, of the
Nazi deportation of Jews, which `began in the trains, the locked box
cars, eighty to a hundred people per car, crossing Europe to the camps
in Poland’ and the Armenians `starving, in terror, defecating on
themselves.’

The German military was in command of Ottoman troops and was involved
in the deportations and massacres. The German ambassador in
Constantinople, Baron von Wagenheim, and his U.S. counterpart, Count
von Bernstorff, declared that what the Turks were doing to the
Armenians was `entirely justified…Their own fault.’ Between 1915 and
1922, close to 1.5 million Armenians lost their lives. Significantly,
the U.S. never declared war on Turkey, in spite of the
Constantinople-Berlin axis. With more than two decades of American
anger against the Turks for their treatment of the Armenians, American
public opinion favored war with the Turks. On the other side of the
fence, a formal declaration of war would mean the seizure of vast
American missionary holdings in Turkey, valued at $123 million, and
perhaps expulsion, ending what little humanitarian relief the
missionaries were able to provide the Armenians.

For a `refresher’ in Muslim brutality, eyewitness reports are quoted
in the book. The British consul in Aleppo Province in 1890, Henry
Burnham, related how the killing of Armenians was motivated by Islamic
fanaticism and a jihad mentality: `…armed with clubs and cleavers,
cut down the Christians, with cries of `Allahu Akbar!’ broke down the
doors of houses with pickaxes and levers, or scaled the walls with
ladders. Then when mid-day came they knelt down and said their
prayers, and then jumped up and resumed their dreadful work, carrying
it far into the night. Whenever they were unable to break down the
door, they fired the houses with petroleum.’

Mosques were used as rallying points for mobs during Friday prayers. A
survivor, Abraham Hartunian, described the desecration of two Armenian
churches: `The mob had plundered the Gregorian church, desecrated it,
murdered all who had sought shelter there and as a sacrifice, beheaded
the sexton on the stone threshold. (At another church) The leader of
the mob cried: `Deny your religion!’ No one answered…The leader gave
the order to massacre. The first attack was on our pastor. The blow of
an axe decapitated him.’

In a letter home that came into the hands of another British consul, a
Turkish soldier writes: `My brother, if you want news from here, we
have killed 1,200 Armenians, all of them as food for the
dogs…Mother, I am safe and sound. Father, we made war on the
Armenian unbelievers. Through God’s grace no harm befell us…May God
bless you.’

In the best of Islamic brutal tradition, women suffered the worst
fate. If they were not killed, they were raped and sold into slavery
or harems. `The game of swords’ was witnessed by Aurora Mardiganian
near Aleppo, where Turkish killing squads `planted their swords in the
ground, blade up, in a row at several yards intervals, the men on
horseback each grabbed a girl. At the signal, given by a shout, they
rode their horses at a controlled gallop, throwing the girl with the
intent of killing her by impaling her on a sword. If the killer missed
and the girl was only injured, she would be scooped up again until she
was impaled on the protruding blade. It was a game, a contest.’ The
Turks then forced the Jews of the city to gather up the bodies and
throw them into the Tigris River.

As Queen Victoria’s Prime Minister William Gladstone wrote: `The very
worst things that men have ever done have been done when they were
performing acts of violence in the name of religion.’ It takes a
diabolically sadistic and evil mind to conjure up schemes whereby
deportees were forced to pay first-class fare for a box car, or where
a condemned man’s family is forced to pay for his execution. While
some German civil employees reacted with revulsion to such `Turkish
Delights’, the fact remains that racial extermination `technology’ was
observed, brought home and put to full use in Hitler’s attempted
extermination of the Jewish people.

The Turks to this day downplay the massacres they (along with the
Germans and Kurds) committed against Armenians. Professor Deborah
Lipstadt of Emory University has written: `Denial of genocide –
whether that of the Turks against the Armenians or the Nazis against
Jews – is not an act of historical reinterpretation . . . it is the
final stage of genocide, because it strives to reshape history in
order to demonize the victims and rehabilitate the perpetrators.’ To
this, Elie Wiesel adds that denying genocide is a `double killing’
because it murders the memory of events.

Radical Islam declared war on the West with the first World Trade
Center attack in 1993. It is the stated aim of the spiritual leaders
of a billion Muslims, from Southeast Asia across two continents to the
Atlantic, to re-conquer Europe (and eventually the rest of the world)
and reestablish a Caliphate ruled by the dictates of the Koran. Recent
events in Eurabia, such as the ritual murder of Dutch filmmaker Theo
van Gogh, for example, afford a preview of what’s in store once Islam
takes over.

President Bush’s Saudi pals continue to export radical Islamist
`education’ world-wide, while Iran – Islamic terror export hub to the
world – thumbs its nose at the West in pursuit of a nuclear weapons
capability, with the declared aim of obliterating the State of
Israel. They do so with the tacit or active collaboration of China and
Russia. A nuclear-armed Pakistan is another source of uncertainty and
instability.

The wrongheaded internment of Japanese-Americans following Pearl
Harbor was an emergency measure justified on grounds of national
security. Surely now is a time of even greater peril for Western
civilizations, when severe restrictive measures should be applied to
extreme-Muslim sources of incitement (mosques and religious schools),
fundraising organizations, and the expulsion of illegal `students’ and
other undesirable elements. If the American-Japanese community was
considered a security risk in 1941, does not the same apply to the
Muslim community in the U.S., which provided the infrastructure
enabling the September 11 attacks to take place?

While Spain’s shameful capitulation handed al-Qaeda a victory, Britain
and other European democracies are finally awakening to the
life-threatening dangers of the radical Islamic cancer eating at them
from within. A malignancy calls for painful surgery, unpleasant
medicine and everlasting vigilance if the patient ` Western
Civilization – is to survive.

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HarperCollins; October 2003; ISBN: 0060198400; 496 pages.
Review written by Giv Cornfield, Ph.D.
Edited by IHC Staff,