Daily Trust (Abuja, Nigeria)
Feb 2 2007
Nigeria: Dink, Zion And the Armenian Genocide
OPINION
February 2, 2007
Posted to the web February 2, 2007
Adamu Adamu
What a sad and painful irony that Hrant Dink, the Turkish-Armenian
journalist, would finally fall a victim to the genocide debate that
he himself has done much to downplay. And last year, to his own
astonishment, he fell victim to the laws of the Turkish Republic that
had imposed on him a civic schizophrenia of sorts. He had been coping
well, though, but it was not easy in a modern state that seemed to
have so much anxiety about its own holistic integrity. With the
result that Dink was on his way to prison for being such a good Turk.
On 8 October 2005, a court in Istanbul sentenced him to six months in
prison [suspended for good behaviour], for writing an article that
‘insulted and belittled Turkishness’. And he was totally devastated
by the conviction.
"I guilty of racism!?" he asked. "How can this be? All my life I have
struggled against ethnic discrimination and racism. I would never
belittle Turkishness or Armenianness. I wouldn’t allow anyone else to
do it, either."
But others before him had done exactly that to the Republic. The
Young Turks, in particular Mehmed Talaat, Ismail Enver and Ahmed
Djemal; Ziya Gokalp, Alparslan Turkes and, above all, Mustapha Kemal
Ataturk had each in his own way belittled Turkey; and what was the
result?
Defeat followed defeat. With the help of Russia, Britain and France,
Greece defeated Turkey in 1829. Russia forced Turkish withdrawal from
Bulgaria in 1878. In 1908, the Young Turks untied Turkey from its
past and the slide accelerated.
In 1911, Ottoman provinces in North Africa were lost to Italy and in
1913, the Balkans had wrested their independence; and thereafter,
Bulgarians and Serbians launched the original ethnic cleansing that
saw about 5 million impoverished and bitter Muslim Turks fleeing from
southeastern Europe to seek refuge in their Anatolian ancestral home,
in the eastern parts of which Armenians had already taken up arms for
independence. They collaborated with an invading Russian army against
their homeland, an action that in any nation would have been regarded
as treason. In 1915, the majority of Anatolia’s two million Armenians
were deported to Syria and Mesopotamia. And today, they constitute
the largest unassimilated minority group in Syria; but according to
Armenian sources that was not what happened. They said that hundreds
of thousands [the highest estimate is 1.5 million] died or were
killed in the process. But despite being an Armenian, Dink, the
journalist, in a rare bout of candour, dismissed the genocide claim.
He worked for reconciliation between Christian Armenians and Muslim
Turks; and, along with Nobel Prize winner Orham Pamuk, had been
prosecuted for their views about the genocide claim. They denied
claims that one and half million Armenians had been killed in a
systematic genocide at the hands of the Ottoman Empire. They had
argued that large numbers of people-both Muslim and Christian-had
perished during the traumatic breakup of the Ottoman Empire, and,
especially, during the actual deportations taking place amidst a war
with Russia. And Turkey stand condemned for the unnecessary loss of
lives; but there was never any policy by Sultan Abdul Hamid or even
the godless Young Turks who replaced him. If anything, there is ample
evidence to prove that the genocide claim was invented.
But a parallel event was to happen in Russia itself under Joseph
Stalin. Crimea, which had been under Turkish rule for 300 years,
briefly became independent in 1774 before it was annexed and
swallowed by Russia in 1783. After the October Revolution, it became
the Republic of Taurida. During the Second World War, suspecting
Crimean Tartars of pro-German sympathies, Stalin deported them to
Siberia, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, and around 600,000 died en
route.
But today none of the great powers is accusing Russia of genocide as
they properly do in the earlier case of the Ukraine Famine in which 7
million Ukrainians perished as a direct result of Stalin’s deliberate
policy to cause mass starvation, part of the estimated 70 million
killed as sacrifice to the god of communism. By 1933 up to 25,000
were dying everyday in Ukraine as they bravely resisted the
Bolsheviks.
In all of the other well-known cases of genocide, paradoxically,
except the most famous of them all-the Holocaust-there was always the
essential element of deliberate policy that was lacking in the
Turkish case. In the Rape of Nanking, in 1937, for instance, the
Japanese Imperial Army deliberately murdered 300,000 Chinese. Between
1975 and 1977, Pol Pot exterminated 2 million Cambodians; and between
1992 and 1995, Serbians killed more than 200,000 Muslims. In 1945,
Allied forces-United States, Britain and France-firebombed a target
without any military value or significance. But, curiously, the world
today does not remember as genocide the gratuitous massacre of the
inhabitants of Dresden and the destruction of Europe’s most beautiful
city by the leaders of the ‘free world.’
At any event, the claim of the Armenian genocide had never been taken
seriously be any of the European powers except France, which had its
own reasons for promoting it. From time to time, it would raise it as
it did in 1998. That time, however, it was not raised as a foreign
policy issue to be used against Turkish attempt to get into the
European Union; but as French contribution to Armenia that was then
locked in a bitter struggle over land with Azerbaijan after the
collapse of the Soviet Union. The idea was that the genocide claim
would do for the Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh in 1994 what Holocaust
claims did for the Zionists in Palestine in 1948. Both claims,
however, have remained unproved; and to the discerning world they
remain what they are-false claims.
In order to better publicize their cause they took a leaf from the
Palestinian struggle that resorted to spectacular acts of skyjacking
and other desperate acts of terror to catch world attention. At the
time the PLO was enjoying its heyday, they established the Armenian
Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia [ASLA] otherwise known as
the Justice Commandos of the Armenian Genocide. By the end of the
1970’s more than two dozen Turkish diplomats had been assassinated by
the commandos and many more injured.
And the Armenian lobby, like the Holocaust industry before it, has
accepted and come to value what Dr James J Martin, the doyen of
historical revisionism, had said in relation to the invention of the
word ‘genocide’ by Raphael Lemkin, the Americanized Polish Zionist
Jew, in preparation for the charge that would be made against Germany
after World War II: "that with vast labor and proper publicity,
something can still be made out of nothing."
And the Armenian lobby is relatively speaking, quite powerful and
capable of vast labour that can get to places and mount the proper
kind of publicity required. Just consider this:
The Association of Genocide Scholars in its conference held in
Montreal, June 11-13, 1997, reaffirms that the mass murder of
Armenians in Turkey in 1915 is a case of genocide which conforms to
the statutes of the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and
Punishment of Genocide. It further condemns the denial of the
Armenian Genocide by the Turkish government and its official and
unofficial agents and supporters.
Several US presidents had spoken about the Armenian Question. Some of
them have included Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and George Bush. On
April 24, 2000, President Clinton said, "Today we remember a great
tragedy of the twentieth century: the deportations and massacres of
roughly one and a half million Armenians in the final years of the
Ottoman Empire.
"I join Armenians around the world, including the Armenian-American
community, in mourning the loss of those innocent lives. I also
extend my sympathy to the survivors and their descendants for the
hardships they suffered. I call upon all Americans to renew their
commitment to build a world where such events are not allowed to
happen again. The lesson we must learn from the stark annals of
history is that we must forge a more humane future for the peoples of
all nations. April 24, 2000."
And it almost went beyond presidential speechmaking. Early in October
2001, the House International Relations Committee passed a
non-binding resolution urging President Bill Clinton and future US
presidents to recognize what it described as "the systematic and
deliberate annihilation of 1.5 million Armenians as genocide."
However, owing to pressure from the Turkish prime minister, the Bill
was withdrawn two weeks later. Bulent Ecevit sent a letter to Clinton
thanking him for his efforts to shelve the resolution. It had become
an object of diplomatic paper-chase.
But even Henry Morgenthau, U.S. ambassador to Turkey at the time,
would only report to Washington: "When the Turkish authorities gave
the orders for these deportations, they were merely giving the death
warrant to a whole race."
The origins of the Armenian Genocide story has a far more
intellectual basis that even the Holocaust; because it was invented
by top-ranking scholars in the service of the British Foreign Office.
The whole incident was a masterful fabrication built upon a real
happening in order to embarrass the defeated Ottomans and use it to
exert concessions.
It was written by Professor Arnold J Toynbee, reputedly the greatest
historian the world had ever known, though he himself was to say of
ibn-Khaldun’s Muqaddimah ‘the greatest book ever written’ by any man.
But perhaps its greatest value was that when the Zionists came, they
would have something to draw upon in inventing their own forgery. But
perhaps, it should be admitted, though, that with Deuteronomy at
their disposal, they probably wouldn’t need Toynbee.
The Holocaust is Israel’s number one propaganda weapon creating a
deep-seated guilt complex in Western society and unprecedented
international sympathy, which has lead to an uncritical support for
the Jewish [or, more correctly, Zionist] State, and made even the
most deserved and most appropriate criticism of Israel impossible for
Western statesmen, most especially in the US, where Zionist control
of the media is total.
When recently Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad questioned the
Holocaust, international media took up the chorus of condemning him;
and, in the process, unwittingly opened up the subject for debate.
But it was not debate that was on their minds. What they wanted to do
was to isolate Ahmedinejad. The most effective weapon of the Zionists
against exposure has been what is called "the silent treatment;" but
it is impossible to ignore the president of a leading nation who has
decided to lend his weight to Holocaust denial. Otherwise that is
what they would have done.
That the media couldn’t ignore Ahmedinejad’s comments was more
because they believed that by publicizing the denial in a world that
had come to accept its "truth," they hoped to ridicule the president,
and, in addition, use the reminder that his denial had afforded them
and capitalize on the sympathy generated to write and push through
the last remaining chapter of the Holocaust saga.
Last Friday, they got their way when the United Nations adopted a
resolution sponsored by the United States and co-sponsored by more
than 100 other countries condemning Holocaust denial. And so,
finally, the Holocaust has truly become a ‘Holy Cause’ as John Bennet
of the Victorian Council for Civil Liberties once feared. He
questioned ‘why in a country such as America where most people can
say anything they like [the laws of obscenity here being what they
are] and do practically anything they like, the one thing Americans
can’t do is to publicly challenge the Holocaust, or the "Holy Cause,"
as it may perhaps be more accurately described.’
Ahmedinejad was not the first to deny the Holocaust, though he is the
first president to do so publicly and to damn the consequences.
Thousands before him have denied it and with good reason. But
Holocaust denial as a science may be said to have properly begun with
the publication of The Hoax of the Twentieth Century by Arthur R.
Butz, distinguished professor of mechanical engineering at the
prestigious Northwestern University, Evanston in the United States.
No one who has read this book will ever again believe any shred of
the Holocaust saga; but, of course, one should be ready to be up
against a lie that has been so often repeated that it becomes a truth
that can no longer be questioned.
For, among the stoutest defenders of Holocaust are some of its most
vulnerable victims. Such is the effect and power of a 60-year-old
propaganda machine that has almost all the international news and
entertainment media at its beck and call.
The works of Professor Butz, Dr. Robert Faurisson of the University
of Lyon in France, Professor Udo Walendy of Verlag fur Volkstum he &
Zeitgeschichsforschung, Dr. Martin A. Larson of The Spotlight in
Washington, Swedish historian Ditlieb Felderer, and, above all, the
pioneering works of Dr. James J. Martin set the tone for the founding
of the Institute of Historical Review, which, in its own words, is in
business "to bring history in accord with the facts." Its turf was
the Second World War, and this immediately brought it into conflict
with the Holocaust myth.
Paul Rassinier, who was interned at Buchenwald, was the first to
throw the salvo that began the demolition work of the Holocaust
edifice; and it was as a result of his exposes that the Holocaust
Establishment was forced to admit that no gassing of human beings
took place in any of the concentration camps in Germany. They now
concentrate on the concentration camps in Poland-Auschwitz, Sobibor,
Treblinka, Maidanek, Bitburg-before these too are demolished.
Professor Walendy carried out a pictorial critique of Holocaust. He
took each and every one of the better known pictures of Holocaust and
painstakingly traced them to all the originals from which they were
cleverly faked-with barbed wire, emaciated bodies and all. Books by
the Institute, written in the highest tradition of historical
scholarship and on scientific basis, have torn to smithereens the
tales of soap from human fat, the gas ovens and the crematoria, the
impossibility of using Zyklon-B to effect what they claim happened,
and devastating exposes on the Nuremberg trials.
But because these classic works of history will not be touched by the
prestigious publishing houses nor be stocked by any of the reputable
bookshops and other outlets, the weight of Ahmedinejad is of greater
propaganda value than all the tomes of intellectual output that have
been written to discredit many of the claims that people today regard
as Gospel truth.
But the Holocaust Establishment was not without its own intellectual
effort. It commissioned the writing of The Diary of Anne Frank,
ostensibly written by a young Jewish girl of her ordeals in hiding as
her race was systematically liquidated. It was quickly exposed as a
fake, though you never got to hear about it. For instance, you
probably have never heard that Anne’s diary was written with a
ballpoint pen, something that had not yet been invented when the book
was supposed to have been written. And Anne’s father, Otto Frank,
later had to pay off the diary’s ghostwriter in order to duck a
lawsuit.
It is indeed a pity that Dink died as a result of a genocide that
never took place, for a nation that didn’t know where it was going,
and on behalf of a people who didn’t know who they were. But is it
really then such a pity?
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