The Forgotten Genocide, Rediscovered – Armenian Directory & News

THE FORGOTTEN GENOCIDE, REDISCOVERED
By Andrew G. Bostom American Thinker

Assyrian International News Agency, CA
Aug 30 2007

A combination of official diplomatic correspondence, and private
memoirs — most notably the diaries of Henry Morgenthau, the
U.S. ambassador to Turkey from 1913 to 1916, an extended report by
American consul Leslie Davis in Harput, Turkey, from 1915 to 1917, and
the recently published United States Official Records on the Armenian
Genocide, 1915-1917 — provides lucid, often repellently detailed
historical accounting of what the U.S. government knew regarding the
Ottoman Empire and the Armenian genocide. These materials are perhaps
the most salient examples of the evidence, as per the language of HR:/
SR:106, "documented in the United States record," which support the
formal U.S. recognition of the Armenian genocide as proposed in the
Congressional resolutions.

The wartime reports from German and Austro-Hungarian officials,
Turkey’s World War I allies, as well as earlier British diplomatic
reports dating back to 1890, confirm the independent U.S. evidence
that the origins and evolution of the genocide had little to do
with World War I "Armenian provocations." Contemporary accounts by
European diplomats written from 1890 through the World War I era,
also demonstrate that these genocidal massacres were perpetrated in
the context of a formal jihad waged against the Armenians because
they sought the equal rights promised to them, but never granted,
under various failed schemes to reform the discriminatory system of
Ottoman Islamic Law ("Shari’a"). A widely disseminated 1915 Ottoman
Fatwa entitled "Aljihad"(brought to the U.S. Consul’s attention in
Cairo), for example, clearly sanctioned religiously motivated jihad
violence. Historian Johannes Lepsius’ eyewitness accounts from Turkey
documented the results of such invocations of jihad:

"559 villages whose surviving inhabitants were converted to Islam with
fire and sword; 568 churches thoroughly pillaged, destroyed and razed
to the ground; of 282 Christian churches transformed into mosques;
of 21 Protestant preachers and 170 Armenian priests who were, after
enduring unspeakable tortures, murdered on their refusal to accept
Islam." Lepsius concluded with this rhetorical question: "Is this a
religious persecution or is it not?"

"And at a time when jihadist violence from Darfur to Ground Zero has
spilled so much innocent blood, dissimulation about the jihad of 1915
[emphasis added] can only aid our enemies."

Moreover the various "strategic rationales" and arguments put forth
to oppose formal U.S. recognition (as in HR:/SR:106) of the Armenian
genocide — the U.S.-Turkish alliance, the Turkish-Israeli alliance,
the vulnerability of Turkey’s vestigial Jewish minority — appear
wanting and hackneyed in light of burgeoning evidence which undermines
their basic credibility.

But most importantly, there is a compelling moral imperative to
pass these resolutions which transcends the dubious geopolitical
considerations used to rationalize and sustain Turkey’s ongoing
campaign of genocide denial. Professor Deborah Lipstadt, the renowned
Holocaust scholar, and author of Denying the Holocaust, and History on
Trial (which recounts her crushing defeat of Nazi-sympathizer David
Irving’s "libel’ suit"), in conjunction with twelve other leading
genocide scholars, elucidated the corrosive immorality of genocide
denial in this 1996 statement:

Denial of genocide — whether that of the Turks against the
Armenians or the Nazis against the Jews — is not an act of historical
reinterpretation. Rather, it sows confusion by appearing to be engaged
in a genuine scholarly effort. Those who deny genocide always dismiss
the abundance of documents and testimony as contrived or coerced, or
as forgeries and falsehoods. Free speech does not guarantee the deniers
the right to be treated as the ‘other’ side of a legitimate debate when
there is no credible other side"; nor does it guarantee the deniers
space in the classroom or curriculum, or in any other forum. Genocide
denial is an insidious form of intellectual and moral degradation…

Introduction

Senate: and House: Resolutions 106 both call upon the President,

…to ensure that the foreign policy of the United States reflects
appropriate understanding and sensitivity concerning issues related to
human rights, ethnic cleansing, and genocide documented in the United
States record [emphasis added] relating to the Armenian Genocide.

The diaries of Henry Morgenthau, the U.S. ambassador to Turkey from
1913 to 1916, in conjunction with the extended report by American
consul Leslie Davis in Harput (remote eastern), Turkey, from 1915 to
1917, and the recently published United States Official Records on
the Armenian Genocide, 1915-1917 — the latter consisting of memos
filed on a daily basis, informing the U.S. Secretary of State and
President Woodrow Wilson of the efforts to rescue as many Armenians
as possible (and including the obstacles confronting the rescuers’
efforts) — are perhaps the most salient examples of the evidence,
as per the language of HR/SR 106, "documented in the United States
record." This combination of official diplomatic correspondence,
and private memoirs, provides a lucid, often repellently detailed
historical accounting of what the U.S. government knew regarding the
Ottoman Empire and the Armenian genocide.

American Witnesses to the Armenian Genocide: Observations from
U.S. Diplomats, 1915-1917

Ambassador Morgenthau, wrote a letter to his son on June 19, 1915,
as the massacres of the Armenians reached a murderous crescendo,

The ruin and devastation that is being wrought here is heart-rending.

The government is using its present opportunity while all other
countries are at war, to obliterate the Armenian race…

His despair was intensified by feelings of impotence as a diplomat
for a neutral nation, made all the more distressing by his sympathetic
understanding of such mass persecution as a Jew:

…and the worst of it is that it is impossible to stop it. The United
States as a neutral power has no right to interfere in their internal
affairs, and as I receive report after report of the inhuman treatment
that the Armenians are receiving, it makes me feel most sad. Their
lot seems to be very much the same as that of the Jews in Russia, and
belonging to a persecuted race myself, I have all the more sympathy
with them.

Morgenthau reiterated his overall assessment that a frank genocide,
in modern parlance, was taking place, both in his diary, and a plethora
of memos submitted to the U.S. Secretary of State, Robert Lansing. He
stated, for example, that the

…persecution of Armenians is assuming unprecedented proportions.

Reports from widely scattered districts indicate a systematic attempt
to uproot peaceful Armenian populations and through arbitrary efforts,
terrible tortures, wholesale expulsions and deportations from one end
of the Empire to the other, accompanied by frequent instances of rape,
pillage and murder, turning into massacre, to bring destruction and
destitution on them.

Aleppo (Syria) Consul, J.B. Jackson wrote to Ambassador Morgenthau
on September 29, 1915 confirming the genocidal organization and scale
of the unfolding tragedy:

The deportation of Armenians from their homes by the Turkish
Government has continued with a persistence and perfection of
plan…32,751…[arrived in Aleppo] by rail from interior stations…In
addition thereto it is estimated that at least 100,000 others have
arrived afoot. And such a condition as these unfortunates are in,
especially those coming afoot, many having left their homes before
Easter, deprived of all their worldly possessions without money
and all sparsely clad and some naked from the treatment by their
escorts and the despoiling depopulation en route. It is extremely
rare to find a family intact that has come any considerable distance,
invariably all having lost members from disease and fatigue, young
girls and boys carried off by hostile tribesmen, and about all the
men having been separated from the families and suffered fates that
had best be left unmentioned, many being done away with in atrocious
manners before the eyes of their relatives and friends. So severe
has been the treatment that careful estimates place the number of
survivors at only 15% of these originally deported. On this basis
the number of those surviving even this far being less than 150,000
up to September 21, there seems to have been about 1,000,000 persons
lost up to this date. [emphasis added]

There have been persistent reports of the selection of great numbers
of the most prominent men from nearly every city, town and village,
of their removal to outside places and their final disappearance by
means of which we are not positively informed but which the imagination
can more or less accurately establish, as months have passed and no
news has come of their existence. The heinous treatment of thoroughly
exhausted women and children in the open streets of Aleppo by the
armed escorts, who relentlessly beat and kicked their helpless charges
along when illness and fatigue prevented further effort, is evidence
of what must have happened along the roads of the interior further
removed from civilization.

The exhausted condition of the victims is further proven by the death
of a hundred or more daily of those arriving in this city. Travelers
report having seen the numberless corpses along the roadside in the
adjacent territory, or bodies in all sorts of positions where the
victims fell in the last gasps of typhoid, fever and other diseases,
and of the dogs fighting over the bodies of children. Many are the
harrowing tales related by the survivors, but time and space prevent
the recital thereof.

And Harput Consul Davis contrasted the idyllic beauty of the Lake
Goeljuk region, with the gruesome atrocities committed against the
Armenians there, under the aegis of the Turks:

Few localities could be better suited to the fiendish purposes
of the Turks in their plan to exterminate the Armenian population
than this peaceful lake in the interior of Asiatic Turkey, with its
precipitous banks and pocket-like valleys, surrounded by villages of
savage Kurds and far removed from the sight of civilized man. This,
perhaps, was the reason why so many exiles from distant vilayets
[provinces] were brought in safety [from afar]…and then massacred in
the "Slaughterhouse Vilayet" of Turkey. That which took place around
beautiful Lake Goeljuk in the summer of 1915 is almost inconceivable.

Thousands and thousands of Armenians, mostly innocent and helpless
women and children, were butchered on its shores and barbarously
mutilated.

Some of the bodies had been burned…probably in the search for gold.

We estimated that in the course of our ride around the lake, and
actually within the space of 24-hours, we had seen the remains of
not less than 10,000 Armenians who had been killed around Lake Goeljuk.

This, of course, is approximate, as some of them were only the bones
of those who had perished several months before, from which the flesh
had entirely disappeared, while in other cases the corpses were so
fresh that they were swollen up and the odor from them showed that
they had been killed only a few days before. I am sure, however,
that there are more, rather than less, than that number; and it is
probable that the remains which we saw were only a small portion of
the total number in that vicinity. In fact, on my subsequent rides
in the direction of Lake Goeljuk I nearly always discovered skeletons
and bones in great numbers in the new places that I visited…

A True Genocide

Was the horrific fate of the Ottoman Empire’s Armenian minority, at
the end of the 19th and early 20th centuries, in particular, during
World War I, due to "civil war", or genocide ? A seminal analysis
by Professor Vahakn Dadrian, the most accomplished historian of this
tragedy, published in 2002, validates the conclusion that the Ottoman
Turks committed a centrally organized mass murder, i.e., a genocide,
against their Armenian population. Relying upon a vast array of
quintessential, primary source documents from the World War I allies of
the Ottoman Empire, Germany and Austria-Hungary, Dadrian obviated the
intractable disputes surrounding the reliability and authenticity of
both Ottoman Turkish, and Armenian documents. He elucidated the truly
unique nature of this documentary German and Austro-Hungarian evidence:

During the war, Germany and Austria-Hungary disposed over a vast
network of ambassadorial, consular, military, and commercial
representatives throughout the Ottoman Empire. Not only did they
have access to high-ranking Ottoman officials and power-wielding
decision-makers who were in a position to report to their superiors
as locus in quo observers on many aspects of the wartime treatment
of Ottoman Armenians. They supplemented their reports with as much
detail as they could garner from trusted informers and paid agents,
many of whom were Muslims, both civilians and military…

Moreover, the documents analyzed possessed another critical attribute:
they included confidential correspondence prepared and sent to Berlin
and Vienna, which were meant for wartime use only.

This confidentiality, Dadrian notes, enabled German or Austro-Hungarian
officials to openly question the contentions of their wartime Ottoman
allies, when ascertaining and conveying facts truthfully to their
superiors in Europe. Dadrian cites the compelling example of the
November 16, 1915 report to the German chancellor, by Aleppo Consul
Rossler. Rossler states,

I do not intend to frame my reports in such a way that I may be
favoring one or the other party. Rather, I consider it my duty to
present to you the description of things which have occurred in my
district and which I consider to be the truth.

Rossler was reacting specifically to the official Ottoman allegation
that the Armenians had begun to massacre the Turkish population
in the Turkish sections of Urfa, a city within his district, after
reportedly capturing them. He dismissed the charge, unequivocally,
with a single word: "invented’".

Amassed painstakingly by Dadrian, the primary source evidence from
these German and Austro-Hungarian officials — reluctant witnesses
— leads to this inescapable conclusion: the anti-Armenian measures,
despite a multitude of attempts at cover-up and outright denial, were
meticulously planned by the Ottoman authorities, and were designed to
destroy wholesale, the victim population. Dadrian further validates
this assessment with remarkable testimony before the Mazhar Inquiry
Commission, a Nuremberg-like tribunal, which conducted a preliminary
investigation in the post-war period to determine the criminal
liability of the wartime Ottoman authorities regarding the Armenian
deportations and massacres. The December 15, 1918 deposition by General
Mehmed Vehip, commander-in-chief of the Ottoman Third Army, and ardent
CUP (Committee of Union and Progress, i.e., the "Ittihadists", or
"Young Turks") member, included this summary statement:

The murder and annihilation of the Armenians and the plunder and
expropriation of their possessions were the result of the decisions
made by the CUP…These atrocities occurred under a program that was
determined upon and involved a definite case of willfulness. They
occurred because they were ordered, approved, and pursued first by
the CUP’s [provincial] delegates and central boards, and second by
governmental chiefs who had…pushed aside their conscience, and had
become the tools of the wishes and desires of the Ittihadist society.

Dadrian’s own compelling assessment of this primary source evidence
is summarized as follows:

Through the episodic interventions of the European Powers, the
historically evolving and intensifying Turko-Armenian conflict had
become a source of anger and frustration for the Ottoman rulers and
elites driven by a xenophobic nationalism. A monolithic political
party that had managed to eliminate all opposition and had gained
control of the Ottoman state apparatus efficiently took advantage of
the opportunities provided by World War I. It purged by violent and
lethal means the bulk of the Armenian population from the territories
of the empire. By any standard definition, this was an act of genocide.

Jihad as a Major Determinant of the Armenian Genocide

The wartime reports from German and Austro-Hungarian officials,
Turkey’s World War I allies, as well as earlier British diplomatic
reports dating back to 1890, confirm the independent U.S. evidence
that the origins and evolution of the genocide had little to do
with World War I "Armenian provocations." Emphasis is placed,
instead, on the larger pre-war context dating from the failure of
the mid-19th century Ottoman Tanzimat reform efforts. These reforms,
initiated by the declining Ottoman Empire (i.e., in 1839 and 1856)
under intense pressure from the European powers, were designed to
abrogate the repressive laws of dhimmitude, to which non-Muslim
(primarily Christian) minorities, including the Armenians, had been
subjected for centuries, following the Turkish jihad conquests of
their indigenous homelands.

Led by their patriarch, the Armenians felt encouraged by the Tanzimat
reform scheme, and began to deluge the Porte (Ottoman seat of
government) with pleas and requests, primarily seeking governmental
protection against a host of mistreatments, particularly in the
remote provinces. Between 1850 and 1870, alone, 537 notes were sent
to the Porte by the Armenian patriarch characterizing numerous
occurrences of theft, abduction, murder, confiscatory taxes, and
fraud by government officials. These entreaties were largely ignored,
and ominously, were even considered as signs of rebelliousness. For
example, British Consul (to Erzurum) Clifford Lloyd reported in 1890,
"Discontent, or any description of protest is regarded by the local
Turkish Local Government as seditious."He went on to note that this
Turkish reaction occurred irrespective of the fact that "..the idea
of revolution.," was not being entertained by the Armenian peasants
involved in these protests.

The renowned Ottomanist, Roderick Davison, has observed that under the
Shari’a (Islamic Holy Law) the "..infidel gavours [dhimmis, rayas]"
were permanently relegated to a status of "inferiority" and subjected
to a "contemptuous half-toleration." Davison further maintained that
this contempt emanated from "an innate attitude of superiority",
and was driven by an "innate Muslim feeling", prone to paroxysms of
"open fanaticism". Sustained, vehement reactions to the 1839 and 1856
Tanzimat reform acts by large segments of the Muslim population, led
by Muslim spiritual leaders and the military, illustrate Davison’s
point. Perhaps the most candid and telling assessment of the doomed
Tanzimat reforms, in particular the 1856 Act, was provided by Mustafa
Resid, Ottoman Grand Vizier at six different times between 1846-58. In
his denunciation of the reforms, Resid argued the proposed "complete
emancipation" of the non-Muslim subjects, appropriately destined to
be subjugated and ruled, was "entirely contradictory" to "the 600
year traditions of the Ottoman Empire." He openly proclaimed the
"complete emancipation" segment of the initiative as disingenuous,
enacted deliberately to mislead the Europeans, who had insisted upon
this provision. Sadly prescient, Resid then made the ominous prediction
of a "great massacre" if equality was in fact granted to non-Muslims.

Despite their "revolutionary" advent, and accompanying comparisons
to the ideals of the French Revolution, the "Young Turk" regime
eventually adopted a discriminatory, anti-reform attitude toward
non-Muslims within the Ottoman Empire. During an August 6, 1910
speech in Saloniki, Mehmed Talat, pre-eminent leader of the Young
Turks disdainfully rejected the notion of equality with "gavours’",
arguing that it "…is an unrecognizable ideal since it is inimical
with Sheriat [Shari’a] and the sentiments of hundreds of thousands of
Muslims…" Roderick Davison notes that in fact "..no genuine equality
was ever attained…", re-enacting the failure of the prior Tanzimat
reform period. As a consequence, he observes, the Young Turk leadership
"…soon turned from equality…to Turkification…"

During the reign of Sultan Abdul Hamid, the Ottoman Turks massacred
over 200,000 Armenians between 1894-96. This was followed, under the
Young Turk regime, by the Adana massacres of 25,000 Armenians in 1909,
and the first formal genocide of the 20th century, when in 1915 alone,
an additional 600,000 to 800,000, or even 1 million Armenians were
slaughtered. The massacres of the 1890s had an "organic" connection
to the Adana massacres of 1909, and more importantly, the events of
1915. As Vahakn Dadrian, the leading scholar of the Armenian genocide,
argues, these earlier massacres facilitated the genocidal acts of
1915 by providing the Young Turks with "a predictable impunity." The
absence of adverse consequences for the Abdul Hamid massacres in the
1890s allowed the Young Turks to move forward without constraint.

Contemporary accounts from European diplomats make clear that these
brutal massacres were perpetrated in the context of a formal jihad
against the Armenians who had attempted to throw off the yoke of
dhimmitude by seeking equal rights and autonomy. For example, the
Chief Dragoman (Turkish-speaking interpreter) of the British embassy
reported regarding the 1894-96 massacres:

[The perpetrators] are guided in their general action by the
prescriptions of the Sheri [Sharia] Law. That law prescribes that if
the "rayah" [dhimmi] Christian attempts, by having recourse to foreign
powers, to overstep the limits of privileges allowed them by their
Mussulman [Muslim] masters, and free themselves from their bondage,
their lives and property are to be forfeited, and are at the mercy of
the Mussulmans. To the Turkish mind the Armenians had tried to overstep
those limits by appealing to foreign powers, especially England. They
therefore considered it their religious duty and a righteous thing
to destroy and seize the lives and properties of the Armenians.

Bat Ye’or confirms this reasoning, noting that the Armenian quest for
reforms invalidated their "legal status," which involved a "contract"
(i.e., with their Muslim Turkish rulers). This

"…breach…restored to the umma [the Muslim community] its initial
right to kill the subjugated minority [the dhimmis], [and] seize
their property."

Lord Kinross has described the tactics of Abdul Hamid’s agents, who
deliberately fomented religious fanaticism among the local Muslim
populations in Turkish Armenia, and the devastating results of this
incitement:

It became their normal routine first to assemble the Moslem population
in the largest mosque in a town, then to declare, in the name of
the Sultan, that the Armenians were in general revolt with the aim
of striking at Islam. Their Sultan enjoined them as good Moslems
to defend their faith against these infidel rebels. He propounded
the precept that under the holy law the property of rebels might be
looted by believers, encouraging Moslems to enrich themselves in the
name of their faith at the expense of their Christian neighbours,
and in the event of resistance, to kill them.

Hence, throughout Armenia, the attack of an ever increasing pack of
wolves against sheep…

Each operation, between the bugle calls, followed a similar pattern.

First into a town there came the Turkish troops, for the purpose
of massacre; then came the Kurdish irregulars and tribesmen
for the purpose of plunder. Finally came the holocaust, by fire
and destruction, which spread, with the pursuit of fugitives and
mopping-up operations, throughout the lands and villages of the
surrounding province. This murderous winter of 1895 thus saw the
decimation of much of the Armenian population and the devastation
of their property in some twenty districts of eastern Turkey. Often
the massacres were timed for a Friday, when the Moslems were in
their mosques and the myth was spread by the authorities that the
Armenians conspired to slaughter them at prayer. Instead they were
themselves slaughtered, when the Moslems emerged to forestall their
design. The total number of victims was somewhere between fifty and a
hundred thousand, allowing for those who died subsequently of wounds,
disease, exposure, and starvation…In each of thirteen large towns
the numbers of those dead ran well into four figures. In Erzurum,
the bazaar of a thousand shops was looted and wrecked by the Moslems,
while some three hundred Christians were buried the next day in
a single massed grave…Cruelest and most ruinous of all were the
massacres at Urfa, where the Armenian Christians numbered a third
of the total population. Here in December 1895, after a two-months
siege of their quarter, the leading Armenians assembled in their
cathedral, where they drew up a statement requesting Turkish official
protection. Promising this, the Turkish officer in charge surrounded
the cathedral with troops. Then a large body of them, with a mob in
their wake, rushed through the Armenian quarter, where they plundered
all houses and slaughtered all adult males above a certain age. When
a large group of young Armenians were brought before a sheikh, he
had them thrown down on their backs and held by their hands and feet.

Then, in the words of an observer, he recited verses of the Koran and
"cut their throats after the Mecca rite of sacrificing sheep."…When
the bugle blast ended the day’s operations some three thousand refugees
poured into the cathedral, hoping for sanctuary. But the next morning
– a Sunday – a fanatical mob swarmed into the church in an orgy of
slaughter, rifling its shrines will cries of ‘Call upon Christ to
prove Himself a greater prophet than Mohammed.’ Then they amassed
a large pile of straw matting, which they spread over the litter of
the corpses and set alight with thirty cans of petroleum.

The woodwork of the gallery where a crowd of women and children
crouched, wailing in terror, caught fire, and all perished in
the flames. Punctiliously, at three-thirty in the afternoon the
bugle blew once more, and the Moslem officials proceeded around the
Armenian quarter to proclaim that the massacres were over. They had
wiped out 126 complete families, without a woman or a baby surviving,
and the total casualties in the town, including those slaughtered in
the cathedral, amounted to eight thousand dead.

A 1915 Ottoman Fatwa believed to have been written by Sheikh
Shawish (entitled, Aljihad, and translated into English, March 10,
1915) included a statement attached to its official United States
consulate translation indicating, "It was undoubtedly this and
similar pamphlets which inspired the Jewish community of Alexandria"
to contact the United States Consul General’s office in Cairo. The
calls to religiously motivated violence against non-Muslims, as
sanctioned by Islam-jihad war-are unmistakably clear.

If you believe in God, in his faith and apostle, hear the words of our
sages as recorded by his holy prophet. ‘You believers take not the
Jews and Christians as friends unto you, He who loves then shall be
called one of them’. ‘God shall not foster the tyrants’. You believers
accept not unto you friends of these who abuse your faith and mock
thereof. They are called unbelievers, and you hearken unto the words
of God of you believe. Therefore if after you will put to heart to
these sacred words, perhaps they have been spoken to you by God not
to acquire unto us Jewish or Christian friends. From these holy words
you will realize that it is forbidden us to approach those who mock
our faith – Jews and Christians, for then God forbid, God forbid we
shall be deemed by the almighty as one of them God forbid…. After
all this how can we believe in the sincerity of your faith when you
befriend and love unbelievers, and accept their Government without any
rising without attempting to expel them from your country. Therefore
arise and purify yourselves of such deeds.

Arise to the Holy War no matter what it costs so as to carry into
execution this sacred deed. It is furthermore said in the Koran ‘If
your fathers if children taken unto them friends of the unbelievers,
estrange yourselves even from them.’… The Mohammedan religion
enjoins us to set aside some money for Government expenses and for
preparations of a holy war. The rest of your tithes and contributions
you are duty bound to send to the capital of the Caliphate to help
them to glorify the name of God, through the medium of the Caliph.

Let all Mussulmans know that the Holy War is created only for this
purpose. We trust in God that the Mohammedan lands will rise from
humiliation and become faithfully tied to the capital of the Caliphate
until, so as to be called ‘the lands of Islam’. This is our hope
and God help us to carry through our holy aims to a successful issue
for the sake of our holy Prophet… A holy war is a sacred duty and
for your information let it be known that the armies of the Caliph
is ready and in three divisions, as follows: War in secret, war by
word of mouth, and physical war. War in secret. This is the easiest
and simplest. In this case it is to suppose that every unbeliever
is an enemy, to persecute and exterminate him from the face of the
earth. There is not a Mussulman in the world who is not inspired by
this idea. However in the Koran it is said: ‘That such a war is not
enough for a Mohammedan whether young or old, and must also participate
in the other parts of the Holy War. War by word of mouth. That is to
say fighting by writing and speaking. This kind of war for example
should pertain to the Mahomedans of the Caucasus.

They should have commenced this war three or four months ago, because
their actual position does not permit them to but the carrying on
of such warfare. Every Mahomedan is in duty bound to write and speak
against the unbelievers when actual circumstances do not permit him
to assume more stringent measures, as for instance in the Caucasus.

Therefore every writer must use his pen in favor of such a war.

Physical war. This means actual fighting in the fullest sense of the
word… Now let us mention here the means to be adopted in carrying
on this holy war, as follows: Every private individual can fight with
deadly weapons, as for example. Here is the following illustration of
the late Egyptian Verdani who shot the unbelieving Butros Gal Pacha
the friend of the English with a revolver. The murder of the English
police Commissioner Bavaro in India by one of our Indian brethren.

The killing of one of the officials of Kansch on his coming from
Mecca by the Prophet’s friend ‘Abu Bazir El Pzachbi’, peace be unto
him! Abdallah ibn Aatick and four colleagues killed ‘Abu Raafah Ibn El
Hakiki’. The leader of the Jews of Khaybar so famous for his enmity to
Islamism. This was executed by our Prophet’s command, so did Avrala Ibn
Ravacha and his friends when they killed Oscher Ibn Dawas one of the
Jewish dignitaries. There are many instances of similar cases. Lord
of the Universal What fails us now, and why should not some of us go
forth to fight this sacred war for exalting thy glorious name?

An intrepid Protestant historian and missionary Johannes Lepsius,
who earlier had undertaken a two-month trip to examine the sites
of the Abul Hamid era massacres, returned to Turkey during World
War I. He again documented the results of such invocations of jihad
against non-Muslims, as espoused by Sheikh Shawish, during the period
between 1914-1918. Lepsius wrote:

Are we then simply forbidden to speak of the Armenians as persecuted on
account of their religious belief’? If so, there have never been any
religious persecutions in the world…We have lists before us of 559
villages whose surviving inhabitants were converted to Islam with fire
and sword; of 568 churches thoroughly pillaged, destroyed and razed
to the ground; of 282 Christian churches transformed into mosques;
of 21 Protestant preachers and 170 Gregorian (Armenian) priests who
were, after enduring unspeakable tortures, murdered on their refusal
to accept Islam. We repeat, however, that those figures express only
the extent of our information, and do not by a long way reach to the
extent of the reality. Is this a religious persecution or is it not?

Finally, Bat Ye’or places the continuum of massacres from the 1890s
through the end of World War I, in the overall theological and
juridical context of jihad, as follows:

The genocide of the Armenians was the natural outcome of a policy
inherent in the politico-religious structure of dhimmitude. This
process of physically eliminating a rebel nation had already been used
against the rebel Slav and Greek Christians, rescued from collective
extermination by European intervention, although sometimes reluctantly.

The genocide of the Armenians was a jihad. No rayas took part in it.

Despite the disapproval of many Muslim Turks and Arabs, and
their refusal to collaborate in the crime, these masssacres were
perpetrated solely by Muslims and they alone profited from the booty:
the victims’ property, houses, and lands granted to the muhajirun,
and the allocation to them of women and child slaves. The elimination
of male children over the age of twelve was in accordance with
the commandments of the jihad and conformed to the age fixed for
the payment of the jizya. The four stages of the liquidation —
deportation, enslavement, forced conversion, and massacre — reproduced
the historic conditions of the jihad carried out in the dar-al-harb
from the seventh century on. Chronicles from a variety of sources,
by Muslim authors in particular, give detailed descriptions of the
organized massacres or deportation of captives, whose sufferings in
forced marches behind the armies paralleled the Armenian experience
in the twentieth century.

"Double Killing"- Ongoing Turkish Denial of the Armenian Genocide

Elie Wiesel has noted, appositely, that the final stage of genocide,
its denial, is "double killing". Ignoring absurd and scurrilous
allegations contained in Turkish propaganda documents (for example,
the May 27, 1999 eleven page document entitled, "An Objective Look
at House Resolution [HR] 155", submitted by the Turkish ambassador in
Washington, D.C., to all United States Congressmen, which contained the
mendacious claims that Armenians had murdered 100,000 Ottoman Jews, and
1.1 million Ottoman Muslims), several persistent denialist rationales
at least merit exploration and sound rebuttal, before being dismissed.

Dadrian has reduced these particular attempts to characterize the
Armenian genocide as ‘debatable’ into the following three lines of
argument (which he aptly terms "disjointed"):

(i) the Ottoman governments intent was merely to relocate, not
destroy, the deportee population; (ii) in the context of the larger
global conflagration, i.e., World War I, the Armenians and Turks
were engaged in a civil war, which was itself directly responsible
for heavy Turkish losses; (iii) Turkish losses during the overall
conflict far exceeded Armenian losses.

Dadrian poses the following logical question as a preface to his
analysis of the spurious claim that the Turks engaged in a ‘benevolent
relocation’ of Armenian deportees:

…how did the Young Turk authorities expect to resettle in the
deserts of Mesopotamia hundreds of thousands of dislocated people
without securing the slightest accommodation or other amenities
affording the barest conditions of subsistence for human beings?

The sham of ‘relocation’ was made plain by the Chief of Staff of the
Ottoman Fourth Army who oversaw the areas designated to receive these
forcibly transferred Armenian populations. He rejected the relocation
pretense categorically in his memoirs stating "…there was neither
preparation, nor organization to shelter the hundreds of thousands
of deportees." This critical assessment from a key Ottoman official
confirms the observations of multiple consuls representing Turkeys
allies Austria and Germany (in addition to the US Ambassador to the
Ottoman Empire, Morgenthau). These diplomats maintained repeatedly
that dispatching the victimized Armenian populations to such desert
hinterlands sealed their fate — death and ruination.. Moreover,
the hundreds of thousands of deportees were not merely transferred
from war zones, as claimed, but from all parts of the Ottoman Empire.

Dadrian further observes,

As official documents unmistakably reveal (and American Ambassador
Morgenthau confirms) only the rapid deterioration of Turkey’s
military situation and the resulting time constraints prevented the
authorities from carrying out the projected comprehensive deportation
and liquidation of the rest of the Armenian population. In the case
of Istanbul, for example, then the capital of the Empire, by November
1915 already 30,000 Armenians had been surreptitiously, and by a system
of quotas, removed, according to a confidential report to Berlin by
German Ambassador Metternich. As to Smyrna, only forceful intervention
of German General Liman Von Sanders, the regional military commander,
stopped the completion of the deportation of that major mercantile
harbor city’s Armenian population. That intervention was triggered
by the dispatch of Smyrna’s first Armenian deportee convoy as ordered
by the province’s Turkish governor-general Rahmi.

This intervention proved a mere respite, however, as in 1922 the
insurgent Kemalists destroyed Smyrna in a holocaust that consumed
large segments of the surviving Armenian population, as well.

Were the mass killings of the Armenians merely an unintended
epiphenomenon of a "civil war", characterized by one apologist as
"…a struggle between two nations for a single homeland"? Dadrian
ridicules this argument by first highlighting the essential attributes
of a bona fide civil war: the collapse of central government authority,
creating a power vacuum filled by armed, antagonistic factions engaged
in violent and sustained clashes.This basic paradigm simply did not
apply to wartime Turkey, whose Ottoman state organization,

…was not only fully functional but on account of its armed forces
were able to wage for four years a multi-front gigantic war against
such formidable enemies as England, France and Tsarist Russia. The
wartime emergency measures, martial law and the temporary suspension of
parliament were conditions which helped invest the executive branch
of the Ottoman government with enormous and concentrated power,
power that was more than enough to exercise dictatorship.

Moreover, most able-bodied Armenian males were conscripted into the
Ottoman Army long before Turkey intervened in the war. What was left
of the Armenian population consisted by and large of terror stricken
women, children and old me desperately trying to stay alive in an
environment filled with the memories of past massacres, a consuming
apprehension regarding new and impending disasters and burdened with
all sorts of war-related hardships.

The ‘civil war argument’ also hinges on the assertion that four
specific Armenian uprisings-Shabin Karahisar (June 6-July 4, 1915),
Musa Dagh (July 30-September 1915), Urfa (September 29-October
23, 1915) and in particular Van (April 20-May 17, 1915)-comprise a
major, organized "Armenian rebellion." Reports by consuls of Turkey’s
wartime allies Austria and Germany, debunk this argument. The Austrian
Military Plenipotentiary to Turkey during World War I, in his memoirs,
characterized the Van uprising as "…an act of desperation" by
Armenians who "…recognized that [a] general butchery had begun in
the environs of Van and that they would be the next [victims]."

Germany’s consul in Aleppo, Walter Rossler, described the Urfa uprising
in similar terms. Imbued with the recent memory of the brutal 1895
massacre, and the unfolding spectacle of mas murder in their vicinity
during the summer of 1915, the Urfa Armenians made a hasty, last
ditch effort to defend themselves. German Ambassador Paul Count von
Wolff-Metternich filed a 72-page report to his government in Berlin
addressing all four of these uprisings. Metternich maintained that
each of these uprisings was a defensive act attempting merely to ward
off imminent deportation, and he stated bluntly "…there was neither a
concerted general uprising, nor was there a fully valid proof that such
a synchronized uprising was organized or planned." As Dadrian observes,

How could desperate groupings of people trying to stay alive by
defending themselves be described as ‘rebels’supposedly bent on
undermining a mighty state system intent on destroying them?…without
exception these uprisings were improvised last-ditch attempts to ward
off imminent deportation and destruction. Without exception they were
all local, very limited, and above all, highly defensive initiatives;
as such they were ultimately doomed to failure. The temporary success
of the Van uprising was entirely due to a very fortuitous circumstance:
the timely arrival of the advance units of the Russian Caucasus army. A
delay of one or two days in this movement might well sealed the fate
of the defenders.

Dadrian concedes that regardless of their justification — underscored
in wartime German, Austrian, and US consular reports of the sustained
historical record of Armenian oppression and episodic massacre by
the Turks,

Individual Armenians and even some small groups of Armenians in very
isolated cases resorted to espionage, sabotage, and other anti-Turkish
hostile acts…[and]…several thousands of Armenians from all over
the world, including several hundred former Ottoman subjects, rushed
to the Caucasus to enroll in the ranks of the Russian Caucasus army
to fight against the Turks; the majority of them were, however,
Russian subjects.

In his concluding remarks on the civil war apologetic, Dadrian poses,
and then addresses this "ultimate question":

…does the ensemble of these facts warrant a decision to deport
and wantonly destroy an entire population? The answer should be no
for a variety of reasons but in one particular respect that answer
is cast into special relief. The reference is to a host of other
ethnic and nationality groups and individuals who likewise indulged
in such anti-Turkish hostile acts during the war, including sabotage,
espionage and volunteering for service in the armed forces of Turkey’s
enemies. Foremost among these were the Kurds, who like the Armenians,
were engaged in pro- as well as anti-Turkish activities.

On the eastern front several of the spies caught by the Turks were
themselves Turks; so were a number of Greeks operating in the west of
Turkey. Nor can one exempt the Jews who provided two distinct volunteer
corps fighting the Turks at two different fronts, the Dardanelles (in
1915) and Palestine (in 1918). Moreover, one of the largest wartime
espionage networks, the NILI in Yaffa, Palestine, which was caught by
the Turks, was run by a small Jewish group. And yet…[T]hese [Turkish]
authorities at that time did not think it prudent to extend their
operations of ethnic cleansing to these nationalities and minority
groups and thereby compound the already existing problems arising
from the ongoing mass murder of the Armenians.

Dadrian dismisses as "blatant sophistry" the non-sequitur Turkish claim
of 2.5 million victims in the 1914-1922 period because it includes
(and conflates),

… disparate categories of events such as losses in World War I,
losses in the post-Turkish campaign for independence, as well as
losses due to epidemics, malnutrition and succumbing to the rigors
of the elements… What is fundamental in all these losses is that
overwhelmingly they are the byproducts and the results of warfare
with Turkey’s external enemies. These warfare losses are cryptically
blended, juxtaposed and composed with the number of victims of an
organized mass murder. Indeed, the two categories are collapsed
whereby victim and victimizer groups are subsumed under a single,
undifferentiated category, having been leveled almost beyond
differentiation, and no longer discernible as separate, if not
antithetical, categories.

The Commemoration Date

Within 24-hours of agreeing to a secret military and political pact
with Imperial Germany on August 2, 1914, the Ittihadist (‘Young Turk’)
government ordered a general mobilization, which resulted in the
military conscription of nearly all able-bodied Armenian males aged
20-45. Additional calls were soon extended to the 18-20, and 45-60
year old age groups. The preponderance of these Armenian recruits were
executed by Turkish officers and fellow soldiers after having been
employed as labor battalion soldiers. German and Austrian military and
political officials, as well as the American Ambassador to the Ottoman
Empire, Henry Morgenthau, all rejected the subsequent Turkish arguments
during the commission of the genocide that massive deportations of
the Armenians were justified due to concerns for military security.

Aleppo’s veteran German Consul, Walter Rossler, in a report of 27
July 1915 to Berlin declared, "In the absence of menfolk, nearly
all of whom have been conscripted, how can women and children
pose a threat?"…German Colonel Stange, in charge of a detachment
of Special Organization Forces in eastern Turkey, questioned the
veracity of the argument of Ottoman military authorities. These
authorities were maintaining that the deportations were a military
necessity because they feared an uprising. In his report to his
German military superiors, Stange retorted, "Save for a small
fraction of them, all able-bodied Armenian men were recruited. There
could, therefore, be no particular reason to fear a real uprising
(emphasis in the original)"…Austrian Vice Marshall Pomiankowski,
Military Plenipotentiary at Ottoman General Headquarters, provided
his answer to these questions. The Turks, "began to massacre the
able-bodied Armenian men…in order to render the rest of the
population defenseless." After graphically describing the scenes
of these serial massacres of conscripted Armenian men which were
"in summary fashion," and "in almost all cases the procedure was the
same,",…Morgenthau noted with emphasis the same rationale: "Before
Armenians could be slaughtered, Armenia must be made defenseless." In
this connection, the Ambassador notified Washington on 10 July 1915
that "All the men from 20 to 45 are in the Turkish army."

Dadrian has argued that perhaps this initial isolation of the 18-60
year old Armenian male population in the first week of August
1914 heralds the onset of the subsequent genocide. However, the
Armenian genocide is formally commemorated on April 24, this year
marking the 92nd year since the events of April 24, 1915. On that
date, the Turkish Interior Ministry issued an order authorizing the
arrest of all Armenian political and community leaders suspected of
anti-Ittihadist or Armenian nationalist sentiments. In Istanbul alone,
2345 such leaders were seized and incarcerated, and most of them
were subsequently executed. The majority were neither nationalists,
nor were they involved in politics. None were charged with sabotage,
espionage, or any other crime, and appropriately tried. As the intrepid
Turkish scholar Taner Akcam recently acknowledged,

…Under the pretext of searching for arms, of collecting war levies,
or tracking down deserters, there had already been established a
practice of systematically carried-out plunders, raids, and murders
[against the Armenians] which had become daily occurrences…

Within a month, the final, definitive stage of the process which
reduced the Armenian population to utter helplessness, i.e., mass
deportation, would begin.

Today’s Status Quo of Immoral Denial and Diplomatic Confusion

But ninety-two years after the events of April 24, 1915, the Turkish
government persists in its denials of the Armenian genocide, abetted
by a well-endowed network of unsavory political and pseudo-academic
lobbyists operating with the imprimatur of morphing geo-strategic
rationales. Until the Soviet Union imploded, "Turkey as a bulwark
against Communism," was the justifying mantra; now, "Turkey as a
bulwark against radical Islam," is constantly invoked

This leeway afforded Turkey is both morally indefensible, and
increasingly, devoid of any geo-strategic value. West Germany was
arguably a much more direct and important ally against the Soviet
Communist bloc, while each successive post-World War II West German
administration, from Konrad Adenauer through Helmut Kohl, made
Holocaust denial a punishable crime. Moreover, there is burgeoning
evidence, available almost daily, that Turkey’s government under the
Muslim ideologue Erdogan, and large swaths of the Turkish media,
intelligentsia, and general public, are stridently anti-American,
and hardly qualify as "bulwarks against radical Islam." Indeed,
Turkey’s contemporary Islamic "revival" is of particular relevance to
the tragic events that transpired between 1894 and the end of World
War I, precisely because the Armenian genocide was in large measure
a jihad genocide.

Another source of lobbying pressure in opposition to the Congressional
resolutions formally recognizing the Armenian genocide are major
Jewish organizations such as the Anti-Defamation League (ADL),
The Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), B’nai
B’rith, and the American Jewish Committee (AJC). All have opposed
the Armenian genocide recognition legislation in the Congress,
including the presentation of letters from the Jewish community of
Turkey, complemented, in the cases of ADL and JINSA, by their own
statements opposing these Congressional resolutions. Even the most
recent statements by ADL and AJC — which recognized the Armenian
Genocide under duress — actively oppose (ADL), or fail to support
(AJC), the resolutions. These groups maintain that passage of HR/SR 106
jeopardizes both the safety on Turkey’s small Jewish minority (which is
glaringly inconsistent with their simultaneous hagiography of Turkey’s
treatment of Jews, past and present), and what they profess to be the
ongoing congenial and strategic relationship between Turkey and Israel.

While Germany openly recognizes the Holocaust, and prosecutes
Holocaust deniers, Turkey refuses to recognize the Armenian genocide
and in fact has prosecuted its own citizens if they dare to affirm
this established genocide. Nobel Prize winning Turkish author Orhan
Pamuk, for example, was prosecuted under penal code Article 301,
which states: "A person who, being a Turk, explicitly insults the
Republic or Turkish Grand National Assembly, shall be punishable by
imprisonment of between six months to three years." A complaint was
also filed against the Turkish scholar Taner Akcam who forthrightly
acknowledges the Armenian genocide, and the late Armenian editor
Hrant Dink — ultimately assassinated by a Turkish nationalist —
was earlier prosecuted and punished, under this same statute.

After a three weeks delay which kept important U.S. military troops
at sea, on March 1, 2003, the Turkish parliament rejected a resolution
that would have allowed these forces to open a northern front against
Iraq from Turkish soil. This serious rupture, and other evidence
adduced by the founder and chairman of a leading Turkish think tank
prompted his candid observation in May, 2005 that, "Turkish-American
relations have been in a process of erosion for a long time. The
strategic partnership is long over. [emphasis added] And after it
ended, unfortunately no effort was made to redefine our relations."

Public attitudes in Turkey towards the U.S. are overtly negative.

During early March 2005, an announcement poster inviting the public
to attend a large scale anti-US demonstration, on March 19, 2005 was
displayed extensively throughout the streets of Istanbul, and in the
lobbies and hallways of public buildings as well. The poster depicted
the US as a giant octopus with long tentacles strangling the globe,
and proclaimed, "America Get Your Hands Off the Middle East."

Signatories of the poster represented millions of members from the
most prominent national organizations, trade and labor unions, and
professional associations of Turkey. Valley of the Wolves (released
February, 2006), the wildly popular, most expensive film ever made in
Turkey, is a stridently anti-American propaganda piece, which appears
to mirror the widespread hateful Turkish attitudes towards the U.S.

expressed in polling data from the spring of 2006.

There is also no evidence that the diaspora dhimmitude of ADL and
like-minded U.S. Jewish community advocacy groups has done anything
to ameliorate the chronic plight of Turkish Jews (whose numbers
have steadily declined from a post World War II census of 77,000 to
less than 17,000 at present), or bolstered the so-called "alliance"
between Turkey and Israel. Such servile efforts have failed to alter a
virulently Antisemitic Turkish religious (i.e., Islamic), and secular
culture which continues to target Turkey’s vestigial Jewish population
— only 16% of Turks view Jews favorably according to a Spring 2006
Pew Global Attitudes survey — and the Turkish populace is virulently
anti-Zionist, and anti-Israeli.

Interviewed for a November 19, 2003 story in The Christian Science
Monitor, following the bombing of Istanbul’s two main synagogues
by indigenous Turkish jihadist groups, Rifat Bali, a scholar, and
Turkish Jew, acknowledged the chronic plight of Turkey’s small,
dwindling Jewish community, whose social condition remains little
removed from the formal "dhimmi" status of their ancestors. "The
Turkish Jews have not been fully integrated or Turkified, and they
have had to limit their expectations. A kid grows up knowing he is
never going to become a government minister, so no one tries, and
the same goes for positions in the military."

These acts of jihad terrorism targeting Jews occurred against
a backdrop of relentless Antisemitic propaganda conflating Jews,
Zionism, and Israel — spearheaded by groups emphasizing traditional
Islamic motifs of Jew hatred — a campaign that continues unabated.

For example, Milli Gazete, the daily produced by former Prime Minister
Erbakan’s National Salvation Party since January, 1973, and a major
organ of fundamentalist Islam in Turkey, published articles in February
and April of 2005 which were toxic amalgams of ahistorical drivel,
and rabidly Antisemitic and anti-dhimmi Koranic motifs.

"Secular" Turkish antisemitism was perhaps best exemplified by a
"cinematic motif" in Valley of the Wolves (mentioned earlier for its
anti-Americanism) which featured an American Jewish doctor dismembering
Iraqis supposedly murdered by American soldiers in order to harvest
their organs for Jewish markets. Prime Minister Erdogan not only failed
to condemn the film, he justified its production and popularity. This
is the same Mr. Erdogan who in 1974, then serving as president of
the Istanbul Youth Group of the Islamic fundamentalist National
Salvation Party wrote, directed, and played the leading role in a
theatrical play entitled Maskomya, staged throughout Turkey during the
1970s. Mas-Kom-Ya was a compound acronym for "Masons-Communists-Yahudi
[Jews]", and the play focused on the evil, conspiratorial nature of
these three entities whose common denominator was Judaism.

During the Hizbollah-initiated war of July-August 2006, Prime
Minister Erdogan also repeatedly blamed Israel for the conflict,
emphasizing that "nobody should expect us [Turkey] to be neutral
and impartial." Concurrently, Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, the Turkish
secretary-general of the 57-Muslim nation Organization of the Islamic
Conference denounced Israel’s self-defensive actions as "state terror."

Conclusions

The Ottoman Turkish destruction of the Armenian people, beginning
in the late 19th and intensifying in the early 20th century, was
a genocide, and jihad ideology contributed significantly to this
decades long human liquidation process. These facts are now beyond
dispute. Milan Kundera, the Czech author, has written that man’s
struggle against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.

In The Banality of Indifference, Yair Auron reminds us of the
importance of this struggle:

Recognition of the Armenian genocide on the part of the entire
international community, including Turkey (or perhaps first and
foremost Turkey), is therefore a demand of the first order.

Understanding and remembering the tragic past is an essential
condition, even if not sufficient in and of itself, to preventing
the repetition of such acts in the future….

And in his eloquent Wednesday 8/22/07 column "No Room to Deny Genocide"
the Boston Globe’s Jeff Jacoby emphasized the nexus between the jihad
genocide of the Armenians, the contemporary depredations of jihad,
and the dangers of denial: "And at a time when jihadist violence from
Darfur to Ground Zero has spilled so much innocent blood, dissimulation
about the jihad of 1915 can only aid our enemies." Moreover the various
"strategic rationales" and arguments put forth to oppose formal
U.S. recognition of the Armenian genocide-the U.S.-Turkish alliance,
the Turkish-Israeli alliance, the vulnerability of Turkey’s vestigial
Jewish minority-appear wanting and hackneyed in light of burgeoning
evidence which undermines their basic credibility.

But most importantly, there is a compelling moral imperative to
pass these resolutions which transcends the dubious geopolitical
considerations used to rationalize and sustain Turkey’s ongoing
campaign of genocide denial. Professor Deborah Lipstadt , the renowned
Holocaust scholar, and author of Denying the Holocaust, and History on
Trial (which recounts her crushing defeat of Nazi-sympathizer David
Irving’s "libel’ suit"), in conjunction with twelve other leading
genocide scholars, elucidated the corrosive immorality of genocide
denial in this 1996 statement:

Andrew G. Bostom, MD, MS is an Associate Professor of Medicine at
Brown University Medical School, and regular contributor to Frontpage
Magazine. He is the author of "The Legacy of Jihad."