ARMENIANS ‘MASSACRED 10,000 JEWS,’ CLAIMS REPORT
Today’s Zaman, Turkey
Oct 10 2007
Recent remarks by New York-based Jewish lobby organization the
Anti-Defamation League (ADL) about the alleged Armenian genocide have
added further fuel to a long-standing debate over the World War I-era
deaths of Anatolian Armenians.
However, recent studies conducted in Ottoman archives reveal another
side to the period, suggesting that Armenian gangs killed about 10,000
Jews in Anatolia and the Caucasus around the same time, according to
a news story in the latest issue of Aksiyon news magazine.
The recent remarks by the ADL that the Armenian genocide claims should
be accepted — a stance which was later softened by the qualification
that it was a matter for historians — caused uneasiness among the
global Jewish community, Aksiyon noted. At the time Lenny Ben-David,
former undersecretary at the Israeli Embassy in the US, had cautioned
the Israeli government to act wisely on the issue. In his article
published in the Oct. 5 issue of the Jerusalem Post, titled "Turkey
and Armenia: What Jews should do," In the piece, Ben-David referred to
the arguments that Armenians killed hundreds of thousands of Muslims
and hundreds of Jews in the early 20th century.
An examination of the Ottoman archives and documents shows Armenian
gangs are estimated to have killed somewhere in the region of 2 million
Muslims between 1914 and 1919. The same archives also suggest thousands
of Jews were killed by Armenians. Though the definite number is not
known, it is reckoned to be approximately 10,000.
Aksiyon’s story also explains that Gad Nassi, a researcher and author
who has made studies on Sabetayist, Ladino-speaking and Crypto Jewish
communities, took down the massacre stories of living witnesses. At
that time the Ottoman Empire sponsored the detailed studies of the
atrocities perpetrated against Muslims by Armenians in collaboration
with Russians. According to the reports prepared from these studies,
officials saw a pile of the corpses of 300 Jewish people who had set
off from Hakkari to search for their relatives, only to be intercepted
and killed by Armenians. International Strategic Research Organization
(ISRO/USAK) Chairman Sedat Laciner maintains that the lack of a Jewish
population in southeastern Anatolia can be attributed to massacre
by Armenians.