The Jihad Genocide of the Armenians by Andrew G. Bostom

[Gavur]

The Jihad Genocide of the Armenians
April 22nd, 2005



I attended a banquet in New York City April 2, 2005, celebrating Professor Vahakn Dadrian’s distinguished career, most notably, his singular contributions to the study of the Armenian genocide. Dadrian’s scholarship is characterized by a unique combination of painstaking, tireless research in the face of unseemly and well financed resistance, brilliant innovation (for example, his use of Austrian and German diplomatic sources free of either Armenian or Turkish biases), and, most remarkable of all in this era, an intellectual honesty oblivious to political correctness.

Regarding this latter point, specifically, Dadrian has always been unafraid to identify the uniquely Islamic institution of jihad as a critical etiologic factor in the Armenian genocide. Indeed, the most revealing interlude of that April 2nd evening, for me, was his blunt recapitulation of a massacre as depicted in Reverend K. Balakian’s eyewitness narrative Hai Koghota (The Armenian Golgotha)—the major literary work [1] affecting Dadrian’s decision to study the genocide. In a 2003 essay collection [2], Dadrian recounted the harrowing details of this particular slaughter, its Islamic religious motifs unexpurgated. Six thousand four hundred Armenian children, young girls, and women from Yozgad, were decamped by their Turkish captors at a promontory some distance from the city. Then,

To save shell and powder, the gendarmerie commander in charge of this large convoy had gathered 10,000-12,000 Turkish peasants and other villagers, and armed with “hatchets, meat cleavers, saddler’s knives, cudgels, axes, pickaxes, shovels”, the latter attacked and for some 4-5 hours mercilessly butchered the victims while crying “Oh God, Oh God” (Allah, Allah). In a moment of rare candor, this gendarmerie commander confided to the priest-author, whom he did not expect to survive the mass murder, that after each massacre episode, he spread his little prayer rug and performed the namaz, the ritual of worship, centered on prayer, with a great sense of redemption in the service of Almighty God.

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. [3]. German and Austrian military and political officials—whose governments were allied with Turkey, as well as the American Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, Henry Morgenthau—all rejected the subsequent Turkish argument 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 Armenian 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” [4]

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 90th 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. [5] As the intrepid Turkish author 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…[6]

Within a month, the final, definitive stage of the process which reduced the Armenian population to utter helplessness, i.e., mass deportation, would begin. [7]

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 Dadrian published in 2002 validates the conclusion that the Ottoman Turks committed a centrally organized mass murder, i.e., a genocide, against their Armenian population. [8] 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…[9]

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. [10] 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. [11]

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”. [12]

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, 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. [13]

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. [14]

Jihad as a Major Determinant of the Armenian Genocide

The wartime reports from German and Austro-Hungarian officials also confirm independent 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. [15] 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. [16]

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. [17] 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. [18]

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. [19]

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”. [20] 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. [21] 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. [22]

Despite their “revolutionary” advent, and accompanying comparisons to the ideals of the French Revolution, the CUP’s “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…”. [23] 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 CUP leadership “…soon turned from equality…to Turkification…” [24] Indeed, an influential member of the Ottoman Committee of Union and Progress, Sheik Abd-ul-Hack, a “progressive” Young Turk, made this revealing declaration writing in a Parisian Muslim review, (Le Mecherouttiete, edited by Sherif Pasha, Paris), in August, 1912:

[Gavur]

Cont...

Yes! The Musulman religion is in open hostility to all your world of progress. Understand, you European observers, that a Christian, whatever his position may be, by the mere fact of his being a Christian is regarded by us as a blind man lost to all sense of human dignity. Our reasoning with regard to him is as simple as it is definitive. We say: the man whose judgment is so perverted as to deny the existence of a one and only God, and to make up gods of different sorts, can only be the meanest expression of human degradation; to speak to him would be a humiliation for our intelligence and an insult to the grandeur of the Master of the Universe. The presence of such miscreants among us is the bane of our existence; their doctrine is a direct insult to the purity of our faith; contact with them is a defilement of our bodies; any relation with them a torture to our souls. Though detesting you, we have condescended to study your political institutions and your military organization. Over and above the new weapons that Providence procures for us through your agency, you have yourselves rekindled, the inextinguishable faith of our heroic martyrs. Our Young Turks, our Babis, our new Brotherhoods, all our sects, under various forms, are inspired by the same idea; the same necessity of moving forward. Towards what end? Christian civilization? Never! Islam is the one great international family. All true believers are brothers. A community of feeling and of faith binds them in mutual affection. It is for the Caliph to facilitate these relations and to rally the Faithful under the sacerdotal standard. [25]

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 Armenians were slaughtered. [26] The massacres of the 1890s had an “organic” connection to the Adana massacres of 1909, and more importantly, the events of 1915. As Dadrian argues, they 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. [27]

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. [28]

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… [29]

Kinross [30] 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 [31] 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? [32]

Finally, Bat Ye’or [33] places the continuum of massacres from the 1890s through the end of World War I, in an overall theological and juridical context, 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 screeds (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 [34]), several persistent denialist rationales at least merit exploration and sound rebuttal, before being dismissed. Dadrian [35] 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:

[Gavur]

…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? [36]

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.” [37] 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. [38]. 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 Turkeys 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. (emphasis added) [39]

Were the mass killings of the Armenians merely an unintended epiphenomenon of a “civil war”, characterized by one apologist [40] 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. [41] 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. [42]

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 Turkeys wartime allies—Austria and Germany, debunk this argument. The Austrian Military Plenipotentiary to Turkey during World War I, in his memoirs [43], 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. [44] 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.” [45] 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. [46]

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. [47]

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 fo the largest wartime espionage networks, the NILI in Yaffa, Palestine, which was caught by the Turks, was run by a small Jewish group. An yet, a relatively mild, if not insignificant and inconsequential treatment was accorded to them by the Turkish authorities. These 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. [48]

Lastly, 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. [49]

Conclusion

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. [50] In The Banality of Indifference, Yair Auron [51] 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….

Yet ninety 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 sycophants operating with the imprimatur of morphing geostrategic rationales—formerly, “Turkey as a bulwark against Communism”, and now, “Turkey as a bulwark against radical Islam”. This leeway afforded Turkey is both illogical and morally indefensible. 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 Adenauer through Kohl, made Holocaust denial a punishable crime. Moreover, there is burgeoning evidence, available almost daily, that both Turkey’s government under the Muslim ideologue Erdogan (see here as well) and large swaths of the Turkish media and intelligentsia (see, “Turkish Media Project”) 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, because the Armenian genocide was in large measure a jihad genocide. But most importantly, there is a compelling moral imperative which transcends the flimsy 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… [52]

Dr. Bostom is an Associate Professor of Medicine and author of the forthcoming, The Legacy of Jihad on Prometheus Books

Notes[1] Balakian, Reverend K., Hai Koghkotan. Trouakner Hai Mardirosakroutiunen. Berlinen Tebee Zor 1914-1920 (The Armenian Golgotha. Episodes from the Armenian Martyrilogy. From Berlin to Zor 1914-1920), vol. 1. Vienna, 1922. [2] Dadrian, V. “The Quest for Scholarship in My Pathos for the Armenian Tragedy and its Victims”, in Pioneers of Genocide Studies, S. Totten and S. Jacobs, editors, New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2002, pp. 239-240.[3] Dadrian, V. “The Signal Facts Surrounding the Armenian Genocide and the Turkish Denial Syndrome”, Journal of Genocide Research, 2003, Vol. 5, p. 273.[4] Germany Foreign Ministry Archives Turkei 183/38, A23991, or R14087, K. no. 81/B.1645; Germany Foreign Ministry Archives Botschaft Konstantinopel 170, J. no. 3841, “secret” report of 23 August 1914; Joseph Pomiankowski, Der Zusammenbruch des Ottomanischen Reiches, Graz, Austria: Akademischer Druck- u. Verlag, 1969, p. 160.; and Henry Morgenthau, Ambassador Morgenthau’s Story, Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1918, pp. 302-304. Morgenthau’s 10 July report is in US National Archives, RG59, 867.4016/74; all cited in Dadrian, V. “The Armenian Genocide: An Interpretation”, in Winter, J., editor, America and the Armenian Genocide of 1914, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003, p.63, footnotes 18-21.[5] Uras E., The Armenians and the Armenian Question in History, 2nd ed., (Istanbul, 1976), p.612[6] Akcam T., Turkish National Identity and the Armenian Question, (Istanbul, 1992), p. 109.[7] Hovanissian R., Armenia on the Road to Independence, (Berkeley, CA, 1967), p. 51.[8] Dadrian V., “The Armenian Question and the Wartime Fate of the Armenians as Documented by the Officials of the Ottoman Empire’s World War I Allies: Germany and Austria-Hungary”, International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, (2002), Vol. 32, Pp. 59-85.[9] Dadrian V., “The Armenian Question and the Wartime Fate of the Armenians”, p.60.[10] Dadrian V., “The Armenian Question and the Wartime Fate of the Armenians”, p.76[11] Dadrian V., “The Armenian Question and the Wartime Fate of the Armenians”, p.76, with specific primary source documentation, p.84 n.109.[12] Dadrian V., “The Armenian Question and the Wartime Fate of the Armenians”, p.76, with specific primary source documentation, p.84 n.109.[13] Dadrian V., “The Armenian Question and the Wartime Fate of the Armenians”, p.77, with specific primary source documentation, Pp.84-85 n.111.[14] Dadrian V., “The Armenian Question and the Wartime Fate of the Armenians”, p.77.[15] Davison R., “Turkish Attitudes Concerning Christian-Muslim Equality in the Nineteenth Century”, The American Historical Review (1954), Vol. 54, Pp. 844-864.[16] Bat Ye’or, The Decline of Eastern Christianity Under Islam, (Cranbury, NJ: Fairleigh xxxxinson University Press, 1996) 522 Pp.[17] Dadrian V., Warrant for Genocide: Key Elements of Turko-Armenian Conflict, (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1999), p. 39.[18] Dadrian V., “The Armenian Question and the Wartime Fate of the Armenians”, p.61, with specific primary source documentation p.79, n.11[19] Dadrian V., “The Armenian Question and the Wartime Fate of the Armenians”, p.61, with specific primary source documentation p.79, n.11[20] Davison R., “Turkish Attitudes Concerning Christian-Muslim Equality in the Nineteenth Century”, p.855.[21] Bat Ye’or, The Decline of Eastern Christianity Under Islam, Reports by British Diplomats [1850-1876], Pp. 395-433.[22] Dadrian V., “The Armenian Question and the Wartime Fate of the Armenians”, Pp.61-62, with specific primary source documentation, p.79 n.14.[23] Dadrian V., “The Armenian Question and the Wartime Fate of the Armenians”, Pp.61-62, with specific primary source documentation, p.79 n.15.[24] Davison R, “The Armenian Crisis, 1912-1914”, The American Historical Review, (1948) Vol. 53, Pp. 482-483.[25] Servier, A. Islam and the Psychology of the Musulman, translated by A. S. Moss-Blundell, London, 1924, pp. 241-42. [26] Dadrian V., The History of the Armenian Genocide, (Providence, RI: Bergahn Books, 1997), Pp. 155, 182, 225, 233 n.44; Auron Y., The Banality of Indifference, (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2000), p. 44.[27] Dadrian V., The History of the Armenian Genocide, Pp. 113-184.[28] Dadrian V., The History of the Armenian Genocide, p. 147, with primary source documentation p. 168 n.199.[29] Bat Ye’or, The Dhimmi: Jews and Christians Under Islam, (Cranbury, NJ: Fairleigh xxxxinson University Press, 1985) Pp. 48,67, 101.[30] Lord Kinross, The Ottoman Centuries-The Rise and Fall of the Turkish Empire, New York: Morrow Quill Paperbacks, 1979, pp. 559-560.[31] U.S. State Department document 867.4016/57, March 10, 1915.[32] Gabrielan M.C., Armenia: A Martyr Nation, (New York, Chicago: Fleming H. Revell, Co., 1918), p. 269.[33] Bat Ye’or, The Decline of Eastern Christianity Under Islam, p. 197.[34] Dadrian, V. The Key Elements in the Turkish Denial of the Armenian Genocide: A Case Study of Distortion and Falsification, The Zoryan Institute, Cambridge, MA, 1999, pp. 18-19.[35] Dadrian, V., “The Signal Facts Surrounding the Armenian Genocide and the Turkish Denial Syndrome”, pp. 274-275.[36] Dadrian, V., “The Signal Facts Surrounding the Armenian Genocide and the Turkish Denial Syndrome”, p. 275.[37] Orgeneral Ali Fuad Erden, Birinci Dunya Harbinde Suriye Hantiralari [Syrian Memoirs of World War I], Vol. 1 p. 122; cited in, Dadrian, V., “The Signal Facts Surrounding the Armenian Genocide and the Turkish Denial Syndrome”, p. 275.[38] Dadrian, V., “The Signal Facts Surrounding the Armenian Genocide and the Turkish Denial Syndrome”, p. 275.[39] Dadrian, V., “The Signal Facts Surrounding the Armenian Genocide and the Turkish Denial Syndrome”, p. 275. [40] Lewis, B., The Emergence of Modern Turkey, London: Oxford University Press, 1961, p. 350.[41] Dadrian, V., “The Signal Facts Surrounding the Armenian Genocide and the Turkish Denial Syndrome”, p. 275. [42] Dadrian, V., “The Signal Facts Surrounding the Armenian Genocide and the Turkish Denial Syndrome”, pp. 275-276.[43] Pomiankowski, J., Der Zusammenbruch des Ottomanischen Reiches, p. 160.; cited in Dadrian, V., “The Signal Facts Surrounding the Armenian Genocide and the Turkish Denial Syndrome”, p. 276.[44] Germany Foreign Ministry Archives Turkei 183/40, A35040, Rossler’s November 8, 1915 report; cited in Dadrian, V., “The Signal Facts Surrounding the Armenian Genocide and the Turkish Denial Syndrome”, p. 276. [45] Germany Foreign Ministry Archives Turkei 183/40, A25749, September 18, 1916 report, p. 14; cited in Dadrian, V., “The Signal Facts Surrounding the Armenian Genocide and the Turkish Denial Syndrome”, p. 276. [46] Dadrian, V., “The Signal Facts Surrounding the Armenian Genocide and the Turkish Denial Syndrome”, p. 276.[47] Dadrian, V., “The Signal Facts Surrounding the Armenian Genocide and the Turkish Denial Syndrome”, p. 277. [48] Dadrian, V., “The Signal Facts Surrounding the Armenian Genocide and the Turkish Denial Syndrome”, p. 277. [49] Dadrian, V., “The Signal Facts Surrounding the Armenian Genocide and the Turkish Denial Syndrome”, p. 277.[50] Kundera M., The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, (New York, NY: Harper Collins, 1999)[51] Auron Y., The Banality of Indifference, p. 56.[52] Dadrian, V. The Key Elements in the Turkish Denial of the Armenian Genocide: A Case Study of Distortion and Falsification, p. 81.




Andrew G. Bostom

[imported_Turk]

references are so serious ..congratulations ..good concoct piç

[Gavur]

THANK YOU
AND PEOPLE LIKE YOU!

Anlayana davul zurna saz
Anlamayanlar senin gibi kaz!

Some noise can be put up with if you comprehend whats at hand
one with no capablity can be like you a hen!

[Gavur]

Goebbels And The Jihadist Youth by Andrew G. Bostom

American Thinker, AZ
April 11 2006

The Big Lie as propaganda device has a long and dishonorable
history, gulling onto complacency those who prefer to avoid
unpleasant worries. The Nazi propagandist Goebbels was its most
notable practitioner, but for sheer numbers and historical roots,
no other group can match the efforts of jihadist Muslims, with their
religiously-sanctioned practice of deceiving infidels to protect
the faith.

Al-Jazeera aired on March 24, 2006, a rather chilling, one-sided
"dialogue" between representatives of Arab and Danish student
organizations who met in Damascus, ostensibly to discuss the violent
worldwide Muslim reactions following publication of the Muhammad
cartoons by the Danish paper Jyllands-Posten. Video clips and a written
transcript of this event are available through the Middle East Media
Research Institute (MEMRI).

Ahmad Al-Shater, Chairman of the Arab Students Union, and his Sudanese
Student Union colleague "Muhammad," were unremittingly truculent
in their presentations, which melded classic taquiyya (sanctioned
dissimulation of Islamic doctrine to "protect" the faithful), or
sheer ignorance, Muslim Jew-hatred, and a Goebbels-like distortion of
contemporary events, including the requisite conspiratorial Judenhass
(Jew-hatred).

Al-Shater began by stating that it was the nefarious "Zionists" and
"imperialists" who had deliberately misrepresented Islam by wrongfully
associating the religion with terrorism. He asserted categorically:

According to the Islamic religion, even in times of war, it is
forbidden to uproot a tree, it is forbidden to kill a woman, it is
forbidden to kill a child, it is forbidden to destroy wells... It is
forbidden to fill wells with earth... Water wells... It is forbidden to
harm human life, it is forbidden to destroy a church, it is forbidden
to attack a religious belief...

Classical Islamic doctrines on jihad war, and more importantly the
actual practice of jihad campaigns in accord with this theory, put
the lie to Al-Shater's uninformed or deliberately taquiyya-laden
assertions. Al-Shater's basic contention that "it is forbidden
to attack a religious belief" is patently absurd-the archetypal
proto-jihad campaigns of Muhammad himself imposed Islam and Islamic
suzerainty upon the pagans, Jews, and Christians of ancient Arabia,
and continue to provide the rationale for aggressive jihad imperialism
to this day.

For example, Muhammad, according to a summary of sacralized Muslim
sources,

..waited for some act of aggression on the part of the Jews of Khaybar,
whose fertile lands and villages he had destined for his followers...to
furnish an excuse for an attack. But, no such opportunity offering,
he resolved in the autumn of this year [i.e., 628], on a sudden and
unprovoked invasion of their territory.

Ali (later, the fourth "Rightly Guided Caliph", and especially revered
by Shi'ite Muslims) asked Muhammad why the Jews of Khaybar were being
attacked, since they were peaceful farmers, tending their oasis, and
was told by Muhammad he must compel them to submit to Islamic Law. The
renowned early 20th century scholar of Islam, David Margoliouth,
observed aptly:

Now the fact that a community was idolatrous, or Jewish, or anything
but Mohammedan, warranted a murderous attack upon it.

Moreover, this canonical hadith (from Sahih Muslim Book 019, Number
4324), which further incorporates a Koranic verse (K 59:5), states
clearly that Muhammad also sanctioned the destruction of the trees
(i.e., date palms) of infidel foes:

It is narrated on the authority of 'Abdullah that the Messenger of
Allah (may peace be upon him) ordered the date-palms of Banu Nadir to
be burnt and cut. These palms were at Buwaira. Qutaibah and Ibn Rumh
in their versions of the tradition have added: So Allah, the Glorious
and Exalted, revealed the verse (K59:5): "Whatever palm-tree you
cut down or leave standing upon its roots, It is by Allah's command,
and that He may abase the transgressors"

And with only minor points of internal disagreement, the consensus
amongst all four major schools of classical Sunni Islamic jurisprudence
contradicts each claim made by Al-Shater. The Hanafi jurists Abu
Yusuf (d. 798), Shaybani (d. 803/805), and Shaikh Burhanuddin Ali of
Marghinan (d. 1196), state:

[Abu Yusuf]-It seems that the most satisfactory suggestion we have
heard in this connection is that there is no objection to the use of
any kind of arms against the polytheists, smothering and burning their
homes, cutting down their trees and date groves, and using catapults.

[Shaybani]-The army may launch the attack [on the enemy] by night or
by day and it is permissible to burn [the enemy] fortifications with
fire or to inundate them with water.

[Shaikh Burhanuddin Ali of Marghinan]-in the Traditions...the Prophet
plundered and despoiled the tribe of al-Mustaliq by surprise, and
he also agreed with Asamah to make a predatory attack upon Qubna
at an early hour, and to set it on fire, and such attacks are not
preceded by a call...If the infidels, upon receiving the call [to
Islam], neither consent to it nor agree to pay capitation tax, it
is then incumbent on the Muslims to call upon God for assistance,
and to make war upon them, because God is the assistant of those
who serve Him, and the destroyer of His enemies, the infidels, and
it is necessary to implore His aid upon every occasion; the Prophet,
moreover, commands us so to do. And having so done, the Muslims must
then with God's assistance attack the infidels with all manner of
warlike engines (as the Prophet did by the people of Ta'if), and must
also set fire to their habitations (in the same manner as the Prophet
fired Baweera), and must inundate them with water and tear up their
plantations and tread down their grain because by these means they
will become weakened, and their resolution will fail and their force
be broken; these means are, therefore, all sanctified by the law.

The Hanbali jurist, Ibn Qudama (d. 1223) concurs, and both he and
Ibn Taymiyya (d. 1328), also a Hanbali, elaborate on the issue of
when killing women and children may in fact be allowed:

[Ibn Qudama]-It is permitted to surprise the infidels under cover of
night, to bombard them with mangonels [an engine that hurls missiles]
and to attack them without declaring battle (du'a'). The Prophet
attacked the Banu Mustaliq unexpectedly, while their animals were
still at the watering-place; he killed the men who had fought against
him and carried off the children into captivity. It is forbidden to
kill children, madmen, women, priests, impotent old men, the infirm,
the blind, the weak-minded, unless they have taken part in the combat.

[Ibn Taymiyya]-As for those who cannot offer resistance or cannot
fight, such as women, children, monks, old people, the blind,
handicapped, and their likes, they shall not be killed, unless they
actually fight with words [e.g. by propaganda] and acts [e.g. by
spying or otherwise assisting in the warfare]. Some [ jurists] are
of the opinion that all of them may be killed, on the mere ground
that they are unbelievers, but they make an exception for women and
children since they constitute property for Muslims.

Averroes (d. 1198), the renowned philosopher and scholar of the
natural sciences, who was also an important Maliki jurist, outlines
some of the (rather trivial) points of controversy:

Opinions vary as to the damage that may be inflicted on their property,
such as buildings, cattle, and crops. Mâlik allowed the felling of
trees, the picking of fruits and the demolishing of buildings, but
not the slaughter of cattle and the burning of date-palms...According
to Shâfiî, dwellings and trees may be burnt as long as the enemy have
the disposal of fortresses.

The Shafi'i jurist Al-Mawardi's (d. 1058) opinion confirms the
prevailing consensus views:

The amir [leader] of the army may use ballistas and catapults when
besieging the enemy, for the Messenger of Allah...set up a catapult
against the inhabitants of Ta'if. He may also destroy their homes,
make night raids against them and cause fire. If, moreover, he reckons
that by cutting their date-palms and their trees down it will serve to
weaken them, such that they are overcome by force or are compelled to
make a peace agreement, then he should do so; he should not, however,
act in this way if he does not see any such benefit in it.... It is
also permitted to block off the supply of water to them, or to prevent
them from using it, even if there are women and children amongst them,
as it is one of he most potent means of weakening them and gaining
victory over the, either by forcer or through a treaty. If a thirsty
person amongst them requests a drink, the amir may either give him
to drink or refuse him, just as he has the option of killing him or
letting him live.

Even the writings of the much lionized paragon of mystical Sufism
and Shafi'i jurist al-Ghazali (d. 1111)-who, as noted by the esteemed
scholar W.M. Watt, has been "...acclaimed in both the East and West as
the greatest Muslim after Muhammad..."-underscore how these practices
were normative:

one must go on jihad (i.e., warlike razzias or raids) at least once a
year...one may use a catapult against them [non-Muslims] when they are
in a fortress, even if among them are women and children. One may set
fire to them and/or drown them...One may cut down their trees...One
must destroy their useless books. Jihadists may take as booty whatever
they decide..

Ibn Hudayl, a 14th century Granadan author of an important treatise on
jihad, explained how these allowable methods facilitated the violent,
chaotic jihad conquest of the Iberian peninsula, and other parts
of Europe:

It is permissible to set fire to the lands of the enemy, his stores
of grain, his beasts of burden - if it is not possible for the Muslims
to take possession of them - as well as to cut down his trees, to raze
his cities, in a word, to do everything that might ruin and discourage
him...[being] suited to hastening the Islamization of that enemy or
to weakening him. Indeed, all this contributes to a military triumph
over him or to forcing him to capitulate.

And these repeated attacks, indistinguishable in motivation from
modern acts of jihad terrorism, like the horrific 9/11/01 attacks in
New York and Washington, DC, and the Madrid bombings on 3/11/04, or
those in London on 7/7/05, were in fact designed to sow terror. The
17th century Muslim historian al-Maqqari, explained that the panic
created by the Arab horsemen and sailors, at the time of the Muslim
expansion in the regions subjected to those raids and landings,
facilitated their later conquest:

Allah thus instilled such fear among the infidels that they did not
dare to go and fight the conquerors; they only approached them as
suppliants, to beg for peace.

The essential pattern of the jihad war is captured in the classical
Muslim historian al-Tabari' s recording of the recommendation given
by Umar b. al-Khattab (the second "Rightly Guided Caliph") to the
commander of the troops he sent to al-Basrah (636 C.E.), during the
conquest of Iraq. Umar reportedly said:

Summon the people to God; those who respond to your call, accept
it from them, but those who refuse must pay the poll tax out of
humiliation and lowliness. (Koran 9:29) If they refuse this, it is
the sword without leniency. Fear God with regard to what you have
been entrusted.

[Gavur]

Cont...

By the time of al-Tabari's death in 923, jihad wars had expanded the
Muslim empire from Portugal to the Indian subcontinent. Subsequent
Muslim conquests continued in Asia, as well as Eastern Europe. Under
the banner of jihad, the Christian kingdoms of Armenia, Byzantium,
Bulgaria, Serbia, Bosnia, Herzegovina, Croatia, and Albania, in
addition to parts of Poland and Hungary, were also conquered and
Islamized by waves of Seljuk, or later Ottoman Turks, as well as
Tatars. Arab Muslim invaders engaged, additionally, in continuous
jihad raids that ravaged and enslaved Sub-Saharan African animist
populations, extending to the southern Sudan. When the Ottoman Muslim
armies were stopped at the gates of Vienna in 1683, over a millennium
of jihad had transpired.

These tremendous military successes spawned a triumphalist jihad
literature. Muslim historians recorded in detail the number of
infidels slaughtered, or enslaved and deported, the cities, villages,
and infidel religious sites which were sacked and pillaged, and the
lands, treasure, and movable goods seized.

And once again, despite Mr. Al-Shater's ignorance or disingenuous
denial, this sanctioned but wanton destruction, resulted in: the
merciless slaughter of non-combatants, including women and children;
massive destruction of non-Muslim houses of worship and religious
shrines-Christian churches, Jewish synagogues, and Zoroastrian,
Hindu, and Buddhist temples and idols; and the burning of harvest
crops and massive uprooting of agricultural production systems,
leading to famine. Christian (Coptic, Armenian, Jacobite, Greek, Slav,
etc.), as well as Hebrew sources, and even the scant Zoroastrian,
Hindu and Buddhist writings which survived the ravages of the Muslim
conquests, independently validate this narrative, and complement the
Muslim perspective by providing testimonies of the suffering of the
non-Muslim victims of jihad wars.

Al-Shater also spewed forth this lying invective-180 degrees divorced
from reality-which included a frank "burning of the Reichstag"
reference to mosque destruction considering the recent bombing of the
revered Shi'ite "Golden Mosque" in Samarra-a striking contemporary
event, but also just another manifestation of over a millennium of
Muslim sectarian violence between Sunnis and Shi'a:

Those who try to pin the blame for terrorism on the Muslims, headed
by the leader of international terrorism, America, and by Zionism
and imperialism, are killing our children in Palestine and Iraq on a
daily basis, as you can see. They are destroying schools. They are
destroying churches and mosques. They violate our honor. They rape
women and slit open the stomachs of pregnant women.

The bitter irony is that in stark contrast to Al-Shater's mendacious
slurs against American troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, or Israeli
forces in Gaza, Judea or Samaria, it is modern jihad campaigns which
have been fraught with the atrocities he enumerates. A few prominent
examples include: the Ottoman massacres of the Bulgarians in 1876
and larger genocidal slaughters of the Armenians at the close of
the 19th century, through the end of World War I; the Moplah jihad
against the hapless Hindus of South India in 1921; the massacres of
Assyrian Christians by Arab and Kurdish Muslims near Mosul in 1933;
and the recent genocidal jihad waged against Southern Sudanese
Christians and Animists by the Arab Muslim Khartoum government,
primarily during the last decade of the 20th century.

American correspondent Januarius A. MacGahan recorded these
observations from Batak, July-August, 1876 during his investigation
of the Bulgarian massacres:

The number of children killed in these massacres is something
enormous. They were often spitted on bayonets, and we have several
stories from eye-witnesses who saw little babes carried about the
streets, both here and at Otluk-kui, on the point of bayonets. The
reason is simple. When a Mahometan has killed a certain number of
infidels, he is sure of Paradise, no matter what his sins may be...the
ordinary Mussulman takes the precept in broader acceptation, and
counts women and children as well. Here in Batak the Bashi-Bazouks,
in order to swell the count, ripped open pregnant women, and killed
the unborn infants. As we approached the middle of the town, bones,
skeletons, and skulls became more numerous. There was not a house
beneath the ruins of which we did not perceive human remains, and
the street besides were strewn with them.

Lord Kinross described the slaughter of the Armenian community of Urfa
in December, 1895, one of a series of brutal massacres committed by
the Ottoman Turks between 1894 and 1896, as follows:

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.

Vahakn Dadrian recounted the harrowing details of the slaughter of 6400
Armenian children, young girls, and women from Yozgad, described in
Reverend K. Balakian's eyewitness narrative of the World War I period
(1914-1920), Hai Koghota (The Armenian Golgotha). The victims were
left by their Turkish captors at a promontory some distance from the
city. Then,

To save shell and powder, the gendarmerie commander in charge of this
large convoy had gathered 10,000-12,000 Turkish peasants and other
villagers, and armed with "hatchets, meat cleavers, saddler's knives,
cudgels, axes, pickaxes, shovels", the latter attacked and for some
4-5 hours mercilessly butchered the victims while crying "Oh God,
Oh God" (Allah, Allah). In a moment of rare candor, this gendarmerie
commander confided to the priest-author, whom he did not expect to
survive the mass murder, that after each massacre episode, he spread
his little prayer rug and performed the namaz, the ritual of worship,
centered on prayer, with a great sense of redemption in the service
of Almighty God.

J. J. Banninga, an American graduate of the Western Theological
Seminary, spent forty-two years in India, serving for 25 years as
head of the Union Theological Seminary at Pasumalai in South India.

His analysis of the 1921 Moplah (i.e., Muslims of Arabic and Hindu
descent living in the Malabar district of South India) jihad-one of
many periodic outbreaks of Moplah fanaticism-included these harrowing
descriptions:

...the Hindu population fell easy prey to their (i.,e., the Moplah)
rage and the atrocities committed defy description...The tale of
atrocities committed makes sad reading indeed. A memorial submitted by
women of Malabar to Her Excellency the Countess of Reading mentions
such crimes as wells filled with mutilated bodies, pregnant women
cut to pieces, children torn from mother's arms and killed, husbands
and fathers tortured, flayed, and burned alive before the eyes of
their wives and daughters; women forcibly carried off and outraged;
homes destroyed; temples desecrated...not less than 100 Hindu temples
were destroyed or desecrated; cattle slaughtered in temples and their
entrails placed around the necks of the idols in place of garlands
of flowers; and wholesale looting. No fiendish act seems to have been
too vile for them to perpetrate.

...There were, during the rebellion, many cases of forced conversion
from Hinduism to Mohammedanism. There was a double difficulty about
restoring these people to their old faith. In the first place there
is a severe penalty resting on any Mohammedan that perverts...and in
the second place there is really no door save birth into Hinduism.

On August 11, 1933, less than a year after British withdrawal from the
region, the "new" Iraqi armed forces, aided by local Arab and Kurdish
tribesmen, began the wholesale massacre of Assyrians in the Mosul
area (Simel, Dohuk). Before the end of August, 1933, 3000 Assyrians
were murdered, and thousands more displaced. An example typical of
the carnage was described in a contemporary chronicle believed to
have been written by Mar Eshai Shimun XXIII, a Cambridge University
graduate and Patriarch of the Church of the East:

The inoffensive population was indiscriminately massacred, men, women
and children alike, with rifle, revolver and machine gun fire. In one
room alone, eighty-one men from the Baz tribe, who had taken shelter...

were barbarously massacred. Priests were tortured and their bodies
mutilated. Those who showed their Iraqi nationality papers were the
first to be shot. Girls were raped and women violated and made to
march naked before the Arab army commander. Holy books were used as
fuel for burning girls. Children were run over by military cars.

Pregnant women were bayoneted. Children were flung in the air and
pierced on to the points of bayonets. Those who survived in the other
villages were now exposed day and night to constant raids and acts
of violence. Forced conversion to Islam of men and women was the
next process. Refusal was met with death. Sixty five out of ninety
five Assyrian villages and settlements were either sacked, destroyed
or burnt to the ground. Even the settlements which existed from the
year 1921 and who had no connection in any way with the trouble were
wrecked and all property looted by Iraq army and tribesmen.

The intrepid Dr. John Eibner made 20 visits to the Sudan during decade
of the 1990s, reporting on the recrudescence of jihad slavery. The
Arab Muslim dominated Khartoum government established an overtly
jihadist Popular Defense Force, which further incorporated local Arab
militias. Their jihad depredations targeting the Christian and Animist
tribes (principally the Dinkas of northern Bahr al-Ghazal, together
with the black African Nuba tribes of southern Kordofan) slaughtered,
displaced, and enslaved tens, sometimes hundreds of thousands at
a time. During the spring of 1998 alone, more than 300,000 persons
were displaced, while the total number killed and enslaved remained
unknown. These Dinka victims-women and children-shared the fate of
the Nuba, as described by Eibner:

Some Nuba captives end up as chattel slaves but the overwhelming
majority are deported to concentration camps elsewhere in Sudan, where
they serve in slave-like conditions. The children are sent to militant
Qur'anic schools, while the women are sent out to work without pay
as day laborers on farms and in private homes. Sexual abuse is rife.

Al-Shater's conspiracy mongering (the publication of the Danish
cartoons was yet another act of the "cabal"), and gross distortions
of Islamic doctrines and history were complemented by his lionization
of Holocaust deniers Roger Garaudy and David Irving (whose name he
could not recall-"He relies on documents. I cannot recall his name,
but he is a great English intellectual, a university professor, who
refuted the Holocaust."), as well as the viscerally anti-American
and Antisemitic British politicians George Galloway and Ken Livingston.

The briefer presentation of Al-Shater's colleague, Sudanese Student
Union Chairman "Muhammad" included raw Muslim Judenhass, threats to
Danish soldiers, and equally mendacious assertions of U.S.

murderousness in Iraq-compared, with earnestness, to the putatively
"light casualties" inflicted on the Iraqis during Saddam's 30-year
reign of domestic terror.

I'd like to tell you that harming the Prophet is not a new thing. One
thousand four hundred years ago, the Jews tried to kill him in
Al-Madina. In our religion, harming the Prophet is where we draw
the line. We are prepared to die to prevent this......As you know,
Bush killed 110,000 people in Iraq, while Saddam did not kill even
one third of this figure. Saddam did not kill even 30,000 people
throughout his rule. I would like to welcome you on this visit,
because the image of Denmark and the Danish people has become very
negative in the Arab and Islamic world. In conclusion, I would like
to say that tomorrow America will pass a resolution in the U.N.

Security Council calling for international military intervention in
Sudan. Among these forces, obviously, there will be Danish forces. I
would like to inform you that because the Sudanese people are so
angry over this affront, they will kill the Danish soldiers before
they kill the others.

He may be invoking an oral tradition, preserved in the hadith,
for this uniquely Islamic motif of Jew hatred (Bukhari- Volume 3,
Book 47, Number 786), which maintains that the perfidious Jews caused
Muhammad's protracted, excruciating death from poisoning.

Narrated Anas b. Malik: A Jewess brought a poisoned (cooked) sheep
for the Prophet who ate from it. I continued to see the effect of
the poison on the palate of the mouth of Allah's Apostle

The rest of Sudanese Student Union Chairman "Muhammad" statements
speak for themselves.

And what were the responses of the Danish Student Delegation Head
to his Muslim interlocutors, the Chairmen of the Arab Students and
Sudanese Student Unions?

...as a representative of the Danish youth and not a representative
of the government, I cannot explain to you why the Danish government
has not apologized...And another important question, in your last
very concrete questions about... could a Danish newspaper have made
drawings of the Holocaust or denying the Holocaust. And the answer to
that question is yes. There's no law in Denmark preventing a Danish
newspaper from making drawings of the Holocaust.

These muted, largely non-sequitur responses by the Head of the Danish
Student Delegation are a tangible product of the "Eurabian ethos",
which Bat Ye'or warned, pervades Western European academic and
political institutions. The very "cartoon dialogue" itself was but a
microcosm of the larger Euro-Arab Dialogue process and a distressing
illustration of the most craven dhimmitude that parent institution
has engendered, threatening, as Bat Ye'or notes, the very foundations
of Western society:

This Eurabian ethos operates at all levels of European society. Its
countless functionaries, like the Christian janissary slave-soldiers of
past Islamic regimes, advance a jihadist world strategy. Eurabia cannot
change direction; it can only use deception to mask its emergence,
its bias and its inevitable trajectory. Eurabia's destiny was sealed
when it decided, willingly, to become a covert partner with the Arab
global jihad against America and Israel. Americans must discuss the
tragic development of Eurabia, and its profound implications for the
United States, particularly in terms of its resultant foreign policy
realities. Americans should consider the despair and confusion of
many Europeans, prisoners of a Eurabian totalitarianism that foments
a culture of deadly lies about Western civilization. Americans should
know that this self-destructive calamity did not just happen, rather
it was the result of deliberate policies, executed and monitored by
ostensibly responsible people.

Finally, Americans should understand that Eurabia's contemporary
anti-Zionism and anti-Americanism are the spiritual heirs of 1930s
Nazism and anti-Semitism, triumphally resurgent.

Andrew G. Bostom is the author of The Legacy of Jihad.

http://www.americanthinker.com/articles.php?article_id=5404

[Behcet]

Christians have their own "jihads".

I heard Armenians refering to Karabag war as "sacred". So they make christian jihad on Azeris.

[Hovik]

Christians have their own "jihads".

I heard Armenians refering to Karabag war as "sacred". So they make christian jihad on Azeris.

Since we're talking about Azeri's and Jihad, wasn't it Azerbaijan that recruited Al Qaeda members, and Chechen Mercineries to fight against Armenians (in part on the basis they were Christian)?

[Behcet]

Since we're talking about Azeri's and Jihad, wasn't it Azerbaijan that recruited Al Qaeda members, and Chechen Mercineries to fight against Armenians (in part on the basis they were Christian)?

Chechens and Azeris were helping each other to repond to the Orthodox crusaders in the Caucasus, so a Christian "jihad" is/was waged on them.