Progressives have been erasing and rewriting history for 100 years. While we should be justifiably outraged, the more important question should be, “Why?” Right now, high school students are raising their voices proclaiming we must repeal the Second Amendment and confiscate all personal firearms. (see Gun Control: The First Steps Of Tyranny) One has to wonder, is it because they are clueless about the Jewish Holocaust and the Armenian Genocide? So, Liberty, I will emphasize once again, “Those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it.” Don’t let this history repeat!
That’s my 2 cents.
Love,
Mom
In 1915, The New York Times reported on the Armenian mass starvation on a daily basis. Today, ISIS and the other extremists are engaging in a jihad specifically to return Turkey to a caliphate, regroup the Ottoman Empire to pre-Sykes-Picot borders and annihilate all non-Muslims. Yet, reports of this vast massacre of Christians is almost nonexistent in the Times and other such “progressive” publications.
Turkey refuses to acknowledge the Armenian Genocide, while several countries, including the United States of America, shy away from calling it a genocide. As Turkey has become an ally, diplomats have been reluctant to force the recognition of past atrocities in efforts to avoid destroying peaceful relations. Yet, even in the last decade, Turks have been persecuted, prosecuted, and even executed for printing about the killing of the Armenians. In addition, the Armenian deaths directly influenced the invention of the term “genocide” in 1943. Known as Red Sunday, Armenians worldwide commemorate April 24 as Genocide Remembrance Day in honor of the start of the Armenian Genocide.
As the Armenians were sent off to their death, another law was passed in September giving the government the right to confiscate all their property, including homes, land and livestock. Using criminals to perpetuate their atrocities, the government rewarded them with the seized possessions. Military commanders permitted their soldiers to “do to [the women] whatever you wish”, which resulted in prevalent sexual abuse and rape of not only women, but young girls. The more beautiful ones were defiled by upwards of a dozen men before being left to die. Others were stripped of their clothing and displayed on the auction block to be sold as sex slaves. As stated by The Oxford Handbook of Genocide Studies, "Muslims were eager to obtain Armenian women. Authorities registered such marriages but did not record the deaths of the former Armenian husbands."
The Ottoman Empire’s allies of Germany and Austria-Hungry, as well as the United States, who was still neutral at the time (see The Day America’s Neutrality Sank), and even Pope Benedict XV offered help to the Armenians. Yet the empire rejected those proposals justifying their actions by insisting they resulted from the Armenian’s pro-Russian sentiments. However, in a note by CUP’s Talaat Bey on September 16, 1915, he revealed their real motivation.
“The Government [has] decided to destroy completely all the Armenians living in Turkey...An end must be put to their existence, however criminal the measures taken may be, and no regard must be paid to either age or sex or conscientious scruples.”
This was confirmed by the German Ambassador, who stated, “Talaat Bey...openly stated that the [government] wished to take advantage offered by the war to make a clean sweep of their enemies at home without being troubled by foreign diplomatic intervention.” A U.S. businessman stated that while in Damascus, “several Turks whom I interviewed, told me that the motive of this exile was to exterminate the race.”
In a July 16, 1915, telegram to the U.S. Department of State, Ambassador Henry Morgenthau, Sr., called the government’s actions a “campaign of race extermination.” His 1918 memoirs elaborated, asserting, “When the Turkish authorities gave the orders for these deportations, they were merely giving the death warrant to a whole race; they understood this well, and, in their conversations with me, they made no particular attempt to conceal the fact.”
Before 1914, over 2.1 million Armenians lived in the Ottoman Empire. By 1922, that number had plummeted to under 300,000. The Turkish government admits to 300,000 Armenian deaths due to the war and disease. Yet it is believed approximately 1.5 million died at the hands of the CUP. In addition, estimates by Armenian religious leaders report upwards of 2,000 churches and 200 monasteries were destroyed by the Ottoman government. Furthermore, approximately $339 billion, by today’s value, in assets and personal property was confiscated from both Turkish and Russian Armenians. All of which the Turkish government still emphatically denies
Following World War I, the Allied Powers divided control of the Ottoman Empire under the Sykes-Picot Agreement. (see The Ottoman Empire Strikes Back) The Turks quickly began a revolt, eventually winning their independence in 1923 and dissolving the caliphate the following year.
Liberty, while we piously convince ourselves that we are too enlightened and informed to let such abominations happen again, brave Americans are in the Middle East right now rescuing hundreds of Christians experiencing the exact same Muslim extremist persecution the Armenians encountered. Not only are the Christians being raped, sold as sex slaves and massacred, their predators are now harvesting their organs to make a profit. Without anesthesia or any type of painkillers, innocent non-Muslims are kidnapped, taken in a room, and cut open so their heart, liver and other organs can be removed as they lay there dying. (See Holocaust: Then And Now).
April 24, 2018
Dear Liberty,
For the past five years, ISIS Muslim militants in the Middle East have waged a war on their Christian neighbors very much like the Jewish Holocaust in Germany. However, this is not a new battle. Its roots go back through centuries of Radical Islamist conquering, enslaving, and killing Christians. One hundred years ago, Islamists attempted to eradicate all Armenian Christians. This event led to a new term - Genocide: The Armenian Genocide.
Shortly after Christ’s resurrection, His disciples dispersed across the known world spreading the Good News of His saving grace. (see Tree Of Life) The apostle Andrew traveled to the city of Byzantium, where he began a church. As Christianity spread throughout the region, Tiridates III of Armenia declared it the state religion in 301. Around 330 AD, Roman emperor Constantine I renamed Byzantium as Constantinople. In addition, he proclaimed Christianity the official religion of the Eastern Roman, or Byzantine, Empire in current-day Turkey, freeing Christians from persecution with the “Edict of Milan”. (see Trinity, Or Not Trinity)
For centuries Muslims targeted Constantinople, resulting in the crusades, with the Ottoman Empire finally conquering Constantinople and ending the Byzantine Empire on May 29, 1453. (see Crusade For The Truth and The State Of Israel) As a result, Christians quickly began losing their rights and churches to the Muslims, who imposed oppressive laws on the Armenian inhabitants and turned their churches into mosques. Over the next 400 years, Christian and other non-Muslim Armenians were treated as second-class citizens, barely above a slave status. In order to make sure the infidels remained inferior, laws were established forbidding their ability to have a weapon or even ride on horses or camels. No Christian practices, such as ringing of church bells, were permitted, especially if it interfered with Muslim worship or customs. Not only were they persecuted, they were purposely left defenseless so they had no ability to retaliate against that oppression. Laws and judges favored Muslims, making it virtually impossible for non-Muslims to receive justice for the violence and tyranny Kurdish nomads inflicted upon the Armenians.
By the turn of the 20th century, the Ottoman Empire gained and lost land during wars. (see The Ottoman Empire Strikes Back) As borders changed, the Armenian population found themselves split between territory in the Ottoman Empire and Russian controlled areas. Two small Armenian revolutions occurred in 1887 and 1890, as they revolted against the draconian taxes imposed on non-Muslims as well as other oppressive laws. Yet neither resulted in any change. However, disdain for the Armenians only grew within factions of the Ottoman Empire. Following their own uprising, control of the empire fell to the Young Turks, who set their sights on finally ridding themselves of the pestilences of the Armenian Christians once and for all.
Starting with their defeat in the First Balkan War, the Turks blamed the Armenians for their troubles and labeled them as traitors, widening the divide between the Muslims and Christians. As their progress in World War I began to diminish, Young Turk leaders in the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) seized the opportunity, using the umbrella of war to spread propaganda that the Armenian Christians were fighting against them and with their Russian brothers.
Therefore, in February of 1915, the CUP disarmed Armenian soldiers in their army, placing them instead in labor battalions. However, without their weapons, these Armenians were quickly assassinated. Soon after, Djevdet Bey, a CUP leader and governor of Van, ordered the city to provide 4,000 soldiers immediately for service, yet the Armenians knew his only goal was to eliminate all able-bodied men. For that reason they only offered 500 soldiers. Furious, Djevdet accused them of revolting and declared, "If the rebels fire a single shot, I shall kill every Christian man, woman, and" (pointing to his knee) "every child, up to here".
Late in the night on April 23 and into the early morning of April 24, 1915, officials in the Ottoman government targeted 250 Armenians of social and intellectual status in Constantinople, the Ottoman capital. Before long, community leaders in other areas were also arrested, with all being sent to one of two holding camps near Ankara. Over the next few weeks, many detainees were tortured to death as others were executed in the public square while the remainder were just massacred.
A month later, on May 29, the CUP Central Committee passed the Tehcir Law, or Temporary Law of Deportation, which allowed the government to deport and assassinate Armenians. In addition, CUP leader Mehmet Talaat Pasha expanded his assault on Armenians beyond Constantinople, claiming, “the Armenian riots and massacres, which had arisen in a number of places in the country” threatened war zone security. In reality, Talaat Pasha used the one event in Van to demonize all Armenians across the region and gather support from the Muslim people to continue his eradication of the Christian Armenians.
The Armenian people were dehumanized and marched towards the Syrian town of Deir ez-Zor. However, most did not make the walk across the desert. This is primarily due to the fact that the Ottoman government withheld essentials such as food and water from the Armenians. Victims lined the path to their destination as hundreds of thousands died of starvation and dehydration while others were systematically assassinated. Those who made it to the camps continued to suffer from starvation with the added issue of dysentery.
Other Christians were quickly and easily disposed of in villages in the Muş plain as they were packed in stables and haylofts before the structures were set on fire. Vahakn Dadrian, a genocide scholar, reported 80,000 Armenians in 90 villages were disposed of in this manner. An American consul in Trabzon stated, “Many of the children were loaded into boats and taken out to sea and thrown overboard.” During a parliamentary session in Trabzon on December 21, 1918, a Turkish deputy admitted, “the district’s governor loaded the Armenians into barges and had them thrown overboard.” The Italian consul commented, “I saw thousands of innocent women and children placed on boats which were capsized in the Black Sea,” while others were dumped in the Euphrates. It is estimated over 50,000 Armenians drowned.
RED SUNDAY
