Ottoman Empire – The Conservative-Patriot Christian Right

Ponder on the Greek Genocide, Americans

John R. Houk

© February 2, 2017

As WWI was nearing its end for Ottoman Turkey, their defeat now guaranteed and the loss of what was left of a large empire was unfolding before Ottoman-Turkish eyes. The Turkish power elites began to focus on Turkish nationalism. Turkish nationalism had no place for non-Turkish and non-Muslim minorities residing on Turkish land.

Eventually a Turkish power elite struggle ended with a leader Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (Greek perspective and Armenian perspective) winning the day. Kemal viewed the WWI loss was partly due to a lack modernization that European nations had experienced. Kemal changed his name to solely Ataturk and began a secularizing process but still a nationalist process.

Between the Turkish elite struggles through to Ataturk hegemony, Turkey’s minorities began to experience an ethnic cleansing genocide. Christians in Turkey experienced genocide. The Armenian and Assyrian Christians suffered the most. The Greek people of western Turkey had a heritage of the area that stretched to a time before the birth of Christ.

At the end of WWI and the Greco-Turkish war an exchange of Turkish Greeks for Greek Muslims are agreed upon. The sadness is that the Greeks of Turkey were brutalized in their expulsion with loss of property, assaults, rapes and in many cases death. Also a sad issue: most of the Greeks leaving Turkey occurred between 2014 and 1922 as the losing Greek army retreated from Turkey. The fleeing Greeks in this stage were the most brutalized by the Turks and numbered probably close to a million or so. After the Lausanne Treaty legalized a population exchange between Greece and Turkey, the number of Greeks leaving was much smaller:

According to official records of the Mixed Commission, the ‘Greeks’ who were transferred after 1923 numbered 189,916 and the number of Muslims expelled to Turkey was 355,635 (Ladas 1932:438–9; using the same source, however, Eddy 1931:201 states that the exchange involved ‘192,356 Greeks from Turkey and 354,647 Muslims from Greece’). While accurate figures are impossible to ascertain, it is probable that the total number of Christians who entered Greece at this time was in the region of 1.2 million, the main wave being in 1922 during the period of hostilities (Bierstadt 1925: 248–250; Eddy 1931: 251; Ladas 1932: 438–442; Pentzopoulos 1962: 96–99; Kitromilides and Alexandris 1984–5; Hirschon 1998 [1989]: 36–9). (2 The Consequences of the Lausanne Convention, AN OVERVIEW; Demographic effects [pg. 2]; By Renée Hirschon; Oxford University – School of Anthropology; 2003)

The Greek perspective of the genocide can be read at “THE GREEK GENOCIDE: 1914-1923” among other places you can research. The first paragraph sums up the horrors experienced by Greeks living in Turkey in the time period:

The Greek Genocide was the systematic extermination of the Greek subjects of the Ottoman Empire before, during and after World War I (1914-1923). It was instigated by successive governments of the Ottoman Empire; the Committee of Union and Progress Party (C.U.P), and the Turkish Nationalist Movement of Mustafa Kemala Atatürk. It included massacres, forced deportations and death marches, summary expulsions, boycotts, rape, forced conversion to Islam, conscription into labor battalions, arbitrary executions, and destruction of Christian Orthodox cultural, historical and religious monuments. According to various sources, approximately 1 million Ottoman Greeks perished during this period.

Other sources have differing stats to one degree or another. The point being is that Turkish Muslims were not pleasant toward Greeks then. Today the unpleasantness continues with illegal refugees flooding into Greece permitted largely by European Union (EU) multiculturalism. You’d think history would have taught the Greek government some lessons, right? Some observations by the essayist Fjordman (Thanks to Anders Breivik now exposed as Peder Jansen), should not only wake up the Greeks but also Americans. American Democrats are trying to force Muslim refugees down American throats in the name of Multiculturalism as if that is our “American values”. IT IS NOT! Our American values toward immigration is to welcome but to assimilate as in out of many, one American nation emerges (E PLURIBUS UNUM). NOT many diverse cultures tearing America apart!

Think of that as you read the Fjordman essay below from the Gates of Vienna.

JRH 2/2/17

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Trojan Seahorses in Greece

By Fjordman

Posted January 16, 2017 11:53 pm

Posted by Baron Bodissey

Gates of Vienna

I visited Greece in the spring of 2013. Once a leader of ancient European civilization, Greece is now at the epicenter of many of the ills befalling modern European civilization. These include the financial crisis in the Eurozone and non-European mass immigration.

In Athens, the Thiseio metro station is situated close to the Temple of Hephaestus at the ancient Agora. When I visited it on several occasions, I saw immigrants urinating near the temple in broad daylight. The migrants who gathered in this area seemed to come from places such as Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. I doubt all of them had entered legally.

Twenty-five centuries ago, Socrates lectured here. Today, Adbul Karim the illegal immigrant urinates here. This was in 2013. Things were about to get a lot worse.

Aristotle once founded biology as a scientific discipline while studying marine life on the beaches of Lesbos. More recently, Lesbos, Kos and other islands in the Aegean Sea have witnessed a flood wave of predominately Muslim immigrants entering uninvited.

The number of illegal immigrants coming to Europe was already significant in 2013. It continued growing in 2014 and exploded the following year. In 2015, more than a million people from the Islamic world and Africa forced their way into Europe, causing chaos from the Balkans to Germany. Most of the migrants were young and physically fit men of military age. Some of the hostile Muslims shouted “Allahu akbar!” while attacking the local police. Yet these aggressive intruders are still routinely labeled “refugees” by the Western mass media.

In the autumn of 2015, a single Greek island could receive thousands of boat migrants in a single day. I watched several drone videos during the peak of this influx. It looked like an invasion on a nearly industrial scale. It resembled D-Day on the beaches of Normandy in 1944, only without the tanks.

An invasion does not always require tanks or fighter jets.

Lesbos alone had to deal with tens of thousands of life jackets abandoned by the migrants.^[1]

It would be tempting to call these culturally alien intruders Trojan seahorses, since many of them arrive in small boats or rubber dinghies. But perhaps that is unfair. Seahorses are gentle animals, after all. It is a documented fact that some of these Muslim asylum seekers were involved in serious crime and deadly terrorist attacks in Europe afterwards.

Kos Greece

In December 2016 and January 2017, I spent some days on the islands of Kos and Rhodes. The town of Kos has a small but worthwhile archaeological museum, situated next to a mosque dating back to Ottoman times. Compared to world-class institutions in Athens such as the Acropolis Museum or the National Archaeological Museum, it was modest. Yet it contains a fine collection of statues and other ancient artifacts. It is testimony to the incredible richness of Greek art history that even local museums contain objects of such high quality.

Kos Greece 2

An Askleipion was a healing temple dedicated to Asklepios, the ancient Greek god of medicine. In addition to the ones in Thessaly and Epidaurus in mainland Greece, the Askleipion on Kos was among the greatest such establishments in the Greco-Roman world. Hippocrates of Kos, perhaps the most important Greek physician in Antiquity, probably received his medical training here. Galen, another prominent Greek physician, studied at the Askleipion at Pergamon on the west coast of Asia Minor.

The Staff of Asklepios, a serpent-entwined rod, is still used internationally as a symbol of medicine, healing and pharmacies. When visiting Kos around New Year’s, there were very few tourists on the island. I literally had the entire Askleipion all to myself. You can see from the ruins that it must have been a big and prominent temple a couple of thousand years ago.

Fjordman, Kos #1: Asklepion of Kos, where Hippocrates once studied and worked

There is a statue of Hippocrates next to the modern harbor in Kos town. It is inscribed with the Hippocratic Oath for the ethical practice of medicine. “Do no harm,” the basic message of the Hippocratic Oath, remains a guiding principle for many modern physicians.

Fjordman, Kos #6: Statue of Hippocrates in the harbor of Kos town

For several days in a row I could see a small group of illegal immigrants sitting directly behind this statue. They were literally hiding in the shadow of Hippocrates. There was some symbolism to this. Muslims force their way into Europe, using European ethical ideals and humanism as a weapon to gain entry. The migrants I saw in January 2017 did not speak Arabic. Based on their looks, I would guess that some of them came from South Asia, perhaps from Pakistan or Bangladesh, while others may have come from Afghanistan or Central Asia.

Muslim Migrants at Kos

Kos is located very close to the west coast of Anatolia or Asia Minor, the country we now call Turkey. Using only the naked eye, I could clearly see individual houses in Turkey. You hardly need a motorized boat to travel this short distance. A kayak would be enough. In calm weather, an able swimmer might be able to swim from Turkey to Greece and the EU.

Several other Greek islands such as Samos, Lesbos and Chios are also situated close to the Turkish coastline. All of these islands have experienced major problems with illegal immigrants. Some of these problems still remain in 2017.

Turkey has been rocked by a series of deadly terror attacks in recent years. The number of foreign tourists visiting the country has fallen sharply because of this between 2014 and 2017.

The Islamic State (ISIS) is suspected to be behind several attacks on Turkish soil. This is somewhat ironic. Accusations have earlier been made that Turkish authorities quietly aided ISIS, as long as they were fighting the Kurds.^[2] 2017 was just a couple of hours old when Turkey was hit by yet another bloody attack. This time, the target was a nightclub in Istanbul.^[3]

For all its substantial social and economic problems, Greece is still a safer travel destination than neighboring Turkey. You will see more veiled Muslim women in Brussels, Berlin, Stockholm or Amsterdam, not to mention London or Paris, than you see in Rhodes or Kos.

Most of the migrants who arrive in Greek islands do not want to stay there. They want to get to countries in northwestern Europe with more generous welfare states.

Muslim Migrants at Kos 2

The number of migrants entering Greece from Turkey was sharply reduced in 2016 compared to 2015. However, some illegal immigrants continue to arrive in Greek islands. Boat migrants crossing the Mediterranean along the longer route, from North Africa to Italy, reached record levels in 2016.^[4] Moreover, this temporary reduction in the flow of migrants into southeast Europe is entirely dependent upon the actions and policies of Turkish authorities.

The Turkish government and President Erdogan engage in open blackmail and demographic warfare against Europe. They have repeatedly stated that they want money and visa-free access to the EU for millions of Muslims in Turkey.^[5] Otherwise, they will unleash the hordes from the Middle East again.

That is not the worst-case scenario. The worst-case scenario is that Turkey, an increasingly Islamic and unstable country, itself might descend into a full-blown civil war. Such an event would trigger even larger population movements towards Europe than we have seen so far.

Greeks have been at the receiving end of one of the longest campaigns of ethnic cleansing in human history. For nearly 1,400 years, Muslims have been wiping out communities of Greek-speaking Christians in the eastern Mediterranean. Greeks fought a long and bloody struggle to liberate themselves from centuries of brutal and oppressive Turkish rule.

Now, Multiculturalism, the EU and mass immigration bring Islam back. Greeks and other Europeans are expected to celebrate this. In 2017 Athens will get its first new mosque since Ottoman times.^[6] This happens partly after pressure from the pro-Islamic policies of the EU.

By early 2017, the migrant situation in Greece was calmer than in 2015. Yet I sensed an underlying fear among some of the local Greeks that the troubles could restart again at any moment. The Islamic world and Africa have booming populations and dysfunctional societies.

Hundreds of millions of people in these overpopulated regions would potentially like to move to Europe. The apocalyptic scenes of 2015 may simply be a prelude to what is yet to come.

Notes:

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-34675552 Migrant crisis: The lifejacket ‘mountains’ of Lesbos. 30 October 2015. http://www.express.co.uk/news/world/640102/migrant-crisis-life-jackets-greece PICTURED: Images of dumped life jackets show devastation of the migrant crisis. Feb 1, 2016.

http://www.businessinsider.com/links-between-turkey-and-isis-are-now-undeniable-2015-7 Senior Western official: Links between Turkey and ISIS are now ‘undeniable’ Jul. 28, 2015.

http://www.foxnews.com/world/2017/01/01/new-year-attack-on-packed-istanbul-club-leaves-3-dead.html New Year’s attack on packed Istanbul club leaves 39 dead. January 01, 2017.

http://www.thelocal.it/20170106/italys-boat-migrant-numbers-surged-20-in-2016 Italy boat migrant numbers surge 20% in 2016. 6 January 2017.

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-38103375 Migrant crisis: Turkey threatens EU with new surge. 25 November 2016.

http://www.ekathimerini.com/215222/article/ekathimerini/news/greek-capitals-first-modern-mosque-expected-by-end-april Greek capital’s first modern mosque expected by end-April. January 12, 2017.

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Ponder on the Greek Genocide, Americans

John R. Houk

© February 2, 2017

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DONATE TO FJORDMAN [To Donate, go to the bottom of the Gates of Vienna essay, and click on the Fjordman logo that says “Donate to Fjordman”. This will take you to the Fjordman PayPal donation page.]:

For a complete archive of Fjordman’s writings, see the multi-index listing in the Fjordman Files.

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Lepanto: One of Three Christianity Preserving Battles

John R. Houk

© March 16, 2015

I am a Christian. In full disclosure my faith might be better pinned with the terms Pentecostal, Charismatic and Word of Faith. Much of mainline Protestant Denominations would call one or all those descriptions as heretical in their faith. I am not a Roman Catholic or an Eastern Orthodox Christian although I do not condemn their faith as many Protestants do in various degrees of virulence. On a personal level I place more faith in the Bible than in tradition, but I do not condemn tradition for tradition preserved Christianity during the Dark Ages in the West and Muslim domination in the East.

I recognize that the dogma of Churches or of individuals are not absolute, because perfection will only come to the Body of Christ until the Second Coming of Christ that brings finality to the eradication of Satan’s realm on earth which was bequeathed to old slew foot via a load of deception fed to Eve (deceived) then to Adam (not deceived) who knew better than to accept deception as truth.

Now in saying all that I ran across an article about the Battle of Lepanto in 1571. That battle was one of three defining battles that resulted in preserving Christian Europe from Islamic conquest. The first is one battle that has two historical names in 732 AD: Battle of Tours/Poitiers. The last Battle marked the beginning of the end of the last Muslim super power the Ottoman Empire which found its death bed at the end of WWI between 1918 and 21: Battle of Vienna (1683). The 1571 Battle of Lepanto was as significant as the other two in which it was in between; however unlike those other battles Lepanto was a naval one.

The account below is from the perspective of a militant Roman Catholic website which hasn’t necessarily a good opinion of Protestants but justly are high lighting the nature of Islam.

JRH 3/16/15

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The Battle of Lepanto–Why We Are Free

By Ashley Ladouceur and Marty Arlinghaus

UC Society of Saint Paul

Let me tell you the story of the Battle of Lepanto.

Don John in the Battle of Lepanto

The year is 1571.

The Ottoman Empire has been expanding by method of jihad (in other words, military conquest).

This is the extent of the empire at the beginning of the battle:

The Ottoman Empire extent in 1571

“The inmost sea of all the earth is shaken with their ships.”

“The Ottoman Turks yearned to bring all Europe within the dar al-Islam, the ‘House of Submission’ — submissive to the sharia law. Europe, as the land of the infidels, was the dar al-Harb, the ‘House of War.’” (From Lepanto, 1571: The Battle that Saved Europe by H. W. Crocker, III posted to CatholicCulture.org. Copyright by Morley Publishing Group Inc.)

Meanwhile, Christendom was divided by the Protestant Reformation

“The North is full of tangled things and texts and aching eyes
And dead is all the innocence of anger and surprise,
And Christian killeth Christian in a narrow dusty room,And Christian dreadeth Christ that hath a newer face of doom.”

The scene is set.
On the Christian side we have a strong leader in Don John of Austria, a handsome 24 year-old son of Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor. At his command were 206 galleys, 40,000 oarsmen and sailors, 28,00 soldiers and knights, the thousands of rosaries said by faithful Christians as requested by Pope Pius V, the ministries of the religious and priests who accompanied the fleet, and the entreaties of the hosts of saints and angels in Heaven.

Don John of Austria

On the side of the Turks, led by Ali Pasha, there were 328 ships, 77,000 men (including 10,000 Janissaries—Christian boys taken from their families as tax payment when they were about the age of 6. They were forced to convert to Islam, taught the art of war, and given the opportunity of advancement in the Turkish army.), and 50,000 oarsmen—many of them Christian slaves.

The Battle
Spies warned Ali Pasha of the Christian advance thus he had time to set up his fleet in a battle line. This fleet was more experienced and stronger than the Christian one. The naval battle began. The galleys fired cannon balls at each other.

The Battle of Lepanto

When ships got close, a floating hand-to-hand combat was commenced with scimitars, bows, and muskets on the Turk’s side and swords, pikes, and arquebuses on the Christian’s side. An unexpected strong wind allowed the Christian fleet to pin part of the Ottoman fleet against some shoals; this wind seems to have been a gust of the Holy Spirit. Some of the Christian galley slaves on the Ottoman ships revolted, incapacitating those galleys.

But Don John of Austria has burst the battle-line!

The Christian fleet was victorious. The Turks lost 170 ships, 33,000 men to death, wounds, or capture, and 12,000 Christian slaves. Christians endured 7,500 men killed and 22,000 men wounded.

The turning of the tide of the Ottoman advance is due to the prayers of the millions of Catholics in Christendom. October 7th, the day the battle took place, is now the feast of Our Lady of the Rosary, and the month of October is the month of the Rosary.

Are we not facing similar battles today, if not even greater ones? Christians are being massacred and exiled from their homes where they have dwelt for nearly 2,000 years in Iraq and Syria by Islamic groups such as ISIS (or Islamic State). Christians in other Islamic countries continue to face anti-Christian laws that prevent them from freely practicing their religion on pain of imprisonment or death. Unlike in the 16th century when Lepanto was fought, these atrocities are met with apathy by the modern Western culture, which is experiencing its own anti-Christian secularization which thinks Christians cannot possibly be persecuted. The overt culture of death advanced by the Islamic State has just as strong a hold in the hearts of Westerners who accept abortion, assisted suicide, euthanasia and other life-denying practices such as contraception that continues to cause populations of developed countries to plummet to the point where future generations will collapse under the weight of the much larger older generations. Christianity itself continues to suffer from splintering and a lack of unity of believers. The odds seem to be overwhelmingly against the Church.

But we are the Church Militant. We are united as members of the Body of Christ. We are the Catholic Church. Just as 500 years ago Christians united in prayer to defeat the Ottomans, we can unite in prayer now to combat the spiritual and physical evils in our world today.

For more exciting information on the Battle of Lepanto: http://www.catholicculture.org/culture/library/view.cfm?recnum=7391

To read the poem G. K. Chesterton wrote about the battle: http://www.bartleby.com/103/91.html

To listen to a chant of the Templars as they march to war: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M0d4qM7gCH8

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Lepanto: One of Three Christianity Preserving Battles

John R. Houk

© March 16, 2015

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The Battle of Lepanto–Why We Are Free

About UC Society of Saint Paul

Is Erdogan Setting Stage for Turkish Caliphate?

Sultan Erdogan

John R. Houk

© June 27, 2014

Caroline Glick has written a very interesting editorial: “Turkey’s high-risk power play”. Glick’s observations are about Turkey’s Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Erdogan seems to be a mystery to Washington DC. For years the PM’s Radical Islamic beliefs seemed to be second to governing a secular pseudo-democratic Muslim State. His initial actions appeared supportive to the Ataturk vision for Turkey but with only a slight reform of bringing Islam to the fore of Turkish society. HOWEVER, in recent years, Erdogan’s governing actions have begun to match his Radical Muslim beliefs. Thus Glick posits in no uncertain terms that Erdogan is trying to revive Turkey’s Muslim domination a la Ottoman style of the old empire days prior to WWI.

Erdogan has moved Turkey away from being a rare Muslim friend of Israel to joining the rest of the Muslim world in Jew-hatred. Erdogan is openly supporting Hamas that has the agenda of destroying Israel, killing Jews and establishing a Radical Muslim State called Palestine. The interesting point that Glick brings up is that Erdogan has reversed decades of a policy of Turkification (ok, I don’t know if this is an actual word but you get the idea) of Turkish society to encouraging non-Turkish yet Muslim ethnic groups to seek the historical identity. One stunning example is Turkey’s treatment of an independent Kurdistan in northern Iraq.

After the U.S. finished liberating Iraq from Saddam Hussein’s Baathist Party oppression of Iraq a debate began on how Iraq should exist politically. Saddam always favored Iraqi Sunni Muslims over the majority Shia Muslims and the ethnic Kurdish Muslims. Saddam retained power via extreme repression of Shias and Kurds. There was talk of dividing Iraq into three independent nations controlled by the three major players of Iraq; viz. the Kurds in the north, the Sunni minority that gravitated toward the west and the Shias that gravitated toward the eastern part of Iraq bordering Iran.

American conventional wisdom quickly abandoned the three State scenario due American National Interests of the location of oil fields and the legitimate concern that the Arab Shia population of Iraq would be absorbed into Iran which are ethnically Persian yet also are Shias. So the Bush Administration tried to build a new Iraq nation under the auspices of shared governance by the three Iraqi groups. Unfortunately for the shared governance concept the Western concept of democratic elections placed a Shi’ite as the governing Prime Minister. PM Maliki slowly moved away from shared governance to Shia domination by the purging of Sunni political leaders. It may be a bit more complicated but you get the idea.

Enter Erdogan’s Turkey agenda change toward non-Turks. She believes Erdogan is taking a page from the old Ottoman playbook of divide and conquer to maintain political power via the unifying effects of Sunni Islam.

Glick paints a picture of Turkey under Erdogan reasserting Islamic rule under Turkish power to rival the Islamic rule agenda of Shia Iran.

For U.S. National Interests this provides a scenario that has definite pluses and minuses. In the short run letting Sunnis under the aegis of Turkey duking it out with Iran over who controls the Islamic world probably benefits the U.S. by staying out of it. The U.S. would be in an ironic Byzantine situation of throwing support back and forth to keep the violent Muslims in one area more than islamifying the West. The Byzantine factor is the long run. If one group Muslims gains the ascendancy over their the West again could face crazy Muslims trying to conquer the world forcing an Islamized civilization as the Christian Middle East experienced under early Arab conquests and Europe faced from the Ottomans right up to the 17th century (See Also HERE).

Before proceeding to Caroline Glick’s essay I thought you might benefit from a snapshot of how the Ottoman’s maintained a huge Islamic empire for some time. If find that tiresome feel free to skip it, but you really should read Glick.

In addition to their traditions of family sovereignty, the Ottomans drew strength from their origins as ghazis. The ghazi principle fueled their urge for conquest and then helped them to structure their developing society. The social structure of settled, urban Islamic society consisted of four social groupings: 1) the men of the pen, that is, judges, imams (prayer leaders), and other intellectuals; 2) the men of the sword, meaning the military; 3) the men of negotiations, such as merchants; and 4) the men of husbandry, meaning farmers and livestock raisers. Life on the frontier was far less structured; society there was divided into two groups, the askeri (the military) and the raya (the subjects). Besides protecting the realm and the raya, the askeri conquered new territories, thus bringing more raya and wealth into the empire.

… By late in the reign of Suleiman the Magnificent, the men of the pen were the bureaucrats of the empire, while the judges and imams made up a separate group called the men of religion. The men of the pen, the men of religion, and the men of the sword all were classified as askeri. As such, they were exempt from taxes and lived off of the wealth produced by the raya. Each of the three groups had its own educational system, its own internal practices, and its own values. In Ottoman society there was a place for everyone, but one of the functions of the sultan was to keep everyone in their place.

There was even a place for the non-Muslim. In classical Islamic tradition, non-Muslim religious communities that possessed an accepted, written holy book were granted a covenant of protection, the dhimma, and were considered to be protected people, the dhimmis. In return for this status they paid a special poll tax, the cizye. The Ottomans continued this tradition during the reign of Muhammad the Conqueror (reigned 1451-1481). The three leading non-Muslim religious communities—the Jews, the Greek Orthodox Church, and the Armenian Church—were established as recognized dhimmi communities known as millets. Each millet was headed by its own religious dignitary: a chief rabbi in the case of the Jews, and patriarchs in the case of the Greek Orthodox and Armenian communities. In the millet system, each community was responsible for the allocation and collection of its taxes, its educational arrangements, and internal legal matters pertaining especially to personal status issues such as marriage, divorce, and inheritance. In the pre-modern Middle East, identity was largely based on religion. This system functioned well until the European concepts of nationalism and ethnicity filtered into the Ottoman Empire in the second half of the 19th century.

…

…The Ottomans modified the ghulam system by instituting the infamous devshirme, in which young Christian males between the ages of 8 and 15 were removed from their villages in the Balkans to be trained for state service. The youths were brought before the sultan, and the best of them—in terms of physique, intelligence, and other qualities—were selected for education in the palace school. There they converted to Islam, became versed in the Islamic religion and its culture, learned Ottoman Turkish, Persian, and Arabic, and were trained in the military and social arts. They owed absolute allegiance to the sultan and were destined for the highest offices in the empire as they rose through the ranks of the school. When members of this select group graduated at about the age of 25, they assumed positions in the provincial military structure or took up service in the palace guards regiments. They could then work their way up the system and become its military-administrative head, the grand vizier. Those not selected for the palace school converted to Islam, worked for rural Turkish farmers, learned vernacular Turkish and folk Islamic culture, and became members of the sultan’s elite military infantry, the Janissaries.

This division in the devshirme, between those who received the best available education in the high Islamic tradition and those who followed the folk tradition and served as Janissaries, reflected a significant development within the society as a whole: the definition of the Ottoman identity. By the early 16th century the term Ottoman, which had first indicated the men around Osman and then the dynasty itself, had become a cultural-political-sociological term. Only a minority of the askeri class could be called “true” Ottomans. To be an Ottoman one had to serve the state and the religion and know the “Ottoman way.” Serving the state meant having a position within the military, the bureaucracy, or the religious establishment that carried with it the coveted askeri status and tax exemption. Serving the religion meant being a Muslim. Knowing the “Ottoman way” meant being completely at home in the high Islamic tradition. It also meant being fully trained in Arabic and Persian—languages that were, along with Turkish, the constituent elements of Ottoman Turkish, the language vehicle of all Ottomans. By this definition, the bulk of the Janissary corps—made up of devshirme youths who were not trained in the palace school but rather in the traditions of folk Islam—could not be considered Ottomans. … (The Ottomans: From Frontier Warriors To Empire Builders: Ottoman Society – Part 4; By Robert Guisepi; International World History Project – About IWHP; 1992 [Bold text is author’s])

JRH 6/27/14

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Turkey’s high-risk power play

By Caroline Glick

June 24th, 2014

CarolineGlick.com

For most Westerners, Turkey is a hard nut to crack.

How can you understand a state sponsor of terrorism that is also a member of NATO?

How can you explain Turkey’s facilitation of Kurdish independence in Iraq in light of Turkey’s hundred-year opposition to Kurdish independence?

What is Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyep Erdogan trying to accomplish here?

Is he nuts?

On the terrorism support front, today Turkey vies with Iran for the title of leading state sponsor of terrorism.

First there is Hamas.

Last week an Israeli security official told the media that the abduction of Naftali Frankel, Gilad Shaer and Eyal Yifrah was organized and directed by Saleh al-Arouri, a Hamas commander operating out of Turkey.

Turkey has welcomed Hamas to its territory and served as its chief booster to the West since the jihadist terror group won the Palestinian legislative elections in 2006. Erdogan has played a key role in getting the EU to view Hamas as a legitimate actor, despite its avowedly genocidal goals.

Then there is al-Qaida. As Daniel Pipes documented in The Washington Times last week, Turkey has been the largest supporter and enabler of the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIS).

Erdogan’s government has allowed ISIS fighters to train in Turkey and cross the border between Turkey and Syria at will to participate in the fighting. Moreover, according to Pipes, Turkey “provided the bulk of ISIS’s funds, logistics, training and arms.”

Similarly, Turkey has sponsored the al-Nusra Front, ISIS’s al-Qaida counterpart and ally in Syria.

The Assad regime is not the Turkish- sponsored al-Qaida-aligned forces’ only target in Syria. They have also been engaged in heavy fighting against Rojava, the emerging Kurdish state in northwest Syria. Yet the same Turkey that is sponsoring al-Qaida’s assault on Syrian Kurdistan is facilitating the independence of Iraqi Kurdistan.

In breach of Iraqi law that requires the Kurds to sell their oil through the central government and share oil revenues with the central government, earlier this month Turkey signed a 50-year deal allowing the Kurds to export oil to the world market through a Turkish pipeline. The Kurds are currently pumping around 120,000 barrels of oil a day to the Turkish port of Ceyhan.

Top Turkish officials have in recent weeks come out openly in support for Iraqi Kurdish independence from Baghdad.

Following ISIS’s takeover of Mosul, Huseyin Celik, the spokesman for Erdogan’s ruling AKP party told the Kurdish Rudaw news service, “It has become clear for us that Iraq has practically become divided into three parts.”

Blaming Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki for Iraq’s instability Celik said, “The Kurds of Iraq can decide where to live and under what title they want to live. Turkey does not decide for them.”

To date, most Western analyses of the Erdogan regime’s behavior have come up short because their authors ignore its strategic goal. In this failing, analyses of Turkey are similar to those of its Shi’ite counterpart in Iran. And both regimes’ goals are wished away for the same reason: Western observers can’t identify with them.

Iran is not a status quo power. It is a revolutionary power. Iran’s goal is not regional hegemony per se, but global supremacy.

As Lee Smith recently noted, two decades before al-Qaida and its goal of establishing a global Islamic caliphate burst onto the scene, Ayatollah Khomeini had already made the Islamic division of the world into the House of Islam and the House of War the basis for Iran’s foreign policy. He viewed his Shi’ite theocracy as the rightful leader of the Islamic empire that would destroy all non-believers and their civilization.

Iran’s first act of foreign policy – the takeover of the US Embassy in Teheran – was a declaration of war not only against the US, but against the nation-state system as a whole.

Iran uses terror, irregular warfare and subversion to achieve its ends because such tactics induce chaos.

As Iran expert Michael Ledeen wrote last week, to defeat the US in Iraq, “the Iranian regime provoked all manner of violence, from tribal to ethnic, because they believed they were better able to operate in chaos.”

The US failed to understand Iran’s strategy because the US was unable to reconcile itself with the fact that other actors do not seek stability as it does.

Like Iran’s mullahs, Erdogan and his colleagues also reject the nation-state system. In their case, they wish to replace it with a restored Ottoman Empire.

Spelling out his goal in a speech in the spring of 2012, Erdogan described Turkey’s mission thus: “On the historic march of our holy nation, the AK Party signals the birth of a global power and the mission for a new world order. This is the centenary of our exit from the Middle East [following the Ottoman defeat in World War I]. Whatever we lost between 1911 and 1923, whatever lands we withdrew from, from 2011 to 2023 we shall once again meet our brothers in those lands.”

To achieve this goal, like Iran, Turkey seeks to destabilize states and reduce peoples to their ethnic, sub-national identities. The notion is that by dividing societies into their component parts, the various groups will all be weaker than one unified state, and all of them will feel threatened by one another and in need of outside support.

This is the same model Erdogan is following in Turkey itself as he remakes it in his Ottoman mold.

As Amir Taheri explained last October, Erdogan has been encouraging members of ethnic groups that long ago melted into the larger Turkish culture to rediscover their disparate identities, learn their unique languages and so separate out from the majority culture of the country. At the same time he is repressing the Kurds, Alevis and Armenians, minorities that have maintained their identities at great cost.

In parallel to his attempt to subsume the Kurds, Alevis and Armenians into a wider morass of separate sub-Turkish ethnicities, Erdogan has been assiduously cultivating hundreds of Muslim Brotherhood associations to enable their takeover of mosques and other key institutions to build a countrywide support base for Islamic supremacism.

By fragmenting Turkish society into long-forgotten component parts while uniting it under radical Islam, he wishes to unite the country under his Sultanate rule while dividing its various factions against one another to maintain support for the regime over the long haul.

A large part of repressing the Kurds at home involves denying them outside assistance. This is where Iraqi Kurdistan comes into the picture.

By acting like Iraqi Kurdistan’s best friend, Erdogan hopes to attenuate their support for Turkish Kurds.

While Turkey and Iran are rivals in undermining the international system, their goals are the same, and their strategies for achieving their goals are also similar. But while their chaos strategy is brilliant in its way, it is also high risk. By its very nature, chaos is hard, if not impossible to control. Situations often get out of hand. Plans backfire.

What we are seeing today in Syria and Iraq and the wider region demonstrates the chaos strategy’s drawbacks.

As Pinchas Inbari detailed in a recent report for the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, the Syrian civil war is causing millions of Syrians to leave the country and their migrations are changing the face of many countries.

For instance, their arrival in Lebanon has transformed the multi-ethnic state into one with a preponderant Sunni majority, thus watering down Hezbollah’s support base.

The Kurds in Iraq may feel they need Turkey today, but there is no reason to assume that this will remain the case for long.

Kurdish unity across Iraq, Syria, Turkey and Iran will destabilize not only Turkey, but Iran, where Kurds make up around ten percent of the population. Iranian Kurdistan also abuts the Azeri provinces. Azeris comprise nearly half the population of Iran.

As for ISIS, it is scoring victories in Iraq today. But its forces are vastly outnumbered by the Baathists and the Sunni tribesmen that defeated al Qaida in 2006. There is no reason to assume that these disparate groups won’t get tired of their new medieval rulers.

Many commentators claimed that Erdogan’s recent foreign policy setbacks in the Arab world convinced him to abandon neo-Ottomanism in favor of more modest goals. But his cultivation of Iraqi Kurdistan, and his sponsorship of ISIS, al-Nusra, the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas tell a different story.

Erdogan remains an Islamic imperialist.

Like Iran he aims to destroy the global order and replace it with an Islamic empire. But like Iran, if his adversaries get wise to what he is doing, it won’t be very difficult to beat him at his own game by using his successes to defeat him.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

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Is Erdogan Setting Stage for Turkish Caliphate?

John R. Houk

© June 27, 2014

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Turkey’s high-risk power play

About Caroline Glick

Prophecy: What Lies Ahead

Here is an alternative Bible Prophecy thought for you. The USA will remain the most powerful military on Earth and will enhance its military position by embracing nationalism to a greater degree. Turkey will supersede Iran as the Islamic regional power. Hamas will look to Turkey as an arbiter of destiny. Israel and Hamas will reconcile with Hamas becoming the dominant organization over Arabs that call themselves Palestinians. Turkey’s Islamic domination will lead Muslims away from Arab nationalism to a kind of Islamic Universalism leading to the reestablishment of the Caliphate under Turkish auspices.

These are just some of the predictions from Walid Shoebat that seems to be the prophetic theme of a new book “The Case for Islamophobia: America’s Final Warning.”

I am guessing the prophetic essay “Prophecy: What Lies Ahead” is a preview of what is in Walid’s book. The essay goes against the grain of recent Biblical prophecy pundits and theologians with an emphasis that the book series “Left Behind” has it wrong.

I am certain Walid’s predictions will be criticized by both geopolitists and Biblical oriented prophetic writers. Nevertheless, the case is well presented and the only real critic will be the progression of time.

JRH 2/25/13 (Hat Tip: Diana Fatouros – Closed Facebook Group 1683 AD)

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Armenians Butchered by Muslim Turks

John R. Houk

© April 12, 2012

One of the world’s most heinous modern day genocides occurred in the early part of the 20^th century. I am not talking about the Holocaust in which nearly SIX MILLION Jews died and another roughly SIX MILLION other people labeled not fit to live in the Nazi Aryan Empire of Adolf Hitler.

The genocide I am writing about is memorialized on a global scale on April 24, not that it is the only day it happened. This genocide was carried out by Muslim Turks toward the end of WWI and toward the beginning of the Turkish Republic formed after the last Ottoman Sultan was scuttled by Ataturk trying to secularize Turks.

At the demise of the Ottoman Empire by the WWI Allies and Great Britain in particular Turkish authorities began an ethnic cleansing of Turkish Anatolia with the goal of preventing the total annihilation of a Turkish nation. Both Greeks (SA Here) and Armenians received the boot. This was a brutal time for Greeks but most of them were successfully transplanted to Greece. It was a different story for Christian Armenians though. Armenians living in Turkey will brutally murdered to the tune of around TWO MILLION people in forced marches to the Syrian Desert before Turkey was forced out of the area by the British and revolting Arabs.

Below is some information I have gathered from other websites pertaining to the Armenian Genocide at the hands of Turkey. As you read the information remember to pray for Armenian justice as April 24 approaches.

JRH 4/12/12

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Recognize the Armenian Genocide

By Coalition to Recognize the Armenian Genocide

Armenian Genocide Background Information

In the dying days of the Ottoman Empire, under the cover of World War I, the Young Turk government embarked on a racist strategy of “Turkification” of what had been a multi-ethnic, multi-religious empire. One-and-one-half million Armenians were murdered in the Armenian Genocide, and survivors were exiled from their 3,000-year-old homeland. Rather than acknowledge the Armenian Genocide, the Turkish government directs a sophisticated, multi-million dollar campaign of denial, the final stage of genocide.

The Turks also annihilated the Ottoman Assyrian and Greek communities, thereby eliminating the area’s indigenous populations, whom they had conquered several centuries earlier. Moreover, Turkey’s Kurds have suffered severe repression since the 1920s; thousands of Kurdish villages were destroyed as recently as the 1990s in a brutal pacification campaign.

Today’s relatively homogenous Republic of Turkey was thus methodically created over the past century through genocide, ethnic cleansing, confiscation of wealth, and severe discrimination.

The Armenian Genocide: Settled History

“We want to underscore that it is not just Armenians who are affirming the Armenian Genocide but it is the overwhelming opinion of scholars who study genocide: hundreds of independent scholars, who have no affiliations with governments, and whose work spans many countries and nationalities and the course of decades . . . The scholarly evidence reveals the following: On April 24, 1915, under cover of World War I, the Young Turk government of the Ottoman Empire began a systematic genocide of its Armenian citizens – an unarmed Christian minority population. More than a million Armenians were exterminated through direct killing, starvation, torture, and forced death marches. The rest of the Armenian population fled into permanent exile. Thus an ancient civilization was expunged from its homeland of 2,500 years.”

“The Armenian Genocide was the most well-known human rights issue of its time and was reported regularly in newspapers across the United States and Europe. The Armenian Genocide is abundantly documented by thousands of official records of the United States and nations around the world including Turkey’s wartime allies Germany, Austria and Hungary, by Ottoman court-martial records, by eyewitness accounts of missionaries and diplomats, by the testimony of survivors, and by decades of historical scholarship . . . The Armenian Genocide is corroborated by the international scholarly, legal, and human rights community.”

International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS) letter to Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, 6.13.05

“The abundance of scholarly evidence led to the unanimous resolution of the International Association of Genocide Scholars that the Turkish massacres of over one million Armenians from 1915 to 1918 was a crime of genocide.”

IAGS letter to U.S. Representatives Tom Lantos and Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, 10.5.07

“The Armenian Genocide . . . was the template for all modern genocide – Adolph Hitler was so impressed with the Turkish extermination of the Armenians that it figured in his own genocidal plans.”

“Raphael Lemkin, who created the concept of genocide as a crime of international law, did so in large part on the basis of what happened to the Armenians in 1915.”

American foreign service officers risked “their lives rescuing Armenians during the Genocide and compiling the more than 40,000 pages of documentation now housed in the National Archives.”

IAGS letter to President Barack Obama, 3.7.09

Denial of the Armenian Genocide: A Multi-Million Dollar Industry

“We are concerned that Turkey’s lobbying efforts, which are now in full force will lead to a repetition of the H. Res. 106 debacle of late 2007 [when the resolution was] subverted by unethical pressure, coercion, and cajoling by Turkey . . . The intellectual freedom of our country cannot be held hostage by a foreign government, particularly by one with the worst human rights record in NATO.”

IAGS letter to President Barack Obama, 3.7.09

“The tactics of genocide denial are predictable, and the Turkish government has used them all.”

Testimony to Congress by Dr. Gregory Stanton, President, IAGS, 4.23.08

“Despite this clear consensus of experts, Turkey exerts political leverage and spends millions of dollars in the United States to obfuscate the Armenian genocide, with alarming success even at the highest levels of government . . . Revisionist historians who conjure doubt about the Armenian genocide and are paid by the Turkish government provided the politicians with the intellectual cover they needed to claim they were refusing to dictate history rather than caving in to a foreign government’s present-day interests.”

“‘Denial is the final stage of genocide,’ says Gregory Stanton, president of the International Association of Genocide Scholars. ‘It is a continuing attempt to destroy the victim group psychologically and culturally, to deny its members even the memory of the murders of their relatives. That is what the Turkish government today is doing to Armenians around the world.’”

“Efforts to kill the memory of the Armenian genocide began while carrion birds were still picking over corpses in their desert boneyards, with Turkey issuing a first official statement assuring the world at large that no atrocities had occurred . . . Turkey began intervening in the U.S. on behalf of denying the genocide in the 1930s.”

“The relationship of Turkey to U.S. scholars promoting Armenian genocide denial is similar to that of the oil industry to fringe climatologists who dispute the reality of global warming.”

“‘Denial of the Armenian genocide has developed over the decades to become a complex and far-reaching machine that rivals the Nazi Germany propaganda ministry,’ says [Professor Taner] Akçam. ‘This machine runs on academic dishonesty, fabricated information, political pressure, intimidation and threats, all funded or supported, directly or indirectly, by the Turkish state. It has become a huge industry.’”

State of Denial, Summer 2008, Southern Poverty Law Center

“I write to you on behalf of the Middle East Studies Association of North America (MESA) and its Committee on Academic Freedom (CAF) in order to express our alarm and grave concern over the forced resignation of Professor Donald Quataert from the Chairmanship of the board of governors of the Institute of Turkish Studies (ITS) . . . Dr. Quataert’s relinquishment of his position came after he refused to accede to the request of ITS’s honorary chairman, [Turkish] Ambassador Nebi Sensoy, that he issue a retraction of a scholarly book review he wrote about the killings of Armenians (1915-1918) in the Ottoman Empire . . . The reputation and integrity of the ITS as a non-political institution funding scholarly projects that meet stringent academic criteria is blackened when there is government interference in and blatant disregard for the principle of academic freedom . . . Furthermore the attitude towards Dr. Quataert sharply contrasts with your government’s recent call to leave the debate regarding the events of 1915 to the independent study and judgment of scholars.”

Middle East Studies Association letter to Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan, 5.27.08

Turkey’s Proposal for a Historical Commission: Latest Denial Tactic

“We represent the major body of scholars who study genocide in North America and Europe. We are concerned that in calling for an impartial study of the Armenian Genocide, you may not be fully aware of the extent of the scholarly and intellectual record on the Armenian Genocide and how this event conforms to the definition of the United Nations Genocide Convention . . . We note that there may be differing interpretations of genocide—how and why the Armenian Genocide happened—but to deny its factual and moral reality as genocide is not to engage in scholarship but in propaganda and efforts to absolve the perpetrator, blame the victims, and erase the ethical meaning of this history . . . We would also note that scholars who advise your government and who are affiliated in other ways with your state-controlled institutions are not impartial. Such so-called “scholars” work to serve the agenda of historical and moral obfuscation when they advise you and the Turkish Parliament on how to deny the Armenian Genocide.

IAGS letter to Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, 6.13.05

“It is disingenuous of the government of Turkey to use the red herring of a ‘historians’ commission,’ half of whose members would be appointed by the Turkish government, to ‘study’ the facts of what occurred in 1915 . . . A ‘commission of historians’ would only serve the interests of Turkish genocide deniers.”

IAGS letter to U.S. Representatives Tom Lantos and Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, 10.5.07

“Turkey’s call for an ‘historical commission’ to study the events of 1915 is an attempt to put genocide deniers on an equal level with genuine scholars.”

IAGS letter to President Barack Obama, 3.7.09

“There is no more ‘other side’ to the truth about the Armenian genocide than there is about the Holocaust.”

Testimony to Congress by Dr. Gregory Stanton, President, IAGS, 4.23.08

“The government of Turkey has since continued to call for a ‘historian’s commission’ of scholars to ‘study the facts of what happened in 1915-1923.’ The proposed committee is marketed as a high-minded quest for truth and reconciliation, a long overdue arbitration of disputed history, and a chance to finally give equal weight to both sides of the story. But as the saying goes, a lie isn’t the other side of any story. It’s just a lie.”

State of Denial, Summer 2008, Southern Poverty Law Center

“Because Turkey has denied the Armenian Genocide for the past nine decades, and currently under Article 301 of the Turkish penal code, public affirmation of the genocide is a crime, it would seem impossible for Turkey to be part of a process that would assess whether or not Turkey committed a genocide against the Armenians in 1915. Outside of your government, there is no doubt about the facts of the Armenian Genocide, therefore our concern is that your demand for a historical commission is a political sleight of hand designed to deny those facts. Turkey has, in fact, shown no willingness to accept impartial judgments made by outside commissions . . . We believe the integrity of scholarship and the ethics of historical memory are at stake.”

Letter to Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan written by seven former presidents of IAGS (Helen Fein, Roger W. Smith, Frank Chalk, Joyce Apsel, Robert Melson, Israel W. Charny, and Gregory Stanton), 11.3.09

Genocide Denial Endangers Us All

“We believe that acknowledgments of the Armenian Genocide are an important step toward ending the final stage of every genocide, denial, which continues to inflict suffering on the group that has been victimized – an inhuman assault on memory perpetrated by the Turkish government for more than 90 years.”

“The 94-year denial of the Armenian Genocide has emboldened perpetrators ever since.”

IAGS letter to President Barack Obama, 3.7.09

“Studies by genocide scholars prove that the single best predictor of future genocide is denial of a past genocide coupled with impunity for its perpetrators. Genocide Deniers are three times more likely to commit genocide again than other governments.”

Testimony to Congress by Dr. Gregory Stanton, President, IAGS, 4.23.08

“Denials of known events of genocide must be treated as acts of bitter and malevolent psychological aggression, certainly against the victims, but really against all of human society, for such denials literally celebrate genocidal violence and in the process suggestively call for renewed massacres – of the same people or of others.”

Dr. Israel Charny, Executive Director, Institute on the Holocaust and Genocide, Jerusalem, 7.17.01

“The black hole of forgetting is the negative force that results in future genocides. When Adolf Hitler was asked if his planned invasion of Poland was a violation of international law, he scoffed, ‘Who ever heard of the extermination of the Armenians?’”

The 8 Stages of Genocide by Dr. Gregory Stanton, President, Genocide Watch, 1996

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Turkish Extermination of Christian Armenians Time Line

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Uploaded by tmpeters

Sep 3, 2011

“In April 1915 the Ottoman government embarked upon the systematic decimation of its civilian Armenian population. The persecutions continued with varying intensity until 1923 when the Ottoman Empire ceased to exist and was replaced by the Republic of Turkey. The Armenian population of the Ottoman state was reported at about two million in 1915. An estimated one million had perished by 1918, while hundreds of thousands had become homeless and stateless refugees. By 1923 virtually the entire Armenian population of Anatolian Turkey had disappeared.” — Armenian National Institute.

Fergal Patrick Keane investigates, for Correspondent, how the holocaust returns to haunt the relationship between Turkey and its western allies.

For decades Armenians campaigned to have the killings of their forefathers in Ottoman Turkey recognized as genocide but there has been an equally determined campaign by Turkey to this day to deny the ‘genocide’ with threats of reprisals against any country that uses the term ‘genocide’ to describe the slaughter encouraged by the United States anxious to win Ankara’s support in geo-politics.

The documentary discloses how President George W Bush and his predecessor Bill Clinton both broke promises to the Armenians that they would recognize the ‘genocide.’ Talking to Armenian survivors, Turkish officials and key political figures in the United States, Keane investigates two different versions of events that left Armenians ‘Betrayed’ in their Forgotten Holocaust.

Courtesy of FreeDocumentaries.com

(Advanced appreciation is rendered for materials used without express permission of copyright owners. Tommy Peters — April 11th 2011)

http://tommypetersbicycles.blogspot.com/

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Armenians Butchered by Muslim Turks

John R. Houk

Please Support NCCR

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Recognize the Armenian Genocide

ABOUT:

The Coalition to Recognize the Armenian Genocide is a grassroots group whose goal is to achieve official recognition of the Armenian Genocide by the United States government.

The coalition is the outgrowth of a dialogue between members of the Boston-area Jewish and Armenian communities. The group was formed in reaction to the Anti-Defamation League’s lobbying for the Turkish government against recognition of the Armenian Genocide.

Contact us at info@recognizearmeniangenocide.org

I am Huge with Israel is the Land of the Jews

John R. Houk

Some might wonder the reasoning of a Christian Right Winger is so committed to the existence of Israel and Jews that internally and globally support the existence of a Jewish State. Then again as part of the Christian Right you might not wonder. In this day and age every Christian (authentic, Progressive or Emerging/Emergent) needs to search their conscience and contemplate their reasons for supporting or hating on Israel.

I am obviously a part of the Christian Right that wears the moniker of a Christian Zionist. Zionists lobbied heavily for the creation of a Jewish State and ultimately for that State to be in the homeland of the heritage that God provided to Jews (Hebrews) as a Promised Land. The British plugged into the Zionist movement during WWI in battling their enemies of Germany, Austro-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire (Turkey). In the case of the Jews that enemy that mattered was the Ottoman Empire which still held a multinational empire in the Middle East. Victory over the Ottoman’s meant that Europe controlled Middle Eastern land as victors in war. Essentially the British and the French took slices of the Middle East with the League of Nations validating that control under the idealism that a Mandatory System would give Middle Eastern people their own nation. Primarily the Middle Eastern people had not known personal sovereignty for centuries due to Ottoman rule. Indeed Middle Eastern Arabs rose up in revolt against the Ottomans under the dream of freedom and sovereignty.

Many Arabs became understandably nationalistic and dreamed of a Pan-Arab nation. Unfortunately for the Pan-Arabists the Brits and the French had no intention of allowing one huge Arab nation to exist in the Middle East. Hence the Mandatory system was utilized to play on the tribalistic thinking of Muslim Arabs and offered kingdoms to Sheiks; i.e. essentially to the Muslim families that were the most supportive of the British Army fighting the Ottomans in the Middle East. (It was mostly a British effort in the Middle East during WWI even though the French was given a Mandatory as well.) By playing on the greed for power Britain and France easily carved up the Middle East.

The British Mandate for Palestine’s original intention was for a Jewish State. The British bean to rethink their National Interest position when somebody realized that the Arabs – being good Muslims – were extremely hostile to a largely immigrant Jewish crowd that with the promise of leaving European persecution. So the British tried to slow down the Jewish promise for a return to their homeland to accommodate nationalistic Pan-Arabism.

Well that is the end of my incomplete thoughts on how modern Israel began to emerge.

The point is that Zionism prevailed and Israel came into existence. The irony of the 1948 survival to claim the independence of modern Israel is that a significant amount of Zionist Jews were Left leaning and not necessarily totally observant Jews. The one commonality between Israel’s Left and Right (with the Right largely being religious Jews) was to survive as a nation to avoid the extermination that Hitler’s Nazi Germany attempted to perpetuate on Jews that resulted in nearly SIX MILLION Jewish deaths.

Now let’s be clear that Israel is a Jewish State that also has Christians, Muslims and various Islamic offshoots such as the Druze syncretic religious population. Christians, Muslims and Muslim offshoots are completely free to practice their faith openly without threat of state sanctioned persecution. The drawback is that proselytization is not allowed in Israel.

For a Christian Right person such as me, evangelism is a preeminent part of being a Christian. So question is: Why are there evangelicals that are so supportive of the Jewish State of Israel? The answer is related to the term Christian Zionism.

Let’s look at some thoughts on Christian Zionism

Here is a Jewish perspective from the Jewish Virtual Library:

Christian Zionism can be defined as Christian support for the Zionist cause — the return of the Jewish people to its biblical homeland in Israel. It is a belief among some Christians that the return of Jews to Israel is in line with a biblical prophecy, and is necessary for Jesus to return to Earth as its king. These Christians are partly motivated by the writings of the Bible and the words of the prophets. However, they are also driven to support Israel because they wish to “repay the debt of gratitude to the Jewish people for providing Christ and the other fundamentals of their faith,” and to support a political ally, according to David Brog, author Standing With Israel: Why Christians Support the Jewish State.

…

Despite their support for Israel, many Jews however, are uncomfortable with Christian Zionists. This discomfort is fed by Christian anti-Semitism, Christian replacement theology, evangelical proselytizing, and disagreements over domestic and political issues.

Dispensationalist Christianity, an interpretive or narrative framework for understanding the overall flow of the Bible, teaches that Christianity did not replace Judaism, but that it restored lost elements of it. The dispensationalist view of the Bible is that the Old Testament is foreshadowing for what will occur in the New Testament and, at the end, Jesus returns to reign on Earth after an epic battle between good and evil. Israel plays a central role in the dispensationalist view of the end of the world. The establishment of Israel in 1948 was seen as a milestone to many dispensationalists on the path toward Jesus’ return. In their minds, now that the Jews again had regained their homeland, all Jews were able to return to Israel, just as had been prophesied in the Bible. As described in the Book of Revelation, there is an epic battle that will take place in Israel after it is reestablished — Armaggedon — in which it is prophesied that good will finally triumph over evil. However, in the process, two-thirds of the Jews in Israel die and the other third are converted to Christianity. Jesus then returns to Earth to rule for 1,000 years as king.

Although these Christians do hope for a Messianic age, the majority of them do not wish for the deaths of thousands of Jews during Armageddon. Dispensationalist Christians believe that the Jewish people, not Christians, are the ones who were promised Israel in the Bible. In their view, Christianity did not come into existence to replace Judaism, but to restore it. This view has surpassed replacement theology as the dominant form of Christian thought regarding Israel in America today. Jews who are suspicious of Christian Zionist motives are usually unaware that many Christian supporters of Israel have abandoned replacement theology.

Aside from anti-Semitism and Christian replacement theology, many Jews are wary of the fact that many evangelical Christians simply want to convert them to Christianity or speed up the Second Coming of Christ …

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Christian Zionists say Jews have no reason to distrust their motives for supporting Israel because they do not believe they can speed up the Second Coming of Christ. In the Gospel of Matthew, it is written that Jesus said about his return, “But of that day and hour no one knows, not even the angels of heaven, but My Father only.”

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Christian Zionists are also more conservative on Israel than many Jews. They favor Israel maintaining all of its settlements in the West Bank, and were opposed to the Israeli disengagement from the Gaza Strip. Some prominent Christian Zionists have been highly critical of Israeli government policy of giving over parts of Israel to the Palestinian people. Christian Zionists, like followers of the Israeli Right, believe that Israel should never cede any section of Israel to the Palestinians because Israel was given to the Jews by God. … (Read the entire JVL article)

It is important to understand that not all Jews are on board with Christian Zionism. The organized Christian Church has a long history of persecution against Jews. Jews are proud of their heritage whether Liberal or religious, have nearly no interest in listening to a proselytizing message from a Christian.

Part Two: Christian Zionism

In the previous segment we looked at the question “What is Zionism?” and simply defined it as the biblical promises and prophecies made by God to the Jewish patriarchs that their descendants would occupy the Promised Land, what the world today calls Palestine, forever. Today we are going to look at the question:

“What is Christian Zionism?”
You may never have heard of it before. Christian Zionism is a movement resulting from the Bible, mainly among Gentile Christians who share this interpretation and this vision of God being faithful to all His covenants; including the covenant He made with Abraham so long ago. We have been convinced by God to support this modern return, this latest and final return of the Jewish people to the Promised Land; by our prayers and fervent intercession and with our finances, actions and energies. (From webpage – Christian Zionism)

The above quote is from a very informative website.

I have got to post this article on Christian Zionism Defined by the International Christian Embassy Jerusalem which is re-posted at ZionismOnTheWeb.org. This is a succinct explanation of Christian Zionism:

Christian Zionism Defined

By International Christian Embassy Jerusalem, 10/1/2006
Reproduced at Zionism On The Web with permission from christian-zionism.org

Tens of thousands of churches, and literally tens of millions Christians in the USA have a committed belief in the importance of standing with Israel and blessing the Jewish people. The verse most often referred to as their biblical mandate is Genesis 12:3 in which God tells Abraham “I will bless those who bless you and I will curse those who curse you and in you all the families of the earth will be blessed.”

Since the birth of the State of Israel in 1948 the theological error known as Replacement Theology has begun to decline and increasing is a theology of Christian Zionism that understands the importance of God’s everlasting covenant with Abraham and the nation he would birth.

However, just as the term “Zionism” has been turned into a negative word by Israel’s enemies, so “Christian Zionism” is under attack and often misrepresented in the media and in some public discourse. For this reason, the ICEJ’s articles and monographs defining and clarifying the beliefs of Christian supporters of Israel and placing their “love for Israel” within its proper biblical context are proving invaluable.

Christian Zionists

“Zionism, [is] the national movement for the return of the Jewish people to their homeland and the resumption of Jewish sovereignty in the Land of Israel, advocated, from its inception, tangible as well as spiritual aims. Jews of all persuasions, left and right, religious and secular, joined to form the Zionist movement and worked together toward these goals. Disagreements led to rifts, but ultimately, the common goal of a Jewish state in its ancient homeland was attained. The term “Zionism” was coined in 1890 by Nathan Birnbaum.” (Jewish Virtual Library).

If Zionism is the belief in the Jewish peoples right to return to their homeland, then a Christian Zionist should simply be defined as a Christian who supports the Jewish peoples right to return to their homeland. Under this broad and simple definition, many Christians would qualify no matter what their reasons are for this support. Just as Jews of all persuasions formed the Zionist movement then Christians of all persuasion can also fall within this broad definition of a Christian Zionist.

For this very reason, a myriad of answers may be given by a Christian when questioned about their support of Israel. Answers can include political, historical, and/or religious reasons. For example, see our article Why We Support Israel.

Theology of Christian Zionism

The actual theology of Christian Zionism, also known as Biblical Zionism, supports the right of the Jewish people to return to their homeland on scriptural grounds. The biblical foundation for Christian Zionism is found in Gods Covenant with Abraham. It was in this covenant that God chose Abraham to birth a nation through which He could redeem the world, and to do this He bequeathed them a land on which to exist as this chosen nation.

Christian Zionism is confirmed throughout the Hebrew Scriptures. The major and minor prophets consistently confirmed this national calling on Israel, promised her future restoration to the land after a period of exile, and spoke of her spiritual renewal and redemption bringing light to the world.

Christian Zionism differs with Replacement Theology which teaches that the special relationship that Israel had with her God in terms of her national destiny and her national homeland has been lost because of her rejection of Jesus as Messiah, and therefore the Church has become the new Israel. The Church has then inherited all the blessings promised to Israel but the judgments and curses still conveniently remain over the Jewish people.

Instead, Christian Zionism teaches from the scriptures that Gods covenant with Abraham is still valid today. There remains a national destiny over the Jewish people and her national homeland is her everlasting possession in fulfillment of Gods plans and purposes for her. The New Testament scriptures not only affirm the Abrahamic covenant, but they confirm the historical mission of Israel and that Israels gifts and calling are irrevocable.

Most Christian Zionists would agree that Israels reemergence on the worlds scene, in fulfillment of Gods promises to her, indicate that other biblically-predicted events will follow. However, Christian Zionism is not based on prophecy or end-time events. It is based on Gods promises and calling – which are irrevocable. (The end of the article has several links to information on Christian Zionism)

Now here is my thing on being a Christian Zionist. If a Jewish person desires to know about Jesus I am more than willing to share the Gospel so that a Jewish person can KNOW Jesus – personally; however I believe evangelizing Jews is not a profitable action. The Jews – who are God’s Chosen People – will know Jesus by the Lord’s own Divine action. How that plays out, I do not have a clue.

Perhaps in the Last Days when Israel is in trouble of destruction without some kind supernatural help, the Lord Jesus Christ will reveal Himself as the King of the Jews of the line of David and as the Son of God. Or perhaps at Christ’s return with his angels and Saints at the end of the Tribulation period when the Thousand Year Reign of King Jesus is established in which the remnant of living Gentiles and Jews who have not Believed will now know Jesus is King, the head of government of the true New World Order. Undoubtedly the power of the Lord’s return will create instant respect for the authority of Jesus to rule as the head of One World Government; however it will take a training period of One Thousand Years to allow a heart belief in Jesus as Lord and Savior.

It is after the 1000 year training period that Satan will be released from chains. Satan will work his temptation on the humans of planet earth and some will join Satan’s army. The end of the Book tells us Satan loses in that final battle and he is cast into the lake of fire with the anti-Christ and the False Prophet to exist in eternal burning with bodily consumption. Those humans committed to reject life in Christ before the Parousia and after will join Satan in the lake of fire.

By the time of the creation of the New Heavens and the New Earth with the New Jerusalem as the dwelling place of God’s presence all things will be new and there will be division of Jew and Gentile. The point being, from a Christian perspective, the Jews will discover their Messiah supernaturally and accept His Presence.

Now here is a little personal rumor history. When I was a teenager my Grandmother told me a Jewish ancestry existed in my heritage to go along with my German and English strains. Now she told me this in hush-hush terms as if she was embarrassed to share this with me. I thought it odd at the time that she spoke of my ancestors in such a hushed tone. At the time I could care less because my prime directive was to have fun and party in the small college town – Washington State – I grew up in.

As I grew older and became a Christian I thought on that day of my Grandmother’s hushed information Jewish blood in my veins. If it is true, I had a sense of pride rather than embarrassment. I understand my Grandmother’s close-to-the-vest attitude because she was a kid in the days in which a Jew was frowned upon even in America.

Whether my Jewish lineage is true or not, I could not say. I never pursued an ancestry chart, mostly because it has never been in my budget. I might try to get someone to work on that for me some day, but I don’t have time currently. At any rate the potential of a Jewish ancestry increases my position as a Christian Zionist.

JRH 1/1/12

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John R. Houk

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