Islam and the Christian Genocides in Turkey

The Turkish poet Serkan Engin sends this guest-essay on the Islamic nature of the genocides of the early 20th century against Christian minorities in Turkey.

Islam and the Christian Genocides in Turkey
by Serkan Engin

As some have said in the West: in truth the Armenian, Assyrian, Chaldean, Nestorian and Pontian Greek genocides* were “Christian genocides”. On the other side were Muslim Turks and Kurds. The basis in society and the justification in conscience of these genocides were Islamic rules.

Islam gives permission to all Muslims to kill and rape every non-Muslim, and also to grab all their money and property. The de facto killers in these genocides were the predatory bands of the “Secret Organization” (In Turkish: Teşkilatı Mahsusa). The Turks and Kurds who killed their non-Muslim neighbours, enslaved their women and little girls as sex slaves, and grabbed all their property, had no awareness of “nationalism,” as did their commanders, the leaders of the Union and Progress Organization. So the Turks and Kurds who took part in the Armenian, Assyrian, Chaldean, Nestorian and Pontian Greek genocides massacred innocent humans with pleasure, did not do all this for the benefit of “Turkish nationalism”. They were simple farmers, describing themselves as “Muslim”, but not as “Turkish” or “Kurdish”.

The massacre order given by the Union and Progress Organization leaders was a gift for the Turks who lived as predators for two thousand years, and only turned to agriculture and the breeding of livestock in Anatolia. They considered it a gift because they got the chance to pillage their “rich” non-Muslim neighbours on the order of their government, and also they could take revenge upon non-Muslims who had, in their eyes, a great deal of money.

Kurds had been living in the same region for thousands of years and didn’t have ability, aptitude and historical experience except in the jobs of agriculture and the breeding of livestock. They, like their Turkish coreligionists, became happy too, because along with the Turks they would loot the money and property of the non-Muslims.

Muslim Turks and Kurds pulled their non-Muslim neighbours to pieces with the appetite and wildness of hyenas without any mercy; moreover, they gloated over all of this. They grabbed all the houses and stores of the non-Muslims, and they enslaved the women of non-Muslims as sex slaves and also domestic slaves in their “harems” as their “booty,” as is ordered by the rules of Islam. And they sold some of these women and girls at the slave bazaars for a bit of money.

The perpetrators of this terrible period didn’t feel any self-reproach. On the contrary, they were very happy, because they became more worthy of Allah, the god of Islam. They became better Muslims with these disgusting massacres. So they came closer to the heaven of Islam, with its many houris (group sex) and open buffet bar (rivers of kevser wines).


(Click to enlarge)

They were at peace with themselves because they were obeying the laws of their own god, Allah, and the government.

They raped tiny girls and women, slaughtered innocent humans, burned children alive, and massacred millions of non-Muslims by the order of the “peaceful” religion Islam.

Because their Allah was very merciless to the ones who disbelieved.

*   In 1913, the Turkish Ottoman government of the supposedly liberal Committee of Union and Progress initiated a program of forcible Turkification of non-Turkish minorities. Starting in 1915 the government turned to deliberate extermination of indigenous and Christian ethnic groups — Assyrians, Greeks, Armenians, Chaldeans and Nestorians. Most well-known is the wholesale slaughter and destruction of the Armenian Christians living in what is modern-day Turkey. It is estimated that between 1 and 1.5 million Armenians were killed. In 1943 the Armenian holocaust inspired the Polish-American lawyer Raphael Lemkin to coin the term “genocide” to define the planned and systematic extermination of entire nations or ethnic groups.

The genocides ordered by the Turkish government and perpetrated by Turkish and Kurdish Muslims are accepted as fact by serious Western historians but are till this day strenuously denied by the Turkish authorities.

Source: AINA
 

About Serkan Engin

The socialist Laz-Turk poet and author Serkan Engin was born in 1975 in Izmit, Turkey.

His poems and articles on poetic theory appear in more than fifty literary journals in Turkey. In 2004 he published a poetic manifesto entitled “Imagist Socialist Poetry”. He has been trying to launch a new movement in Turkish poetry, and to this end has published numerous articles about literary theory.

His poems and articles on poetry theory have been published in English in many international literary journals all over the world. His political articles on Islam and also on the Armenian, Assyrian, and Greek genocides have been published in a number of countries in many languages including Sweden, USA, Greece, India, France, Argentina, Netherland, Armenia, Indonesia and Finland.

13 thoughts on “Islam and the Christian Genocides in Turkey

  1. thank you for the article that tells it like it was that was written by someone who lives there and knows the true history of this shameful period. I can only hope that this article will wake people up to the true face of Islam, and that it hasn’t changed in the 1400 years since its inception.

  2. On a beautiful spring day such as today the image at the top of this article comes as a jolt. Try as I might, I can’t scroll down fast enough to avoid it. But I’ve seen it before and the horror is always there.

    I lived and worked for one year in Kayseri, almost right in the centre of this map. I’ve returned there several times since and my deepening knowledge of what went on there (and all over Turkey) means that I now see it all in a new light. The Armenian Genocide is a verboten subject of conversation in Turkey (at least between the yabanci —foreigners—and the locals; I don’t know how it’s discussed among Turks themselves). I’ve experienced the agitated response from Turks who are quick to point out that the Armenians were traitors, that it was wartime – “bad things happen.” (The massacres of Armenians at the end of the 19th century in Turkey can’t be blamed on World War I, but no one seems to consider that.) The ferocity of the denial, I now know, means that it’s pointless to push the subject further, for there will no changing of the Turkish mindset, not in the foreseeable future. Just think of Erdogan’s furious denials and you get an idea of the mainstream Turkish viewpoint.

    On the other hand, I’ve experienced a denial of a more benign kind, which I was once gullible enough to somewhat believe: I’ve been told, when naively (this was 13 years ago) asking where did all the Armenians go and why did they abandon their beautiful churches, that they simply wanted “to go to their home country.”

    It’s hard to believe that I was so ignorant of the various Christian genocides of the early 20th century. They are under-taught in the West, but in Turkey I believe that the teaching of them is severely distorted.

  3. You have written a moving response. I know what you mean about having to scroll past that picture…usually the B puts them below the fold so I won’t be triggered. However, I knew it was coming, so I kind of unfocus my eyes till I get to the text.

    “Erdogan’s furious denials” are echoed by Christian Turks, too. They are proudly nationalist and seem blind to the possibility that persecution may be in their future. Turks first, Christians second.

    I can’t remember when I learned about the Armenian genocide but it wasn’t so very long ago…a French cultural psychiatrist/ethnographer did some research into the Armenian survivors who landed in France (they truly did flee throughout the West). Back before we started Gates of Vienna I ran across her book in a remaindered bin and was fascinated by what she found.

    I no longer have the book and can’t remember her name. But I do recall vividly her observation that many Armenian/French women – descendants of the survivors – were beauticians (or whatever the name would be for women who open hair salons and spend their days cutting and styling other women’s hair). This researcher, whose interest was drawn to people who had survived disasters and how they created their lives in the aftermath, was sure that these Armenian hair salons existed because they all held some cultural memory of the innumerable beheadings their people experienced.

    When I read her conclusions I was reminded of the many nail salons in this country owned and operated by South Koreans. In the early 1950s the Catholic North Koreans were driven out, moving southward after suffering horrific persecution. It was common to see refugees whose fingernails had been pulled out or otherwise mutilated. I was about nine years old when I read these stories of their escapes in old Reader’s Digest magazines. I look around now and see many small Korean nail salons and think she was right.

    [Some people may remember vaguely those old RDs – no advertisements, and no glossy paper. People would donate them by the boxload to the orphanage where I lived. I could read a whole year – perhaps a decade old by then – in a week or so in the summer. Boy, do I remember those Korean stories! RD must have featured many of them because American troops were over there in that Cold War “conflict” back then…]

    • Dymphna, I also un-focus my eyes until I know that gruesome images, such as this one, are off-screen. This isn’t because I don’t want to know – it’s because I know only too well what happened. Like you, I also don’t know when I became truly aware of the Armenian Genocide, but I believe it was about 11-12 years ago. My awakening came, along with many other revelations, in the years following 9-11 when I began to read everything I could find on Islam and Middle Eastern history. One very revealing book is “A Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility” by Taner Akcam. However, few Turks will ever read this since the number of books read there is very small.

  4. The scenes of such violence, one cannot help but wonder at the evil of the perpetrators and the callousness with which they did these evil things.

    It is also disturbing, because a rational observer to the contemporary smouldering conflict of the West vs Islam will soon come to the realization that there can be no accomodation with those who would visit the same scenes upon us, except through similar un-numbered heaps of Muslim bodies until there are none left to oppose or threaten. And the degree of hardening of hearts that would be required to accomplish this. As a former soldier, it is easier to contemplate the killing of enemy combatants in warfare, and while still butchery, it is infinitely more palatable to the conscience than the slaughter of non-combatants such as those Armenians.

    The disturbing thought is that half measures will only result in a new generation eager for vengeance for the lives of their fathers and grandfathers, and the cycle will continue in perpetuity. And yet, I cannot see any other way except through equal cruelty and brutality exceeding what the Muslim world has thus far inflicted upon the West. In the end there can only be one remaining; either we are conquered or we stand up and conquer those who would exterminate us.

    • Agreed. Repatriation of all Muslims in the West is a necessity. Anything less leaves the danger in place – a political doctrine that in its essence encouraged hostility toward infidels. At a bare minimum, all Muslims must abjure Islam on pain of summary confiscation of property and immediate deportation for a false oath.

      I think we faced a similar situation with communism. In the US, the Supreme Court hit upon the formula that one can advocate communist government and organize to achieve it but one cannot advocate the violent overthrow of the government.

      However, nothing about communism is in any way compatible with liberty and the rule of law, yet we left gangrenous flesh in place. Just because we required communists to pretend they would not resort to violence did not mean they were the least bit averse to it. Who were the consummate killers of the last century but communists? These were left alone to operate freely with Frank Marshall Davis taking pictures of the Hawaiian coast and Armand Hammer secretly delivering Soviet money to the CPUSA.

      I have not read Burnham’s Suicide of the West but if I were to write on the subject of suicide, I would say it is in our stars because we cannot make a steely-eyed assessment of what part of other civilizations can mix with ours.

      We are so feeble-minded that were a man out of the jungles of New Guinea to arrive at Dulles International Airport in a loin cloth and with a bone through his nose, millions of American social justice warriors (aka morons) and naifs would swoon in the sure knowledge that yet another rocket scientist or Silicon Valley software engineer had arrived to elevate us poor schlepps to new heights of propositional nation excellence.

      As Diana West and Stan Evans showed, America was deeply penetrated by communists and there are even now powerful forces who are adamant that the extent of that penetration must not be known. The ferocious attacks on McCarthy in his time were perpetrated by the same forces.

      America’s love affair with foreigners and all manner of, shall I say it, un-American ideas and cultural filth must come to an end. Nothing in our civilization requires us to commit suicide by turning blind eyes to what is just simply putrid.

  5. It’s often not mentioned in discussions about the Armenian genocide, that the Armenians applied some informal justice on the Turkish architects of the genocide in later years. In the years after the First World War, many of the ringleaders fled to Germany where Armenian assassins systematically hunted them down. Read up on Soghomon Tehlirian for just one example.

  6. Thank you for this post. The Christian genocides in Turkey are not a thing of the past better to be forgotten and forgiven. They are being re-enacted under our (rather indifferent) eyes in Syria and Iraq, while in many other Muslim countries smaller-scale anti-Christian violence is an everyday event. Even in the West, Christian refugees from Muslim countries are sometimes harassed by Muslims.

    And the Turkish establishment is shamelessly unrepentant about its bloody past. One can legitimately fear that it would perpetrate these horrors again if it had a chance.

  7. Hitler’s view as he set upon his own plan of genocide:

    I have given the order, and will have everyone shot who utters one word of criticism that the aim of the war is not to attain certain lines, but consist in the physical destruction of the opponent. Thus for the time being I have sent to the East only my “Death’s Head units” with the order to kill without pity or mercy all men, women, and children of the Polish race or language. Only in such a way will we win the vital space that we need. Who still talks nowadays of the extermination of the Armenians?”

    — Adolf Hitler

    Source:
    http://www.atour.com/~aahgn/news/20040107c.html#APPENDIX-Excerpts-from-Adolph-Hitler-speeches

  8. I’m curious to see if any “smart” Muslim is going to rebut this. The true face of Islam needs to be continuously made known with articles such as this.

  9. Islam has the will but not the means to destroy us, and we have the means but not the will to defeat Islam.

    No prize for guessing the outcome.

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