IHC Review
The First World War made it clear the old idea that “war is politics by another means” is outdated in the 20th century. In the case of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, war meant extermination. Speaking to his top generals days before invading Poland in September 1939, Adolf Hitler praised the virtues of power and brutality, referring to how easy it had been to destroy defenseless people like the Armenians. “Who today, after all, speaks of the annihilation of the Armenians?” he asked. Under the cover of war, Muslim Turks (with German help) completed the massacre of Christian Armenians begun in the 1890s. On the eve of WW II, Hitler was readying his own apparatus of death for annihilating the Jews of Europe, knowing he could do so with impunity.
This book deals at length with U.S. government involvement (or the insufficiency thereof, depending on one’s point of view) in supporting fellow-Christian Armenian victims. It brings to light President Woodrow Wilson’s proposal to extend United States dominion and protection over the Armenian Republic. At Wilson’s insistence, Henry Morgenthau, a wealthy Jewish-American lawyer, financier and supporter who helped Wilson win the election, was appointed in 1913 American Consul in Istanbul. Reluctant to accept the post at first, he was convinced by Rabbi Stephen Wise that a Jew in that position could be of great help not only to the sizeable Jewish community in Turkey, but also to the Zionists in Palestine, which was under Turkish rule at the time.
Deutsche Bank financed and German engineers built the railway systems in the
Ottoman empire, Germany’s most important foreign project. Better-educated Armenians made up the main work force operating the railways, which “introduced into modern history railway transport of civilian populations as part of the plan of race extermination.” The Armenian workers were thus initially spared, but eventually they too were swept up in the all-embracing Armenian genocide. There is a close parallel between the two genocides, of the Nazi deportation of Jews, which “began in the trains, the locked box cars, eighty to a hundred people per car, crossing Europe to the camps in Poland” and the Armenians “starving, in terror, defecating on themselves.”
The German military was in command of Ottoman troops and was involved in the deportations and massacres. The German ambassador in Constantinople, Baron von Wagenheim, and his U.S. counterpart, Count von Bernstorff, declared that what the Turks were doing to the Armenians was “entirely justified…Their own fault.” Between 1915 and 1922, close to 1.5 million Armenians lost their lives. Significantly, the U.S. never declared war on Turkey, in spite of the Constantinople-Berlin axis. With more than two decades of American anger against the Turks for their treatment of the Armenians, American public opinion favored war with the Turks. On the other side of the fence, a formal declaration of war would mean the seizure of vast American missionary holdings in Turkey, valued at $123 million, and perhaps expulsion, ending what little humanitarian relief the missionaries were able to provide the Armenians.
For a ‘refresher’ in Muslim brutality, eyewitness reports are quoted in the book. The British consul in Aleppo Province in 1890, Henry Burnham, related how the killing of Armenians was motivated by Islamic fanaticism and a jihad mentality:
“…armed with clubs and cleavers, cut down the Christians, with cries of ‘Allahu Akbar!’ broke down the doors of houses with pickaxes and levers, or scaled the walls with ladders. Then when mid-day came they knelt down and said their prayers, and then jumped up and resumed their dreadful work, carrying it far into the night. Whenever they were unable to break down the door, they fired the houses with petroleum.”
Mosques were used as rallying points for mobs during Friday prayers. A survivor,
Abraham Hartunian, described the desecration of two Armenian churches: “The mob had plundered the Gregorian church, desecrated it, murdered all who had sought shelter there and as a sacrifice, beheaded the sexton on the stone threshold. (At another church) The leader of the mob cried: ‘Deny your religion!’ No one answered…The leader gave the order to massacre. The first attack was on our pastor. The blow of an axe decapitated him.”
In a letter home that came into the hands of another British consul, a Turkish soldier writes: “My brother, if you want news from here, we have killed 1,200
Armenians, all of them as food for the dogs…Mother, I am safe and sound. Father, we made war on the Armenian unbelievers. Through God’s grace no harm befell us…May God bless you.”
In the best of Islamic brutal tradition, women suffered the worst fate. If they were not killed, they were raped and sold into slavery or harems. “The game of swords” was witnessed by Aurora Mardiganian near Aleppo, where Turkish killing squads “planted their swords in the ground, blade up, in a row at several yards intervals, the men on horseback each grabbed a girl. At the signal, given by a shout, they rode their horses at a controlled gallop, throwing the girl with the intent of killing her by impaling her on a sword. If the killer missed and the girl was only injured, she would be scooped up again until she was impaled on the protruding blade. It was a game, a contest.” The Turks then forced the Jews of the city to gather up the bodies and throw them into the Tigris River.
As Queen Victoria’s Prime Minister William Gladstone wrote: “The very worst things that men have ever done have been done when they were performing acts of violence in the name of religion.” It takes a diabolically sadistic and evil mind to conjure up schemes whereby deportees were forced to pay first-class fare for a box car, or where a condemned man’s family is forced to pay for his execution. While some German civil employees reacted with revulsion to such ‘Turkish Delights’, the fact remains that racial extermination ‘technology’ was observed, brought home and put to full use in Hitler’s attempted extermination of the Jewish people.
The Turks to this day downplay the massacres they (along with the Germans and Kurds) committed against Armenians. Professor Deborah Lipstadt of Emory University has written: “Denial of genocide – whether that of the Turks against the Armenians or the Nazis against Jews – is not an act of historical reinterpretation . . . it is the final stage of genocide, because it strives to reshape history in order to demonize the victims and rehabilitate the perpetrators.” To this, Elie Wiesel adds that denying genocide is a “double killing” because it murders the memory of events.
Radical Islam declared war on the West with the first World Trade Center attack in 1993. It is the stated aim of the spiritual leaders of a billion Muslims, from Southeast Asia across two continents to the Atlantic, to re-conquer Europe (and eventually the rest of the world) and reestablish a Caliphate ruled by the dictates of the Koran. Recent events in Eurabia, such as the ritual murder of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh, for example, afford a preview of what’s in store once Islam takes over.
President Bush’s Saudi pals continue to export radical Islamist ‘education’ world-wide, while Iran – Islamic terror export hub to the world – thumbs its nose at the West in pursuit of a nuclear weapons capability, with the declared aim of obliterating the State of Israel. They do so with the tacit or active collaboration of China and Russia. A nuclear-armed Pakistan is another source of uncertainty and instability.
The wrongheaded internment of Japanese-Americans following Pearl Harbor was an emergency measure justified on grounds of national security. Surely now is a time of even greater peril for Western civilizations, when severe restrictive measures should be applied to extreme-Muslim sources of incitement (mosques and religious schools), fundraising organizations, and the expulsion of illegal ‘students’ and other undesirable elements. If the American-Japanese community was considered a security risk in 1941, does not the same apply to the Muslim community in the U.S., which provided the infrastructure enabling the September 11 attacks to take place?
While Spain’s shameful capitulation handed al-Qaeda a victory, Britain and other
European democracies are finally awakening to the life-threatening dangers of the radical Islamic cancer eating at them from within. A malignancy calls for painful surgery, unpleasant medicine and everlasting vigilance if the patient – Western Civilization – is to survive.
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HarperCollins; October 2003; ISBN: 0060198400; 496 pages.
Review written by Giv Cornfield, Ph.D.
Edited by IHC Staff, www.infoisrael.net.
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