The Inside Assyria Discussion Forum #5

=> for what? being attacked by Christian nations???

for what? being attacked by Christian nations???
Posted by pancho (Moderator) - Friday, May 3 2013, 14:17:26 (UTC)
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I have considerably more respect for you than for Toro and so I went to the site you posted. You have remained on-point in our discussions and dealt with issues not personality.

When governments, including the United States, do not come clean and tell their citizens and those of other countries, the truth behind their actions then we, the people, have three choices at least. We can take their word for what they are willing to tell us.....we can hold off on forming our own judgement until they release all relevant documents or, we can make an honest attempt to analyze whatever is known and draw at least some, tentative, conclusions....after all, it is not OUR fault that "you don't know the whole story" and we can't very well agree to remain ignorant and make who-knows-what further mistakes, simply because information is being deliberately withheld.

Your question, "is this the truth" can only be guessed at, but we can use our best efforts and not pre-conceived prejudice, to reach a conclusion. Historians on both sides of the argument have reached no definite conclusion, though taxi drivers everywhere have...I know that the Christian side has produced documents claiming to show that Turkish officials ordered massacres, but these were later shown to be forgeries. I also know that records show that hundreds and thousands of Muslims and Christians died through starvation and disease...and also that forced marches of Christians from the borders to the interior resulted in many deaths due to extreme cold and hardship, and also that many Christians were shot outright...I also know that Armenians and other Christians killed Muslims and otherwise worked to help the Allies defeat Turkey in hopes of being given their own countries or rule in their own countries. This is sedition and in time of war, treason, for which the universal penalty is death, often without trial....this is the law everywhere, not just in Turkey.

The French philosopher Voltaire famously said that if you wanted to discuss with him you would first have to define your terms...so let's define what is meant by the word genocide. Here is what a well respected dictionary gives...


geno·cide
noun ˈje-nə-ˌsīd

Definition of GENOCIDE

: the deliberate and systematic destruction of a racial, political, or cultural group.

That's pretty accurate. What are the main elements in the definition? First is "deliberate"...that means with intent, planned, done "on purpose" and not willy nilly or by accident or as the mood strikes one...second is "systematic"...that means incorporating a system, a plan, a well organized method of procedure. Both of these imply a governmental approach or control or orders....only a government has the means and the power to set up "systems" and to act with deliberation, with planning etc.

If a mob of Christians attacks Jews in one town, it is not genocide. Even if they kill every Jew in that town, as long as the Jews in neighboring towns are left alone, it is not genocide...it is murder, it is mob-violence, it can even be a massacre, but without government planning and systems in place for the continued and deliberate murder of every last Jew to be found anywhere, it is not genocide.

When the Iraqi army inflicted group-punishment on the villagers in Semele, it was not genocide, even though it was a government agency, the army, carrying out the murder of those villagers...because they made no further moves against all the other Christian villages nearby or against Christians in the rest of the country. Semele was a massacre, it was an example of the kinds of group-punishments inflicted by lots of governments against an entire group for what a few individuals had done...as for instance the Iraq War was punishment of an entire people for what a handful of non-Iraqis had done.

There was no attempt, in Iraq, to kill every last Christian...just send a message to the villagers living near to the border where that group had crossed into Syria. On the other hand, the murder by starvation and disease of over 700,000 Iraqi children, under the age of five, comes far closer to being a true genocide. For one thing it was a policy of the United States government...when then Secretary of State Madeleine Albright was asked about the resulting deaths of thousands of Iraqi babies due to our government's imposition of Sanctions, she replied that this was an "acceptable" outcome to the policy....further, it was said, by government officials, that Sanctions were intended to force the grieving parents to rise up against Saddam. US Sanctions were aimed at all Iraqis, everywhere, not just in one or two villages...they did not ultimately succeed in killing all or most Iraqi babies, but they certainly could have had that result....therefore the United States stands guilty of attempted genocide.

It WAS a "deliberate" policy and there were "systems" put in place, at the governmental level, to accomplish it AND government officials admitted to it. It was not mob violence, it was not a spontaneous rising of angry American citizens against Iraqis...great planning and deliberation and expenditure went into that policy and its aims were clearly stated at the time and the resulting deaths were part of a government POLICY. So far, where Turkey is concerned, I haven't seen anything close to that.

The Turkish government had good reason to suspect the loyalty of its Christian citizens...we can go into particulars if you'd like. It had good reasons for wanting to remove them from its borders...the conditions of the forced marches were deplorable and inhumane, but then so was the war brought to Turkey by Christian nations.

However,and this is significant in terms of whether there was a genocide or not, Christians in major cities or away from the borders were left alone. If it had been a true genocide Christians from all over Ottoman lands would have been rounded up. You remember no doubt how the German Christians handled the Jews in WW II...government agencies were set up to track every last Jew, even if that Jew had only one distant relative who was Jewish and had lived an entire life as a Christian...camps were set up, people were worked to death in factories, railroad lines were built, boxcars set aside, ovens and slave camps set up and an entire apparatus and mechanism aimed entirely at rounding up the Jews of Europe, not just Germany, for extermination and this was stated several times as the POLICY and aim of the Christians government of Germany...with silence from the pope.

This is vastly different from what happened in Turkey in 1915 etc.

As far as the site you posted, Rashad has exposed other such sites, set up by Christians with a nominal "Turk" or Copt who pretends to speak for the other side...as a way to show that even the "enemy" admits to the crimes that the Christians are claiming Muslims are guilty of.

The sad truth is that even the very term "genocide" was coined to define what Christians did, not Muslims. The word first came into being in 1947, after the world learned of the German Christian government's efforts to round up and destroy all Jews....such a deliberate GOVERNMENT policy had never been seen before in the modern era...never before had an entire people been targeted, not for anything they had done against the State, indeed Germans of Jewish faith had fought for Germany in the past and been productive even brilliant citizens...but rather for what they WERE, or for what their religion was...that was their only crime, for which mass extermination was the GOVERNMENT policy.

This is a far cry from what happened in Turkey...and so I say that genocide did not take place in Turkey. I think we use that term in hopes of making the Turks at least as awful and guilty as the Christians, but the sad truth is that only Christians have invented and then committed these kinds of crimes, against an entire people just for what they ARE and not for anything they did.

Finally, we can look at the historical record of both groups, of Christian Europeans and Muslim Turks to see how each has dealt, historically, with the group they are accused of committing this atrocity on. You must know, since you live in Europe, that pogroms and massacres and persecution of Jews and their periodic exile and confiscations have been going on for 1000 years at least, leading up to the genocide of Jews and the Holocaust. It is a known part of Christian behavior towards Jews, therefore there is really nothing surprising in the Holocaust except its industrial scale...but the attitudes behind the genocide of Jews have been there for centuries.

By contrast the exact opposite is true of Turkish behavior and attitude towards Christians. The Ottoman Empire was the only place in the world where Christians and Jews lived in peace with Muslims, greater peace than existed between Christian and Christian in Europe, or America. The Turks had NEVER done anything like a massacre of Christians JUST for being Christians, whereas the Christians of Europe had committed such crimes against Jews for hundreds of years. Therefore Christian behavior had been consistent for a 1000 years whereas what the Turks stand accused of doing only happened in modern times at that only when the Christian nations of Europe, and America, ganged up on Tuekey to steal its petroleum. We can elaborate this last point if you like, but this post is long enough.



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