Islamist Terror Throughout History

Modern day Turkey is a state striving towards democracy and desiring recognition and acceptance as an equal by the modern industrial democracies of Europe, America, and Asia. Turkey is a member of NATO, although its NATO function as the frontier bulwark against the Soviet Union is now defunct. Because of its frontier role, Turkey has been the recipient of over $32 billion in US financial aid. Now, Turkey is making a historical bid to become the first largely Muslim, mostly Middle-Eastern state to become a member of the European Union. When so much of the U.S. and other leading industrial democracies’ efforts around the world are directed at democratization rather than containment of the Red Menace does Turkey merit equal status among world’s leading democracies and continued largesse of the world? … If and only if its progress towards democracy is both true and demonstrable.

The authors of the United States’ constitution succinctly describe the basic attribute of a democracy – that the state recognizes explicitly and implicitly that all of its citizens have an inalienable right to life, liberty and pursuit of happiness. To respect these rights, democratic societies grant all of their citizens the right of self-determination, including to those citizens that are in some way different from the majority of others in that country. Turkey’s performance in this most basic of responsibilities of a democratic government is decidedly poor. Furthermore, it is disconcerting that Turkey is unrepentant in its insistence that it is justified in suppressing its minorities. It is even more disconcerting that Turkey simply denies that it ever transgressed against its minorities. Such denial of culpability is why Turkey does not yet belong among the leading democracies of the world. It is also why Turkey should not be succored by world’s leading democracies. Only solid steps towards “glastnost” and transparency will guaranty that Turkey will respect the rights of all of its citizens and not only those of Turkish descent and Muslim religion.

Some of this failure can be explained by the historical circumstances. Turkey’s journey from a band of Seljuk mercenaries who appeared at the outskirts of Europe in the twelve and thirteenth centuries into its present relatively advanced condition of statehood is both fascinating and terrifying. The Seljuk sultans, who took over the rule of Middle East from the Arab Caliphs in early medieval period, gave land to their most successful mercenary chieftains. One such group, the Osmanlis, named after their leader, received a fief in the Northwestern Anatolia mainly to serve as a buffer against Eastern Rome’s (Byzantium’s) Imperial armies. They were successful against the Romans and against Seljuk Turks, against whom they rebelled, and against Persians. As time went along, Ottoman Turks, as they were later named, over the course of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries expanded their domain over most of the former Eastern Roman Empire, including Anatolia, Syria, Iraq, the Levant, Egypt, Greece and the Balkans. In doing so, Turks became overlords of many indigenous people of proud history and ancient culture: Greeks, Syrians, Arameans, Assirians, Phoenicians, Jews, Armenians, and Egyptians. Thus, all of the land Turks conquered had to be jealously guarded against the territorial pretenses of the previous owners.

Many of the conquered including populations of entire regions such as Albania (formerly pagan Thracians) converted into Islam to avoid economic and political discrimination under the rule of the autocratic sultans. Others, especially those subjects of the Eastern Roman Empire who were already Christian, held on to their Christian faiths and carried on the traditions of their ethnic identity. It is against these citizens that Turkish government unleashed wave after wave of genocidal horrors.

When winds of freedom swept across the world starting with the American Revolution in the latter part of the eighteenth century and ending with the abortive German and Russian revolutions in the beginning of the 20th century, the Christian minorities of the Ottoman Empire also began clamoring for the recognition of their inalienable rights. In response, Turkish government unleashed terror:

· When the Peloponnesian Greeks rebelled against the despotic rule of the Sultans in 1821, Turkish response was not just military. The Sultan had innocent Greeks living in Istanbul hunted down and killed in blind retribution. He also strung up the Patriarch of the Greek Christian church from the gates of his palace, then had the body flung into the sea. In Crete, fanatical Janissary detachments massacred thousands, including the Metropolitan of Candia and his five bishops, who were slaughtered at the altar of their cathedral. Because a Turkish ship of the line was sunk near the shores of the island of Chios, the Turks killed, banished or sold into slavery one hundred thousand Christian Greeks.

· In 1826, it was Janissaries who fell afoul of the Sultan. Janissaries, ex-Christians themselves, were traditionally trained by the western officers and, as the Turkish version of the Praetorian Guard, exercised influence over actions of the Sultan. They were herded into the barracks and bombarded with cannon until four thousand of them were dead.

· For the next 25 years, continued peace-time suppression of Christian rights, physical and mental abuse heaped upon the non-Muslim, provoked numerous protests from Britain, Austria, France and Russia.

· In 1860, intermittent violence against Christians burst into a flame when thousands of Maronite Christians in Damascus were murdered with the connivance of the local Turkish officials.

· In 1876, the Christians in the Balkan states of Bosnia, Herzegovina, Montenegro, Bulgaria and Serbia rose in a revolt. In response, irregular Turkish troops went on a rampage in Bulgaria, killing twelve thousand Christians within a single month. This became known around the world as the “Bulgarian horrors”.

· In 1880, the ambassadors from six European countries jointly protested the discriminatory treatment of Christian Armenians by the Turkish government.

· In 1891, Turkish irregular soldiers commanded and financed by the Turkish government, began systematic oppression of the Christian population.

· In 1894 and 1895, the Turkish irregulars, with the participation of Turkish army, launched a general massacre of Christians. o A Christian Armenian demonstration in Istanbul, bearing a petition to the Sultan, was attacked by the police and fanatical Moslems who bludgeoned many of the demonstrators. The mob then ransacked the Christian quarter of the city, killing, looting, and setting shops and houses on fire. o In Trebizond, over a thousand Christians were killed in their houses and places of business. Some were clubbed by Turks in boats as they tried to swim to ships in the harbor to save their lives. o In Eastern Turkey, where Christian Armenians constituted about one third of total population, the massacres took place under better management. Turkish army would move in and kill all those deemed capable of bearing arms. Turkish irregulars and tribesmen swarmed behind killing, raping, looting. o In Urfa in Eastern Turkey, for two days in a row successive waves of attacks forced Christian Armenians to take a refuge within the thick walls of a cathedral. Each day the Turkish army with frenzied mob in their wake rushed the cathedral, captured the people within and massacred them all. Some eight thousand people were killed there in two days.

· In 1896 the massacres culminated in a two days of mayhem in Istanbul. Irregulars, criminals, Muslim fanatics ran the streets of Christian quarter armed with cudgels, knives and clubs, killing any Christian found, or anyone who resembled a Greek or an Armenians or anyone wearing a cross. The massacre stopped when the British marines landed in Istanbul ostensibly to protect its embassy and when the six European powers launched an open protest with the Sultan.

· It is estimated that at least 200,000 Christians, most of them Christian Armenians and Greeks, were massacred in 1890 to 1896. Because of these crimes, the last representative of the house of Othman, Sultan Abdul Hamid, was nicknamed Abdul the Great Assassin and The Bloody Sultan in Europe.

· In 1909, in the southern Anatolian town of Adana, religious hatred and class resentment against prosperous Christian community, spilled over into a massacre of some 15,000 to 20,000 thousand Christian Armenians. Two American missionaries also lost their lives.

· In 1915, the Turkish Republican government carried out an organized campaign of ethnic cleansing and genocide against Christians. o Tens of thousands of Christians who were conscripted into Turkish armies were disarmed, and then taken into secluded areas where they were bayoneted or shot. o The first official deportation of thousands of Christian families was carried out in the southern Anatolia. Most were marched on foot to Lebanon or Syria. Some were deported via rail. o In April of 1915 250 leading Christian citizens of Constantinople, including Armenians and Italians, were arrested in the night and deported immediately. Most were killed in various destinations in Central Anatolia. o At the same time, in Eastern Anatolia, Christian Armenians beat back marauding Turkish army and held the city for a time until stronger Turkish forces entered the city and massacred the combatants and non-combatants. o Over the course of the year, mass eviction and deportation of the Christians of all denominations took place throughout Turkey. The Turkish government recruited large numbers of convicted criminals to harass, kill and rob Christians on the way. Systematically, the evicted families were not allowed to pack or to take supplies of food or water, which assured that a large portion of them would die before getting to intended destination. o It is estimated that over a million of Christians, mostly Armenians and Greeks died in 1915 alone.

· In 1916 mass deportations and killings of Christians continued resulting in another half a million Christians.

· In 1917 and 1918, the Russians briefly captured Eastern Turkey and stopped the massacres. However, beset by domestic problems, they withdrew after a short time, leaving some of the provinces in the hands of armed Christian Armenians. However, far more numerous Turks returned, routed the few Christian defenders and invaded the Christian Armenian and Georgian Caucasian territories of Russia, once again engaging in total war effort to exterminate Christian minorities, this time across its borders.

· From about 1919 to 1923, the Turkish Republic attacked a small, newly reformed Christian nation of Armenia twice, explicitly trying to eradicate the first Christian nation in the world. That they did not succeed entirely is owed to the heroism of the Christian Armenians, Russians and Georgians, who fought outmanned, outgunned and outgeneraled, but who fought for their nation, for their religion and for the lives of their families.

The first step in Turkey’s bid to become recognized as a democracy worthy of support and inclusion by the Free World must be its recognition and acknowledgement of past aggression and genocide carried out against its minorities. Only then can the Turkish citizens themselves be assured of their safety against their own government. Only then can Turkey take its place among the world’s democracies as a government truly committed not to repeat the mistakes of the past.

Book Description (Amazon)

This is a study that digs deeply into this "other" slavery, the bondage of Europeans by north-African Muslims that flourished during the same centuries as the heyday of the trans-Atlantic trade from sub-Saharan Africa to the Americas. Here are explored--perhaps for the first time--the actual extent of Barbary Coast slavery, the dynamic relationship between master and slave, and the effects of this slaving on Italy, one of the slave takers' primary targets and victims.

About the Author: Robert C. Davis is in the Department of History, Ohio State University, Columbus. (Published 2004)

This post starts WAY too late. The first Islamist terrorists were the Assassins, a Shia offshoot in the 12th and 13th centuries. They offered the whole package - the virgins, Paradise, etc., plus a whole lotta hash, and the inevitable bloodletting for the greater good of the Faithful. After the Zealots of Roman Judea, they were history's second band of suicide knifers. As is the wont of Islamist terrorists, they went out of their way to p*ss off the Supreme military power of their time, in their case the Mongol Empire of Mongke Qua Quan. Result - their extirpation, the destruction of the Abbasid Caliphate, the sack of Bagdhad [sound familiar?] and the rise of the Il - Khanate of Persia [a lesson the mullahs have apparently forgotten]. The focus on the Ottomans is not truly relevant to the title of the post.

A Great summary of how men governed men back when both Christian methods and Islamic methods were both acceptable forms of submission to the cause.

"Civilization" I believe it was recorded as.... Yes--"civilization". Sprinkled with a little ritual was= "religion".

If you want the complete, unabridged history of Muzzie violence, terror and warfare, read it in their own words at A Brief Chronology of Muslim History. Their pride in their violent conquest rather than peace, forgiveness and grace is absolutely disgusting and vile. This is what they have in store for us.

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