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AN Islamic organisation warning of the return of an empire founded 700 years ago has hacked into the website of a Wollongong church and published disturbing images and messages. For several days, anyone who visited the website of Wollongong's Wesley Church was greeted by anti-war messages flanked by pictures of the Turkish flag, masked soldiers and an image of US President George W Bush with a cross over his face. While the text on the www.wollongongmission.unitingchurch.org.au website was not in English, other websites on the internet hacked by the same group, AdReNaLin, identified those responsible as "sons of the Ottoman...

Catholic History Restored by: Malcolm A. Kline, June 23, 2008 One of, if not the main, problem with the way that history has been taught for decades is that students gain little indication of the majesty of it all. Facts that help explain why the world works as it does are casually tossed aside by those we would entrust with passing on the past because they do not fit some theory du jour. Such theories usually spin around the alleged avarice of Christian white males, such as, supposedly, our founding fathers. Richard Hofstadter famously echoed this motif in his still-widely...

October 16, 2007, 4:00 a.m. Genocide Resistance The possession of arms saved many Armenians. By Dave Kopel & Paul Gallant, & Joanne D. Eisen Whatever may be said about the U.S. House of Representatives committee vote concerning the use of the term “genocide� in reference to Turkey’s atrocities against the Armenians during World War I, two facts are indisputable: It was gun confiscation that made the atrocities possible. And it was the possession of firearms that saved many Armenians. Under the Ottoman Empire, Armenians, who are mostly Christian, had not been allowed to own firearms. This was standard practice...

I never thought the day would come. But here it is! Being an Armenian -- like playing women's basketball at Rutgers, losing money on Enron, and contracting AIDS in Africa before it -- is now relevant and topical. Hell, yes. I feel so damn temporarily important, and I wouldn't trade it for having sold steroids to sluggers or resisted arrest in Los Angeles or, for that matter, having rented storefront from Barney Frank. Bask, fellow Armenians! Bask. Ours is the world and all that's in it -- and, which is more, we'll have a hairy son. Lest you've been comatose...

Turk Warns Against House 'Genocide' Motion By SEBNEM ARSU Published: October 15, 2007 ISTANBUL, Oct. 14 — The chief of the Turkish armed forces has warned that military relations with the United States would take a negative turn if Congress approved the Armenian genocide resolution that was passed by the House Foreign Affairs Committee last week. Gen. Yasar Buyukanit, the armed forces chief, was quoted by the newspaper Milliyet on Sunday as saying that the resolution, which condemns the killings of 1.5 million Armenians by Ottoman Turks beginning in 1915 as an act of genocide, has caused considerable disappointment in...

Justice: Of course, it's right to recognize the wrong that the former Ottoman Empire did to the millions of Armenians it slaughtered and deported from 1915 and 1922. That said, does Congress have to recognize it now? The answer is no. The country that was formed following the Ottoman Empire's collapse in 1922, Turkey, is today a stable, democratic and secular country — and an ally of the U.S. and Europe. Believe it or not, after ours its army is the second-largest in the NATO alliance — bigger than Britain's, France's or Germany's. More importantly, it straddles a swath of...

Schoolboys in my native Hungary used to recite an old ditty. It conjured up emotions ossified in the seams of time. The Kings of Hungary Freedom Square, Budapest, Hungary Stork, stork, ciconia, What makes your foot bleed? A Turkish lad is slashing it A Magyar lad is mending it With a fife, a drum and a fiddle of reed.The wounded stork’s song was a fragment of tribal memory bobbing to the surface from the collective unconscious of a great historical hurt. It was a bitter lay, a denunciation of the Ottoman Empire, the Xanadu of imperial Islam. The Turks had...

Steve Centanni and Olaf Wiig framed by shadow of Adam Gadahn Last month, American al-Qaeda operative Adam Gadahn issued a “convert-to-Islam-or-die message to U.S. President George W. Bush, Daniel Pipes, Michael Scheuer, Steve Emerson and Robert Spencer. This attempt at forced conversion to Islam followed the “conversion” at gunpoint of the two kidnapped Fox News reporters Steve Centanni and Olaf Wiig. What exactly was the significance of these events? On the one hand, these attempts at forced conversion were in clear continuity with Islam’s long history of calling people to convert before waging war on them. But how exactly...

PARIS: Lawmakers in France approved a bill Thursday introducing fines and prison sentences to those who deny that the killing of Armenians by Ottoman Turks during and after World War 1 amounted to genocide. Deputies in the National Assembly, France's lower house of Parliament, voted 106-19 favoring the bill, which recognizes the killings of about 1.5 million Armenians from 1915 to 1919 as genocide and imposes a fine of 45,000 euros and a year in prison on those denying it. Senators from the upper house will now consider the bill, which upon passage, will go before president Jacque Chirac. The...

The suggestion to form a Turkish commonwealth among Turkic-speaking countries voiced at the recent gathering of leaders of Turkic states in Turkey’s seaside resort city of Antalya appears to reflect Ankara’s desire to strengthen its economic and political positions in Eurasia. Moscow should not treat Turkey’s growing geopolitical ambitions lightly, some Russian analysts say. On September 18-20, the 10th Turkic States and Communities’ Friendship and Cooperation Congress took place at the posh hotel complex on Turkey’s Mediterranean coast. Organized by the Turkish Cooperation and Development Agency (TIKA), the Turkic Convention brought together top policymakers from Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan,...

Media insiders are asking if the History Channel bowed to political pressure in pulling a documentary suspected of detailing Turkish atrocities against Armenians. "Ottoman Empire: The War Machine” mysteriously disappeared from the History Channel schedule on June 22, the day it was to premiere – even though the network had run promos just days before and pre-sold DVDs on its Web site. The documentary recounts the six-century reign of the Ottomans, and their empire, the precursor of modern-day Turkey. "Although none have seen the documentary, critics suspect that it likely covers the death of more than a million Armenians at...

As the E.U., U.N. and U.S. contrive to fund the Palestinian Authority despite declarations that they would never aid Hamas; as the Russians rush to aid Iran’s nuclear ambitions; and as America is ever more riven by furious disagreement over the prosecution of the terror war, a historical analogy is useful to put things in perspective. On Tuesday, May 29, 1453, the armies of the Ottoman Sultan Mehmet II entered Constantinople, breaking through the defenses of a vastly outnumbered and indomitably courageous Byzantine force.

The most controversial incident in the colourful life of Lawrence of Arabia was made up by the celebrated hero, according to new forensic evidence.The brutal sex attack on Lt Col T E Lawrence by Turkish soldiers, which allegedly took place while he was serving as the British liaison officer during the Arab revolt, was considered so contentious that it was covered up by the British Army.   Diary of a lie? The 1917 journal But now, a new history of the Arab revolt is to claim that Lawrence invented the attack in order to smear political opponents and fulfil...

ROMA, March 22, 2006 – In the summer of 2004, when he was a cardinal, Joseph Ratzinger on two occasions defined as “a great error� the addition of Turkey to the European Union. But now that Ratzinger is pope, his position is no longer one of prejudicial rejection. This can be gathered from an article published in the latest issue of “La Civiltà Cattolica,� the magazine of the Rome Jesuits that is examined and approved by the Holy See before being printed. The author of the article is Jesuit Fr. Giovanni Sale, a specialist in the political history of the...

WASHINGTON -- The Crusades may be causing more devastation today than they ever did in the three centuries when most of them were fought, according to one expert. Robert Spencer, author of "Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades)" (Regnery), claims that the damage is not in terms of lives lost and property destroyed but is a more subtle destruction. Spencer shared with ZENIT how false ideas about the Crusades are being used by extremists to foment hostility to the West today. Q: The Crusades are often portrayed as a militarily offensive venture. Were they? Spencer: No. Pope Urban...

A Turkish-made film that portrays American soldiers in Iraq as brutal and callous killers is setting attendance records in Turkey and has just opened throughout Europe. From the opening seconds to the dramatic conclusion, the movie, "The Valley of the Wolves - Iraq," portrays Americans as wearing the black hats. In one scene, an American doctor, played by American actor Gary Busey, is furious because troops keep killing Iraqi prisoners before they reach the Abu Ghraib prison. The doctor's problem? If the Iraqis are dead, he can't harvest their organs to send to Israel. The movie, the most expensive production...

AL QAEDA'S STATED GOAL--to reestablish the caliphate, the political leadership of worldwide Islam embodied first in the successors of the Prophet Muhammad and most recently in the four-century rule of the Ottoman dynasty--is pure, ahistorical fantasy. One way to appreciate this is to revisit the 33-year reign of the most remarkable modern caliph, Sultan Abdul Hamid II (1876-1909). An ally neither of bigoted Islamists nor of the radical secularists who ultimately deposed him, Abdul Hamid was an Islamic modernizer--and, interestingly, a friend of the United States. Abdul Hamid emphasized the role of Islam inside the Ottoman Empire, and he emerged...

Even today, sources on inventions list six by Franklin that are still in active use today. One of those sits in my back hall, cheerfully and economically heating the back of my home – the Franklin stove. Another sits on the bridge of my nose as I write this – a pair of bifocals. But this is about Franklin’s greatest invention, one that the lists never mention because it is mere words, not a physical object. Franklin made seven trips to Europe, as a diplomat and scholar. He was welcomed into all the learned societies that existed in Europe then....

I recently set out to learn more about Islam. I had no agenda at the time except to broaden my knowledge on the subject. What I have learned sickened me. I had previously been accepting of the notion that Islam was a peaceful religion and that the Muslim terrorists who inflict so much pain and death around the world represented a fringe element outside of mainstream Islam. I was wrong. The Islamic deity, Allah, is a false god. While the term "Allah" does indeed carry the same meaning as "God," Mohammed's Allah is nothing more than a construct of a...

EU Commissioner for Enlargement Olli Rehn’s spokesman Christina Nagy, expressed her sadness for the oppression of Turkish soldiers against the Kurdish people. This official about the retaking Ocalans court stated “establishing the order of the EU Human right court is one of the EU’s requirements.

YEREVAN (Reuters) - Hundreds of thousands of people clutching tulips, carnations and daffodils climbed a hill in Armenia's capital on Sunday to lay wreaths and remember the 1.5 million they say were killed 90 years ago in Ottoman Turkey. From the top the crowds could see the heights of Mount Ararat, now in eastern Turkey, the region where Armenia says its people were slaughtered in a deliberate genocide during the chaos surrounding the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire. The mountain is a potent symbol for the Christian nation but it lies out of reach across a fortified frontier. Local families...

The Eastern Question that haunted the chancelleries of 19th-century Europe has returned to haunt George Bush and Tony Blair; or rather, the consequences of the failure to find a satisfactory answer to it have blighted all attempts to create a new international order in the aftermath of the cold war. This book is required reading for anyone wanting to have an informed opinion on recent events in Iraq; the fact that its author worked for Blair's "Strategic Futures Unit" makes one wonder why the prime minister did not spend more time reading history and less commissioning dodgy dossiers. There are...

Dear Dr. Lewis, This e-mail is in response to your above-referenced article published today, Dec. 19th on ChronWatch.http://www.chronwatch.com/content/contentDisplay.asp?aid=11860. Very little of what follows will be news to you but please indulge me. These past 60 odd years the West has been on the defensive trying (ineffectually) to keep Islam at bay and Islam has been on the offensive their declared aim being to convert by armed force the infidels except the Jews whose eradication from this planet has been (with Europe's quiet acquiescence) pronounced, save young Jewish maidens destined to be parceled out to the harems of the faithful. It...

Jihad against the British, 1920 Under the terms of the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, the Arab countries of the old Ottoman Empire were put under the mandated control of the victorious allies. Britain became responsible for Palestine and Iraq (the former Ottoman provinces of Mesopotamia), while France assumed responsibility for Syria and Lebanon. The arrangement was not popular with emerging Arab nationalists, and it was expensive for the countries holding the mandates. It cost the British government $18 million a year to maintain the resident garrison in Iraq of 25,000 British and 80,000 Indian troops. In addition, there were...

<p>Having lived nine years in parts of the former Ottoman Empire but never having visited Turkey, the country at the core of that entity, I was looking forward to seeing what its largest city and former capital, Istanbul, looked like.</p>

Crusade vs. Jihad The rage of Muslim fundamentalists against America, the 'Great Satan,' can be traced back to holy wars of the 11th century and winds through a history of European colonialism and Cold War competition. SALIM MANSUR, For the London Free Press On the Sunday following 9/11, President George W. Bush spoke to Americans reeling from the shock of terrorist attacks on New York and Washington. The twin towers of the World Trade Center had collapsed, but the fires and smoke from Ground Zero were still visible and painted Manhattan's skyline in dull brown and grey. Bush appealed for...

A few days before the fall of Constantinople to the armies of Ottoman jihad, some six centuries ago, a strange debate was taking place inside the imperial city. Constantinople then had a very loud senate, stubborn theologians, and merciless philosophers. It was the heir to Greco-Roman civilization, but also host to hot debates — so hot that they effectively isolated the city's elites from the realities of then-world politics. The political establishment of the Eastern Rome was consumed in complex rhetoric — what historians would later call "Byzantine debate." Just days before the city fell to the Islamic armies...

By Michael Chapman To Our Readers Has something you've read here startled you? Are you angry, excited, puzzled or pleased? Do you have ideas to improve our coverage? Then please write to us. All we ask is that you include your full name, the name of the city from which you are writing and a contact telephone number in case we need to get in touch. We look forward to hearing from you. Email the Opinion Page Editor The U.S. government is rightly calling for the prosecution of Iraqis who committed human rights abuses and war crimes. Unfortunately, that same...

A Modern Jihad GenocideBy Andrew G. BostomFrontPageMagazine.com | April 28, 2003 The Greater Boston Armenian Genocide Commemoration Committee, issued a press release, April 7, 2003, noting that April 24, 2003 marked the 88th "anniversary" of the Armenian genocide. On April 24, 1915, the Turkish Interior Ministry issued an order authorizing the arrest of all Armenian political and community leaders suspected of anti-Ittihad (“Young Turk” government), or Armenian nationalist sentiments. In Istanbul alone, 2345 such leaders were seized and incarcerated, and most of them were subsequently executed. The majority  were neither nationalists, nor were they involved in politics. None were...

The Pope yesterday beatified a 17th-century friar credited with halting a Muslim invasion of Europe and in the process gave the world cappuccino coffee. More than 300 years after his death, Marco d'Aviano cleared the last step before sainthood, as the Pope recognised the friar's miraculous work, including curing a nun who had been bedridden for 13 years. When a vast Ottoman Turk army was marching on Vienna in 1683, d'Aviano was sent by the Pope to unite the outnumbered Christian troops. After a prayer meeting led by d'Aviano, they were spurred to victory. As the Turks fled, legend has...

March 9, 2003 A World Still Haunted by Ottoman Ghosts By DAVID FROMKIN A ghost has been haunting the United States. It is the specter of the Ottoman Empire. The ghost is with us today, in the antagonism between Turkey and the Kurds in any war over Iraq. It was with us two years ago, when Osama bin Laden, in a televised message, said the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks were in retaliation for what the West had done 80 years earlier: divvy up the remains of the Ottoman Empire. The ghost made its appearance when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, igniting...

Ancient fort razed by Saudis BY SAM COATES A CASTLE in Mecca has been torn down to make way for a development by Osama bin Laden’s family. Saudi Arabia has been accused of the “cultural massacre” of Ottoman treasures after the al-Ajyad Castle was razed so that the bin Laden Construction Company could build an hotel, blocks of flats and a shopping mall. The 220-year-old castle, which was demolished despite protests, was built on a hill overlooking the Grand Mosque by the ruling Ottomans to protect the city and its Muslim shrines from invaders. Archaeologists have said that the castle ...

RABAT, JAN 11, SPA -- THE ISLAMIC EDUCATIONAL, CULTURAL AND SCIENTIFIC ORGANIZATION (ISESCO), HAS ANNOUNCED THAT MAKKAH-BASED AJYAD FORTRESS IS NOT CONSIDERED AS ONE OF THE LANDMARKS OF THE HUMAN CIVILIZATION, AND MOREOVER, THE FORTRESS IS NOT REGISTERED IN THE LIST OF THE HISTORICAL SITES AT PARIS-BASED UNESCO. A STATEMENT RELEASED BY ISESCO HERE ON FRIDAY SAID 'ISESCO BELIEVES THAT THE ISSUE OF AJYAD FORTRESS IS A MATTER THAT ONLY CONCERNS THE KINGDOM OF SAUDI ARABIA'--SPA

ANKARA, Turkey (AP) — Turkey's culture minister accused Saudi Arabia on Monday of engaging in a ``cultural massacre'' of Ottoman treasures after Saudi authorities tore down a 200-year-old castle in Mecca to make way for a hotel complex. Saudi authorities demolished the al-Ajyad Castle, along with other buildings in a Mecca neighborhood close to holy shrines in the city, a few weeks ago to allow for the construction of a trade center and hotel to accommodate Muslim pilgrims. Turkey's Culture Minister Istemihan Talay said his country was lodging a protest with UNESCO — the U.N. agency responsible for the preservation ...