Armenians and Jews – from Ethnic Cleansing to Extermination
The 20th century witnessed perhaps the greatest two genocides in human history: the Armenian Genocide, perpetrated by the Muslim Turks and the Jewish holocaust, perpetrated by Nazi Germany. There seems to be something clearly obvious connecting both great genocides of the 20th century. Though history books suggest that the two genocides were separated by a great distance in time and space and perpetrators, and though the Armenian Genocide is still unfortunately a peripheral story in the violent history of the 20th century. However, there can be no doubt there is a deep connection between the two, and that the Armenian Genocide was the preamble to the Jewish Holocaust. Much more than the fact that both were an integral part of the history of humanity’s darkest century, the Armenian Genocide shaped and influenced the Jewish holocaust.
The crucial question is what were the imperatives and motivations for the radical change in Nazi policy from ethnic cleansing of the Jews to genocide? Himmler and Heidrich were in the front. As we shall see, like others among the Nazi leadership, they both were deeply influenced by the Islamic propaganda and operations of Amin al-Husseini. He pushed and pressured against the ethnic cleansing and deportations of Jews but propagated and implored for their extermination. However, from their vantage point, the trigger and the example model was the Armenian genocide perpetrated by the Ottoman Empire in 1915.
From Hitler down to his government officials, they believed that under the war situation and conditions they could exterminate the Jews and no one could care or condemn. Just like the Ottoman Empire did in WWI, without the reaction of the world and international groups. They believed their policy of final solution of the Jews can be achieved through the war processes. The German leaders were well acquainted with the consequences and the reality of the Armenian genocide and they believed that the ill-reaction, the lack of any retaliatory reaction against Turkey, and the use of words without deeds will duplicate itself with their policy of exterminating the Jews.
The question is why mainstream history writing has not only been reluctant to discuss the Armenian Genocide at all, but even do not think of the possible connections between the two. The most important fact is that Islamic atrocities through its 1400 bloody years of massacres, ethnic cleansing and genocides are almost obscure when it comes to the attention of mainstream research. The Muslims’ atrocities and abominations were not hidden in the dark. The Muslims did it in the light of the sun. They hailed and glorified it and have written about it. Yet, for our case, there is alleged and imagined controversy over the factuality of the Armenian Genocide and Turkey continues its campaign of denial as if nothing happened and all is just myth.
Why? Perhaps because the historians were afraid to do their research right. History proves that intimidation was an integral part of Islamic political processes. Like today, where there is a “Great Silence and Denial” concerning Islamic atrocities perpetrated all over the world. More than 90 percent of world terrorism is Islamic. More than 70 percent of world violence is Islamic. And the countdown continues. There is not even one state around the world that is not under Islamic attack by Jihad of terrorism, or by Da’wah, Islamic diplomacy of deceit of the infidels, or by Hijrah, the Islamic mass immigration. Still, just look around, astonished and perplexed, to realize the great denial from politicians, from the academia and the media, as if it is not Islam, as if Islam is a religion of peace and harmony and compassion, and as if the horrors and atrocities perpetrated are not Islamic, and those who execute them are in fact not Muslims but in disguise.
Can one explain this folly, this stupidity, this total absurd? Or perhaps because it was and still is convenient to blame the West of all its faults, including imperialist-colonialist crimes? Is it? Well, concerning this issue of imperialism and colonialism, academic research and political approaches ignore the fact that the 1400 years of Islamic history were by far the highest and darkest embodiment of imperialism and colonialism in the history of mankind. The Islamic traditions of Islamization and Arabization of the occupied territories is of utmost notoriety. This is how the Middle East which was mainly Christian has become Arab and Muslim. Afghanistan was Buddhist before its Islamization. This is the case of Indonesia and hundreds of millions in India and China, to mention but few.
Still Western historian blame the bloody history of the West, and stop there. It fits the Christian traditions of self-accuse and self-blame (Mia Culpa!) like the Jewish tradition (“we have sinned, we have transgressed, and we have committed crimes”). You will not find this approach in Islam. On the contrary, whereas Judaism and Christianity internalize the guilt, Islam always and under no condition externalize the guilt (“do I have problem? You are guilty and responsible!”). From here come the absurd and imagined accusations against Israel, which are intended to cover up, to conceal, to draw the veil over the Arabs and Muslims misdoings and crimes. The famous Jewish phrase “he who charges others, charge with his own defects”, is critically relevant to Islam. Muslims always deny their faults and always accuse their enemies. In their state of mind they are always the victims. Victimhood and accusing the other have become Islamic expertise and it is proven again and again in contemporary world. The brilliant research done by Ibn Warraq eloquently elaborates this issue while criticizing the notorious impostures of Edwards said.
Or perhaps Islamic atrocities are denied because Western appeasement policies so pervasive in Western traditions? Or perhaps the traumas of the two World Wars of the 20th century of millions of deaths and destruction is the reason? Or perhaps the optimism of Western mind and thinking about the good in human nature and that in the end the good wins? Perhaps there are other reasons, but whatever the reasons are, Islam is the embodiment of evil, and out of Western weaknesses and lack of understanding Islamic victory seems very evident. Therefore the question to ask is what went wrong with the West, not with Islam, as Bernard Lewis suggests. It is in fact always What Went Wrong with the West. These are the four W’s that bring the greatest civilization in history, the Western civilization, to its demise. Like in the era of Byzantium, Islam wins not because and out of its powerfulness and abilities, but because of the vacuum created by Western failures and weaknesses.
As for the other statement, concerning the possible connections between the Armenian genocide and the Jewish holocaust, this research intends to put things straight and tries to explore the issue and draw the conclusions: was the holocaust of the Jews inspired by the events, the processes and repercussions of the Armenian Genocide? The Armenian Genocide is only one chapter in the notorious Islamic religious history in which Islamic scriptures order to hate and to destroy by all means all other religious groups, they regard as infidels. The Christians suffered the uppermost persecutions and massacres.
Gregory Stanton, the president of Genocide Watch, suggests how genocide develops in eight stages: Classification: categories to distinguish people into “us and them” by ethnicity, race, religion, or nationality. Symbolization: names or other symbols are given to the classification. Dehumanization: denying the humanity of the other group. Members of it are equated with animals, vermin, insects or diseases that must be eliminated. Organization: Genocide is always organized, usually by the state. It often uses militias or special army units to provide deniability of its responsibility. Polarization: groups are driven apart. Hatred and propaganda are broadcasted. Preparation: Members of victim groups are forced to wear identifying symbols and separated out. Their property is expropriated and they are segregated into ghettoes or deported. Extermination begins, and quickly becomes genocide. Denial follows a genocide. The victims are blamed.
The problem with the model is that The “measures” and “actions” he proposes are highly naïve; totally unrealistic as if other communities care about and are ready to take real actions; and they depend on wishful thinking as if there is a common interest and good will among the international organizations. Again and again reality proves that most of the genocidal acts were publicly known in real time, and still nothing was done. While the later on excuses were many, still measures were not taken.
Turkey – the Armenian Genocide, 1915
In 1915, leaders of the Ottoman Empire set in motion a strategy to massacre the Armenians living its territory. There were more than 2 million Armenians at that time. By early 1920s, when the genocide, a premeditated and systematic campaign to exterminate an entire people, finally ended, some 1.5 million of Turkey’s Armenians were butchered, slaughtered, burnt and drowned and more Armenians forcibly removed from the country. This was the greatest holocaust perpetrated ever, until the Jewish Holocaust by the Nazisin WWII. In 1922, when the “Medz Yeghern” or “the Great Disaster” was over, there were just 388,000 Armenians remaining. Every April 24 marks the “Great Crime,” the Armenian genocide that took place under Islamic Ottoman Empire. Still, the Turkish government until today does not acknowledge the genocide, and it is still illegal in Turkey even to talk about what happened to Armenians during this era.
The Armenian people have made their home in the Caucasus region of Eurasia for some 3,000 years, a thousand years before the invader Turks came to their territory. It became the first nation in the world to make Christianity its official religion. The Armenian community thrived despite the Ottoman discriminatory policy and forced Islamization. They had been better educated and wealthier than their Turkish Muslim neighbors. At the end of the 19th century, the despotic Turkish Sultan Abdul Hamid II was infuriated by the Armenian campaign to win basic civil rights, and declared that he would solve the “Armenian question” once and for all. “I will give them a box on the ear which will make them…relinquish their revolutionary ambitions.”
It should be clearly put that if early 20th century Turkey had the apparatuses and technology to execute what Nazi Germany had, mainly the gas chambers, it is sure that the entire Armenian population may well have been annihilated. The genocide the Turks had operated must not be denied, neglected, or play down. It is exactly an Islamic attitude of denial and it must be understood mainly by Islamic terms and totally condemned.
The butchering of 1.5m Armenians by the Ottoman Turks during World War I remains one of the bloodiest and most contentious events of the 20th century, and has been called the first modern genocide. 25 concentration camps were set up in a systematic slaughter aimed at eradicating the Armenian people, classed as “vermin” by the Turks. The common description of the concentration camps was, like the gates of Dante’s Hell. Indeed, again it was Islam against Christianity. Winston Churchill described the massacres as an ‘administrative holocaust’ a crime that was planned and executed for political reasons. The opportunity presented itself for clearing Turkish soil of a Christian race.
Despite the amount of evidence eyewitness accounts, official archives, photographic proofs of crucified Christians including girls, reports of diplomats, and testimony of the survivors, the denial of the Armenian Genocide by successive regimes in Turkey to the present is overwhelming. To add pain to insult, the denial of the historical reality of the Armenian Genocide is also part of the Western world, for political and economic reasons. Even Israel, the land of the Jews, after the Nazi Holocaust, shamelessly continues to deny the Armenian Genocide. It is here to warn out: in the long run Turkey under Erdogan is more dangerous to Israeli national interests than Iran.
The age-old specter of Muslim persecution of Christian minorities was fundamental to the Armenian Genocide. For Winston Churchill this was an opportunity presented itself for clearing Turkish soil of a Christian race, without being disturbed by foreign intervention. There are huge crystal clear objective evidence and research studies which unequivocally agree that it was a deliberate, calculated genocide perpetrated in the light of the sun. U.S. Senate Resolution 359 from 1920 heard testimonies that included evidence of the most colossal crime of all the ages, of mutilation, torture, brutal death, destruction of an entire population. The 1919 film “Auction of Souls” reveals a small part of this horrible situation.
Almost 1.5 million Armenians perished as the result of direct and deliberate mass-murder, execution, starvation, disease, physical abuse, and mass-deportation. The original people who lived in Anatolia for nearly 3,000 years were perished. First, the Armenians in the Army and governmental branches were deported and sent to remote places, where they later on were killed. Then, intellectuals and community leaders were arrested and deported to the countryside, where they were executed. In May, the remaining Armenian population was deported by train and by foot(“Death March”) to concentration camps in the Syrian Desert under the supervision of the Teshikilati Mahsusa–the Special Organization ,a unit of the Turkish army made up of criminals released from prisons.
The annihilation of the Armenian children represents the genocide at its horrible side. According to Dadrian, “In the provinces of Sivas, Harput, Trabzon, Erzurum, Diyarbekir, as well as the independent sanjaks of Urfa and Maras the genocide was earned out in part through deportations and in part through massacres… In all of these operations children were part of the general population targeted for wholesale destruction. They were also subjected to differential forms of mass murder.” These forms of murder included methods such as mass drowning, mass burning, sexual assaults, and mutilations.
Between May and August 1915, the Armenian population of the eastern provinces was deported and murdered en masse. According to the American ambassador, Henry Morgenthau, the Armenians were “slaughtered like sheep.” Women and children were deported to concentration camps to be exterminated. Though they were crying out: “We will become Muslims! We will become anything you want, just save us!”nothing saved them. Women threw their babies into lakes rather than hand them over to the Turks.There was mass looting and pillaging of Armenian goods. Some were burned out to find the gold coins they swallowed.In four days alone, from 10-14 June 1915, the gangs ‘eliminated’ some 25,000 people in the Kemah Erzincan area alone.
The case of Elazig (historic Kharpert/Kharput) is the perhaps one of the best to internalize the horrors of the Armenian genocide. It was the “physical elimination of the Armenian people and most of the evidence of their ever having lived on the great highland called the Armenian Plateau, to which the perpetrator side soon assigned the new name of Eastern Anatolia.”The city of Elazig is located in the Armenian highland of eastern Turkey. The Ottomans captured the region in 1515, but the Armenian presence in the city remained strong despite all of the pressures to which the Armenians were subject, such as forced conversions to Islam. No matter how much the Turkish government is trying to erase the Armenian heritage in Kharput and the rest of Turkey, the Armenian roots of the region are undeniable.
On the eve of the genocide, the figures indicate that the Armenian population of Kharpert/Kharput remained relatively static for almost a century, never deviating much from approximately 40,000.”U.S. Consul at Kharput, Leslie A Davis, the American consul in Kharput, reported In September 1915 the discovering the bodies of nearly 10,000 Armenians, calling it the “slaughterhouse province.” He also described a horrendous scenes of butchering around Lake Goeljuk near Kharput: The killing squads dashed infants on rocks in front of their mothers. Orphanages in which Armenian children were gathered after the liquidation of their families served as transit camps for subsequent annihilation through drowning. In the mass burning of Armenian orphans, plain sadistic fiendishness was mostly at work and they ended their misery by torching them en masse.
Mass poisoning and rapes of children were also widespread.”The other modality involves rape before murder. In Ankara province, near the village of Bash Ayash, two rapist-killers raped twelve boys, aged 12-14, and subsequently killed them. Those who did not die instantly were tortured to death while crying ‘Mummy, Mummy’… A female survivor from Giresun relates how in Egin, Kharput province, some 500 Armenian orphans collected from all parts of that province were poisoned through the arrangement of the local pharmacist and physician.” He summed up the genocide by declaring: “I do not believe that there has ever been a massacre in the history of the world as general and thorough as that which is now being perpetrated in this region, or that a more fiendish, diabolical scheme has ever been conceived in the mind of man.”
In four provinces, Diyarbakir, Harput, Bitlis, and Aleppo, this method was applied with special ferocity that which took place around beautiful Lake Goeljuk in the summer of 1915 is almost inconceivable. Thousands and thousands of Armenians, mostly innocent and helpless women and children were butchered on its shore and barbarously mutilated. One village priest, kneeling down to pray for mercy, the Turkish soldiers beheaded him, and played football with the old man’s decapitated head before his devastated family (like the Islamic Caliphate State in Syria and Iraq!).At the horrific Ras al-Ain camp near Urfa, two German railway engineers reported seeing three to four hundred women arrive in one day, completely naked. One witness told how Sergeant Nuri, the overseer of the camp, bragged about raping children. Many mothers gave their children to Turkish and Kurdish families to save them from death. Of the 45,000 Armenians who made it to Deir al Zor, only 40 remained alive at the end of the war.
In her memoir, Ravished Armenia, Aurora Mardiganian described being raped and thrown into a harem. In the city of Malatia, she saw 16 girls crucified, vultures eating their corpses. “Each girl had been nailed alive upon her cross, spikes through her feet and hands. Only their hair blown by the wind covered their bodies.”Elsewhere, bodies tied to each other drifted down the Euphrates. And in the Black Sea region, the Armenians were herded onto boats and then thrown overboard. In the desert regions, the Turks set up primitive gas chambers, stuffing Armenians into caves and asphyxiating them with brush fires. Everywhere, there were Armenian corpses: in lakes and rivers, in empty desert cisterns and village wells. Travelers reported that the stench of death pervaded the landscape. By 1917, the Armenian ‘problem’, as it was described by Ottoman leaders, had been thoroughly “resolved.”
Often forgotten, the fact is that all Christians under Turkish rule, Assyrians and Greeks, and not only Armenians, were also targeted for massacre and ethnic cleansing. The only thing that distinguished Armenians, Assyrians, Greeks and others from Turks was that they were all Christian. Yet Turkey continues to aggressively deny the holocaust it perpetrated, and unlike Germany refuses to repent. Moreover, today Turkey moves back to reclaim its Islamic Ottoman heritage and systematically continues to persecute the Christian minorities. The Armenian massacre was the greatest crime of the war, and the failure to act against the Turkish horror means that all talk of peace is mischievous nonsense. These words are not only true to the Armenians alone but also to all Christians, and not only to Turkey but to the entire Islamic world. More than 100 years after the genocide, Turkey shamelessly still denies the Armenian Genocide and Turkish history textbooks even blame on the Armenians themselves. When experts deny the Armenian genocide and succeed in preventing world governments from officially recognizing it, they are killing the victims all over again. As long as the genocide remains unrecognized, justice will not be established. The curse of the genocide will not leave the land, and the hope is Turkey must never see the light of day.
Germany – the Jewish Holocaust, 1939-1945
Anti-Semitism did not start with Hitler and Nazi Germany, but the code “final solution” it was the horrible climax of Jew hatred. However, for the discussion here, it is important to understand that Islam was the first religion that developed anti-Semitism in scientific methods, both from religious and racist aspects, and that Muhammad was the first to perpetrate ethnic cleansing and genocide to the Jews in Arabia.
The roots of Hitler’s anti-Semitism are unclear. In 1933, Jews in Germany numbered around 525,000, only 1 percent of the total German population. When imprisoned for his role in the “Beer Hall Putsch” of 1923, Hitler wrote his memoirs and propaganda attitude, “Mein Kampf”(My Struggle), in which he predicted a general European war that would result in “the extermination of the Jewish race in Germany.” However, at that time Hitler was obsessed with the idea of the superiority of the “pure” German race, which he called “Aryan,” and with the need for “Lebensraum,” living space, for that race to expand. As for the Jews, it was ethnic cleansing and not genocide. It is of note that the Jews take only 1.5 percent in Mein Kampf, yet, 9 percent in the Qur’an.
One can trace three distinct stages: the first, “Aryanization” of Germany (1933-1939); the second, “Ghettoization”of the Jews in Poland (December 1939 to March 1942); the third, “the Final Solution” of the Jews (1942 to May 1945).
At first, the Nazis reserved their persecution for political opponents, Communists and Social Democrats. The first official concentration camp opened at Dachau in March 1933, under the control of Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS, and later on the chief of the German police. Its prisoners were Communists and “liberals.” The Nazis used harsh violence and economic pressuresas to encourage Jews who were harassed and boycotted to leave the country. It was pure racist Aryan nationalism exemplified by pan-Germanism as to enable the territorial expansionism of Lebensraum (living space) policy for the German people. The Nuremberg Laws, enacted in September 1935, stated that only those of German blood were defined as citizens. The Jews, being inferior to the Aryan master race were to be ethnic cleansing yet the exterminated solution, the genocidal policy was not yet formalized.
The important policy was “Aryanization” of Germany, dismissing non-Aryan Jews from civil service and liquidating Jewish-owned businesses. Under the Nuremberg Laws, Jews became routine targets for stigmatization and persecution and stripped of their citizenship. The aim was to deport the Jews out of Germany not to exterminate them. The culminated of this process was the “night of broken glass” in November 1938, when German synagogues were burned and windows in Jewish shops were smashed. The result, from 1933 to 1939, hundreds of thousands of Jews left Germany with the encouragement of the authorities.
One of the options devised by the Nazis was the scheme to rid Germany of the Jews by deportation and forced emigration under the code of “The Madagascar Plan.” At the beginning of 1940, plans were devised to ship the Jews under Nazi control to Madagascar, in the context of forced ethnic cleansing. Soon this was abolished and Poland became the alternative to the Jewish issue. After the occupation of Poland, the German police forced tens of thousands of Polish Jews from their homes into ghettoes, giving their confiscated properties to ethnic Germans from the Reich or Polish gentiles. The Jewish ghettoes in Poland characterized by widespread unemployment, poverty and hunger. In 1941, Jews from all over the continent were transported to the Polish ghettoes. On April 27 1940,Himmler ordered the establishment of a concentration camp at Auschwitz.
However, the drastic change came after the German invasion of the Soviet Union, in June 1941. Mobile killing units called Einsatzgruppenmurdered more than 500,000 Soviet Jews and others in few months. Now the road was clear to the Holocaust. On July 17, 1941, Hitler tasked Heinrich Himmler with responsibility for all security matters in the occupied Soviet Union. Two weeks later, on July 31 1941, Hermann Goring submitted a written authorization to Reinhard Heydrich, chief of the SD, the security service of the SS, to prepare a plan for a “final solution of the Jewish question” in territories under German control and to coordinate the participation of all involved government organizations.
The Nazis frequently used euphemistic language to disguise the true nature of their crimes. The term “Final Solution” referred to the annihilation of the Jewish people. The symbolization of the new policy was in September 1941, where every Jew was marked with a yellow star. Again, this was not Nazi invention but an Islamic one invented and practiced during the Abbasid Empire. This change can also be understood by the rise of Germany’s optimism of its victory over Europe: on September 27 1940,the Berlin-Rome-Tokyo Axis was established.
On October 1 1941, All Jewish emigration was halted, and on October 14 1941, Mass deportation to concentration camps of Jews from all over Nazi-controlled Europe began.The result, Himmler assigned General Odilo Globocnik to systematically implement the murder of the Jews under the code name “Operation Reinhard.” However, the first act of extermination was the “General Plan for the East” envisaged the deportation of the Jewish population of occupied Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union to Siberia for use as slave labor or to be exterminated. The minutes of the Wannsee Conference estimated the Jewish population of the Soviet Union to be five million, with another three million in Ukraine. Adolf Eichmann masterminded the logistics of the extermination of the Jews.
Though since June 1941, experiments with mass killing had been ongoing at the concentration camp of Auschwitz, the milestone was on December 8 1941, where Chelmno death camp in Poland was opened and the first mass gassing of Jew took place as an industrial project. Only then, five more mass killing centers were built at camps in Poland: Sobibor, Belzec, Treblinka, Majdanek and the largest of all, Auschwitz-Birkenau.
In mid-December 1941 the extermination policy was formalized to become official and abiding, as Hitler himself resolved that the Jews of Europe were to be exterminated immediately. The immediate reason was the military battleground. On December 5 1941, the Soviet Army began a counter-offensive, and on December 7 1941, Japan attacked the United States at Pearl Harbor, and the United States entered the war. Four days later, on December 11 1941, Germany declared war on the United States.
On 20 January 1942, the heads of the Nazi Germany officials and the SS leaders held a conference in Berlin suburb of Wannsee to discuss “the final solution of the Jewish question.” It was summoned by the director of SS, Reinhard Heydrich. The conference signaled a radical change in the attitude of Nazi Germany towards the “Jewish Question,” from ethnic cleansing to genocide in extermination camps in Poland, under the complete charge of the SS. From 1942 up to 1945, Jews were deported to the camps from all over Europe. At Auschwitz alone, more than 2 million Jews were exterminated in a large-scale industrial operation. The final stage of extermination was the crematorium, where the bodies were incinerated.
In contrast to Islamic history of massacres and the Armenian Genocide which were operated in the light of sun, the Nazis tried to keep operation of camps secret. However, eyewitnesses brought reports of Nazi atrocities in Poland to the Allied governments, who failed to respond or to publicize the news of the mass slaughter.
There were three stages in the Nazi policy concerning the “Jewish problem.” a) 1933-1938: encouragement to leave Germany and to immigrate, a soft kind of ethnic cleansing; 1938-1941: Ghettoization of the Jews; c) 1942-1945: extermination of European Jews.
a) 1933-1938: encouragement to leave Germany and to immigrate. Gilbert Achcar analyzed the meeting of Ibn Saud’s special envoy and Hitler, who noted that one of the three reasons why Nazi Germany had warm sympathies for the Arabs was “…because we were jointly fighting the Jews.” He then stated that he himself would not rest until the last Jew had left Germany. Kalid al-Hud observed that Prophet Muhammad had acted the same way. He had driven the Jews out of Arabia. Indeed, until 1938, Hitler encouraged German Jews to immigrate to Palestine. The Nazi leadership actively helped Zionist organizations to encourage the Jewish immigration against the British-imposed restrictions entering Palestine.
The most significant practical effect of Nazi policy on Palestine between 1933 and 1938, however, was to radically increase the immigration rate of German and other European Jews and to double the population of Palestinian Jews. Nazi policy for solving their Jewish problem until the end of 1937 emphasized motivating German Jews to emigrate from German territory. The Gestapo and the SS inconsistently cooperated with a variety of Jewish organizations and efforts to facilitate emigration to Mandatory Palestine. 60,000 German Jews immigrated into Palestine between 1933 through 1936, bringing with them $100,000,000 dollars ($1.6 billion in 2009 dollars).
1938-1941: Ghettoization of the Jews. However, in 1938 the German policy toward the Jewish Homeland in Palestine appears to have substantially changed, as indicated in the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs note from 10 March 1938. The excuse: most Jewish and Zionist organizations aligned with Britain and its allies to oppose Nazi Germany. Unfortunately, the real reason was the pressures put by Amin al-Husseini. Throughout the spring and summer of 1940, the German army expanded Hitler’s empire in Europe, conquering Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg and France. Beginning in 1941, Jews from all over the continent, as well as hundreds of thousands of European Gypsies, were transported to the Polish ghettoes. However, The German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 marked a new level of brutality. Mobile killing units called Einsatzgruppenmurdered more than 500,000 Jews over the course of the German occupation of Eastern Europe. This was the preamble to the extermination, and symbolically enough it was perpetuated in the Islamic countries of the Soviet Union.
c) 1942-1945: extermination of European Jews.
It was the greatest machinery of human slaughter ever in history of mankind, a smooth industrialized technological efficient process, and this extermination was operated during wartime with huge allocation of resources and manpower. The Ghettoization of the Jews helped the extermination, but the question still exist: why would Germany spend so much resources and manpower needed in its war objectives of hegemony?
Even the Jews of North Africa did not escaped the Nazi machine of extermination. At this Wannsee Conference, Reinhard Heydrich, Heinrich Himmler’s deputy and head of the Reich Security Main Office, or RSHA, noted the numbers of Jews to be eliminated in each territory. In the notation for France there are two entries, 165,000 for Occupied France, and 700,000 for the Unoccupied Zone, which included France’s North African possessions, Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia. The SS had established a special unit in 1942 “to Kill Jews in North Africa”. It was led by SS Walter Rauff, who helped develop the mobile gassing vehicles the Germans used to murder Russian prisoners and Jewish people in Russia and Poland. A network of labor camps was established in Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco.
Even after the D-Day invasion and the Soviet offensive the extermination of Jews continued in large scale and a large proportion of Hungary’s Jewish population was deported to Auschwitz, and exterminated. Now, the concentration camps were evacuated, but the so-called “death marches” continued all the way up to the German surrender, resulting in the deaths of some 250,000 to 375,000 Jews. Six million Jews were killed during the Holocaust, two-thirds of the Jews living in Europe before World War II.
A postscript to the Armenian Genocide and the Jewish Holocaust
Ten amounts of tragedies have been existing in the Middle East, and nine of them were fallen on the Kurds. A Muslim but not Arab religious minority, an old nation with a proven history and territory seeking for independence and asking to be recognized on its own territory. Yet, time and again the Kurds are denied as a nation and as a state, and time and again they are persecuted and massacred without the attention and the assistance of the world. The politicians close their eyes, the media becomes deaf, and the academia does not speak. It is a tragedy that cries out to the sky and implore for justice. Still nothing happens and the tragic events continue. Just to compare the Kurds dire and so tragic situation with the Palestinians, a group of people without a history, without nationhood, without the basic components to create a state, and still the world is busy perhaps without any precedence in endowing these corrupt imposters with billions of US dollars and chasing to establish for them a state.
The tragedy of the Kurds is really unbelievable. And now Turkey, yes, again Turkey, the notorious Islamic state under the dictatorship of Erdogan, is now conducting another genocide and ethnic cleansing against the Kurds in Afrin region in Syria, while the silence of the world is disturbing. The world does not know and does not care. Turkey continues its past genocidal policies and the world is silent again.
The Kurds have fought in the forefront battleground against the Islamic Caliphate State (ICS), and paid a high price in casualties and ruins. They have also fought for the sake of the world against the savages, barbarians Islamic Jihadists who have also butchered the Christian Yazidi minority, and the world was silent. It was the Syrian Kurds who lost 2500 of their young men and women fighters and their homes destroyed in liberating Raqqa and other regions from ICS. The Kurds are again abandoned by the West. This is unbelievably sad and extremely surprising since the Kurds were the Western countries most reliable partner in fighting and defeating ISIS.
Afrin is an area of North-Eastern Syria and Erdogan is trying to annihilate the Kurds and Christians of the area. The most maddening aspect of this horrible situation is that Turkey is a part of NATO. This means that the Turkish army is a NATO army. And yet the West is silent as Erdogan uses his NATO army to massacre the most loyal ally of the West in the fight against the Islamic Caliphate State. The Kurds of Afrin never attacked Turkey. There are hundreds of thousands of civilians in the city, yet Erdogan is calling them “terrorists” and bombing them and use unlawful atrocities against them. Moreover, Turkey refers to the attack against Afrin and the Kurdish people as “Jihad.” In this battleground Turkey is cooperating with al-Qaeda and ex-ICS fighters, and the world is silent. The Turkish invasion has already completely driven away the Yazidi people. This ethnic cleansing policy by the Turkish military intends to fulfill Erdogan’s promised: to deliver Afrin to its “true owners”, to replace the population of Afrin with his own jihadist proxies in his continued battle to topple down Bashshar al-Asad regime.
Whatever they worth, the Kurds are the best ally of the US, the West and Israel in the Middle East. Their defeat at the hands of Turkey and the Muslim Brotherhood groups is a defeat for the freedom loving world. They no longer trust that the US will help them. On the contrary, they feel that the US allows Turkey to destroy them. The Turkish army have been killing, raping and looting in the region completely. The Kurds have become so desperate that they want nothing more to do with Islam, let alone Turkey. In their words: “We never want to be Muslims again, we are Zoroastrians and Kurds but not Muslims…” they also praise Israel and press to take the Ka’bah and to control Saudi Arabia. It was the Syrian Kurds who destroyed ICS. Yet now one million people in Afrin region are facing genocide at the hands of Turkey and the Islamic Jihadi groups, and the West is silent again.
To close this vicious circle there came the butchering of an 85 year old Jewish Holocaust survivor woman, Mireille Knoll, on March 23 2018, in Paris. She had been stabbed to death time and again by her neighbor, a Muslim man whom she knew well from when he was a boy. She managed to escape the anti-Semitism of the Nazis, but she was killed by the anti-Semitism of Islam. This was added to the Islamic anti-Semitic butchering of Sarah Halimi, an elderly Jewish woman, on April 4 2017 in Paris.
The authorities in France called it a “hate crime,” but it was another anti-Semite act. The sad joke is that the French authorities are looking for a motive. The answer is clear and it comes from the Islamic Shari’ah. The Qur’an declares: Jews are the worst enemies of the Muslims (98:6), the strongest of all peoples in enmity toward the Muslims (5:82). They are like apes and pigs (2:63-65; 5:59-60; 7:166). They disobey Allah and do not observe his commands (5:13). They fabricate things and falsely ascribe them to Allah (2:79; 3:75, 3:181). They are hypocritical (2:14, 2:44), merciless and heartless (2:74); hiding the truth and misleading people (2:109; 3:78; 4:46); and they commit sins (5:79), staging rebellion against the prophets and rejecting their guidance (2:55).
There are two salient facts to consider: first, it was Islam which was the first and foremost originator of anti-Semitism as a religious and as a racial perspectives. Second, Islam is the main perpetrator of anti-Semite acts in contemporary world, together with its ally, the fascist left. Contrasting the lies and misdoings of the media, it is not Christianity and it is not the right wing. It is exactly Islam and the left.
It is futile to expect living peacefully together, especially in the Islamic states where minorities are harshly and systematically oppressed and politically destroyed. This is the history of Islam. A small reminder were the atrocities perpetrated by the Islamic Caliphate State in Syria and Iraq: on the one hand destroying world historical archeological treasures of humanity, and on the other, the extermination of religious minorities and even Muslims that were considered not religious.
By the same token, the genocide perpetrated against the Armenians was excluded from the category of “war crimes” to be prosecuted and punished by the Allies. As Willis put it:not until 1948 would genocide be clearly defined as an international crime. The Hague conventions did not deal with a state’s treatment of its own citizens. From this perspective, the Armenian genocide was considered a Turkish internal affair, not subject to the jurisdiction of other governments.
But the issue must take a very broader perspective. The Spanish writer, Sebastian Vilar Rodriguez, supposedly published in a Spanish newspaper, in 2006, an obituary: “All European life died in Auschwitz.” The source and validity of the writer and the newspaper are perhaps fake, but still the content is so accurate.
I walked down the street in Barcelona, and suddenly discovered a terrible truth – Europe died in Auschwitz. We killed six million Jews and replaced them with 20 million Muslims. In Auschwitz we burned a culture, thought, creativity, and talent. We destroyed the chosen people, truly chosen, because they produced great and wonderful people who changed the world. The contribution of this people is felt in all areas of life: science, art, international trade, and above all, as the conscience of the world. These are the people we burned.
And under the pretense of tolerance, and because we wanted to prove to ourselves that we were cured of the disease of racism, we opened our gates to 20 million Muslims, who brought us stupidity and ignorance, religious extremism and lack of tolerance, crime and poverty, due to an unwillingness to work and support their families with pride. They have blown up our trains and turned our beautiful Spanish cities into the third world, drowning in filth and crime.
Shut up in the apartments they receive free from the government, they plan the murder and destruction of their naive hosts. And thus, in our misery, we have exchanged culture for fanatical hatred, creative skill for destructive skill, intelligence for backwardness and superstition. We have exchanged the pursuit of peace of the Jews of Europe and their talent for a better future for their children, their determined clinging to life because life is holy, for those who pursue death, for people consumed by the desire for death for themselves and others, for our children and theirs. What a terrible mistake was made by miserable Europe.
*To be published by Mellen Press
https://moderndiplom...enocide-part-1/