Of Minarets and Massacres

[Yervant1]

December 8, 2009

 

Of Minarets and Massacres

 

By Carlin Romano

 

The surprise Swiss vote last month to ban new minarets triggered the

expected gnashing of teeth from those who believe Islam, the least

tolerant of faiths when administered by autocrats and absolute

monarchs, should not only be tolerated, but encouraged.

 

"It is an expression of intolerance, and I detest intolerance,"

commented French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner. "I hope the Swiss

will reverse this decision quickly." Commenters expressed similar

thoughts on blogs - "Deeply ashamed to be Swiss," wrote Stephanie of

Zurich - while voices sympathetic to the vote also quickly flooded the

blogosphere. "Google 'Archdiocese of Mecca,'" one poster from Arizona

acidly suggested.

 

Forgive me if I, too, do not weep that 57.5 percent of the Swiss, now

hosts to a largely moderate Muslim population of Turks and former

Yugoslavs, want to keep their country a quiet car among nations. I am

still busy weeping for the Armenians, the first people in their corner

of the world to officially adopt Christianity, almost eliminated from

history due to regular massacres by the Muslim Turks among whom they

lived for centuries.

 

Is bringing in the Armenian genocide too big a stretch when

contemplating an electoral act about urban design rather than a state

policy to implement ethnic cleansing? After all, the ban doesn't

involve violence (so far), or suppression of religious worship

(mosques remain OK). What is the appropriate context when reflecting

on such a ban?

 

One little-pondered aspect of Web commentary on the news these days is

how it has tremendously widened the spectrum of "context" in

intellectual debate. Examine remarks on the minaret ban and it's easy

to feel that no one short of a walking encyclopedia could properly

tackle the subject.

 

What about the Crusades? The Inquisition? America's genocide of Native

Americans? Church bells and belfries? Jordanian denial of citizenship

to Jews? Nineteenth-century European colonialism in the Mideast?

Islamic discrimination against gays, Jews, women, Christians? Serb

persecution of Muslims in Bosnia? The Battles of Tours (732) and

Lepanto (1571)? Wahhabi fundamentalism? Swiss collaboration with the

Nazis? Swiss protection of Jews from the Nazis? It's enough to make

one's head swim.

 

Perhaps we'll all need "Advanced Context" as a required liberal-arts

course once the anarchy of cybercommentary takes over all intellectual

debate. Allow me, then, in this amorphous, pluralistic environment, to

return to the Armenians. Because it may well be that persuading people

about appropriate context in large moral matters can't be done a

priori, but only, so to speak, pragmatically - you juxtapose the

context you think relevant with the issue at hand, and see whether it

makes a difference to what anyone thinks. It may also be, in moral

matters involving tolerance, that proper context can be sought by

connecting it with a concrete, powerful notion in everyday life:

apology.

 

It's an unfortunate modern truism that all genocides aren't equal in

their impact. As Richard Bernstein noted recently in the International

Herald Tribune, the just-finished trial of a key Khmer Rouge figure in

Cambodia stirred little attention in America. Yet the morally

impoverished reaction over decades to the Turkish government's

massacre of up to 1.5 million Armenians that began in 1915 - bookended

by earlier and later massacres that killed hundreds of thousands -

still stands apart because it once stood as the best-known genocide in

modern history.

 

As early as 1895, The New York Times ran a report headlined, "Another

Armenian Holocaust." In 1915, the Times ran multiple reports with such

headlines as, "Wholesale Massacres of Armenians by Turks" and "800,000

Armenians Counted Destroyed." In 1918, Theodore Roosevelt declared

that "the Armenian massacre was the greatest crime of the war, and

failure to act against Turkey is to condone it." British Prime

Minister David Lloyd George decried the Ottoman state as "this inhuman

Empire." Raphael Lemkin, the Polish lawyer who coined the term

"genocide" in helping to establish the United Nations Convention on

that crime, first used the term in regard to the slaughter of the

Armenians.

 

Thankfully, the quality and extent of scholarship about the Armenian

genocide continues to grow, though it still falls short of that on the

Holocaust. Last spring saw the momentous, long-overdue publication by

Peter Balakian, the American conscience of the Armenian genocide, of

his great-uncle Grigoris Balakian's Armenian Golgotha (Alfred

A. Knopf), an immensely moving, harrowing memoir that instantly takes

its place as a classic alongside Primo Levi's Survival in Auschwitz

and Elie Wiesel's Night. This fall brought Michael Bobelian's

resourcefully reported Children of Armenia (Simon & Schuster), which

focuses not on the genocide itself but the disgraceful history of how

the U.S. government, which once trumpeted Armenian demands for

justice, has repeatedly sold Armenians down the river for cold-war

solidarity, oil contracts, and strategic cooperation from Turkey.

 

Precisely because the Armenian genocide remains unfamiliar to many,

it's necessary to at least sketch what happened.

 

In 1908, the original Young Turks, officially the Committee of Union

and Progress, or CUP, began their takeover of the collapsing Ottoman

Empire by forcing Sultan Abdul Hamid II to re-establish the empire's

constitution, leading many to see the CUP as a reformist movement. The

supporters of the Sultan, who himself saw Armenians as "degenerate"

infidels, fought back, spurring massacres of Armenians in 1909, before

the CUP deposed him. But as the Ottoman Empire lost most of its

European territory during the Balkan Wars of 1912-13, and Muslim

refugees flooded into what is now Turkey, anti-Christian sentiment and

Turkish nationalism both intensified.

 

In 1913, three extreme nationalists among CUP leaders who would become

the architects of the Armenian genocide - Ismail Enver, Ahmed Jemal,

and Mehmed Talaat - staged a coup that gave them complete government

control. As World War I ensued, the CUP leaders, in a military

alliance with Germany, increasingly bristled at the 1914 Armenian

Reform Agreement that granted European powers the right to inspect the

empire's treatment of Armenians.

 

In response, Talaat and his colleagues formulated a policy of

eliminating the empire's Armenians once and for all - a policy postwar

evidence showed he expressed directly to Germany's ambassador, Hans

Freiherr von Wangenheim. In November 1914, the Sheik-Ul-Islam of

Constantinople issued a jihad against Christians, and the looting of

Armenian and Greek businesses in Western Turkey - a kind of Ionian

Kristallnacht - began. In 1915, the CUP arranged for the release of

some 30,000 criminals from Ottoman prisons to form chetes (mobile

killing units) that would become the storm troopers of the genocide.

 

In April 1915, the deportations, executions, and rapes of Armenians in

the Ottoman Empire began. On April 24, the day on which the Armenian

genocide is memorialized worldwide, the CUP arrested some 250 of

Constantinople's Armenian leaders and intellectuals, including

Grigoris Balakian, and imprisoned them in the east - most would

subsequently be killed. (When Lenin exiled many of Russia's leading

intellectuals in 1922, he explicitly contrasted his generous decision

in letting them live with how the Ottomans treated the Armenians.)

 

That year, 1915, saw the awful crescendo of the genocide as the CUP

government forcibly deported Armenians eastward, tortured, massacred,

and starved them on death marches, confiscated their property, killed

almost all of the arrested 250 leaders, and resettled Muslim refugees

on Armenian land. The United States knew all about it as Ambassador

Henry Morgenthau, a hero of the era who eventually lost his position

for trying to protect the Armenians, reported to Washington that "a

campaign of race extermination is in progress under a pretext of

reprisal against rebellion."

 

By August, U.S. diplomats estimated that more than a million Armenians

had been killed. In 1916, Interior Minister Talaat ordered the

massacre of Armenian refugees still surviving in the desert town of

Der Zor, which came to be known as the Auschwitz of the genocide. It

is now believed the Turks slaughtered up to 400,000 Armenians

there. Grigoris Balakian's memoir, like other accounts, achingly

details the astonishing, grisly savagery of the killings - the

beheadings, disembowelments, and mutilations to which Armenian men,

women, and children were subjected. He also acknowledges the existence

of righteous Turks who saved Armenians. Indeed, Taner Akçam, the

brave Turkish historian whose A Shameful Act (Metropolitan Books,

2006) is a monument in this field, dedicated his book to Haji Halil, a

courageous Turk who, at the risk of being hanged, protected eight

members of an Armenian family by hiding them in his home.

 

After World War I ended, when the victorious Allies set out to

dismember the Ottoman Empire, it looked for a few years as if

Armenians, like Jews after World War II, might see justice done by

international powers and institutions. The three chief perpetrators of

the genocide - Enver, Jamal and Talaat - fled Constantinople for

safety abroad. The American King-Crane Commission, and a fact-finding

mission led by General James Harbord, confirmed the extermination. For

a brief period in 1919-20, Ottoman courts, under pressure from the

British, prosecuted some of the perpetrators and sentenced the CUP

leaders to death in absentia. (Armenians seeking revenge assassinated

Talaat and Jamal, who had escaped arrest, within the next few years.)

The prosecutions produced hundreds of pages of evidence that remain

key to showing the genocide issued from official government policy.

 

But then, as Bobelian relates, the Armenian struggle for justice

derailed. President Wilson's push to expand the tiny 900-day Armenian

Republic that emerged from World War I along borders that would be

promised in the 1920 Treaty of Sèvres, collapsed when he suffered a

stroke in 1919 and Mustapha Kemal (later "Atatürk") forcibly began

the establishment of the future nation of Turkey. (Kemal recaptured

lands meant for Armenia as European powers dithered.) In 1921, Turkey

and the Soviet Union divided historic Armenian lands among

themselves. A truncated Armenia survived only as Soviet Armenia. After

Kemal drove the Greek Army out of Turkey in 1922, getting in one more

Turkish massacre of Armenians and Greeks in Smyrna (now Izmir), the

European powers signed the shameful 1923 Treaty of Lausanne,

recognizing the Republic of Turkey as the successor to the Ottoman

Empire without even mentioning Armenia.

 

Bobelian ably covers the sorry story from then to the

present. Repeated efforts by Armenian activists to enlist world powers

in support of Armenian claims fell on deaf ears. After World War II,

U.S. cold-war aims drove an almost 180-degree turn in U.S.-Armenian

policy from Wilson's idealism, dictating a realpolitik alliance with

Turkey against the Soviet Union. Bobelian thoroughly reports how

Turkey has continued to obstruct Congressional resolutions and any

serious U.S. or world action to hold it responsible for its virtual

annihilation of the Armenians.

 

On the eve of Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan's visit to the White

House on December 7, the AP reported: "Breaking a campaign pledge,

Obama has refrained from referring to the [1915] killings as genocide,

a term widely viewed by genocide scholars as an accurate description."

The same week, The New York Times reported that "Ottomania," or

nostalgia for the Ottoman Empire, is a hot new trend in Turkey.

 

Now let's talk again about voting against two new minarets in

Switzerland.

 

The Swiss vote is a signal rather than an endorsement of

intolerance. The Swiss, while facing only a sort of creeping, minor

Islamicization of their society - requests for girls to be excused

from swimming classes, or separate cemeteries of the sort Swiss Jews

already have - are aware of the gargantuan intolerance shown by some

Muslim societies against minority Christians. While they may not

seriously fear such a consequence, many of them plainly want to draw a

line in the sand and say: We will not become a Muslim-dominated

society, and we will stop that process early.

 

Swiss Muslims may protest that it is unfair to burden them with the

worst sins of fellow Muslims. But isn't that sociological fix the

precise reason groups of believers historically split off from their

brethren, forming sects or new religions? So long as Muslims anywhere

keep their place in the House of Islam everywhere, they bear some

responsibility for the actions of their fellow believers. That's

particularly so when they don't powerfully denounce evil acts, or

acknowledge the fear and hostility such acts evoke. That is where

apology comes in.

 

The explosion of Net criticism of the Swiss for their vote recalls the

last major moment in which the cry for Christian apology to Muslims

rose up alongside the usual silence about the need for Muslim

apology. That was Pope Benedict XVI's bizarre magical military tour of

Turkey in 2006, protected by helicopters overhead and Turkish SWAT

teams deployed on every flank in case someone decided to nail him on

his first visit to a Muslim land. The pope, who has his own problems

in regard to personal and institutional behavior in World War II, had,

after all, said unkind things about Islam.

 

There he was in the NATO republic whose foremost motto remains: Those

who forget the past sometimes don't want anyone to remember it, thank

you very much. One might recall, in this regard, the remark famously

attributed to Hitler, speaking to his generals, eight days before

invading Poland in 1939: "Who, today, speaks of the annihilation of

the Armenians?" Benedict played along. He largely kept quiet about

arriving in a land whose predecessor state, the Ottoman Empire - many

of whose leaders became central figures in the Turkish Republic -

committed the largest genocide in history against Christians. To this

day, the Turks have never apologized, never offered a lira of

reparation, never returned stolen property or land. Turkish

newspapers, astonishingly, kept asking whether the pope would offer

yet another, fuller apology for his remarks on Islam. News reports

from elsewhere kept mentioning that Turkey was "99-percent Muslim."

They didn't say why.

By contrast, how intolerant is it to deny a religion a minor aspect of

its ritual behavior, as the Swiss are doing by banning minarets? How

intolerant is it not to apologize? Whether we owe tolerance to the

intolerant is one of the great logical challenges within ethical

theory. Simply declaring that we do, as so many commenters on the

minaret vote urge, fails to convince if one believes tolerance, like

some other ethical duties, arises out of implicit or explicit social

contract, and should be reciprocal.

 

I, for one, find that context, apology, and intolerance matter in the

following way. If you steep yourself in the atrocities of the Armenian

genocide, not to mention the many intolerances exhibited by

majority-Muslim societies toward Christians, Jews, women, gays, and

other non-Muslims, one's conclusion is not an absolutist moral

judgment, but a decision on who owes a greater apology to whom, a

decision on how to allocate one's moral energy.

 

The day that Turkey apologizes and pays reparations for the Armenian

genocide, that Saudi Arabia permits the building of churches and

synagogues, that the Arab world thinks the homeland principles it

applies to the Arabs of Palestine also apply to the Armenians of

Turkey - on that day, I will find time to commiserate with the

generally kind and hard-working Muslims of Switzerland.

 

Carlin Romano, critic at large for The Chronicle Review, teaches

philosophy and media theory at the University of Pennsylvania.

 

 

2009. All rights reserved.

The Chronicle of Higher Education

1255 Twenty-Third St, N.W.

Washington, D.C. 20037

[Arpa]

When did the “minaret/lighthouse/paros /pharos” become a symbol of islam?

Why do “minarets” look like a ph*** well?

http://www.monstersandcritics.com/blogs/theworldinpictures/2009/11/29/swiss-vote-to-ban-minaret-construction/

“minaret” is a an Arabic/Semitic word to mean “lighthouse”. مناره and the Hebrew “menorah”,

http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~lipoff/friends/artistic/Menorah.jpg

from the Arabic “nour/نور/light”

http://www.thelensflare.com/large/lighthouse_1367.jpg

The Armenian word for lighthouse is “paros/փարոս” from the Greek “pharos”. excuse me if it sounds like “phallus”. It takes only a few people whose religious symbol is hidden in their underwear!!

Remember when the furks were examining the underwear of slain kurds to see if they were really muslim kurds or maybe non-muslim Armenians?

Minarets?. May they all sit on it!!! Maybe then we will listen to what comes out of their mouths.

Here is a picture of a building with the Islamic symbol.

http://reformnow.files.wordpress.com/2009/03/outhouse.jpg

Why don’t they go back and add to the building until it becomes as tall as a minaret!!!

Some time ago I read in our local paper that the muslims (mostly pakis) had bought a tract of land , less than a mile from te Armenian Church. I have not surveyed the site, and don’t know its status. It will be interesting to see whose loudspeakers are louder the “allah ou akbar” azan or the church bells playing “Sourb Astuats Sourb/Qristos Tsnav Yev Haytnetsav”. Or in the case of Zurich and Vatican- Which is louder Ave Maria or…

We all remember what happened in Lebanon. The louder the church bells the louder the mosque loudspeakers, so on and son … at infinitum, ad nauseam. Did mohammed invent the loudspeaker?

Edited December 18, 2009 by Arpa

[Boghos]

It is amazing how Europe at large behaves so naively in the face of the ongoing destruction of its values promoted by new and not so new immigrants. The European Left has been hijacked by political correctness and an endless guilty feeling that leads it to defend the most despicable and backward forces centered in Muslim communities. Books have been written about this such as Londonistan (badly put together) but that title is enough. The European Right behaves mostly as if this issue didn't exist. When the Swiss vote against minarets they are bigots. They are not. They are just trying to protect themselves from what is almost an unstoppable movement towards economic, political and social degradation. I am not even going to dwell on demographics...and people, including many gullible and irrational Armenians are anti-American. It makes no sense.

[Eire]

It is amazing how Europe at large behaves so naively in the face of the ongoing destruction of its values promoted by new and not so new immigrants. The European Left has been hijacked by political correctness and an endless guilty feeling that leads it to defend the most despicable and backward forces centered in Muslim communities. Books have been written about this such as Londonistan (badly put together) but that title is enough. The European Right behaves mostly as if this issue didn't exist. When the Swiss vote against minarets they are bigots. They are not. They are just trying to protect themselves from what is almost an unstoppable movement towards economic, political and social degradation. I am not even going to dwell on demographics...and people, including many gullible and irrational Armenians are anti-American. It makes no sense.

 

Actually, the only people willing to even address this issue are the European right-wing populist parties who are slowly gaining ground in almost every European country. Does this show a racist trend amongst native Europeans? Or does it just point to the fact that White Europeans are sick and tired of being force-fed this guilt-trip lie?

 

I find it rather appalling to see Armenians supporting Muslims or even defending their actions at any time (see Lebanese elections and who provided Hezbollah with it's rare Christian votes). If one properly studies history, Islamic expansion just jumps out and can be easily recognized.

 

A perfect example of this European guilt-trip, we can see in the above article that the Crusades were noted as an example of Christian agression towards Muslims, when in fact it all started with the Byzantine attempt to deliver the Christian populations of Armenia from the hands of the Seljuks, resulting in the pivotal battle of manazkert.

 

Its time for white Europeans, Armenians included, to stop accepting this "religious freedom" and "cultural relativism" garbage as fact, and to remember that behind our men lie our women and children, the very future of our existence as a people, a language, a culture and a faith. They are all in danger.

 

Eire

 

*Note: European nationalists who have dared to respond to middle-eastern aggression are quickly branded as Racist bigots. See Cronulla Riots.

Edited April 23, 2010 by Eire