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Turkey's Latest Jihad On Christian Armenians

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  • Turkey's Latest Jihad On Christian Armenians

    TURKEY'S LATEST JIHAD ON CHRISTIAN ARMENIANS

    Algemeiner
    April 4 2014

    Far from being repentant of the Armenian Genocide, Turkey, under the
    leadership of Prime Minister Erdogan, is again, like its Ottoman
    forbear, targeting Armenians; is again causing their death and
    dislocation.

    In the early morning hours of March 21, al-Qaeda linked Islamic jihadis
    crossed into Syrian territory from the Turkish border and launched
    a jihad on the Christian/Armenian town of Kessab. Among other thing,
    "Snipers targeted the civilian population and launched mortar attacks
    on the town and the surrounding villages." Reportedly eighty people
    were killed.

    The jihadis later made avideo touring the devastated town. No
    translation is needed, as the main phrase shouted throughout is Islam's
    triumphant war cry, "Allahu Akbar" (or, according to Sen. John McCain's
    translation, "thank God").

    Eyewitnesses say the jihadis crossed the Turkish border into Syria,
    "openly passing through Turkish military barracks. According to
    Turkish media reports, the attackers carried their injured back to
    Turkey for treatment in the town of Yayladagi."

    About two-thousand Armenians were evacuated to safer areas in
    neighboring Basit and Latakia. Several of these families are currently
    living inside the churches of these towns. Ten to fifteen families
    with members too elderly to flee remained in Kessab, their fate
    currently unknown.

    Syrian troops launched a counteroffensive, but al-Qaeda linked jihadis
    "once again entered the town of Kessab, took the remaining Armenian
    families hostage, desecrated the town's three Armenian churches,
    pillaging local residences and occupying the town and surrounding
    villages."

    Reports further indicate that "the attacks of the al-Qaeda linked
    al-Nusra organization and the Islamic Front was supported with
    artillery fire from Turkish artillery units. A Syrian MIG-23 war
    plane which attended to the operation towards the terror groups was
    shot down by Turkish Air Forces on 23 March."

    Bashar al-Assad naturally denounced before the United Nations
    Turkey's support for terrorists--even as some European leaders, such
    as Denmark's Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt, were praising
    Turkey for its supposedly increased democracy and human rights, and
    supporting the Islamic nation's inclusion into the European Union,
    indifferent to the fact that Erdogan banned Twitter in Turkey after
    tweets exposed his government's corruptions.

    Nor are Armenians and others missing the significance of
    Turkey's role. In a written statement, the Armenian National
    Committee-International condemned Turkey's active role in aiding and
    abetting Christian persecuting jihadi groups:

    For months, we have warned the international community of the imminent
    threat posed by extremist foreign fighters against the Christian
    minority population in Syria. These vicious and unprompted attacks
    against the Armenian-populated town and villages of Kessab are the
    latest examples of this violence, actively encouraged by neighboring
    Turkey. We call upon all states with any influence in the Syrian
    conflict to use all available means to stop these attacks against the
    peaceful civilian population of Kessab, to allow them to return to
    their homes in safety and security. In the last one hundred years,
    this is the third time that the Armenians are being forced to leave
    Kessab and in all three cases, Turkey is the aggressor or on the side
    of the aggressors [emphasis added].

    On March 24, Samvel Farmanyan, a member of the Armenian National
    Assembly, traveled to Syria to meet with Kessab's dislocated Armenians:
    "I should say the impression was shocking," he said. "The situation is
    like the one we have read about in textbooks and literature about the
    Armenian Genocide, in the memories of Genocide survivors.... These
    are tragic events, which cannot but bring forth obvious parallels
    with the events of 100 years ago--the Armenian Genocide."

    Video interviews with the recently dislocated Armenians of Syria
    further document this sentiment. One elderly man says "We've been
    here 97 years since they slaughtered us in Turkey. These al-Qaeda
    'rebel' groups are the grandsons of Abdul Hamid" (the Ottoman sultan
    who committed the first systematic genocide of Armenians).

    Nor were these early massacres limited to Armenians but rather
    targeted Christians in general. As one Syrian-American woman points
    out in writing to me just now: "The Hamidian Massacres (1894-1896)
    led to the mass exodus of Christians from the Levant to the USA. My
    grandfather was one of those who fled persecution. His father was shot,
    by an Ottoman Turk, in front of their ancestral home. Seven children
    were left fatherless. My grandfather, the eldest son, left Syria,
    and traveled as an indentured man, through Mexico, to find freedom
    and safety in the USA. The entire family eventually joined him."

    Such is the continuity and interconnectivity of history. Due to the
    Ottoman Empire's ethnic cleansing campaign and mass dislocation of
    Armenians, some of the latter who survived ended up in places like
    Kessab. Today, due to modern Turkey's support for Islamic jihadis,
    the Armenians of Kessab are once again being killed and displaced.

    Years, decades, and centuries go by; names, narratives and rhetoric
    change; utopian ideals and materialistic rationalizations become
    ubiquitous. Yet the same story, the same enmity--Turkish to Armenian,
    or more distilled yet, Muslim to Christian--lives on, even if in
    different contexts and formats.

    Raymond Ibrahim is author of Crucified Again: Exposing Islam's New
    War on Christians. A Mideast and Islam specialist, he is a Shillman
    Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center, an associate fellow at
    the Middle East Forum, and a Hoover Institution Media Fellow, 2013.

    http://www.algemeiner.com/2014/04/03/turkey%E2%80%99s-latest-jihad-on-christian-armenians/

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