Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day: Christians Continue to be Purged - April 24

There were Christian Lands, which Turkey coveted

Gatestone Institute

Today, April 24, is Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day.  The Genocide Education Project offers a summary of that tragic event which transpired during World War I (1914-1918):

More than one million Armenians perished as the result of execution, starvation, disease, the harsh environment, and physical abuse.  A people who lived in eastern Turkey for nearly 3,000 years [and 2,000 years before the invading Turks arrived] lost its homeland and was profoundly decimated in the first large-scale genocide of the twentieth century. 

At the beginning of 1915 there were some two million Armenians within Turkey; today there are fewer than 60,000….  Despite the vast amount of evidence that points to the historical reality of the Armenian Genocide, eyewitness accounts, official archives, photographic evidence, the reports of diplomats, and the testimony of survivors, denial of the Armenian Genocide by successive regimes in Turkey has gone on from 1915 to the present.

The evidence is, indeed, overwhelming.  As far back as 1920, U.S. Senate Resolution 359 heard eyewitness testimony concerning the “[m]utilation, violation, torture, and death [which] have left their haunting memories in a hundred beautiful Armenian valleys, and the traveler in that region is seldom free from the evidence of this most colossal crime of all the ages.”

In her memoir, Ravished Armenia, Aurora Mardiganian described how she was raped and thrown into a harem (consistent with Islam’s rules of war).  Unlike thousands of other Armenian girls who were discarded after being defiled, she managed to escape. In the city of Malatia, she saw 16 Christian girls crucified: “Each girl had been nailed alive upon her cross,” Aurora wrote, “spikes through her feet and hands, only their hair blown by the wind, covered their bodies.”  (Such scenes were portrayed in the 1919 documentary film Auction of Souls.)

Often overlooked, however, is that this was less a genocide of Armenians and more a genocide of Christians.  Thus the opening sentence of House Resolution 296, which passed on the hundredth anniversary of the genocide (2019), correctly mentions “the campaign of genocide against Armenians, Greeks, Assyrians, Chaldeans, Syriacs, Arameans, Maronites, and other Christians.”

That last word—Christians—is key to understanding this tragic chapter of history: Christianity is what all of those otherwise diverse peoples had in common, and therefore it—not nationality, ethnicity, territory, or grievances—was the ultimate determining factor concerning who the Turks would and would not “purge.”

As one Armenian studies professor asked, “If it [the Armenian Genocide] was a feud between Turks and Armenians, what explains the genocide carried out by Turkey against the Christian Assyrians at the same time?”

According to another professor, Joseph Yacoub, author of Year of the Sword: The Assyrian Christian Genocide, the “policy of ethnic cleansing was stirred up by pan-Islamism and religious fanaticism.  Christians were considered infidels (kafir).  The call to Jihad … was part of the plan” to “combine and sweep over the lands of Christians and to exterminate them.”   Several key documents, including a Syriac one from 1920, confirm that “there was an Ottoman plan to exterminate Turkey’s Christians.”

Read it all here.....