When dealing with the anti-Israeli rage being whipped up in Turkey it would be wise to remember just exactly who the Turks are. For those who don’t know what the punchline of today’s cartoon refers to:
“The Armenian Genocide was carried out by the “Young Turk” government of the Ottoman Empire in 1915-1916 (with subsidiaries to 1922-23). One and a half million Armenians were killed, out of a total of two and a half million Armenians in the Ottoman Empire.
Most Armenians in America are children or grandchildren of the survivors, although there are still many survivors amongst us.
Armenians all over the world commemorate this great tragedy on April 24, because it was on that day in 1915 when 300 Armenian leaders, writers, thinkers and professionals in Constantinople (present day Istanbul) were rounded up, deported and killed. Also on that day in Constantinople, 5,000 of the poorest Armenians were butchered in the streets and in their homes.
The Armenian Genocide was masterminded by the Central Committee of the Young Turk Party (Committee for Union and Progress [Ittihad ve Terakki Cemiyet, in Turkish]) which was dominated by Mehmed Talât [Pasha], Ismail Enver [Pasha], and Ahmed Djemal [Pasha]. They were a racist group whose ideology was articulated by Zia Gökalp, Dr. Mehmed Nazim, and Dr. Behaeddin Shakir.
The Armenian Genocide was directed by a Special Organization (Teshkilati Mahsusa) set up by the Committee of Union and Progress, which created special “butcher battalions,” made up of violent criminals released from prison.
Some righteous Ottoman officials such as Celal, governor of Aleppo; Mazhar, governor of Ankara; and Reshid, governor of Kastamonu, were dismissed for not complying with the extermination campaign. Any common Turks who protected Armenians were killed.”
Thanks to our friend Yaakov Kirschen: Dry Bones
FACT SHEET: ARMENIAN GENOCIDE
KNIGHTS OF VARTAN ARMENIAN RESEARCH CENTER
The University of Michigan-Dearborn
Dearborn, MI 48128
The Armenian Genocide was carried out by the “Young Turk” government of the Ottoman Empire in 1915-1916 (with subsidiaries to 1922-23). One and a half million Armenians were killed, out of a total of two and a half million Armenians in the Ottoman Empire.
Most Armenians in America are children or grandchildren of the survivors, although there are still many survivors amongst us.
Armenians all over the world commemorate this great tragedy on April 24, because it was on that day in 1915 when 300 Armenian leaders, writers, thinkers and professionals in Constantinople (present day Istanbul) were rounded up, deported and killed. Also on that day in Constantinople, 5,000 of the poorest Armenians were butchered in the streets and in their homes.
The Armenian Genocide was masterminded by the Central Committee of the Young Turk Party (Committee for Union and Progress [Ittihad ve Terakki Cemiyet, in Turkish]) which was dominated by Mehmed Talât [Pasha], Ismail Enver [Pasha], and Ahmed Djemal [Pasha]. They were a racist group whose ideology was articulated by Zia Gökalp, Dr. Mehmed Nazim, and Dr. Behaeddin Shakir.
The Armenian Genocide was directed by a Special Organization (Teshkilati Mahsusa) set up by the Committee of Union and Progress, which created special “butcher battalions,” made up of violent criminals released from prison.
Some righteous Ottoman officials such as Celal, governor of Aleppo; Mazhar, governor of Ankara; and Reshid, governor of Kastamonu, were dismissed for not complying with the extermination campaign. Any common Turks who protected Armenians were killed.
The Armenian Genocide occurred in a systematic fashion, which proves that it was directed by the Young Turk government.
First the Armenians in the army were disarmed, placed into labor battalions, and then killed.
Then the Armenian political and intellectual leaders were rounded up on April 24, 1915, and then killed.
Finally, the remaining Armenians were called from their homes, told they would be relocated, and then marched off to concentration camps in the desert between Jerablus and Deir ez-Zor where they would starve and thirst to death in the burning sun.
On the march, often they would be denied food and water, and many were brutalized and killed by their “guards” or by “marauders.” The authorities in Trebizond, on the Black Sea coast, did vary this routine: they loaded Armenians on barges and sank them out at sea.
The Turkish government today denies that there was an Armenian genocide and claims that Armenians were only removed from the eastern “war zone.” The Armenian Genocide, however, occurred all over Anatolia [present-day Turkey], and not just in the so-called “war zone.” Deportations and killings occurred in the west, in and around Ismid (Izmit) and Broussa (Bursa); in the center, in and around Angora (Ankara); in the south-west, in and around Konia (Konya) and Adana (which is near the Mediterranean Sea); in the central portion of Anatolia, in and around Diyarbekir (Diyarbakir), Harpout (Harput), Marash, Sivas (Sepastia), Shabin Kara-Hissar (?ebin Karahisar), and Ourfa (Urfa); and on the Black Sea coast, in and around Trebizond (Trabzon), all of which are not part of a war zone. Only Erzeroum, Bitlis, and Van in the east were in the war zone.
The Armenian Genocide was condemned at the time by representatives of the British, French, Russian, German, and Austrian governments—namely all the major Powers. The first three were foes of the Ottoman Empire, the latter two, allies of the Ottoman Empire. The United States, neutral towards the Ottoman Empire, also condemned the Armenian Genocide and was the chief spokesman in behalf of the Armenians.
The American people, via local Protestant missionaries, did the most to save the wretched remnants of the death marches, the orphaned children.
Despite Turkish denial, there is no doubt about the Armenian Genocide. For example, German ambassador Count von Wolff-Metternich, Turkey’s ally in World War I, wrote his government in 1916 saying: “The Committee [of Union and Progress] demands the annihilation of the last remnants of the Armenians and the [Ottoman] government must bow to its demands.”
German consuls stationed in Turkey, including Vice Consul Max Erwin von Scheubner-Richner of Erzerum [Erzurum] who was Adolf Hitler’s chief political advisor in the 1920s, were eyewitnesses. Hitler said to his generals on the eve of sending his Death’s Heads units into Poland, “Go, kill without mercy . . . who today remembers the annihilation of the Armenians.”
Henry Morgenthau Sr., the neutral American ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, sent a cable to the U.S. State Department in 1915:
“Deportation of and excesses against peaceful Armenians is increasing and from harrowing reports of eye witnesses [sic] it appears that a campaign of race extermination is in progress under a pretext of reprisal against rebellion.”
Morgenthau’s successor as Ambassador to Turkey, Abram Elkus, cabled the U.S. State Department in 1916 that the Young Turks were continuing an “. . . unchecked policy of extermination through starvation, exhaustion, and brutality of treatment hardly surpassed even in Turkish history.”
Only one Turkish government, that of Damad Ferit Pasha, has ever recognized the Armenian genocide. In fact, that Turkish government held war crimes trials and condemned to death the major leaders responsible.
The Turkish court concluded that the leaders of the Young Turk government were guilty of murder. “This fact has been proven and verified.” It maintained that the genocidal scheme was carried out with as much secrecy as possible. That a public facade was maintained of “relocating” the Armenians. That they carried out the killing by a secret network. That the decision to eradicate the Armenians was not a hasty decision, but “the result of extensive and profound deliberations.”
Ismail Enver Pasha, Ahmed Cemal Pasha, Mehmed Talât Bey, and a host of others were convicted by the Turkish court and condemned to death for “the extermination and destruction of the Armenians.”
The Permanent People’s Tribunal recognized the Armenian Genocide on April 16, 1984.
The European Parliament voted to recognize the Armenian Genocide on June 18, 1987.
President Bush issued a news release in 1990 calling on all Americans to join with Armenians on April 24 in commemorating “the more than a million Armenian people who were victims.”
President Clinton issued a news release on April 24, 1994, to commemorate the “tragedy” that befell the Armenians in 1915.
The Russian Duma (the lower house of the bicameral Russian legislature) voted on April 20, 1994, to recognize the Armenian Genocide.
Israel officially condemned the Armenian Genocide as Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister Yossi Beilin proclaimed on the floor of the Knesset (the Israeli legislature), on April 27, 1994, in answer to the claims of the Turkish Ambassador, that “It was not war. It was most certainly massacre and genocide, something the world must remember.”
The Armenian genocide is similar to the Jewish holocaust in many respects. Both people adhere to an ancient religion. Both were religious minorities of their respective states. Both have a history of persecution. Both have new democracies. Both are surrounded by enemies. Both are talented and creative minorities who have been persecuted out of envy and obscurantism.
Issues:
- The Republic of Turkey must cease to be the only major country in the world to deny the Armenian Genocide.
- The Republic of Turkey must show good will by allowing American aid to present-day Armenia to pass through unhindered.
- The Republic of Turkey must cease to train Azerbaijani soldiers in Turkey for the purpose of attacking Armenia.
April 3, 1996
More commentary on Turkey
ISRAEL MUST LEVERAGE
TURKISH REJECTION OF PALMER REPORT
Evelyn Gordon
Jerusalem Magazine, September 5, 2011
For Israelis, the findings of the UN inquiry into last year’s Turkish-sponsored flotilla to Gaza contained little news; the Palmer Report largely echoed the conclusions of Israel’s own Turkel Committee probe: The naval blockade of Gaza was legal; Turkey should have done more to stop the flotilla; Israeli soldiers were brutally attacked by flotilla “activists” and had to use force in self-defense.… But the reactions from both Ankara and Washington have been highly instructive.
First, if anyone still harbored the illusion that the Israeli-Turkish relationship was salvageable, Ankara’s response to the report ought to disabuse them of this notion. What Turkey’s response makes clear is that Ankara never had the slightest interest in repairing its relationship with Jerusalem; what it wanted was to further blacken Israel’s international image, undermine Israel’s vital security interests and humiliate Israel by forcing it to come crawling. And given the UN’s anti-Israel record, Ankara understandably counted on the Palmer Report to do all three.…
But when the report failed to do any of the above, Turkey flatly refused to accept its conclusions. Instead, it announced that it will pursue all the above goals by other means: It will try to secure indictments against Israeli officers and politicians in any court willing to take the case; it will appeal the Gaza blockade to a different UN forum, the International Court of Justice, which–given the precedent of the ICJ’s ruling on the security fence–would likely accept Turkey’s contention regarding its illegality; it will offer future flotillas to Gaza a Turkish naval escort, on the theory that Israel would have to let these flotillas through rather than risk war with Turkey, thereby effectively ending the blockade; and it will rescind these and other hostile measures only if Israel renders them unnecessary by surrendering unconditionally–i.e., by admitting culpability for the deaths, apologizing and ending the blockade.
In so doing, Turkey has made its position too clear for even the rosiest of rose-tinted glasses to disguise: It has irrevocably joined the anti-Israel camp, and seeks only to undermine Israel in any way possible.
But the Obama Administration’s reaction has been no less instructive. Start with the fact that US President Barack Obama worked a miracle I would have sworn was impossible: creating a UN-sponsored inquiry on Israel that produced reasonably fair and balanced conclusions. Add in the fact that Obama has been struggling to convince American Jews of his pro-Israel bona fides, and this would seem to be a golden opportunity to trumpet a pro-Israel achievement. All he would have to do is back the committee he himself established and demand that Turkey accept its conclusions (as Israel has) instead of escalating the conflict via its threatened legal and military moves.
Instead, the administration is still demanding that Israel apologize to Turkey, even though the Palmer Report pointedly avoided demanding any such thing: It said merely that Israel should express regret and offer compensation to the bereaved families–both steps Israel has repeatedly offered to take, but that Turkey rejected as insufficient, insisting nothing less than an apology (i.e., an admission of culpability) would do.
Moreover, Washington has yet to utter a word of criticism of Ankara over its refusal to accept the report’s conclusions and its crude anti-Israel threats. Even Germany’s normally anti-Israel foreign minister–who himself deemed the Gaza blockade “unacceptable” less than a year ago–managed to say that Turkey should take the report’s conclusions “seriously” and avoid “aggravating the situation.” Yet the Obama administration has been silent.…
The inescapable conclusion is that Obama’s goal in establishing the Palmer Commission was in fact identical to Turkey’s: He wanted a report that would incriminate Israel and thereby pressure it to capitulate to Turkey’s demands.… The thunderous silence Washington has maintained…speaks louder than words: This wasn’t the outcome we wanted, and now we don’t quite know what to do to achieve the desired Israeli capitulation beyond continuing our behind-the-scenes pressure for an Israeli apology.…
Israel should be leveraging the Palmer Report–and Turkey’s rejection of it–to prove to the world that Turkey under the AKP is no longer a force for regional stability; it has become a fomenter of conflict, and must be treated as such.… [Unfortunately], in this spat (as in most others), Obama is backing Israel’s enemy.…
ANKARA’S CHOSEN SCAPEGOAT
Caroline B. Glick
Jerusalem Post, September 5, 2011
Monday morning, Turkey took its anti-Israel campaign to a new level. Beyond downgrading diplomatic relations with Israel; beyond suspending military agreements; beyond threatening naval war; beyond threatening to foment an irredentist insurrection of Israeli Arabs; the Turks decided to terrorize Israeli tourists landing in Istanbul airport.
Forty Israeli passengers, mainly businessmen who had landed in Istanbul on a Turkish Airlines flight from Tel Aviv, were separated from the rest of the flight passengers. Their passports were confiscated. They were placed in interrogation rooms and stripped down to their underwear. Their carry-on bags were checked. And then they were lined up against a wall, forbidden to sit down or use the washroom.… The ordeal went on for 90 minutes, until Turkish authorities returned their Israeli passports and permitted them to pick up their suitcases and exit the airport.
What were the Turks trying to accomplish by terrifying the Israeli tourists? They didn’t need to threaten trade ties. Their Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu already took care of that over the weekend. The victimized Israelis said the Turkish airport authorities wouldn’t even answer their questions. Any time we asked them a question, the tourists said, the Turks ignored us. It was as if they weren’t even there.
And that’s the thing of it. The Turks didn’t harass the Israeli tourists in order to send a message to Israel. They have nothing more to say to us. We are non-entities to them. We’re only good for attacking.
No, Israel wasn’t the target audience the Turks were playing to on Monday. Their target audience was the Islamic world generally and the Arab world specifically. Turkey’s influence in these arenas skyrocketed in January 2009 after Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan accused President Shimon Peres and Israel of mass murder as the leaders shared a stage at the Davos Conference.
Similarly Erdogan’s domestic and pan-Islamic support levels increased steeply in the aftermath of the Turkish-supported pro-Hamas flotilla to Gaza in 2010. After nine Turkish government-supported IHH terrorists were killed aboard the Mavi Marmara when they tried to murder IDF naval commandos who had lawfully boarded the ship, the Arabs hailed Erdogan as a hero for bravely attacking Israel.
Given how well scapegoating Israel has served him, Erdogan clearly believes it is a no-risk strategy for raising his star from Cairo to Algiers.
Leftist Israeli commentators refuse to accept what is happening. Writing in Haaretz on Sunday, Shlomo Avineri recommended that Israel compensate the nine IHH members whom IDF commandos killed in self-defense on the Mavi Marmara. Avineri argued that by refusing to do so, Israel was playing into the hands of hardliners. True, “it won’t be easy, but we need to grit our teeth and do the right thing,” he wrote.
Others have argued that Israel may be able to rebuild its strategic relations with Turkey by selling Ankara more drones with which to kill Iraqi and Turkish Kurds. The Turkish military claimed it killed 100 Kurdish fighters in its attacks last month in Iraq and along the Turkish-Iraqi border. Israeli UAVs reportedly played a key role in the bombing. But Turkey needs more. If we sell them more, the argument goes, maybe they will see how useful we are and stop attacking us.
Aside from being morally reprehensible, these arguments fail to recognize the basic reality that Turkey has no interest whatsoever in rebuilding its ties with Israel. The once-important strategic alliance is over and gone, and Israel cannot do anything about it. All Turkey sees us as today is a scapegoat.
It has been argued by commentators on the Right that Turkey’s abandonment of Israel is part and parcel of its abandonment of the US. But this is a mischaracterization of Turkey’s policy toward the US.
Since 2003, Turkey has undertaken a series of actions that have harmed US strategic interests. The first, of course, was Erdogan’s decision on the eve of the Iraq War to deny the US military the right to invade northern Iraq from Turkey. The latest action was arguably Turkey’s joint air exercises with the Chinese Air Force last September. Chinese jets en route to Turkey refueled in Iran. The exercise was a clear signal that NATO member Turkey intends to exploit its alliance with the US to build ties with the US’s chief geostrategic competitor.
Yet at the same time that Turkey has harmed the US, it has also taken steps to assist it. Most recently, last week, Erdogan belatedly agreed to station the high-powered US X-Band radar on its territory as part of a missile defense system to protect NATO allies against the threat of Iranian long-range missiles.
Turkey’s mixed policies toward the US reveal that unlike its position on Israel, Turkey believes that it has an interest in maintaining its alliance with the US. Its hostile behavior is more a function of perceived US weakness than anything else. That is, Turkey is willing to risk angering the US by undercutting it because it does not fear US retribution.…
To its credit, the Netanyahu government…has refused to apologize to Turkey.… Moreover, the government has wisely used Turkey’s behavior as a means of building strong bilateral ties with other victims of Turkish aggression. Over the past two years, Israel has strongly upgraded is strategic ties with Greece, Cyprus, Bulgaria and Romania. Israel should add to these accomplishments by strengthening its ties to Armenia and to the Kurds of Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran.…
We need to recognize that what we are experiencing now is the beginning, not the end, of Turkey’s slide into the enemy camp. Erdogan is openly taking steps to transform Turkey into an Islamic state along the lines of Iran. And the further he goes down his chosen path, the more harshly and aggressively he will lash out at Israel.
Given that scapegoating Israel is not a momentary lapse of reason on Turkey’s part but a central aspect of a long-term regional strategy, it is clear that Israel needs to meet Turkish aggression with more than momentary courage in the face of intimidation and threats. Israel needs to build on its already successful policy of forming a ring of alliances around Turkey and develop a long-term military and diplomatic strategy for containing and weakening it.
