With an empire, though fragmented, expanding from Iberia to India, Islam under the Arabs seems to have reached its pinnacle in the tenth century, and with the fall of Baghdad to the Tatars in 1258, it seemed Islam was in its death-throes. The Turks would soon reverse the decline and forge a new empire. Since their Islamization in the tenth or eleventh century, the Turks became an almost unlimited source of jihad soldiers, and brought a zeal and fanaticism that far surpassed the cruelty of the Arabs. The concept of jihad as part of their new religion enflamed the warlike tendencies of their tribes, roaming through the border regions of Greece and Armenia. Ibn Khaldun, "surely the greatest of all Arab historians", praised the rise of the Turks, and the institution of slavery from which they came, as the embodiment of Allah's mercy:

When the [Abbasid] state was drowned in decadence and luxury... and overthrown by the heathen Tatars... because the people of the faith had become deficient in energy and reluctant to rally in defense... then it was God's benevolence that He rescued the faith by reviving its dying breath and restoring the unity of the Muslims in the Egyptian realms... He did this by sending to the Muslims, from among this Turkish nation and its great and numerous tribes, rulers to defend them and utterly loyal helpers, who were brought... to the House of Islam under the rule of slavery, which hides in itself a divine blessing. By means of slavery they learn glory and blessing and are exposed to divine providence; cured by slavery, they enter the Muslim religion with the firm resolve of true believers and yet with nomadic virtues unsullied by debased nature, unadulterated by the filth of pleasure, undefiled by ways of civilied living, and with their ardor unbroken by the profusion of luxury ¹.

The Turkish period, particularly during the time between Napoleon's conquest of Egypt in the early nineteenth century and the Empire dissolution after World War I, is characterized more by the cruel excesses of their fanaticism than actual conquests. True, the Turks did continue to ravage India and finally capture "Caesar's city" in 1453, over 800 years after the death of the prophet who commanded them to conquer it, and there were other conquests as well, but many of these conquests, such as Palestine, Egypt, and India, had their foundations laid in the previous centuries by their Arab predecessors.

Initially the Turks were incited by the Byzantine emperors to conduct raids against the Persian Sassanids. Upon their conversion to Islam, they took to harassing what was still unconquered of the old empires, ravaging Armenia, Palestine, Mesopotamia, and Anatolia "by cruel devestation and pillage" ² and annexing it to the caliphate. Most of these lands would become Turkish emirates in the future. Inspired by their success and hungry for the spoils, Arab-Muslim warriors, lead by qadis learned in the doctrine of jihad, flocked to the ribats (fortresses set up on the borders of the Dar al-Harb), pillaging and harassing the non-Muslims peoples on the frontiers.

Hindu Slaughter, Part Two

Various Turko-Islamic conquerers wreaked great havok upon the Hindu and Buddhist cultures of India. Mahmud of Ghazni swore to make war against the idolators every year of his life - he led about 17 invasions, and faithfully followed the Qur'anic directive to kill the idolators wherever they could be found. The slaughter he wrought at the temple of Somnath alone, at which Muslim chroniclers claim a toll of 50,000 Hindus, appoints him a place of infamy in Indian history. After his conquests of Varanasi, Ujjain, Maheshwar, Jwalamukhi, and Dwarka, not one temple was left standing. In Kangra, besides over 10,000 other temples destroyed by Mahmud:

In the middle of the city there was a temple larger and finer than the rest, which can neither be described nor painted. The Sultan [Mahmud] was of the opinion that 200 years would have been required to build it. The idols included "five of red gold, each five yards high," with eyes formed of priceless jewels. The Sultan gave orders that all the temples should be burnt with naphtha and fire, and leveled with the ground ³.

Tarikh-i-Yamini of Utbi, Mahmud’s court historian, recorded Mahmud's conquest of Thanesar in 1011:

The blood of the infidels flowed so copiously [at Thanesar] that the stream was discoloured, notwithstanding its purity, and the people were unable to drink it. Had not night come on and concealed the traces of their flight, many more of the enemy would have been slain. The victory was gained by God's grace, who has established Islam forever as the best of religions, notwithstanding that idolators revolt against it. The Sultan returned with plunder which is impossible to recount. Praise be to God, the protector of the world for the honor he bestows upon Islam and Muslims! ⁴

And Nandana in 1013:

The Sultan returned in the rear of immense booty, and slaves were so plentiful that they became very cheap and men of respectability in their native land were degraded by becoming slaves of common shopkeepers. But this is the goodness of Allah, who bestows honour on his own religion and degrades infidelity.

Mahaban 1018:

The infidels deserted the fort and tried to cross the foaming river, but many of them were slain, taken or drowned. Nearly fifty thousand men were killed. The Sultan gave orders that all the temples should be burnt with naptha and fire, and levelled with the ground ⁵.

Kanuaj:

In Kanauj there were nearly ten thousand temples ... Many of the inhabitants of the place fled and were scattered abroad like so many wretched widows and orphans, from the fear which oppressed them, in consequence of witnessing the fate of their deaf and dumb idols. Many of them thus affected their escape, and those who did not fly were put to death. The Sultan took all seven forts in a day, and gave his soldiers leave to plunder and take prisoners.

Shrawa:

The Sultan summoned the most religiously disposed of his followers, and ordered them to attack the enemy immediately. Many infidels were consequently slain or taken prisoners in this sudden attack, and the Muslims paid no regard to the booty till they had satiated themselves with the slaughter of the infidels and worshippers of sun and fire. The friends of God searched the bodies of the slain for three whole days in order to obtain booty ... The booty amounted in gold and silver, rubies and pearls, nearly to three hundred thousand dirhams, and the number of prisoners may be conceived from the fact that each was sold from two to ten dirhams. These were afterwards taken to Ghazna, and merchants came from distant cities to purchase them, so that the countries Mawaraun-Nahr, Iraq and Khurasan were filled with them, and the fair and the dark, the rich and the poor, were commingled in one common slavery ⁶.

Muslim conquerers, from Qasim to Mahmud, Muhammad Ghuri, Firuz Shah, Timur, Akbar the Great, Aurangzeb and others, utterly devestated India's Hindu and Buddhist cultural heritage. The great wealth of India has led many apologists to claim that the Hindu conquests were not religious in nature, but, besides the fact that the acquisition of war spoils is a core tenet of the Islamic faith, the Islamic conquests of India were often well documented by their undertakers. Timur, who had a particular disdain for his Hindu enemies and wrought unparalleled devestation upon them, spoke of his motivations for invading India in his memoirs ⁷:

About this time there arose in my heart the desire to lead an expedition against the infidels, and to become a ghazi; for it had reached my ears that the slayer of infidels is a ghazi, and if he is slain he becomes a martyr. It was on this account that I formed my resolution, but I was undetermined in my mind whether I should direct my expedition against the infidels of China or against the infidels and polytheists of India. In this matter I sought an omen from the Koran, and the verse I opened upon [Q66.9] was this, "O Prophet, make war upon infidels and unbelievers, and treat them with severity." My great officers told me that the inhabitants of Hindustan were infidels and unbelievers. In obedience to the order of Almighty Allah I ordered an expedition against them...

The Prince Muhammad Sultan then commented that, not only is India "full of gold and jewels, and in it there are seventeen mines of gold and silver, diamond and ruby and emerald and tin and steel and copper and quicksilver, etc.", but its inhabitants are "chiefly polytheists and infidels and idolators and worshippers of the sun," and as such, "by the order of Allah and his prophet, it is right for us to conquer them." After some of the nobles and amirs expressed dismay that, by conquering and establishing a foothold in India, their culture will be dilluted and polluted by the Hindus, Timur said,

My object in the invasion of Hindustan is to lead an expedition against the infidels that, according to Muhammad (upon whom and his family be the blessing and peace of Allah), we may convert to the true faith the people of that country, purify the land itself from the filth of infidelity and polytheism; and that we may overthrow their temples and idols and become ghazis and mujahids before Allah.

Timur informed the Hindus that he would "exterminate them to a man" unless they consented to "submit unconditionally and become Muslims and repeat the creed." Many did not submit, and, at Ajodhan,

all the people of the fort were put to the sword, and in the course of one hour the heads of ten thousand infidels were cut off. The sword of Islam was washed in the blood of the infidels and [the treasures of the land] became the spoil of my soldiers. They set fire to houses and reduced them to ashes, and they razed the buildings and the fort to the ground.

Not content with the slaughter, Timur led his armies into the wild to dispatch those who had fled, where he slayed the "demon-like Jats [Hindus] ... made their wives and children captives, and plundered their cattle and property." Prisoners of war, over 100,000 held at Jahun-numa alone, were "dispatched to hell with the proselyting sword." At Delhi, his troops "engaged in slaying, plundering, and destroying ... the spoil was so great that each man secured from fifty to a hundred prisoners - men, women and children."

According to Srivastava, Timur

left [India] prostrate and bleeding ... so thoroughly ravaged, plundered and even burnt that it took [the northwestern provinces] many years, indeed, to recover their prosperity. [Hundreds of thousands] of men, and in some cases, many women and children, too, were butchered in cold blood ⁸.

Thus, archeological evidence shows that thousands of mosques in the former Hindu empire are built on the foundations of, and, in many cases, from the debris of, demolished Hindu temples. Idols were smashed or mutilated and trampled on before Muslim places of worship, or, if they contained precious metals, were melted down and re-used. Some were turned into toilet seats or handed over to butchers to be used as weights. Sacred Hindu texts were defiled or burnt, and cows were slaughtered upon the temple sites so that Hindus could never use them again.

The magnitude of Muslim attrocities in India is so great that I grossly understimate their scope simply by attempting to describe them, particularly in one chapter of one book. By the sword of Islam, an entire civilization was destroyed and the number of dead easily number in the millions over several decades. The value of the booty - "jewels and unbored pearls and rubies, shining like sparks or like wine congealed with ice, and emeralds like fresh sprigs of myrtle, and diamonds in size and weight like pomegranates" ⁹ - can never be measured. "As a result of [this] fanaticism," says Durant, "thousands of temples which had represented the art of India through a millennium were laid in ruins. We can never know, from looking at India today, what grandeur and beauty she once possessed." India before Islam was one of the most advanced civilizations of all time.

In 1290 Osman I, from whom the name Osmanli ("Ottoman") originates, declared independence in his small municipality at the edge of the Byzantine Empire. The metropolitan see of Chalcedon disappeared in the fourteenth century, followed by the sees of Laodicea, Kotyaeon, and Synada in the fifteenth. By that time, Osman's empire stretched from the Balkans to Mesopotamia. Its expansion was interrupted briefly by the Tatar invasion and Sultan Bayezit's defeat at the Battle of Ankara in 1402, but under Mehmet II the Turks conquered a ruined and decadent Constantinople in 1453.

The Fall of Constantinople

Mehmet laid siege to the city for several weeks, but, outnumbered and betrayed by the Western church, who had promised them aid, the defenders could not hold. The head of Constantine, the last emperor of Byzantium, which in truth had already been reduced to merely the great walled city of Constantinople itself, was brought to the Sultan, who had it stuffed and later paraded it through the courts of the Islamic world.¹⁰ In the meantime, the Sultan gave Constantinople to pillage for three days; his men would only need one. Men, women and children were killed indisctiminately and irrespective of age, their corpses decapitated. The blood of the vanquished ran in rivers down the streets before the Turks realized captives would bring greater profit ^{11(See also Qur'an 8.67 and 47.4)}.

Nearly all the Christian places of worship were ravaged: St George by the Charisian Gate, St John in Petra, and the church of the monastery of the Holy Savior in Chora. In Chora they left the mosaics undamaged, but they destroyed the Hodigitria, supposed to be the icon of the Mother of God and the holiest picture in all Byzantium, painted, so it was said, by St Luke himself ¹². In the Sacred Palace, its halls deserted and half-ruined, the churches were completely pillaged. At the Church of the Holy Wisdom, the greatest church in all Byzantium, sailors from the two Turkish fleets as well as the first waves of soldiers from the land-walls converged as desperate worshippers thronged inside praying for deliverance:

The Holy Liturgy was ended, and the service of matins was being sung. At the sound of the tumult outside the huge bronze gates of the building were closed. Inside the congregation prayed for the miracle that alone could save them. They prayed in vain. It was not long before the walls were battered down. The worshippers were trapped. A few of the ancient and infirm were killed on the spot; but most of them were tied or chained together. Veils and scarfs were torn off of women to serve as ropes. Many of the lovelier maidens and youths and many of the richer-clad nobles were almost torn to death as their captors quarreled over them. Soon a long procession of ill-assorted little groups of men and women bound tightly together was being dragged to the soldiers' bivouacs, there to be fought over once again. The priests went on chanting at the alter until they too were taken ¹³.

Private houses were systematically looted; the raiders left a flag by the entrence to show that a home had been thoroughly plundered. Their inhabitants were taken away along with their valuables; anyone who collapsed from fatigue was killed, along with a number of infants who were not of any worth. There were sections left untouched, due mostly to the geography of the city, with quarters separated by wide open spaces, as well as the fact that many local officials, having heard the walls had been breached, prudently surrendered without incident, offering up the keys to their townships to the Sultan, who accepted their submission and provided police to protect their homes and places of worship.

This orgy of bloodlust culminated in a feast at which the heads of the Byzantine commander and his family were displayed as centerpieces at Mehmet's table. After a month the Sultan and his court left Constantinople for the Ottoman capitol Andrinople. As he rode through the streets he was moved to tears: "What a city we have given over to plunder and destruction." The city was blackened as though by fire; churches were defiled and stripped bare, and houses were uninhabitable ¹⁴.

Thus this race of barbarians became the successors to the Roman Empire, and Asia Minor in its entirety belonged to them. By 1460 the Ottomans had conquered Serbia and Peloponnesus; Bosnia and Trbizond in 1463, followed by Albania in 1468. With the conquest of Herzegovina in 1483, the Ottomans ruled the entire Balkan peninsula. Those who refused the Islamic faith were slaughtered or enslaved; churches were burned or converted into mosques. This conquest caused incalculable material devestation, countless massacres, the enslavement or deportation of a large percentage of the population ... "in a word, a general and protracted decline of productivity, as was the case with Asia Minor after it was occupied by the same invaders." ¹⁵.

The Blood Levy

In order to prevent the mass migration Christians from newly acquired territory, Mehmet declared himself protector of the Greek church and bestowing full autonomy upon Greek and Armenian patriarchs to rule over the internal affairs of their people. This was of benefit to the Ottomans, as mentioned, because the rayah (literally, "sheep") could manage affairs of craft, trade, and agriculture that Muslims, who knew little else except war and pillage, were traditionally incapable of. This arrangement was adequate so long as there were fresh territories to be conquered, or while there existed a certain level of enlightenment among the Muslim authorities. Unfortunately for the rayah, the empire was short on both by the middle of the sixteenth century.

In addition to the jizyah and the application of the dhimma, for at least three hundred years Christians suffered another humiliation not often mentioned: the periodic abduction of one-fifth of all Christian children in the conquered lands, a system known as devshirme. On a fixed date, all the fathers were ordered to appear with their children in a public square. In the presence of a qadi, recruiting agents 'more skilled in judging boys than trained horse-dealers are in judging colts', chose the hardiest and best looking boys, aged 14-20. They were then converted to Islam and trained to be janissaries (from the Turkish yeniçeri, meaning "new troops"). Parents who resisted this tribute were hung on the spot.

This system, introduced by Sultan Orkhan (1326-1359), was an indication of the perpetual state of war between the rayah and the Ottomans, and was recognized as such as both sides; children lost to devshirme were regarded by the rayah as casualties of war. This state of war justified what would have otherwise been a blatant infringement on the dhimma; in most cases the blood levy was only enforced upon peoples who did not surrender without resistance. The periodic abductions became annual, and recruiting agents often took more than the prescribed number of children, selling the "surplus" back to their parents.

Taking on average at least 1,000 children a year, and as many as 12,000 a year, the blood levy was by far the most hated of the discriminatory taxes imposed on non-Muslims. In order to save their children from abduction, families were forced to flee to areas which enjoyed exemption from the devshirme - typically cities that surrendered without resistance. Others forced their children into marriages at very young ages. Families often purchased children from poor Muslim families in order to be given up in place of their own. And, most grievously, many parents deliberately mutilated their healthy children to render them unattractive to the Ottoman recruiting agents.

A Century of Genocide

Armenians have lived in the southern Caucasus, between the Black Sea and the Caspian, since ancient times. In 301 C.E., they were the first nation to adopt Christianity as the state religion. Mount Ararat was the site of God's covenant with Noah, and in the European imagination Armenia was continuously associated with the scenery of the Bible. The extermination of this great and ancient culture is one of the great crimes of human history.

Aside from the envenomed hatred common among Islamic rulers towards their dhimmie subjects, the Armenian question arises from the missionary work of Western Christians in Ottoman Armenia coupled with Russian concern for their Christian brethren living under Ottoman rule, as well as the breakdown of competent and intelligent leadership within the Ottoman government - Suleiman the Magnificent (1520-1566 C.E.) was the last able administrator and represents the pinnacle of Ottoman greatness. As the empire declined, the Armenians, who were generally more affluent and wealthy, were scapegoated by an ever-increasingly unemployed and disgruntled army of Muslims. With no fresh territory or spoils to be obtained, and no other trade except pillage and plunder, they turned their aggressions inward.

At first there to convert Muslims to Christianity, the Protestant missionaries were forced to change their focus to the Armenians, Greeks, and Assyrians, who were Orthodox. This was due to the fact that Turkish authorities punished and sometimes executed Muslims who showed even an interest in Christianity. As the Protestants shifted to converting Christians to their denomination, the Ottomans showed little care for these foreign gâvur (infidel dogs), and in fact were amused by them, as the intermix of Protestant and Orthodox created great friction between them.

The effect on Armenian life was dramatic regardless. The missionaries eroded the Armenian patriarchal customs with the church and family, and made it possible for women to attend church in public rather than listen to services in adjacent rooms. By the end of the nineteenth century, most of the women teaching in Armenian schools were trained in American missionary schools. Along with these American ideas, the missionaries injected notions of freedom and expression of justice in the face of tyranny into the Armenian conscious, kindling resistance to Ottoman authority which subjected the Armenians and all non-Muslims to oppressive social and political restrictions that was at the heart of the Armenian question for years to come. As this liberal American vision began to vitalize Armenian culture, the Turks grew suspicious and finally hostile.

The persecution of Armenian Christians under Ottoman rule was at least partially responsible for no less than four Russo-Turkish wars. Russian influence enflamed Armenian desires for equality, which in turn brought reprisals against them, which in turn aroused Russians to act on their behalf; a cycle that lasted much of the nineteenth century. This also created a dilemna in Europe; while governments were concerned with Russian expansion - France and Sardinia, both Roman-Catholic countries, as well as Britain, sided with the Turks in the Crimean War (1953-56) - they were unable to ignore the escalating outrage Ottoman attrocities towards Christians were causing among their general populations. Despite this conflict Britain and France, in particular, viewed the suffering of Ottoman Christians, in contrast to Russian expansion into the Ottoman Empire, as the lesser of two evils, and sided with the Turks time and time again. Time and again, terms were inserted into peace treaties ending war between Russia and the Empire promising better conditions for Ottoman Christians, but these promises proved hollow.

Ottoman Christians and Jews had almost no legal rights before the Tanzimat reforms. While they were actually permitted their own legal system and prisons, these courts had little power in cases involving Muslims, as the Muslim had the right to opt out of the gâvur system and have his case heard in the sheriat mehkeme -Islamic religious court. In Muslim courts, as per Shari'a law, the rayah (dhimmie) had no recourse. Their testimony was either disallowed outright or accorded significantly less weight than a Muslim's; to swear on the Qur'an was to assure the Muslim absolution for whatever he was accused of. This harshly discriminatory legal system left non-Muslims in perpetual danger of an assortment of brutal crimes and injustices. Because they were were not allowed to own weapons, non-Muslims were completely at the mercy of Muslim Turks and Kurds.

The devshirme was still in effect, and the rayahs were subject to a tax farming system, with the right to collect taxes sold to the highest (Muslim) bidder, who in turn delegated collection duties to others; corruption and extortion were rampant. Rayahs were of course required to pay the jizyah, as well as a "hospitality tax" that entitled "government officials, and all who pass as such," to free lodging and food for three days a year in a rayah's home.

Similar to the hospitality tax, Armenians were also subject to the kishlak - the winter-quartering mandate - which obliged them to allow Turks and Kurds, along with their families and cattle, into their homes and properties during the Winter months. As mentioned earlier, the unarmed Armenians, who had no rights in Islamic courts, were at the mercy of heavily armed Muslims who committed violence against them - murder, theft, rape - particularly during these winter months, which in reality often lasted up to half a year. This problem only compounded as the empire declined and unmanagable elements were driven into the Armenian areas, encouraged to wreak havoc.

The Russian campaign for freedom for the subject peoples of Eastern Europe brought the Turks and Russians to war again in 1877, and compelled several Ottoman territories to seek independence. After Greece achieved independence in 1832, purchased by great cost in blood (see below), Balkan nations, such as Serbia, Montenegro, Bosnia, Herzegovina, and Bulgaria, felt they too had the right to freedom. Russia made great gains during this Russo-Turkish War, occupying much of the Ottoman-Armenian territories, prompting the Turks to sign a preliminary armistice - the Treaty of San Stefano - to keep the Russians from besieging Constantinople. These terms made Bulgaria autonomous, Montenegro, Romania, and Serbia independent, with Bosnia and Herzegovina to have autonomous administrations.

However, at the behest of the Ottomans, Disraeli's foreign secretary, Lord Salisbury, demanded Russo-Turkish affairs be settled by European powers. The Treaty of Berlin negated the Treaty of San Stefano and returned thirty thousand square miles of territory and two and a half million Europeans to Ottoman rule and, in Article 61, put the Sultan, Abdul Hamid II, who had harshly persecuted the Armenians in the past, essentially in charge of protecting his non-Muslim subjects from himself. He later carried out his duties to this end by relocating Kurdish thugs en-masse into Armenian lands, with predictable consequences.

Meanwhile, as the Treaty of Berlin was being negotiated, an Armenian delegation was forced to wait outside the conference hall, ignored. When the delegation learned of Article 61, they were enraged and formally protested that they had "been decieved" and that "their rights [had] not been recognized." Archbishop Mugerditch Khirmian, who headed the delegation, returned home and, in a sermon in the Armenian Cathedral in Constantinople, likened the peace process to a "big cauldron of liberty stew" for which the Armenians were given a "paper ladle":

Ah, Dear Armenian people, could I have dipped my paper ladle in the cauldron it would sog and remain there! Where guns talk and sabers shine, what significance do appeals and petitions have? ¹⁶

Continuum of Destruction

Despite Western Europe's kowtowing to the demands of the Sultan to keep Russia under control, the status of non-Muslims under Ottoman rule was becoming an international issue. Angry that Russia and European powers were assigned to oversee reforms the Sultan never intended to implement, he complained of the "everlasting persecutions and hostilities of the Christian world." ¹⁷ Following the end of the Russo-Turk War, conditions for these rayahs - not only Armenians but other non-Muslims - grew worse. The Sultan sent masses of Muslim refugees, who had fled the Balkans and the Caucasus during the Russo-Turk wars, into Anatolia. These refugees openly murdered and raped Armenians and pillaged their properties and possessions. In addition, the Sultan formed the Hamidiye (literally, "belonging to Hamid"), an ever enlarging force of Kurdish regiments fiercely loyal to the Sultan who had, among their other tasks, the job of keeping the Armenians subdued. British consul Charles Hampsun reported on the conditions Armenians endured:

The measure of arming the Kurds is regarded with great anxiety here. This feeling is much increased by the conduct of the Kurds themselves, many of whom openly state that they have been appointed to suppress the Armenians, and that they have recieved assurances that they will not be called to answer before the tribunals for any acts of oppression committed against Christians.

The Armenians in this town are very uneasy, and very many of those who are in a position to be able to so have expressed their intention of leaving Erzerum as soon as the roads are open. ¹⁸

During the Greek revolution of 1821 the inhabitants of Chios participated in a revolt against the Turkish garrison stationed there. The sultan reacted by sending his fleet to the island, and 7,000 Turkish troops slaughtered 25,000 Greeks and took almost twice that number into slavery. The next year, 8,750 were massacred at Missolonghi. Then, in 1826, the Janissaries were wiped out at Constantinople - 26,000 of them. In 1850, 10,000 Assyrians murdered. The massacres gained momentum and became contageous:

• 1876, Bulgaria, 14,700 Bulgarians.
• 1877, Bayazid, 1,400 Armenians.
• 1879, Alashguerd, 1,250 Armenians.
• 1881, Alexandria, 2,000 Christians.
• 1892, Mosul, 3,500 Yezedies. ¹⁹

The Bulgarian attrocities prompted outrage in Europe, particularly from former British PM William Gladstone, who, with the aid of private journalists, touched on Britain's Christian conscience despite Lord Beaconsfield and his Tories' suppression and minimalization of these crimes - the reports of these which Disraeli laughed off as "coffee-house babble" and his ambassador in Constantinople dismissed as not the concern of British interests, even if "ten or twenty thousand perished." ²⁰ Despite Gladstone's declaration that "never again shall the hand of violence be raised by you [the Turks], never again shall the flood gates of lust be opened to you," ²¹ the Turkish pogrom against non-Muslims under their rule was only warming up.

Ironically, it was not until after the Tanzimat reforms, beginning in 1836 and leading up to the declaration of the Turkish Constitution in 1876, all of which was assumed to mean equal rights for all, irrespective of religion, that the concept of "Turkey for the Turks" arose. The problem with these reforms was, hampered by the intellectual bounds of their own religion and in competition with Christians, particularly with the cultural assistance of Western missionaries, Muslim Turks would have found themselves in a subordinate position socially and economically with their non-Muslim subjects. Unfortunately for the Armenians the Armenian question fell onto a mentally unstable man, Hamid II, who ruled during a period in which the empire fell into decline, causing a crisis of self-esteem for both Hamid and the Turks in general. Hamid was bitterly hostile to reform, "hat[ing] the very word 'constitution' and everyone who approved of it." ²²

In 1890 Sultan Abdul Hamid II concieved a plan to settle the Armenian question: "to get rid of the Armenians." ²³ "I will give them a box on the ear," he said one night over tea, "which will make them smart and relinquish their revolutinary ambitions." ²⁴ Hamid was obsessed with the Armenians. He banned the word 'Armenia' from Turkish newspapers; press censorship in Constantinople was so severe that almost no one would read a Turkish newspaper - it could contain nothing worth reading ²⁵. He closed Armenian schools, and banned all books having anything to do with Armenia, as well as dictionaries that contained definitions on "liberty" and "revolution". His paranoia was increased as Armenians began protesting their deteriorating rights, placing placards on public walls appealing to the sensibilities of Muslims around the world and holding demonstrations that inevitably led to violent clashes. The rising ride of the Armenian dissent infuriated Hamid.

Adding to the hordes of Kurds relocated to Armenian lands to terrorize non-Muslims, Hamid sent disgruntled bands of Circassians - refugees from previous Russo-Turk wars - with permission to wreak havoc, and dispatched his agents to spread rumors amongst Muslim tribesmen that Armenians were preparing to attack them. Before long, notables of various Christian communities started turning up dead all over the empire, often murdered at their doorsteps as they returned home from work. The pogram later extended to less prominant Christians, peasants who's wives were told their husbands had "probably run away and left" them or "gone to America" when they reported them missing. Soon, however, the truth of these disappearances became apparent as sheppards began finding corpses in ravines and gullies in the mountains and forests. Others were tortured for no other reason but to show them that Turkey had been freed for the Turks, and were set free to spread the good news. Anyone suspected of dissent - which meant, in a society thoroughly infiltrated by the Sultan's intelligence networks, a significant portion of the population - was arrested, tortured, executed or deported.

As was the case in Andalusia, many of these massacres were prompted by local Islamic revolts against instances where the dhimmi were given rights or priveleges elevated above the Pact of Umar (the first documented dhimma). The massacre at Sassun in 1894 was initiated by a taxation dispute, with the Turks demanding double-payment of government tax arrears, which had for some years prior been deferred, as well as revolt agains the winter quartering of Kurds in their homes, which often led to abduction and rape of Armenian women. Turkish troops were brought into the area, and were soon hunting the defenseless Armenians "like wild beasts", accepting no surrender, bayoneting the men, raping the women, bludgeoning the children against the rocks, and razing the villages from which they fled to the ground ²⁶. One missionary witnessed the "festive occasion":

The slaugter of the Armenians was a joy to the Turks. A massacre was heralded by the blowing of trumpets and concluded by a procession. Accompanied by the prayers of the mullahs and muezzins, who from the minarets implored the blessings of Allah, the slaughter was accomplished in admirable order according to a well-arranged plan. The crowd, supplied with arms by the authorities, joined mostly amicably with the soldiers and the Kurdish 'Hamidieh' on these festive occasions. The Turkish women stimulated their heroes by raising a guttural shriek of their war cry, the 'Zilghit', and deafening the hopeless despair of their victims by singing their nuptual songs. A kind of wild, cannibal humour seized the crowd ... the savage crew did not even spare the children ²⁷.

In Semal, the Armenians gave themselves up after recieving guarantees for their protection. Upon surrender the priest was seized, his eyes were torn out, and he was stabbed to death with bayonets. They then separated the men from the women; the women were raped and the men were bayoneted the following day.

This event, "the first instance of organized mass murder of Armenians in modern Ottoman history that was carried out in peace-time and had no connection with any foreign war" ²⁸, prompted marches on Istanbul, where, after the cry of "liberty or death" had been taken up, police attacked the crowd. Twenty people were beaten to death and hundreds were wounded. There in the broad daylight on the streets of the capitol began ten days of rampage and terror, with massacres going on day and night. During the Fall of 1895 all of Ottoman Armenia was in flames.

From here, a series of organized massacres were undertaken, each time initiated by the sound of the bugle call, an official campaign by force of arms. There was a method to this madness:

Their tactics were based on the Sultan's principle of kindling religious fanaticism among the Muslim population ... It became their normal routine first to assemble the Moslem population in the largest mosque in a town, then to declare, in the name of the Sultan, that the Armenians were in general revolt with the aim of striking at Islam. Their Sultan enjoined them as good Moslems to defend their faith against infidel rebels ... Each operation, between the bugle calls, followed a similar pattern. First into a town there came the Turkish troops, for the purpose of massacres; then came the Kurdish irregulars and tribesmen for the purpose of plunder. Finally came the holocaust, by fire and destruction, which spread with the pursuit of fugitives and mopping-up operations, throughout the lands and villages of the surrounding province. This murderous winter thus saw the decimation of much of the Armenian population and the devastation of their property in some twenty districts of eastern Turkey ... The total number of victims was somewhere between fifty and a hundred thousand, allowing for those who died subsequently of wounds, disease, exposure, and starvation. ²⁹

In Urfa, October 1895, the Armenian quarter was laid seige to for two months, culminating in an invasion by Turkish soldiers and civilians alike in December of that year. Their homes looted and pillaged, those still alive sought shelter in the cathedral, but found no refuge. The Turks smashed down the iron door and, while mocking them to invoke Christ "to prove himself a greater propet than Mohammed", began killing everyone within the church before burning it to the ground with many still alive inside. British Consul G.H. Fitzmaurice estimated between 8,000 and 10,000 killed ³⁰. In Van, 1896, some 8,000 Armenians were killed following an uprising "begun by a mob of Turks, gipsies and zaptiehs." After intense negotiations, a thousand of "the creme of the Armenian youth of Van" agreed to leave Turkey, but were massacred en route ³¹. In addition to these mass murders, 9,570 Armenians were murdered in Constantinople, 14,667 Macedonians in Macedonia in 1903-04, another massacre of 5,640 in Sassun in 1904, and 30,000 Armenians were killed in Adana in 1909 ³², "one of the most gruesome and savage bloodbaths ever recorded in human history." ³³

These massacres were almost without exception carried out under the false pretense of crushing revolutionaries - in Adana, local Muslims fired on Turkish troops to provoke them into killing Armenians, who had recently been disarmed. Yet, with the exception of the Ottoman bank incident in August 1896 - an utterly feeble and pathetic attempt by Armenian reformists known as the Dashnaks to bring attention to the Armenian cause which sparked two days of pillage and slaughter sanctioned by Hamid - "The Armenian population throughout the entire country are exhibiting a marvelous degree of patience under treatment which would rouse any other people to open rebellion." ³⁴

Far more likely and documented as motivation was religious zeal and fanaticism. British consul Henry Barnham tetified to the behavior of the jihadists witnessed in Aleppo province:

The butchers and tanners, with sleeves tucked up to the shoulders, armed with clubs and cleavers, cut down the Christians, with cries of "Allahu Akbar!" broke down the doors of the houses with pickaxes and levers, or scaled the walls with ladders. Then when mid-day came they knelt down and said their prayers, and then jumped up and resumed the dreadful work, carrying it on far into the night. ³⁵

Muslim clerics, imams and softas (students at official religious schools) played central rolls in the murderous rampages, rallying the mobs at mosques by reciting scripture, especially during Friday prayers; "by God's grace", the infidels were made food for dogs. A survivor described their particular animosity for the Christian religion and its adherents:

The mob had plundered the Gregorian church, desecrated it, murdered all who sought shelter there, and, as a sacrifice, beheaded the sexton on the stone threshold. Now it filled our yard. The blows of an axe crashed in the church doors. The attackers rushed in, tore the Bibles and hymnbooks to pieces, broke and shattered whatever they could, blashphemed the cross and, as a sign of victory, chanted the Muhammadan prayer: "Lâ ilaha illallâh wa Anna Muhammad-ur-Rasûl Allâh" (There is no God but Allah and Muhammad is His prophet) ... The leader of the mob cried, "Muhammade salavat!" Believe in Muhammad and be saved. No one answered ... The leader gave the order to massacre. ³⁶

Between Sasun in 1894 through 1896, the aftermath of these massacres was worse than anyone could have conceived. Various European historians and witnesses put the death toll at anywhere between 200,000 and 250,000, with tens of thousands expelled and millions of homes pillaged and burned. The significance of these attrocities could not be measured in terms of mere lives and property, as, according to German pastor Johannes Lepsius, the "social fabric and cultural institutions" of Armenian culture had been decimated: 2,500 towns and villages left completely desolate; 645 churches and monasteries were destroyed; 328 churches were converted into mosques. Tens of thousands were forced to convert to Islam under threat of death; 21 Protestand and 170 Apostolic priests were killed; 546,000 were reduced to abject poverty ³⁷.

Adana 1909

While Hamid II fanatically supressed the idea of constitutional government within the empire, during Tanzimat a new movement arose in opposition to the sultan that would come to seek to dethrone or assassinate him. But while the Young Turks, as they came to be called, were proponents of liberal reform, their ambitions stood only to benefit Muslim Turks; they held no sympathies towards Christian minorities and saw the Armenian question as counterproductive to their movement, as it created a continued unfavorable image of Turks in the minds of Europeans. It wasn't long before the Armenians became aware of this sentiment, and the promise of improvements in the humanitarian situation which would naturally occur under the implementation of the constitution the Young Turk movement fought for soon faded, even after the sultan was effectively stripped of power in 1908.

During the early years of the Young Turk revolution, Christian states in the Balkans began severing ties to the Ottoman empire: Austria annexed Bosnia and Herzegovinia; Bulgaria declared independence. These events further fueled hatred and distrust of non-Muslim minorities, and liberal voices within the movement were silenced, and an effort to strengthen central authority and "Turkify" the empire began. Further, Armenians, though for the most part modest farmers and shephards struggling under the Ottoman tax system, were stereotyped as wealthy merchants and provoked Muslim ire by asserting cultural pride and nationalism.

When a counter-revolution, though short-lived, was declared in Constantinople by religious scholars and authorities declaring an end to constitutional government and implementation of shari'a law, Armenians started turning up dead all over Adana and fear and panic spread throughout the town. As Armenians hurriedly closed their shops and rushed home to their families, Turkish gangs were roaming the streets armed with clubs and pistols. British vice-consul Doughty Wylie arrived to find the town "full of a howling mob looting the shops." Rather than controlling the "pitiless mob of vandals and fanatics", Turkish troops were engaged in killing Armenians. Within 48 hours 2,000 Armenians were killed and tens of thousands were homeless and in need of food and water.

Within days of the massacres, the counter-revolution was thwarted and a ceasefire in Adana was declared. Several Young Turk regiments were sent into Adana, supposedly to stop the killing and establish order, but, like the Turkish troops already stationed there, the fresh troops found themselves engaged in murder and pillage as local Muslims fired on them in order to provoke them into killing Armenians. This was a common tactic employed by the Turks to justify massacre. With the Armenians disarmed following the ceasefire, the Turkish troops killed them in brutal and systematic fashion. Turkish troops set fire to the Mouseghian School, which, along with its students, sheltered 2,000 refuguees from the first massacre. As they ran from the building in terror, some burning alive, they were picked off by soldiers posted in nearby buildings.

During April of 1909, the killing spread from Adana to the adjacent villages, where entire towns and populations were wiped clean; in total some 200 villages were completely destroyed. In Adana, of the 4,823 houses that were burned, 4,437 were Armenian. In his report Wylie declared that the death toll could not be ascertained at the time, but "the loss has been enormous [and] may be estimated at between 15,000 and 25,000; of these, very few, if any, can be Moslems." Journalist Charles Woods wrote, "The burning and destruction were so systematically carried out that more than one Turkish mosque or Moslem house might be clearly distinguished in the very middle of the Christian ruins." ³⁸

The Adana massacres were a turning point for the Armenians and a critical benchmark for the dissolution of their people and culture. Like all attrocities previous, save for token protests, the lack of political recourse or any form of real punishment facilitated a culture of mass murder that permanently devalued and marginalized the lives and cultural heritage of non-Muslims in the empire, a process that would climax in what has been dubbed the Armenian Genocide of 1915. The misnamed "Powers" threatened, warned - and did nothing. As this "massacre with impunity", this "continuum of destruction", was woven deeper into the fabric of Turkish culture, it became clear to the Turks that the Armenian question was one that could only be settled through state-sanctioned attrocities. "You are aware," Talaat Bey of the Committee of Union and Progress said, "that by the terms of the Constitution equality of Mussulman and Gâvur was affirmed, but you one and all know and feel that this is an unrealizable idea. The shari'a, our whole past and history and the sentiments of hundreds of thousands of Mussulmans and even the sentiments of the Gâvur themselves ... present an impenetrable barrier to the establishment of real equality." ³⁹

The Balkan Wars and WWI

The Balkan Wars inflicted new crises on the Ottomans; as they lost more Christian states in the Balkans, its ruling class came under attack, the government destablized, and, as happened under similar circumstances following the Russo-Turkish wars, paranoia, mistrust, hatred and, eventually, attrocity, escalated against non-Muslim minorities, particularly Armenians. In late January, 1913, Talaat and Enver Pasha, heads of the nationalist faction of the CUP, and about 200 followers orchestrated a coup on the Sublime Porte and assasinated the Minister of War, essentially eliminating the "Liberal Party" of the CUP. When the grand vizier was assasinated later that year, the way was paved for Talaat to become minister of the interior, Enver to become minister of war, and Jemal Pasha to become minister of the Navy. This triumvirate came to power with a hightened sense of anxiety over the corrosion of power the empire had increasingly experienced in previous decades, and with the empire's involvement in WWI, their feeling of helplessness, victimization and defensiveness intensified.

The uproar over the Adana and Hamidian massacres prompted Turkey to accept the accord of January/February 1914, entrusting two European inspector-generals to supervise the governments of the Armenian provinces. Armenian was recognized as the official language of the region and restrictions on Armenian schools as well as the administrative and legal inequality between Christians and Muslims were abolished. This severely undermined the policy of Turkification ("Turkey for the Turks") and Islamization by the Young Turk government, and Muslim Turkish sentiment towards non-Mulim gâvur further deteriorated. As the Nazis would eventually come to depict Jews during the Holocaust, likening them to "harmful bacillus" and "bloodsuckers", so the Turks began to see Armenians as an infringing sickness inflicted onto their social, cultural and economic fabric. One Turkish doctor, Mehmet Reshid, the "executioner governor" who would come to be responsible for the massacre and ethnic cleansing of hundreds of thousands of Armenians, characterized them as "dangerous microbes", assuming it to be his duty to remove these germs from the host.

The entry of the Ottoman empire into World War I presented a fresh opportunity to put to action these dehumanizing viewpoints towards non-Muslim minorities. As Armenian bishop and witness to the massacres Krikoris Balakian remarked, "The old idea that war is politics by another means is outdated in the twentieth century. Now war would become hatred by other means. And, in the case of the Armenians, hatred meant extermination." ⁴⁰ In November 1914 the sheikh ul-Islam - the chief Sunni religious authority in the empire - declared jihad against Christians.

Soon after, violent and inflammatory articles appeared without provocation in Turkish newspapers, along with posters, portraying Greeks cutting up Turkish babies or ripping open the wombs of pregnant women, hung in schools and mosques urging Muslims to kill the rayahs wherever they could be found. "He who kills even one unbeliever, of those who rule over us, whether he does it secretly or openly, shall be rewarded by God." ⁴¹

The massacres which came to be known as the Armenian Genocide began in the winter of 1915. Armenian men between twenty and up to sixty years of age were conscipted into the Ottoman army. After a humiliating defeat at the hands of the Russians at Sarikamish, Armenian soldiers were scapegoated for their supposed disloyalty and thrown into labor battalions, were they soon found themselves victim of an organized extermination. Nearly 10,000 Armenian conscripts were killed. Meanwhile, already disarmed civilians were regardless ordered to surrender their weapons, resulting in what James Bryce and Arnold Toynbee called a "reign of terror" as local authorities broke into Armenian homes searching for weapons they knew were not to be found, and arbitrarily killing their inhabitants for the "crime".

In late winter, 1915, Dr Behaeddin Shakir became head of the CUP's Special Organization (SO), lobbyied successfully for full autonomy and marshalled death squads to wipe out the Armenians in the eastern provinces. By spring, anywhere there was an Armenian population to be found they were systematically rounded up; healthy Armenian males were murdered, "executed by firing squad or hacked to death with axes outside villages", while women, children, the sick and the aged were sent on deportation marches to the "interior", assured they would be able to return when they war was over. Robbed of their youth and thus their ability to fend for themselves, as if the unarmed Armenians, able-bodied or not, could resist armed Turkish authorities, Armenian populations throughout the empire were wiped clean. Rather than returning after the war, those not killed outright were "driven on into the desert to die of thirst or disease or exhaustion or gang-rape," ⁴² or herded into caves used as primitive gas chambers and asphyxiated by fire. In 1915 alone, between 800,000 and 1,000,000 Armenians perished; tens of thousands of women were kidnapped into Muslim harems, along with tens of thousands more children abducted and forcibly converted to Islam, further decimating the Armenian populace. The summer of 1916 saw new massacres ignited, with some 200,000 Armenians who had survived the previous year's deportations murdered.

In Phocea, near Smyrna (modern Izmir), 8,000 Greeks were massacred or driven out. The pogrom was witnessed by four Frenchmen, one, Monsieur Manciet, who chronicled the carnage:

From all directions the Christians were rushing to the quays seeking boats to get away in, but since the night there were none left. Cries of terror mingled with the sound of firing. The panic was so great that a woman with her child was drowned in sixty centimeters of water.

The following day the methodical pillage of the city recommenced. And now the wounded began to arrive. There being no doctor, I took upon myself the first aid before embarking them for Mitylene. I affirm that with two or three exceptions, all these wounded were more than sixty years of age. There were among them aged women, more than ninety years of age, who had received gunshots, and it is difficult to imagine that they had been wounded while defending their possessions. It was simply and purely a question of massacre ... Phocea, which had been a place of great activity, was now a dead city. ⁴³.

The Armenian genocides were a combination of massacre, deportation, and slavery. In the central regions of Armenia, the male population above the age of 12 was wiped out en masse. History has not recorded a similar crime since the sixteenth century. Every area inhabited by Armenians was steeped in blood ... there were wretches who, having been mutilated, were made to eat their own flesh; for others, seated and chained, their children were placed on their laps and cut into slices. ⁴⁴ A massacre, however horrible the word may sound, would be humane in comparison with it. ⁴⁵ For the deported, who would probably have preferred death, they were escorted over harsh terrain to the desert of Dayr al-Zur, between Syria and Iraq. The New York Times reported on August 18, 1915:

We now know with certainty from a reliable source that the Armenians have been deported in a body from all the towns and villages in Cilicia to the desert regions south of Aleppo. The refugees will have to traverse on foot a distance, requiring marches of from one to two or even more months.

We learned, besides, that the roads and the Euphrates are strewn with corpses of exiles, and those who survive are doomed to certain death, since they will find neither house, work, nor food in the desert. It is a plan to exterminate the whole Armenian people.

Hundreds of women and young girls and even children groan in prisons. Churches and convents have been pillaged, defiled, and destroyed. The villages around Van and Bitlis have been pillage and inhabitants put to the sword. At the beginning of this month all the inhabitants of Karahissar were pitilessly massacred, with the exception of a few children. ⁴⁶

In every town and villaged they traversed, the Armenians were presented before Muslims at the town hall, who were permitted to claim them as slaves. Those who survived the hunger, thirst, exhaustion, rape, and various other abuses, arrived at Dayr al-Zur, where Arab and Kurdish tribes awaited to inflict the final outrage. The corpses were abandoned in the desert. Other attrocities inflicted included children who had their flesh ripped off with cotton-chopping tools, or had their knee tendons severed. The heads of victims were severed and displayed on sticks. Photos reminiscent of the Holocaust to come show women and children starved to death; practically the only tissue covering their bones was the skin 47; 48.

The UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide of 1948 defines genocide as the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group. ⁴⁹ The key word here with regard to the Amenian massacres of 1914-15 is intent. Did the Turks intend to exterminate the Armenian population, or were their actions, as Bernard Lewis put it, the brutal byproduct of war?

Considering the cruelties inflicted on the Armenians, it seems rather insulting to quabble over what the true intent was. Whether or not they intended to exterminate the Armenians, that was certainly the result. Regardless, almost without exception, the answer to the Armenian question, no matter which Turkish ruler it was posed to, was extermination. What should settle the argument over whether this was genocide is the testimony of high ranking Ottoman officials, such as Talaat Pasha. In 1915 Pasha, the grand vizier of the CUP, boasted to American ambassador Henry Morgantheau, "I have accomplished more toward solving the Armenian problem in three months than Abdul Hamid did in thirty years," ⁵⁰ as well as infamously proclaiming, "An end must be put to [the Armenians'] existance, however tragic the measures to be taken, and no regard must be paid to either age or sex, or to conscientious scruples." ⁵¹ In the Aftermath of WWI, the surviving head of the Special Operations, which organized the death squads with the intent to exterminate the Armenians, testified that the SO had more power than the "official government" and that the "massacres were carried out on order from the Central Committee," of which the SO was in control. ⁵² Yet even in Western media, the dispute is given credence.

Objective scholars, aside from Lewis, who has close ties to the Turkish government ⁵³ and absurdly claimed that "the reality of the Armenian genocide results from nothing more than the imagination of the Armenian people," for which he was convicted of Holocaust denial in France, unanimously agree that this was indeed state sanctioned genocide.

Richard Rubenstein, the preeminent Holocaust scholar, called the Turkish massacre of the Armenians the "first full-fledged attempt by a modern state to practice disciplined, methodically organized genocide," carried out by "a bureaucratic administration capable of governing with utter indifference [to] human needs." ⁵⁴ Raphael Lempkin, the Jewish legal scholar credited with coining the word "genocide" in 1944, said, "I became interested in genocide because it happened to the Armenians; and after[wards] the Armenians got a very rough deal at the Versailles Conference because their criminals were guilty of genocide and were not punished." ⁵⁵

The punishment for this crime - whether it be named genocide, extermination, liquidation, or massacre - as well as the obligation of the perpetrators to make restitution to the survivors and their families, was envisaged by the Allies and included in the text of the Treaty of Sevres of 1920. This treaty resolved to hold accountable those responsible for crimes committed against those in Turkey not of the Turkish race or Muslim religion, however it was never ratified, and these criminals escaped official punishment when the Treaty of Lausanne of 1923 was ratified (Talaat and Enver Pasha were both murdered by Armenians while exiled in Germany). This treaty abandoned the Sevres resolutions calling for an international trial and punishment for the crimes against the Armenians, as well as the recognition of a free Armenian state ⁵⁶.

Whether or not the massacres of 1914-1915 fall under the definition of genocide, objective observers might view the entire 100 year period, beginning with the massacre at Chios in 1821, continuing though 1914-1915, and, finally, ending with the burning of Smyrna in 1922, as one great, continuous genocide of Christian Ottomans. Sadly, as was mentioned, the end of WWI did not bring about the end to the massacres. The Turks had saved their best for last.

The Martyred City

The Armenian genocide of 1915 was the climax of a century of vicious persecution of Turkish non-Muslims under Turkification, yet the terrible story was not brought to a close until 1922, when one of the great crimes of all time took place: the burning of Smyrna and the massacre and scattering of its 300,000 inhabitants. Perhaps more disturbing, at least to Americans, is the complicity of Western powers in the tragedy.

The Turkish army had moved into Smyrna in pursuit of Greek troops who had occupied the city three years prior and had moved inland attempting to retake lands in Asia Minor lost to the Turks five centuries earlier. Routed by the Turks, the Greeks escaped via the harbor, and the civilians of Smyrna were left to deal with the Turkish retribution. Though the Great Powers had encouraged the Greeks to attack Turkey, and though American, British, Italian and French warships were anchored in the harbor, these powers, in Smyrna's hour of desperation, inexplicably adopted a policy of neutrality and allowed this great and ancient city to perish.

The burning of Smyrna marked the end of Greek and Christian civilization in Asia Minor, home to the great Christian assemblies. The Church fathers, St. Paul and the two Gregories, were born at Nicea, Ephesus and Chalcedon. It was at Ephesus, near Smyrna, that St. Paul fought with beasts after the manner of men. Legend tells that Smyrna was founded by a son of the prophet Noah after the flood. Asia Minor gave the world the magnificent cities of Pergamus, Philadelphia, and Ephesus - along with Smyna - all of them among the seven churches of the Revelation. Six of those candles were extinguished long ago, but Smyrna, most likely the birthplace of Homer, burned brilliantly until September 13, 1922.

The Smyrnans were subjected to some of the most horrific tortures ever documented by man. Men were gathered in the town square and had their throats slit. Women were raped and killed and their bodies mutilated. A priest was crucified with horseshoe nails. Little girls were murdered with their breast cut off.

Among the more infamous attrocities committed at Smyrna was the martyring of Metropolitan Chrysostomos. As the Turks descended on the city and the carnage ensued, Chrysostomos, in the tradition of the Greek Church, refused to leave his congregation. His final sermon was interrupted when the chief of police ordered him to appear before the garrison. He was bound and, as he was dragged through the Turkish quarter, had his eyes torn out by the rabid mob. Every so often, whenever he had the strength to do so, he would bless his persecutors, saying "Holy Father forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing." This gesture so angered a Turk that he cut off his hand with his sword, and as the mob continue to tear Chrysostomos to pieces a sympathetic Turk shot him twice in the head to put him out of his misery.

As Turkish soldiers torched the Greek and Armenian quarters of the city, massacring civilians with knives and blunt objects "to save shell and powder", the survivors crowded into the harbor, trapped between the fire and bayonet:

The pitiful throng - huddled together, sometimes screaming for help but mostly waiting in silent panic beyond hope - didn't budge for days. Typhoid reduced their numbers, and there was no way to dispose of the dead.

Occasionally a person would swim from the dock to one of the anchored ships and try to climb the ropes and chains, only to be driven off. On the American battleships the musicians on board were ordered to play as loudly as they could to drown out the screams of the pleading swimmers ... The harbor was so clogged with corpses that the officers of the foreign battleships were often late to their dinner appointments because bodies would get tangled in the propellers of their launches. ⁵⁷

In the terrible annals of the Twentieth Century, two examples of genocide stand out: the most famous is the Jewish Holocaust of 1942-1945. Before the Holocaust there was the Armenian genocide of 1914-1915; the irony is the Armenian genocide was almost a proto-type for the Holocaust:

Thus for the time being I have sent to the east only my Death's Head units [Totenkopfverbände], with the order to kill without pity or mercy all men, women, and children of the Polish race or language. Who still talks nowadays of the extermination of the Armenians (Wer redut heute noch von der Vernichtung der Armenier)? ⁵⁸

Even today, though the Holocaust is remembered, often clichéd, Hitler's words regarding the Armenians ring true. The history of this genocide is drenched in global politics, particularly today as Turkey vies to gain membership into the European Union, and parties on opposite sides of the issue try either to whitewash the whole incident or force Turkey to atone for their crime. In the years after the massacres, governments created scapegoats or otherwise tried to minimalize the tragedy, as Disraeli did - a convenient diversion to appease Muslim populations hostile to French and British protectorates.

In a sane world no deliberation over whether to recognize this genocide would be needed. This problem would of course be alleviated if Turkey herself would atone for the crime, the first step for which would be the simple admission that the crime took place. To this day they have not, and the mere discussion of the event is taboo. ^{59; 60}

Historian Bat Ye'or describes the genocide of the Armenians as the natural outcome of a policy inerent in the politico-religious structure of dhimmitude; a textbook jihad. No rayahs took part in it; it was perpetrated by Muslims alone and they alone profited from the spoils: property, houses, and lands, as well as the allocation of women and child slaves. ⁶¹ One need only to recall the ethnic cleansing and genocide Muhammad himself inflicted on the Jews of Medina, proceeding from deportation to the massacre of all male children above the age of puberty of the Banu Qurayza and the rape and enslavement of the female captives and their children.

Jihad in Transition

The dissolution of the caliphate and the end of the last Islamic empire did not bring about an end to jihad; only an end to jihad conquest. Left behind by the West in every conceivable cultural, economic, and military manner, Islam has entered a transitional phase, as will be discussed in the coming chapters. The inability to conquer by force does not represent an abandonment of the institution of jihad. The essence of jihad is not necessarily war; it is the idea that we, as human beings, have not been created except that we may worship Allah ⁶², and that Lâ ilâha illa Huwa (none has the right to be worshipped but he) ⁶³. All creation belongs to him, and he has entrusted it to those who submit, the act of which jihad is an essential tenet. Whichever means Muslims have available to achieve this end represents jihad. As we will see, in modern times the superiority of Western civilization has opened the door to another, possibly more effective and more permanent method of waging jihad than open warfare. And whether by open conquest or by other means, the results for non-Muslim subjects will be the same.