Talking Turkey

Time to correct some ignorance by a comparison between the Bush administration of the War on Terror and the Ottoman Empire of WW1.

The Bush administration waged illegal aggressive war against Iraq, routinely killed civilians in Pakistan, and bombed Somalia just as the country was stabilizing in order to plunge it back into chaos. The Bush administration and its Neocon policy-makers was responsible for at least 11 million refugees and 2 million civilian deaths.

The Obama administration, which is at least as penetrated by the Israel lobby and seditious Zionist conspiracy against the USA, has refrained from investigating Bush officials for their numerous War on Terror-related crimes or for their financial policy crimes that amount to economic terrorism against the USA.

In contrast, the Ottoman Empire (not the Turkish Republic which counts as one of the successor states) charged, tried, and convicted Talat Pasha, Enver Pasha, and Jemal Pasha, who were the architects of the Armenian genocide. The Ottoman court sentenced them to death.

Unlike the USA today, the Ottoman Empire actually had some sense of accountability for government officials.

We do not have a sane discussion of genocide in the USA. Not only are ethnic Ashkenazi Americans, who try to act as the guardians of US genocide discourse in order to control it, at least as much genocide deniers as Turks, but a segment of the organized Jewish community is also trying to use the Armenian genocide and a very selective reading of Ottoman or Turkish history as part of a program to control genocide discourse and to incite Islamophobia.

Under Turkish Rule points to an example of this sort of biased and hate-filled writing from Andrew Bostom.

The Turks are justifiably sensitive to prejudice against Islam and the Ottoman Empire, whose intellectual and political achievements rendered the word Turkish synonymous with Muslim from the 15th until the beginning of the 20th century.

Throughout the 19th century demonization of Islam and the Ottomans justified mass murder and expulsion of Balkan Muslims while during the same time period similar outrages accompanied Russian expansion into Muslim areas of the Caucasus. The victims of Russian genocidalism generally sought and were granted refuge within the Ottoman Empire.

Tel Aviv Uiversity Professor Ehud Toledano remarks in Slavery and Abolition that scholars have generally used terms like forced migration to minimize the crimes of Czarist expansionism.

Turks will never take part in a serious discussion about genocide before Americans and other Westerners show even-handedness through some sort of acknowledgment of the genocide and ethnic cleansing

• of Balkan Muslim populations as the Ottoman Empire retreated and
• of Caucasian Muslims as the Russian Empire expanded.

[Note that Harvard has occasionally exhibited early 20th century Balkan anti-Muslim postcards celebrating the ethnic cleansing or genocide of local Muslims populations.]

In addition, as long as the USA maintains the criminal conglomeration of racist, murderous, genocidal Zionist invaders, interlopers, and thieves in Stolen and Occupied Palestine, the Islamic world and most of the human race simply is not going to take US babbling about genocide seriously.

The presence in the Obama administration of racist Jewish Zionists like Rahm Emanuel, whose father was a mass murderer of Arab Muslims when there is an office of the justice department with the job of deporting such people to places where they can be tried, and like Larry Summers, whose corruption and incompetence will one day be legendary in the annals of the United States, will certainly help Turks assign the importance to Obama's speech that it deserves.

Phil Weiss discusses Summers' hedge fund payout in Why did Summers get giant hedge payday--and what does it say about the lobby?

I discuss Benjamin Emanuel in The Real Benjamin Emanuel Issue.

In the United States, the discussion of the Armenian Genocide is a politically charged one. There are elements of the Turkish lobbies and the Anti-Defamation League that pressured not to have this recognized as a genocide. Of course, the latter group did it out of Israel's alliance with Turkey and rescinded its ideological but not political decision because of internal pressures. I have not, however, seen this as a particularly academic discussion.

You said:

Because you certainly wont stand up for the term genocide, will you?

I have as yet to hear this taught in any American University, even one concentrated in highly Muslim populated areas, as anything but a genocide. The discourse to undergrads often includes a discussion of lobby's efforts to have it swept under the carpet through lobbying. And, the dialogue inside Turkey, that has lead to various trials and assassinations, like Mr. Dinks.

That aside, Harvard is the founder of the Armenian Studies program in the United States. I have sat in on class from this program, though not at Harvard, and assure you, they teach that it was a genocide. I think if Prof. Walt were teaching otherwise, by now there would be written commentaries by the Armenian department about this. Especially after the cacophony brought by the IL book, I would think such criticism would have been hashed up by now.

We all make assumptions based on our own experiences. I have noticed your spellings and examples and realize that you are using a different set of experiences.