Asia Minor and Why I Fight

I recall an invitation to write about what led each of us to our anti-jihadi stance. I had written about this in part earlier on my site, and I'd like to post some parts of the original article and add a few comments, if no one minds.

From Asia Minor and Why I Fight:

I suppose that since very early on in my life I knew that there was fear associated with the word "Turk". One of the few memories I have of my Grandfather is of him showing me his turquoise colored prayer beads on an old leather band and saying something about Turks. I think that he was telling me about our family and how we came from what is called Turkey and that something had happened with the Turks. What I mainly remember is thinking that I was perhaps Turkish and being corrected adamantly on that point. As with many childhood memories, this one remains vague. But I always knew that somehow the Turks figured into family history in a very bad way. As I got older, I still knew little about being half-Greek, but I did learn that it was de rigeur for Greeks to hate Turks, and just assumed that that was all that was behind my Dad's occasional comments regarding Turks or his outrage when Newt Gingrich claimed that Kemal Ataturk was a hero of his. I never imagined what I would come to discover, both about my family and about all of the Christians of Asia Minor.....

....As I stated, I have few memories of my Grandfather. I knew almost nothing of his family and had never met them. My Father spoke little of them, as well and is now also deceased. But I managed at last to contact my cousins and finally learned the story of our family which had fled the massacres of the 1910s. Some were slaughtered. Many began to flee with the writing so plainly on the wall. They fled to America under assumed names, the ones who left early, to protect their relatives back on the coast of Asia Minor. This was another common practice. I only learned our true family name (my maternal Grandmother's) two years ago from a relative. It was a revalation that I will never forget, writing down that long unused surname and saying it aloud as best as I could pronounce it. It has become like a talisman to me. The name as well as the utter determination that I knew my Great-Grandparents held to flee to a better home, a place where they would not be enslaved or murdered just for their ethnicity or religion. Their determination that their children and grandchildren would not become dhimmis as they had been keeps me fighting with a clarity and resolve that will never be shaken. Now that this country has been attacked, I feel even more strongly that I must continue this fight, and am pleased that there are so many like-minded people out there. But I understand now that early fear of the word "Turk" and of "Islam" as well. I have written that it is not a phobia when there is something real to fear. I am only "fearful" in the sense that I would be if trapped on the traintracks in the face of an oncoming train. The threat is as real as it was to my family so long ago, and I intend to stand my ground here. In fact, I cannot be moved.

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The rest of the article deals with much history of what had happened to all of these Native peoples of Asia Minor, such as the Pontic Greeks (pictured above on a death march in 1917). More important here, I want to share my "talisman", the family name which we had to leave behind with all of our property and half of our family. It is Theodosiou. It is hard for me to even pronounce, but it is MINE. I finally, after years, recovered the one family name I did not know, the name that was kept hidden to protect family left behind, the name that was changed to a rather absurd surname which had been a joke of a nickname. But I know the truth now, and I know this long lost name and I repeat it for strength as I would any prayer. THEODOSIOU. They cannot take that from me.