Researcher of Armenian Genocide Uncovers Lost Evidence of Muslim Extermination of Christians

JewsNews:

Why does the New York Times try to avoid to publish the photos from the Armenian genocide – a Muslim genocide of Christians in accordance to Islam? Do they not wish to show their readers what Islamic brutalities are truly like? And Muslims have not changed one bit. Dhimmi Barack Obama continues to avoid using the word ‘genocide’ in connection with what happened to the Armenians at the hands of the Ottoman Turks. 

The Sharia format to the Armenian genocide was replicated during Nazi Germany at the initiation and constant pressures of Amin al-Husseini, the “Palestinian” jihad leader. From 1914 to 1923, when the Republic of Turkey was founded, it was estimated that 1.5 million Armenians had perished, a full three quarters of the Armenian population of the Ottoman Empire. 

There were an estimated two million Armenians living in the Ottoman Empire on the eve of W.W.I. Well over a million were deported in 1915 and hundreds of thousands were butchered outright. Others died of starvation, exhaustion, and epidemics which ravaged the concentration camps. 

Among the Armenians living along the periphery of the Ottoman Empire many at first escaped the fate of their countrymen in the central provinces of Turkey. Tens of thousands in the east fled to the Russian border to lead a precarious existence as refugees. The majority of the Armenians in Constantinople, the capital city, were spared deportation. 

In 1918, however, the Young Turk regime took the war into the Caucasus, where approximately 1,800,000 Armenians lived under Russian dominion. Ottoman forces advancing through East Armenia and Azerbaijan here too engaged in systematic massacres. The expulsions and massacres carried by the Nationalist Turks between 1920 and 1922 added tens of thousands of more victims. 

By 1923 the entire landmass of Asia Minor and historic West Armenia had been expunged of its Armenian population. The destruction of the Armenian communities in this part of the world was total. 

A small stream flowing into the Dudan cave in Turkey. It was here that the Armenian residents of a local village are said to have been thrown, after being led there by Ottoman gendarmes and local Kurdish paramilitary personnel. For more than a century, Turkey has denied any role in organizing the killing of Armenians in what historians have long accepted as a genocide that started in 1915, as World War I spread across continents. 

The Turkish narrative of denial has hinged on the argument that the original documents from postwar military tribunals that convicted the genocide’s planners were nowhere to be found. 

Now, Taner Akcam, a Turkish historian at Clark University in Worcester, Mass., who has studied the genocide for decades by piecing together documents from around the world to establish state complicity in the killings, says he has unearthed an original telegram from the trials, in an archive held by the Armenian Patriarchate of Jerusalem. 

“Until recently, the smoking gun was missing,” Mr. Akcam said. “This is the smoking gun.” He called his find “an earthquake in our field,” and said he hoped it would remove “the last brick in the denialist wall.” 

The story begins in 1915 in an office in the Turkish city of Erzurum, when a high-level official of the Ottoman Empire punched out a telegram in secret code to a colleague in the field, asking for details about the deportations and killings of Armenians in eastern Anatolia, the easternmost part of contemporary Turkey. 

Later, a deciphered copy of the telegram helped convict the official, Behaeddin Shakir, for planning what scholars have long acknowledged and Turkey has long denied: the organized killing of up to 1.5 million Armenians by the leaders of the collapsing Ottoman Empire, an atrocity widely recognized as the 20th century’s first genocide. 

And then, just like that, most of the original documents and sworn testimony from the trials vanished, leaving researchers to rely mostly on summaries from the official Ottoman newspaper. 

Mr. Akcam said he had little hope that his new finding would immediately change things, given Turkey’s ossified policy of denial and especially at a time of political turmoil when its president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has turned more nationalist. But Mr. Akcam’s life’s work has been to puncture, fact by fact, document by document, the denials of Turkey. 

“My firm belief as a Turk is that democracy and human rights in Turkey can only be established by facing history and acknowledging historic wrongdoings,” he said. He broadened his point to argue that much of the chaos gripping the Middle East today was a result of mistrust between communities over historical wrongdoings that no one is willing to confront. 

“The past is not the past in the Middle East,” he said. “This is the biggest obstacle to peace and stability in the Middle East.” Eric D. Weitz, a history professor at the City College of New York and an expert on the Armenian genocide, called Mr. Akcam “the Sherlock Holmes of Armenian genocide.” 

“He has piled clue upon clue upon clue,” Professor Weitz added. Exactly where the telegram was all these years, and how Mr. Akcam found it, is a story in itself. With Turkish nationalists about to seize the country in 1922, the Armenian leadership in Istanbul shipped 24 boxes of court records to England for safekeeping. 

The records were kept there by a bishop, then taken to France and, later, to Jerusalem. They have remained there since the 1930s, part of a huge archive that has mostly been inaccessible to scholars, for reasons that are not entirely clear. 

Mr. Akcam said he had tried for years to gain access to the archive, with no luck. Instead, he found a photographic record of the Jerusalem archive in New York, held by the nephew of a Armenian monk, now dead, who was a survivor of the genocide.