The Armenian Genocide and my grandmother's secret
Apr 24, 2017 22:59:42 GMT -5
Pacelli and mikemac like this
Post by Marya Dabrowski on Apr 24, 2017 22:59:42 GMT -5
www.wnd.com/2015/04/the-armenian-genocide-and-my-grandmothers-secret/
...After doing a little research, Andrew called me back and said, enthusiastically, “Your grandmother is right!” The mysterious “trumpet-like signal” was a bugle, he informed me, leading me to a series of books and other contemporaneous genocide reports with additional details. A quick sampling:
There was this New York Times story from Sept. 25, 1915, quoting Dr. M. Simbad Gabriel, head of a U.S.-based Armenian organization:
The doctor said that greed, religion, and politics all combined to induce the Turks to massacre the Armenians. The Government was always behind every massacre, and the people were acting under orders.
“When the bugle blows in the morning,” he said, “Turks rush fiercely to the work of killing the Christians and plundering them of their wealth. When it stops in the evening, or in two or three days, the shooting and stabbing stop just as suddenly then as it began. The people obey their orders like soldiers.”
And there was Simon Payaslian, chair of Armenian Genocide Studies at Clark University:
At Friday prayers in the mosque, Muslims were encouraged to attack Armenians. After prayers let out, a bugle would sound from the minarets for the attack to begin, and then a bugle would sound for the attack to end.
And then there was, contained in Bostom’s own book, “The Legacy of Jihad,” this chilling account by Scottish historian Lord Kinross:
Each operation, between the bugle calls, followed a similar pattern. First the Turkish troops came into a town for the purpose of massacre; 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 the fugitives and mopping-up operations, throughout the lands and villages of the surrounding province. …
Cruelest and most ruinous of all were the massacres of Urfa, where the Armenian Christians numbered a third of the total population … When the bugle blast ended the day’s operations, some three thousand refugees poured into the cathedral, hoping for sanctuary. But the next morning – a Sunday – a fanatic mob swarmed into the church in an orgy of slaughter, rifling its shrines with cries of “Call upon Christ to prove Himself a greater prophet than Mohammed.” Then they amassed a large pile of straw matting, which they spread over the litter of corpses and set alight with thirty cans of petroleum. The woodwork of the gallery where a crowd of women and children crouched, wailing with terror, caught fire, and all perished in the flames.
Punctiliously at three-thirty in the afternoon the bugle blew once more, and the Moslem officials proceeded around the Armenian quarter to proclaim that the massacres were over … the total casualties in the town, including those slaughtered in the cathedral, amounted to eight thousand dead.
Superficially, one might conclude such narratives are depicting normal, albeit horribly brutal, military operations where soldiers are coordinated in their advances and retreats by bugle calls. But there’s much more going on here.
“I’ve read accounts,” Andrew Bostom assured me, “of a call to arms where Muslims would show up at residences – people who lived with neighbors for a decade or more – and engaged in indiscriminate slaughter.”
Really? Living and sharing with your neighbors for years, borrowing humus and olive oil when you ran short – and then suddenly turning on them in a frenzy of “indiscriminate slaughter”? Doesn’t sound exactly normal to me....
There was this New York Times story from Sept. 25, 1915, quoting Dr. M. Simbad Gabriel, head of a U.S.-based Armenian organization:
The doctor said that greed, religion, and politics all combined to induce the Turks to massacre the Armenians. The Government was always behind every massacre, and the people were acting under orders.
“When the bugle blows in the morning,” he said, “Turks rush fiercely to the work of killing the Christians and plundering them of their wealth. When it stops in the evening, or in two or three days, the shooting and stabbing stop just as suddenly then as it began. The people obey their orders like soldiers.”
And there was Simon Payaslian, chair of Armenian Genocide Studies at Clark University:
At Friday prayers in the mosque, Muslims were encouraged to attack Armenians. After prayers let out, a bugle would sound from the minarets for the attack to begin, and then a bugle would sound for the attack to end.
And then there was, contained in Bostom’s own book, “The Legacy of Jihad,” this chilling account by Scottish historian Lord Kinross:
Each operation, between the bugle calls, followed a similar pattern. First the Turkish troops came into a town for the purpose of massacre; 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 the fugitives and mopping-up operations, throughout the lands and villages of the surrounding province. …
Cruelest and most ruinous of all were the massacres of Urfa, where the Armenian Christians numbered a third of the total population … When the bugle blast ended the day’s operations, some three thousand refugees poured into the cathedral, hoping for sanctuary. But the next morning – a Sunday – a fanatic mob swarmed into the church in an orgy of slaughter, rifling its shrines with cries of “Call upon Christ to prove Himself a greater prophet than Mohammed.” Then they amassed a large pile of straw matting, which they spread over the litter of corpses and set alight with thirty cans of petroleum. The woodwork of the gallery where a crowd of women and children crouched, wailing with terror, caught fire, and all perished in the flames.
Punctiliously at three-thirty in the afternoon the bugle blew once more, and the Moslem officials proceeded around the Armenian quarter to proclaim that the massacres were over … the total casualties in the town, including those slaughtered in the cathedral, amounted to eight thousand dead.
Superficially, one might conclude such narratives are depicting normal, albeit horribly brutal, military operations where soldiers are coordinated in their advances and retreats by bugle calls. But there’s much more going on here.
“I’ve read accounts,” Andrew Bostom assured me, “of a call to arms where Muslims would show up at residences – people who lived with neighbors for a decade or more – and engaged in indiscriminate slaughter.”
Really? Living and sharing with your neighbors for years, borrowing humus and olive oil when you ran short – and then suddenly turning on them in a frenzy of “indiscriminate slaughter”? Doesn’t sound exactly normal to me....