RUTHFULLY YOURS

If US President Barack Obama were uneducated, if his staff consisted of people who had never been taught history at school, if the government consisted of savages who have just emerged from the Amazon jungle, we could somehow “justify” their ignorance about the history of the Mediterranean and the Middle Eastern people.

But that is not what is going on. This ambush against Israel in UN Security Council Resolution 2334, which considers the Jewish people “occupiers” in their own ancient capital and the holiest part of it, is an act of jihad and an act of political violence – perpetrated by governments to achieve political goals.

This resolution did not randomly emerge from a historical moment, or as the result of political choices based on reasonable criteria to provide peace and stability in the region. It does not help either the Arabs living in the disputed territories — Judea, Samaria and the Gaza Strip – or the Israelis in any peace process. It is an act of vengeance against the foundations of Judeo-Christian civilization and should be treated as such. The Jewish nation has every right to consider this attack an act of war against it. It certainly is an act of war against the history of the Jews and the freedom, democracy, human rights, pluralism and rule of law that Israel represents in the Middle East.

President Obama and his government at the beginning of their service eight years ago turned against the history of the Greek nation with the same political aggression. Obama had a chance to do that when he went to the Turkish Parliament, on April 6, 2009.

Sadly, he did not acknowledge the genocide of the Greeks by the Turkish army under Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. Between 1913 and 1923, millions of Greeks who had lived in Turkey since before the great Christian Byzantine empire, were either slaughtered or driven out. According to some Greek historians, between 800,000 and 1,200,000 Greeks were slaughtered during this period; every year on September14, the State of Greece officially honors the memory of those who died in Asia Minor.

Instead, Obama gave political cover to what the Turks did by saying at the Turkish Parliament on April 6, 2009: “You freed yourself from foreign control, and you founded a republic that commands the respect of the United States and the wider world”.

The “foreign control” to which President Obama refers is the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, where the League of Nations was established. [1]

President Obama, in evident his enthusiasm to flatter the ego of Turkey’s current president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, “forgot” to mention some important events of that era. President Obama “forgot” all about the genocide of Greeks and Christians in Asia Minor by Mustafa Kemal’s Ataturk Turkish. Barack Obama methodically “murdered” historical truth, by ignoring the fact that the Greek army, after the end of World War I in 1918, was sent to Asia Minor under the instructions of the great powers and the winners of the war, to protect Christian populations from persecution, murders and rapes of Muslim Turkish. The Greek army did not go as an occupier but as a protector of human life and human rights.

President Obama sometimes seems to have an indifference to historical truth that often borders on antagonism.[2]

The Greek Ministry of Foreign Affairs immediately responded by saying that “history cannot be rewritten”.

Now, this is what President Obama has tried to do again: to re-write history by claiming that Greece, with the winners’ help of World War I, was an aggressive and imperialistic State that cared only to re-build its Empire against the Turks. In other words, President Obama seemed to mean that the winners of WW I were some Christian Countries who wanted through Greece to establish a Christian Empire, such as the Byzantine Empire, and that Muslim territories and the International Community should, as he was the leader of such a powerful nation, “adopt” his view of history.

The notion that ancient nations which are not Muslim are occupiers in their own lands, is repeated in the UN Resolution 2334.

Obama was complimenting Turkey on not returning to the Ottoman Empire, which officially ended in 1922.

Democracy in Turkey now -what is left of it, that is – consists of all the military and the judiciary purged of anyone who believed in government by the people. Just since August, Turkey has arrested more than 26,000 people, including 120 journalists and has closed 150 news outlets.

“There is no more critical journalism, 90 percent of the free press is destroyed directly or indirectly,” according to Erol Onderoglu, the Turkish representative for Reporters Without Borders. “Investigative journalism is considered treason. Journalism has been stolen by the government.”

Is that kind of clampdown what Europeans would eventually like to see happen here, too?

Historically, Muslim forces began invading Syria in 634, and ended by conquering Constantinople in 1453.

They invaded not only all of Turkey – obliterating the great Christian empire of Byzantium – but then went on to conquer all of North Africa, Greece, Southern Spain, parts of Portugal, and eastern Europe, including Hungary, Serbia and the Balkans.

Emperor Constantine the First had moved the capital of the Roman Empire from Rome to Constantinople and laid the foundation for Christianity to become the official religion of the Roman-Byzantine State and the Western world in general. Emperor Constantine had given the citizens of the Roman Empire the right of the religious tolerance, a liberal action 1700 years ago; today, many leaders in the Arab world say they cannot tolerate Christian Churches in their territories.

The Greeks wanted during the World War I to re-establish the Byzantine Empire, but the Turkish-Muslim world prevented it from happening. Instead, commencing in 1914-15, they conducted a genocide against both the Armenians, and the Greeks until 1923.

At present the Greek community in Turkey numbers around 3000 and are not allowed to attend Greek schools.

For President Obama, the Turkish “victory” seems to have been a sensational win against the Western-Christian world, even though it was this world that had made him President of the United States.

President Obama apparently “forgot” the American’s testimonies who helped the Greeks to escape from Kemal’s Turkish massacres. He “forgot” the 1.5 million Greek refugees who were expelled from their homes in Asia Minor by the Turkish army. The Turkish “democracy” which Mr. Obama so admires, built on seas of blood of other people who were living in those areas. Perhaps, refugees for President Obama and his government, are only those who are Muslims. All the others are “occupiers”…

But even if the Greek army went to Asia Minor as an occupier — if we adopt the most distorted view of history, where exactly it would be an occupier? In the cities that were inhabited by Greeks from the beginning of recorded history?

President Obama apparently did not learn about the Trojan War in school; he apparently never read Homer to know that the inhabitants of the Bosporus and much of Asia Minor were Greeks – just as he apparently never read the Bible, or the Greek and Roman historic records of the Jewish people and their capital, Jerusalem.

The Obama administration, to cover the president’s shameful ambush against the Jewish state, sought through Obama’s Deputy National Security Advisor, Ben Rhodes, to shift the responsibility for the UN resolution onto the Israeli government of Benjamin Netanyahu. Where does the US Democratic party’s downhill plummet end?

U.S. President Barack Obama addresses the UN General Assembly’s seventy-first session, September 20, 2016. (Image source: United Nations)

The US and the UN – both the Security Council and UNESCO – are not who determine what is historically true and what is not. These shameful votes should be reversed immediately; if not, all funding should be withdrawn from the United Nations, by United States and all freedom-loving democracies. They are now, to paraphrase the words of the Soviet Union’s Vladimir Lenin, “paying for the rope with which members of the UN will hang them.”

Maria Polizoidou, a reporter, broadcast journalist, and consultant on international and foreign affairs, is based in Greece.

[1] President Obama also said in the same speech: “At the end of World War I, Turkey could have succumbed to the foreign powers that were trying to claim its territory, or sought to restore an ancient empire”. The “ancient empire” that Obama refers to, is unclear – Ottoman or Byzantine – and the “foreign powers that were trying to claim its territory” were the winners of World War I, including the USA.

[2] Such as claiming for weeks that a video had caused the attacks on the US Embassy in Benghazi, Libya; his knowingly false promises to his own people about the effects of his Affordable Care Act; lies about the Internal Revenue Service; or his endless lies about the “Iran deal”.