RUTHFULLY YOURS

When one talks about Christians in Turkey, one tends to think of them as migrants who moved to the area after Muslims took over or as if Muslims have always been the majority there.

The truth is Bilecik and the rest of Asia Minor, which today has a tiny, dwindling Christian minority, used to be majority-Christian lands, the great Christian-Byzantine Empire.

“The Greek community is dying, and it is not a natural death.” — A Greek an in Istanbul to Helsinki Watch, 1992.

“The Greek community in Istanbul today is dwindling, elderly and frightened,” Helsinki Watch reported. “Their fearfulness is related to an appalling history of pogroms and expulsions that they have suffered at the hands of the Turkish government.” — Helsinki Watch, 1992.

“The conquest of Bilecik is not a random conquest of a territory. The conquest of Bilecik means the establishment of the Ottoman state. And the establishment of the Ottoman state means the beginning of a blessed march. When future generations see this project, they will understand they should be proud of their ancestors and history.” — Selim Yagci, Mayor of Bilecik.

As Turks are taught to take pride in every single thing in their history — including all of the crimes of their ancestors — they still continue committing similar crimes.

Turkish newspapers have recently reported that plans are underway to restore the historic Greek Hagios Georgios Church, referred to as “Aya Yorgi” in Turkish. The church will be converted into a museum and a cultural site.

Osmaneli Mayor Munur Sahin said that the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople, Bartholomew I, also visited the region, and said:

“We re-evaluated the situation of the church. This place will never be opened to worship again. It will serve as a museum and a cultural venue. We obtained the necessary permits; we will bring movable cultural artifacts from around Osmaneli and keep them here.”

The restoration project, approved by the Council of Monuments, is set to be finished in two years. The church lies in ruins — largely because the congregants were either murdered or forcibly deported during and after the 1914-1923 Greek genocide.

Diplomats from some 70 countries gathered in Paris over the weekend to discuss the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and once more depict Israeli settlements as a grave violation of international law. The conference was a failure, but the conferees could have helped themselves by first checking what French courts have to say about those settlements before scoring Israel again.

In 2013 the French Court of Appeals in Versailles ruled that, contrary to Palestinian arguments, Jewish settlements don’t violate the Geneva Conventions’ prohibition against an occupying power transferring “its civilian population into the territory it occupies.” The law, the court held, bars government efforts to transfer populations. But it doesn’t bar private individuals settling in the disputed territories.

The case arose after Palestinian groups sued the French industrial conglomerate Alstom over its role in the construction of a light-rail line in Jerusalem. The Palestinians lost in the court of first instance, and the Versailles court upheld the lower court’s judgment. The case didn’t go further.

That matters because the Paris conference adopted the premise that settlements are illegal as a matter of settled law and the primary obstacle to peace. The French court makes a nonsense of that judgment simply by looking at what the Geneva Conventions say, rather than basing its judgment on a legally meaningless “international consensus.”

As with so many of the Obama Administration’s Middle East peace efforts, the Paris conference makes untenable territorial demands on Israel and gives Palestinians the hope that they can achieve their aims without making compromises. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu dismissed the conference as “useless,” while the U.K. refused to accept its closing declaration calling for a final-status agreement that would “fully end the occupation that began in 1967.”

The reality is that Israel will never return to those borders, and no Palestinian state is going to come into existence so long as it is run by kleptocrats in the West Bank and jihadists in Gaza. The next time a similar conference is organized, it would do better to address Palestinian capacity for responsible self-government rather than offer legally dubious claims against Israeli settlements.

A married couple, Peter and Melanie M., were prosecuted and convicted in July 2016 of creating a Facebook group that criticized the government’s migration policy. Also, in July 2016, 60 people suspected of writing “hate speech” online had their homes raided by German police.

None of the above seems to be enough, however, for the president of the Bundestag, Norbert Lammert, from Angela Merkel’s CDU party, who believes that what Facebook is already doing against “hate speech” is not enough. According to the CDU politician, there is a need for more legislation.

The German government’s view of what constitutes “hate speech” is highly selective and appears limited to protecting the government’s own policies on immigration from legitimate criticism.

When massive antisemitism swept large German cities in the summer of 2014, for example, no such anti-racist zeal was manifest on the part of the German government. On the contrary, there were instances of authorities practically facilitating hate speech. In July 2014, Frankfurt police let mainly Muslim “protesters” use their van’s megaphone to belt out slogans of incitement in Arabic, including the repeated chanting of “Allahu Akbar” and that Jews are “child murderers”.

Firebombing a synagogue, on the other hand, is simply an “act of protest”.

Officials in Germany’s Interior Ministry are urging Interior Minister Thomas de Maizière to establish a “Defense Center against Disinformation” (Ab­wehr­zen­trum ge­gen Des­in­for­ma­ti­on) to combat what they call “political disinformation,” a euphemism for “fake news.”

“The acceptance of a post-truth age would amount to political capitulation,” the officials told Maizière in a memo, which also disclosed that the bureaucrats at the Interior Ministry are eager to see “authentic political communication” remain “defining for the 21st century.”

One wonders whether by “authentic political communication,” the officials of the Interior Ministry are referring to the way German authorities scrambled to cover up the mass sexual attacks on women on New Year’s Eve a year ago in Cologne? At the time, German police first claimed, surreally, on the morning of January 1, 2016, that the situation on New Year’s Eve had been “relaxed.” Cologne Police Chief Wolfgang Albers later dryly admitted, “This initial statement was incorrect.” Alternatively, perhaps they are referring to the decision of Germany’s public broadcaster, ZDF, not to report on the attacks until four days after they had occurred? Even a former government official, Hans-Peter Friedrich, Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Interior Minister from 2011 to 2013, accused the media at the time of imposing a “news blackout” and operating a “code of silence” over negative news about immigrants. How is that for “authentic political communication”?

“In all of these operations children were part of the general population targeted for wholesale destruction. In many instances they were also subjected to separate and differential forms of mass murder.” — Professor Vahakn Dadrian, in Children as Victims of Genocide: The Armenian Case.

These forms of murder included methods such as mass drowning, mass burning, sexual assaults, and mutilations.

“In Ankara province, near the village of Bash Ayash, two rapist-killers — a brigand, Deli Hasan, and a gendarme, Ibrahim — raped twelve boys, aged 12-14, and subsequently killed them. Those who did not die instantly were tortured to death while crying ‘Mummy, Mummy.'” — Professor Vahakn Dadrian, in Children as Victims of Genocide: The Armenian Case.

“A female survivor from Giresun relates how in Agn (Egin), Harput province, some 500 Armenian orphans collected from all parts of that province were poisoned through the arrangement of the local pharmacist and physician.” — Leslie A Davis, U.S. Consul at Harput.

More than 100 years after the genocide, Turkey still denies it and Turkish history textbooks even blame the genocide on the Armenians themselves.

When experts deny the Armenian genocide and even try to prevent the U.S. government from officially recognizing it, they are killing the victims all over again.

“As long as the genocide remains unrecognized, justice will not be established. The curse of the genocide will not leave this land, and Turkey will never see the light of day. This is not a prediction, but a statement of fact.” — Turkey’s Human Rights Association, 2016.

U.S. President-Elect Donald J. Trump was recently called on to “guarantee” to Turkey that the Armenian genocide will not be properly acknowledged by the U.S. Congress, in a set of proposals regarding “U.S. Policy on Turkey”.

“The United States can quietly guarantee Turkey that the Armenian Genocide resolution in Congress will not pass. This has always been critical in the relationship, and most Turks care deeply about the issue,” reads a part of the paper issued by The Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), and authored by former U.S. ambassador to Ankara James F. Jeffrey and Turkish scholar Dr. Soner Cagaptay.

In the meantime, an Armenian protestant church in the Turkish city of Elazig (historic Kharpert/Harput) has been turned into a parking lot, the Dicle News Agency (DIHA) reported.

The walls of the church, which served as a place of worship for the Armenian and Assyrian communities alike, is now loaded with advertising boards, installed by the managers of the parking lot. Before that, the church was used as a flour plant, a marketplace and a livestock market.

The city of Elazig is located in the Armenian highland of eastern Turkey.

Professor Benjamin Lieberman in his book, Terrible Fate: Ethnic Cleansing in the Making of Modern Europe:

“Elazig is a small city in Eastern Turkey of several hundred thousand inhabitants, situated near a series of lakes created by a dam on the Euphrates River. Today its residents are mostly Turks and Kurds, but as late as the spring of 1915 it was also very much an Armenian town. In 1915, Armenians called it Kharpert while Turks referred to it as Harput. It had been an Armenian center for many centuries.”[1]

Inhabitants of the Swedish city of Malmö are living in fear after a 16-year-old Iraqi boy was murdered last week. Ahmed Obaid had been gunned down by an unknown shooter in the Rosengard district on Thursday. The killing is part of a series of violent crimes that has plagued the city located in the south of the Scandinavian country for some time now. Obaid was shot near a bus stop. The teenager had never been involved in crime and was not known to police. His friends say he didn’t fight and had not previously been threatened, writes the dailyExpressen.

The perpetrators are still at large and their identities are still unknown. It does, however, seem yet another hallmark in the disintegration of the Swedish social fabric.

In response to the murder, demonstrators protested in front of city hall yesterday, writes the Swedish Local. Ahmed’s father Najm Obaid, who spoke at the gathering that was also attended by several politicians, said: “we won’t get Ahmed back, but I will be happy if this leads to the violence being stopped.”

Rim Jabboul, an 18-year-old schoolgirl who attended the protest, called the murder“devastating.” She said “it is a real shame that a 16-year-old should have to die like that. He had not lived his life yet. You have to look over your shoulder when you go out at night now. I don’t let my little brother go out at night any more. I hope that the politicians actually view this as a serious problem and start to solve this in Malmö.”

The organisers of the protest presented Justice and Migration Minister Morgan Johansson a set of measures he could implement in order to curb the violent crime wave.

“There’s nothing on it I don’t agree with,” Johansson commented on their proposals. “On the contrary,” he said. “In my opinion, there is no doubt what has to be done. We have to make sure that they can be prosecuted and that they can get long jail sentences.” The Minister furthermore stated that the Swedes “have to get rid of the weapons”, and he is also calling for“tighter punishment so that those who are held for serious gun crime can be arrested immediately and not just be released a few days later.” The government is already working on a draft that, amongst others, plans to quadruple the minimum sentence for the possession ofhand grenades. This type of weapon has recently been used in a Somali gang war that scourged the city of Gothenburg.

Stefan Löfven, Sweden’s Prime Minister, commented as well on the killing in Rosengard, a migrant-dominated precinct notorious for its virtual lawlessness. “On a personal level it’s a tragedy, of course,” he said when he was interviewed on the topic. “Then, on a societal level, it is completely unacceptable that we have this kind of environment where people take it upon themselves to murder.”

Sweden’s most thriving shopping mall has been turned into a no-go zone. According toExpressen, one of Sweden’s two national evening papers, local police are intimidated, and have been forced to implement special measures against the increasingly threatening behaviour of the perpetrators.

According to the authorities, the rise in the number of cases like this correlates with the increasing arrival of undocumented migrants, with incidents involving ‘youths’ from Syria, Afghanistan and Morocco. This causes legal problems when bringing offenders to justice: many claim to be underage, which forces the police to hand them over to social services. “I’ve had people in front of me that look like they are 35, but who claim to be 15. I can’t prove they’re lying so we have to release them,” Rikard Sorensen, a police officer, says.

Expressen made a video report on the matter, in which, among others, the following narratives were told.

It’s 20:00 and the stores in Gothenburg’s Nordstan Mall are closing. As they close, a transformation takes place: the children of the streets awaken. Expressen’s journalists are following policemen on their patrol through the mall. The police go there to look for drugs and to show they too still exist. They are noticed. Large groups of men are present, going out of their way to confront the officers, grazing their uniforms as they pass, otherwise acting aggressively, making derisive sounds, all the while hiding their faces in ski masks.

On one particular Friday, September 2016, fifteen-year-old Jonas (fictitious name) and a friend meet a group of young people just outside of Nordstan. Lured by promises of cigarettes and a game of football, they follow the group back to an alley. Once there, out of sight, they are forced to the ground and robbed of everything. Mobile phones, credit card, cash and house keys. They’re not even allowed to keep their shoes and the shirt they’re wearing.

“One guy frisked me, then took a broken glass bottle to my throat, telling me to take off my sweater,” says Jonas. “It was scary, I’ve never experienced anything like it.” Jonas‘ friend was taken in a stranglehold, while both were also threatened with an iron bar. His mother recalls not even feeling safe at home: “We had to change the locks because they had my son’s name, credit card, the keys to the front door. It was horrible.“https://gatestone.eu/migrant-gangs-sweden/