But, of course. "Sweden labels mass killing of Armenians genocide," by Karl Ritter for the Associated Press, March 11 (thanks to Rich):
STOCKHOLM - Sweden's parliament narrowly approved a resolution Thursday recognizing the 1915 mass killing of Armenians in Turkey as genocide, prompting the Turkish government to recall its ambassador in protest.
The measure passed with a one-vote margin in a surprise decision that came a week after a U.S. congressional committee approved a similar resolution.
Sweden's governing center-right coalition opposed the measure but it passed in a 131-130 vote because a handful of center-right lawmakers broke party lines. Eighty-eight lawmakers were absent in the 349-seat assembly.
"After 95 years it is time for people who have suffered so long to obtain redress," said Gulan Avci, a Liberal Party lawmaker who broke her party's line and backed the measure, which had been proposed by the left-leaning opposition. Avci is a Kurdish immigrant from Turkey.
Historians estimate that up to 1.5 million Armenians were killed by Ottoman Turks around the time of World War I. Turkey denies that the deaths constituted genocide, saying the toll has been inflated and those killed were victims of civil war and unrest.
Turkey recalled its ambassador to Sweden immediately after the vote and the Anatolia news agency reported that Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan canceled a visit to Sweden on March 17.
"We condemn the decision. Our government, and our people strongly reject the resolution crippled by big mistakes and devoid of basis," the Turkish government said in a statement.
The resolution also labeled as genocide the killings of Assyrians and Pontian Greeks, ethnic groups that also suffered under the Ottoman Turks.
Swedish Foreign Minister Carl Bildt said he regretted the Parliament's decision, saying it "will unfortunately not have a positive effect on the ongoing normalization process between Turkey and Armenia."
The U.S. congressional committee approved a similar measure there in a 23-22 vote that would send it to the full House of Representatives, if the leadership decided to bring it up. Minutes after the vote, Turkey withdrew its ambassador to the U.S.
Turkish Ambassador to Sweden Zergun Koruturk told Anatolia that the Parliament's decision was harmful for relations between the two countries.
"I hope they are aware of the damage done here," she said.
Countries recognizing the genocide include Uruguay, Chile, Argentina, Russia, Canada, Lebanon, Belgium, Greece, Italy, the Vatican, France, Switzerland, Slovakia, the Netherlands, Poland, Lithuania and Cyprus.
Good for Sweden, albeit close, 131-130, with 88 absent.
1,500,000 Armenians killed by Muslims.
We've heard that Muslims killed 80,000,000 in India - if that were true, we'd hope that India and others would also recognize that as a genocide.
"Swedish Foreign Minister Carl Bildt said he regretted the Parliament's decision..."
Carl Bildt seems to have no problem with his government saying the most patently offensive, libelous statements about the Zionist entity. Now why is that?
The Turkish Ambassador will have to undergo a metamorphosis before he negotiates his God forsaken country's acceptance within the EU.
Or maybe not !
As Europe is out of control at the moment, he could in all likelyhood push through membership by saying that Turkey is a very nice and tolerant country and full of fun loving people.
That should do it, and probably will !
God help us all !
Turkish Delight anyone ?
It is about time that Islam and the Ottoman Empire got a slap on the wrist. Our children will eventually know the true history of the Muslims. They will not be able to hide their violence for long.
I just hope it is in time to stop immigration into Christian countries. What our Christian leaders need to do is forget the teaching " love thy neighbour as thyself"
Sweden's parliament narrowly approved a resolution Thursday recognizing the 1915 mass killing of Armenians in Turkey as genocide, prompting the Turkish government to recall its ambassador in protest.
If it carries on like this, Turkey will have no ambassadors in the West.
"Countries recognizing the genocide include Uruguay, Chile, Argentina, Russia, Canada, Lebanon, Belgium, Greece, Italy, the Vatican, France, Switzerland, Slovakia, the Netherlands, Poland, Lithuania and Cyprus"
Countries not recognizing the genocide may include, Turkey, Egypt, Yemen, Somalia, Lebanon, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Dhubai, Syria, Iran, Iraq....I think I see a pattern here.
Finally, a way to break the financial backs of muslim regimes--drown them in air-fares for their recalled ambassadors!
I hope we can see the USA added to that list of countries affirming that this happened, despite our muslim-in-chief. If countries like the ones listed can speak the truth, then this country has a duty to do no less...
jew_lover, yes, hindus recognize that. thats why they are so anti islam and anti muslim. Unfortuntly India is ruled by secular elitist and their secular elitist media that is busy white washing all the evil that the islam and muslims haver done in India. They do it to retain the support of indian muslims. These SOB's have for the most part made it a crime to speak out against islam generally and muslims in India in perticuler.
Here is another name missing from the list of countries recognizing the genocide: GERMANY. hmmm, could it have anything to do with German officers training and leading the Turkish Army at that time?
Not surprised that Greece is on the list; just a little surprised that the article mentions that the Turkish was not limited to Armenians. I guess the Greeks and Assyrians were also fomenting 'civil unrest'.
The only thing standing in the way of Armenian - Turkish reconciliation is ............................ the Turks.
But not the United States? How humiliating is this?
Ruslan Tokhchukov, EnragedSince1999.
Hussein's not going to do that! No way! The Turks are his pals!
Thank you desidude.
Let's hope the word spreads, and the world learns, about the 80,000,000 Indians slaughtered by Muslims as well.
I just read my email from the Armenian group and found this quote:
"The Washington Post cites Gulan Avci saying that, "after 95 years it is time for people who have suffered so long to obtain redress." Gulan Avci is a Liberal Party lawmaker who broke with her party's line and voted to recognize the resolution. Avci is a Kurdish immigrant from Turkey."
READ THAT LAST LINE!!! LET US TALK OF POETIC JUSTICE!!!!!
THE ONE VOTE THAT BROKE FROM HER PARTY'S LINE AND SAVED THE DAY... ***** HOORAY***** A KURDISH IMMIGRANT FROM TURKEY!!!
AFTER ALL THE EVIL DEEDS THAT THE TURKS HAVE DONE TO SO MANY PEOPLE, THE KURDS INCLUDED, HOW GREAT IS IT THAT IT WAS A KURD THAT TURNED THE TIDE!!
THANK YOU GOD!!!
I find it interesting, how number of Armenians killed increases over the years. Now it's 1,500,000. Next decade maybe 3 million. Some guys even claimed here that Turks also killed Jews. In the end I guess, Turks will also be accused of Native American population decline and African slave trade.
Yes, terrible things happened during WW1. But my ancestors were not worse than yours. We should have a standard for meaning of genocide. If this is a genocide, than we should start talking about Native American genocide, Algerian genocide by France, Circassian genocide by Russia.
But we know you will bully those who speak about these. Like France is bullying Rwanda now. If you criticize oil war in Iraq, you are a Jihadist. Yes, you make the rules, everything you do is justified.
And it appears Australia hasn't either. How disgraceful.
Be quiet. Please stop wasting our time and insulting our intelligence with reflexive Tu Quoque - which is the mark of every Muslim apologist who has ever posted here. Not to mention the exaggeration and 'straw men' in your first paragraph.
(BTW, you're an idiot with your nonsensical remark re 'the oil war in Iraq' which is 1. most certainly not classifiable as a genocide and 2. *opposed* by most posters here, especially Hugh Fitzgerald, as being a total waste of time, men and money that would have been much better spent elsewhere...say, assisting the non-Muslim South Sudanese to withstand and defeat the monstrous and indeed genocidal Jihad of mass murder, rape, pillage, scorched earth and enslavement that has been waged against them by the Arabised Muslim North Sudanese for the last fifty years and more).
Go and read Vahakn Dadrian on what was done to the Armenian Christians by Turkish, Arab and Kurdish Muslims within the Ottoman Empire and then in 1915. Then, if you dare - *IF YOU BLOODY WELL DARE* - come back here and try to call him a liar. But if you do, we will put you in the same box as David Irving and Garaudy.
Facts have to be faced. *This* particular genocide is not excused or made less real or less evil by what anyone else did. Each human ethnic or cultural group has, at different times, behaved like demons; but it appears to me that because of its governing ideology the Ummah is especially prone to such acts of demonic awfulness, not once, but many, many times, in many, many places, all throughout the past 1400 years of its existence and spread.
Turks - MUSLIM Turks in thrall to Islam, together with nominally Muslim or even supposedly secular Turks in thrall to an Islam-mimicking evil trance-state of Turkish supremacism similar to the 'Aryan' supremacism Hitler would unloose in Germany - murdered hundreds of thousands of Armenian Christians in truly horrendous ways. Arab Muslims and Kurdish Muslims, within the Ottoman domains, eagerly assisted with the butchery, the forced removals/ death marches that led to death from starvation, exposure, thirst and disease, and the rapes and the stealing of children (children who were all 'converted' to Islam by the Muslims who seized them).
There is a mountain of evidence and a great many eyewitnesses.
Denial that it happened, and sly attempts to impugn the credibility of the testifiers, will only be greeted, here, with absolute contempt.
It was - like the preceding Ottoman Muslim mass-murders of Armenians in the 1890s, and like other mass murders earlier, such as the Turkish Muslim mass-murders of Bulgarian Christians - a classic jihad genocide, an orgy of mass killing that went on, and on, and on, to the accompaniment of ecstatic 'Allahu akbars' from many of the murderers.
Anyone who has read the many blood-soaked soul-wrenching accounts from many different lands, gathered together in Bostom's 'Legacy of Jihad', would recognise it as such. An East Timorese (recalling the Indonesian Muslim invasion and occupation) or Moluccan Christian (recalling the mass-murdering and village-destroying ways of the Laskar Jihad in the 1990s) would recognise that what happened to *them* was eerily similar, in all sorts of ways, to what happened to the Armenians.
Turks recall Ambassador. Good start.
Now Turkey, recall all your immigrants to Sweden.
That will really make the Swedes happy!
Dumbledorsarmy,
I was in the process of replying to that desperately crude and disgusting attempt at downgrading one of the modern history most horrific crimes, a national orgy and celebration of sadism, to a mere accident which can and does happen to all of us, but then I read your terrific response and saw there is nothing I can add. Few can write as intelligently and powerfully as you can, DDA. Thank you.
But let me take the opportunity to share something with you:
Some 20 years ago I sat next to an quite old Armenian couple while flying from California to Denmark. The man was a retired professor of medicine and his wife a general physician. They were very intelligent, cultured and erudite, but at the same time unassuming, sweet people. After some hours of conversation I mentioned the Armenian genocide by Turks. I regretted it immediately, because I felt I touched a deposit of terribly painful feelings. Both were born in Turkey and survived the genocide by a sheer miracle, but their entire families were butchered by murder intoxicated Turks who spared absolutely no one. What I will never forget is that when I asked them if they know, or have heard about cases of individual Turks who would try to hide, or in any way help an Armenian they stopped for a while trying to remember their own experience and stories of other Armenian survivors, then the man shook his head, smiled faintly and said quietly: my friend, I there is no place for pity in the Turkish heart.
I said that Nazi Germany and her helpers murdered millions of Jews, nevertheless, and in spite of the danger there were thousands of individual people, ALSO Germans, who risking their own life rescued Jews. But the man repeated that he has never heard of even one similar case during the Armenian genocide.
I met quite a few Turks in my life and on a few occasions I heard what they had to say about the Armenian genocide. They were either defiant, in denial, or angry. But they all shared the attitude that the Armenians had it coming. No sorry, no regret, no shame.
I have good reason to trust what the old Armenian said about Turkish compassion. Indeed, Islam distorts man’s heart in a most profound way.
The only country that really needs to acknowledge the Armenian genocide is Turkey herself. Until that happens, Turkey and the Turks will remain in denial, and no reconciliation can take place. Somehow I don't see this happening until there are no more Mohammedans.
Nevertheless, considering how overwhelming the evidence is, I am disgusted by the countries (USA, UK, Ireland, Sweden, Norway...) that are not on this list. The list is not an exhaustive one, though, so I may be maligning some countries. Does anyone know if there is a complete list, and where it can be found?
Oops! Ignore Sweden on my list of non-signers! Obviously, it shouldn't be there!
It is way passed time to learn the truth about history. We'll never survive short of knowing the truth on all fronts, and issues. This truth seems to be nearly 100 years too late. What good can come from with holding the truth?
And how many other truths are hidden from us?
"Yes, terrible things happened during WW1. But my ancestors were not worse than yours. We should have a standard for meaning of genocide. If this is a genocide, than we should start talking about Native American genocide, Algerian genocide by France, Circassian genocide by Russia."
The poster above, "sonsuz," is -- I gather -- a liberal, secular Turk, but one who feels keenly offended by discussion of the mass-murder, by Turks and Kurds, of Armenians starting in 1915, which is why she ("sonsuz" is a female name in Turkish) carefully mentions "terrible things happened during WW1." Would she be satisfied, or think anyone should be satisfied, with the German who said, complacently, as if that were enough, "yes, terrible things happened during World War II, as in all wars." In fact, she can find something like that in the last few pareagraphs of a short story by Nabokov -- "Conversation Piece 1945" where some society women in Boston entertain the narrator's namesake, who is an apologist for the Germans.
And if "sonsuz" does not know about the massacre of Armenians earlier, in the period 1894-96, when more than 100,000 were killed, a period which was most defniitely not during World War I or any other war but coldbloddedly in peacetime -- she should find out. She should find out what, for example, the poet laureat of William Watson wrote in memory of the Armenians murdered during this period. She should ask herself why it was that many not reactionaries, but the most liberal people in the West, such as Professor Miliukov in Russia, took as their war aim the seizing of Constantinople (in 1914, Consetaninople was 50% non-Muslim, while today the non-Muslim population is about 1% -- how did this decline occur, and why?). She should ask herself about the massacre of the Maronites in Damascus in 1860, when Damascus was under Turkish control.
I have suggested that those whoi are Turkish and secular should not feel that they have anything here to defend or to resent, any more than Germans who were anti-Nazi should or would resent those who speak of the crimes of "Germans" but really mean "Germans who went along with what the Nazi state encouraged, promoted, required."
It was not the Turks alone who killed Armenians, but other Muslims -- Kurds --and it is painful to see cities once largely Armenian -- such as Diyarbakir -- described blandly in news reports as "Kurdish" cities, with no hint of what was before. And in the Syrian desert, Armenian women and children, trying to make it to co-religionists in Beirut (for then the Christians, the Maronites, were still powerful) and Haleb (Aleppo), were sometimes set upon by still a third group of Muslims -- Arab marauders who helped themselves to Armenian women and children, so many of whom were completely helpless to resist.
The mass-murdering of Armenians was propmted by Islam, not by anything else, and would not have occurred had the Turks, and Kurds, not been Muslim. For those Turks who constitute the class of beneficiaries of Kemalism, who have enjoyed a certain mental freedom and an atmosphere now being taken away, bit by bit, by Erodgan and the sly functionaries of his party, have no need to deny what went on in 1894-96 and then, on a much larger scale, starting in 1915. That was Turks and Kurds on Islam. But Kemal Pasha, and those who followed him, were trying to do what they could to create a different Turkey, a different Turk, and a different, even replacement, theology. Such people are the ones who should feel least affected, and perhaps should even publicly admit to the events that Erdogan and company are trying to bully others to shut up about: put the blame where it belongs, on Islam.
As always, Marisol, good reporting! Here is the first real brick in the wall to be erected between civilization and the jungle. Genocide is the correct term for it - even truer than "mass murder". Let us hope that awareness will grow as to what those people who follow a magic book they think are the living and perfect and unchangeable words of God, which words mandate that cold blooded murder be done in this God's name, are really sworn to do: Namely, commit genocide against the entire world which refuses to worship a mere physical book as if it were God Himself. We must say no to murderous idolatry.
Thomas
thank you very much for that small piece of testimony, related to you by Armenian survivors of the genocide.
I have copied and kept it. Curiously, the words of that old Armenian man, which obviously made so strong an impression upon you - "my friend, there is no place for pity in the Turkish heart " - remind me of something that another poster here, one Mark Goldberg, was told about Islam by - of all things - a Tibetan monk.
As Mark recalled it, here at jihadwatch, in 2006:
..."'What do you think of the problems between the moslems and the jews," I asked... I'd never heard this guy ever make a negative comment about other religions, although he was quite the shapeshifter in dealing with all manner of subjects.
"He smiled at me...he gave me a slightly forgiving smile. The kind the nurse gives you when she walks out of the Intensive care room of your loved one, and whispers... "The doctors are working very hard"
"He said softly, but succinctly- " Islam is a devil's religion"."
Thank you DDA,
The two stories merge into each other seamlessly. It is striking that this image of Islam (devil's religion) was expressed by a Tibetan Monk. Dalay Lama could learn something from the man.