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Bernard Lewis's reputation is richly deserved, but everyone has blind spots. Several appear in an admiring piece by Peter Waldman in the Wall Street Journal entitled "A Historian’s Take on Islam Steers U.S. in Terrorism Fight: Bernard Lewis’s Blueprint — Sowing Arab Democracy — Is Facing a Test in Iraq." (Thanks to Bassam Madany.) In it is this paragraph:
Mr. Lewis is also close to government circles in Israel and Turkey—non-Arab lands he describes as the only successful modern states in the region. He warmly praises Kemal Attaturk, who made Turkey a secular republic after World War I by suppressing Islam. (He has also said the Ottoman Turks’ killing of up to 1.5 million Armenians in 1915 wasn’t genocide but the brutal byproduct of war. It was a stance for which a French court convicted Mr. Lewis in 1995 under France’s Holocaust-denial statute, imposing a token penalty.) Israeli experts say Mr. Lewis’s contacts with Turkish generals and politicians helped cement Israeli-Turkish military ties in the 1990s.
Not genocide, eh? It was not only genocide; it was jihad. I examine the historical record in Onward Muslim Soldiers. In 1894, long before World War I, the Ottoman government began killing Armenians. According to the Chief Dragoman (Turkish interpreter) of the British embassy, when the Turks initiated the first wave of the Armenian genocide in 1894, they were "guided in their general action by the prescriptions of the Sheri [Sharia] Law. That law prescribes that if the 'rayah' [dhimmi] Christian attempts, by having recourse to foreign powers, to overstep the limits of privileges allowed them by their Mussulman [Muslim] masters, and free themselves from their bondage, their lives and property are to be forfeited, and are at the mercy of the Mussulmans. To the Turkish mind the Armenians had tried to overstep those limits by appealing to foreign powers, especially England. They therefore considered it their religious duty and a righteous thing to destroy and seize the lives and properties of the Armenians." (Vahakn Dadrian, The History of the Armenian Genocide, Berghahn Books, 1995. P. 147.)
The New York Times reported it in 1915: "Both Armenians and Greeks, the two native Christian races of Turkey, are being systematically uprooted from their homes en masse and driven forth summarily to distant provinces, where they are scattered in small groups among Turkish Villages and given the choice between immediate acceptance of Islam or death by the sword or starvation." ("Turks are Evicting Native Christians," New York Times, July 11, 1915.)
Over a million Armenians were killed -- mostly noncombatants.
The French were right to convict Lewis.
Posted by Robert at February 4, 2004 8:42 AM
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For once we can agree with the French about their holocaust denying conviction of Orientalist, Bernard Lewis, whom we are told is married to a Turkish woman. Having recently finished Alan Palmer's book on "The Decline and Fall of the Ottomon Empire," there is plenty of evidence that corrupt Sultan Abdulhamid played to the sentiments of anti-westernizing islamist Turks and supported the heinous acts against both Greek and Armenian vilyalets. American Christian missionaries were the first to bring news of these atrocities to the attention of those in the west, including famed abolitionist, Harriet Beecher Stowe in the US in the waning days of her life.
When the Armenian holocaust occured in 1915, US Ambassador to Turkey, Henry Morgenthau, Sr. raised an enormous outcry against it in the American press. A role that his son, Henry Morgenthau Jr., US Treasury Secretary during World War II would ironically play in endeavoring to force the Roosevelt administration to form the War Refugee Board to save a pittance of European Jews ( less than 200,000) during the Shoah.
I found this excerpt in Yossi Klein Halevi's book and spiritual jouney entitled "At the Entrance of the Garden of Eden," regarding his discussions with Armenian priests and historians in Jerusalem during the period of national Holocaust Day for Armenians, April 24th.
"The genocide began in 1915. The Muslim Turks, who despised their industrious Armenian Christian minority and feared its secessionist impulses, tested techniques the Nazis would later perfect: state-organzied mass deportations; secret coordination among the army, the police, and the judiciary; and a campaign of deception to convince the victims that deportation was merely resettlement. Entire towns were emptied within days or even hours, their residents marched into the desert, where they died of starvation and thirst or were massacred by bands of convicts released for that purpose. horsehoes were nailed to the feet of Armenian prisoners; some Armenians were nailed to boards to simulate the crucifixion. A German Red Cross representative in Turkey, Armin Wegner, described the death-march of the Armenian nation: "Children wept themselves to death, mend dashed themselves against rocks, mothers threw their babies into brooks, women with child flung themselves, singing, into the Euphrates. They died all ther deaths of the earth, the deaths of all ages."
p. 159
The Nazis only perfected what the Turks began!
Posted by: jihan at February 4, 2004 3:19 PM
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