Famous British historian and “The Independent” correspondent Robert Fisk in his last article touched upon the book “The Thirty-Year Genocide” by Jewish historian Benny Morris. This work covers genocides committed by the Turks. According to Moris, it took 9 long years to complete the book. The co-author of the book is another Jewish historian Dror Ze’evi.
“The Thirty-Year Genocide” tells about the direct participation of Ataturk in the killing of 2.5 million Christians. “Religions indeed push people to extreme violence,” Morris writes.
“The Thirty-Year Genocide” was published by Harvard University Press in April 2019.
Fisk, in particular, writes: “Having written about the genocide of the Armenians for 35 years, I have doubts that the actual call for “jihad” in the Turkish Ottoman empire unleashed at the start of the First World War was as ferocious as Morris makes it out to be. Muftis were indeed told they were in a holy war against Christians – but not against German Christians, Austro-Hungarian Christians, neutral Christians or allies of the Central Powers (Bulgaria, for example).
Many Muslim worshippers, sitting on the carpets of mosque floors, must have shaken their heads in puzzlement at these caveats. Well, one way was to notice the German officers training the Ottoman army, the German diplomats and businessmen who witnessed the genocide of the Armenians with their own eyes, and wrote home about it. Hitler asked his generals who now remembered the Armenians just before invading Poland in 1939.
But again and again, I was brought up short by the sheer, terrible, shocking accounts of violence in Morris’s and Zeevi’s work “:
Fisk also cites testimonies of several Armenian and foreign officials, as well as missionaries proving that Turkey has developed and systematically carried out genocides. As one American missionary said back in the days, the Turks had “become drunk with blood and rapine, and plunder and power, and he [the missionary] will be a different man from what he was before the atrocities.”
westernarmeniatv.com
