The Inside Assyria Discussion Forum #5

=> Revisiting The Assyrians Killed in Turkey

Revisiting The Assyrians Killed in Turkey

Posted by pancho (Guest) - Thursday, February 15 2007, 17:37:41 (CET) from 189.162.10.116 - dsl-189-162-10-116.prod-infinitum.com.mx Mexico - Windows XP - Internet Explorer Website: Website title:

Revisiting The Assyrians Killed In Turkey. No matter how many times one says it, any attempt to be accurate and fair, to condemn all violence equally, is met with scorn and cries that “you want Assyrians killed”, or, “you are a Turk”. But we know these tactics well by now…for they are no different from what American evangelicals do whenever you criticize the handling and even the need for this war on Iraq. It’s just a way of getting you to feel defensive and off their case, but we can safely ignore it and go on to the real issue. Before that though let’s step back and take a look at how you make human beans into nationals and sects and religions. Give me any devout Assyrian adult, when he was a kid, and I’ll make a Turk or Chinaman out of him instead…give me a Muslim as a child and I’ll make a Buddhist adult out of her…give me a Japanese child and I’ll raise it to believe it was always meant to be a fierce German junker…give me a young girl and I’ll raise her to believe she can be a scientist…or believe that she can never be because it’s “unfeminine”…we adults, especially the unscrupulous among us, make these babies into the battling sects, hateful enemies and nationals they grow into. So let’s stop talking as if the adults we hate or we, who learned to hate them, chose to be what we are when we were three years old, without being raised so by those whom we loved and trusted and who should have respected our humanity more than to simply pass on their prejudices, got the same way, onto us, for which everyone hates everyone else…this is nothing more than to follow in the footsteps of the Jewish god who decided to wipe out all the humans that he created because he didn’t like they way he made them…omnipotent and incompetent workman that he was. Would we teach a child to behave this way when it fails…yet we must worship a god such as this? For us to believe that the Ottoman Turks were out to wipe out all Assyrians we’d have to have seen such behavior play out in the past and heard it expounded as a national policy well before the War. On the contrary, Turkey was the only nation in the history of the world to ever allow all three religions the chance and legal right to live together…that this led at times to violence and disruption between them is far less surprising than what went on in Christian countries between Christians…this is not to excuse anything…only to point to a fact you’d think we’d still remember…since we will never benefit like that again, certainly not with American help, to have that much autonomy over our own community as we had among the Turks. But the slaughter of those Assyrians did take place…so how to account for it? If we’ll recall that after the attack of 9/11…the first attack on American soil of such magnitude…by Muslim fanatics and soldiers, not a one of whom was Iraqi, the United States felt perfectly justified in going to war with Iraq and all of Islam anyway, leaving Saudi Arabia alone out of it, as the place where our president’s family does much of its business…even though 15 of the 19 attackers were Saudis. Was this fair, or just…was it warranted? Yet we give, as an excuse, that we would not wait until Iraq, or any other Muslim nation “decided it was going to attack us next”, but we would attack Iraq and any other nation we felt might attack us someday…as a “preventative measure” with a “pre-emptive strike” for what MIGHT happen someday…and all those innocent Muslims caught up in our modern war machinery would just have to suffer the consequences…”sorry about that”. The Turks knew that France, England and The United States were especially greedy for their oil fields. Often times in European newspapers articles appeared describing Turkey as the “sick old man of Europe”…in other words, ripe for the fall…all that was needed was a push . At the thought that foreign Christians might attack Turkey the Armenians within began gathering arms and even seized the central Bank Of Istanbul, threatening to blow it up…and a band of Assyrians under British pay were attacking their garrisons. Should the Ottomans, facing a real war which indeed came and devastated them, with signs of an arms build-up and acts of armed rebellion beginning by their Christian minority(of whichever nationality, as we lump all nationals of Islam under the name “Muslims”, without any distinctions)…should the Turks have behaved any differently than the United States allowed itself to do when it felt threatened? Should the Turks have taken the time to examine who was and who was not a threat among their Christian population or should they have done as the United States did when it declared war and a “Crusade” against all Muslims…by treating all Christians in their lands as one…and seeking to get rid of them all? Remembering that this state of panic was not of their own choosing but that up till then the Millat System had been their preference, but came about rather as a result of the oft-stated intention of the European nations to kill that “old man” and steal his oil? To seek to understand isn’t to excuse…it is to be human…to use ones mind as it was meant by god to be used…as a vehicle and organ of thoughtful consideration and not as a knee, jerking. And since we don’t bother to differentiate between good and bad Muslims, why should the Turks have taken the time to make such distinctions among Christians?…with so many thousands of Christians in their country…Christians who’d shown in the past a tendency to support their co-religionists even to the point of betraying their neighbors and fellow-citizens? And so the Turks went crazy…crazy with fear and panic, especially as they began to lose. But who knows of a Christian king or president who practices Christian charity in his dealings with other nations…even other Christian nations? Especially in time of war Christian nations have shown themselves perfectly capable of committing every atrocity on their co-religionists, let alone on those of other religions, as Turks committed against Muslim and Christian. Why, therefore, would we expect a Muslim king or president or Sultan to deal with other countries, even Muslim ones, according to Muslim precepts and brotherhood? Clearly no nation can yet afford to do so. It was Europeans who brought the world Two World Wars…not Islam. Millions of Christians were killed by Christians and the deliberate horrors and systematic murders of the Nazi camps have never been matched for the sheer efficiency and business-like planning and premeditation that went into them…and the Germans were Christians all…not a Muslim among them. We may like to think that they behaved in a very un-Christian way…but then why or how are we so certain that the Muslims behave in purely Muslim ways when they commit such crimes? And yet, even with the Koran in front of us, explained by all manner of scholars, both Muslim and Christian, we persist in miss-reading the Koran to prove this point we seem fixated on; that Islam is centered around killing Christians and other acts of violence. Didn’t we just finish murdering millions of people over our misinterpretation of their religion…and are we starting down that same path now with Islam? Could there possibly be something wrong with US, instead of everyone else? Isn’t it the spoiled Boy who shouts, “Mommy Mommy they hit me”…without once explaining that he hit them first? Even if, for the sake of argument, we were to grant that…and that Christianity is quite the opposite…how then do we explain why so many Christians so consistently get their own religion wrong…? And given the number of wars in the last 300 years fought between Christians and started by Christians…a time when I doubt we could find anything to equal it in Muslim records, how is it we still claim this religion is one of love and goodness…if it can’t make its followers live by its rules, while the other is of violence? The answer is, simply, as Machiavelli said…that as the world is made today, nations cannot afford to deal with each other in Christian terms…and neither can Muslim nations use the same guidelines…and apparently, neither can Nestorians and Monophysites and the people of Mar Bawi. The Ottomans were desperate to move all Christians away from their borders and into the far reaches of their country, for obvious reasons…they feared lest border villages give aid and comfort to the enemy. The United States felt the same way at the outbreak of the Second World War when it locked up its Japanese, German and Italian citizens. It’s true we didn’t march them to death and shoot stragglers and the weak…but we’re comparing the United States to TURKEY. But less than 40 years before 1915, the American government rounded up one of the last tribes of Native Americans, the indigenous people whose land they had stolen, and marched them, in the freezing cold of a Dakota winter with no warm clothing or food, to their death through cold, disease and starvation at Wounded Knee…also shooting stragglers. So it isn’t so rare for a nation to commit unspeakable acts of barbarism, even a Christian “modern” nation, “Under God”. The puzzling thing is that you’d think we humans would redouble our efforts to understand where we went wrong…to learn better ways to teach our religions to our children…to make sure we don’t unknowingly or deliberately fill them with our own hatreds and attributed to a God…a “God of Love” no less, which culminated in the last wars we suffered from and made others suffer in…but instead we have a hard core of Christians, as there is a hard core of Muslims and Jews too, who seem to only want to revisit those days…to have one more war, one more chance to “win”…and I fear it’s the clergy of each that wants this most…because if there should ever be real peace and brotherhood among humans…they would be out of work…or at least that is their fear…the ones who see their work as a “job” for which they want security…one they wish to succeed at but feel they never will have the chance if their followers spend their days in the sunshine with their friends of all faiths and nations. And, finally…how do we reconcile the war in Iraq with Christian principles while also condemning Iraqis and Turks for defending themselves, when Iraq never made an aggressive move towards the United States? We’ve seen well over one million Iraqis murdered for no reason whatsoever except that they have oil and our president wants it. Yet who among us has bothered much about this atrocity…this crime against humanity? Especially when you consider that ten times the number of Assyrians, babies all, were killed by the United States military during Sanctions and war than were killed at Semele by the Iraqi military…which happened over 60 years ago while the slaughter in Iraq continues to this day. How do we reconcile this silence or ours…our supposed outrage and sorrow over one set of murdered Assyrians while feeling nothing of the kind for ten times that number, also murdered brutality? The answer I think is again that we do not weep for the Assyrian as much as we hate the Muslim…and in that there is no justice or honor…and no end. And what is truly upsetting is that there are those among us who see in the murder of Assyrians, by the right people; Muslims, their only “strategy” for winning the pity of those powerful enough to give them that country they want…if Issaiah won’t hurry up. ..or maybe as a way of hurrying him up. This “strategy” recalls another Hebrew custom of old…whenever the city was besieged by enemies the Hebrews would shut themselves up behind the walls and wait for the attacker to grow bored or suffer from hunger and disease. If rather the Hebrews began to suffer these things…and since they were no match for anyone…as a last desperate move the king would take his first-born son to the top of the walls where the besiegers in their camp could plainly see…and slit his own son’s throat as a way to show his God how desperate were his people…at the sight of so awful a thing and because people back then believed gods inhabited the area around their followers’ cities…the besiegers might be induced to pack up and go home because they feared the wrath of the Hebrew god, now that a child, a prince at that and therefore the most important child in the land, had been killed in human sacrifice…another custom they gave us…along with their Messiah and the need to murder him as well, if we would be “saved”. I wonder if we believe that we need more sacrificial victims for this god to finally be aroused in our favor. It’s a truly chilling thought. --------------------- - BACK TO INDEX - REPLY - QUOTE - EDIT - DELETE -

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