Genocide Label for WWI-Era Killings Has House Support

[RadioPatrol]

WTF is this all about ?

White House And Turkey Fight Bill On Armenia
Genocide Label for WWI-Era Killings Has House Support

By Glenn Kessler
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, October 10, 2007; Page A01

A proposed House resolution that would label as "genocide" the deaths of Armenians more than 90 years ago during the Ottoman Empire has won the support of a majority of House members, unleashing a lobbying blitz by the Bush administration and other opponents who say it would greatly harm relations with Turkey, a key ally in the Iraq war.

All eight living former secretaries of state have signed a joint letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) warning that the nonbinding resolution "would endanger our national security interests." Three former defense secretaries, in their own letter, said Turkey probably would cut off U.S. access to a critical air base. The government of Turkey is spending more than $300,000 a month on communications specialists and high-powered lobbyists, including former congressman Bob Livingston, to defeat the initiative.

Pelosi, whose congressional district has a large Armenian population, has brushed aside such concerns and said she supports bringing the resolution, for the first time, to a full vote in the House, where more than half of the members have signed on as co-sponsors. The House Foreign Affairs Committee, which has passed such a resolution before, is set to vote on it today.

House Resolution 106, officially the Affirmation of the United States Record on the Armenian Genocide, has been pushed doggedly by a congressman whose Southern California district contains the largest concentration of Armenian Americans in the country. Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D) won his seat in 2000 after his Republican predecessor was sandbagged when then-House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert reneged on a pledge and pulled the bill from the floor after a last-minute plea from President Bill Clinton.

Never mind, pandering to her constituents, no matter what the damage to our relations with Allies

 

[RadioPatrol]

Hmm ......... Molsems killing Christians

The status of the Ottoman Armenians



Under the millet system of Ottoman law, Armenians (as dhimmis, along with Greeks, Jews and other ethnic and religious minorities) were subject to laws different from those applied to Muslims.[8] They had separate legal courts, although disputes involving a Muslim fell under sharia-based law. Armenians were exempt from serving in the military and were instead made to pay an exemption tax, the jizya; their testimony in Islamic courts was inadmissible against Muslims; they were not allowed to bear arms, and they had to pay a higher tax,[9] despite being one of the largest minorities in the Ottoman Empire.[10]

In 1914, there were an estimated two million Armenians in the Ottoman Empire.[11] While the Armenian population in Eastern Anatolia was large and clustered, there were many Armenians in the western part of the Ottoman Empire,[12] particularly in and around Constantinople. It was nearly two decades earlier, though, that the first massacres against Armenians in Anatolia had started; The New York Times quoted a Turkish embassy gazette in 1896 that stated: "It wasn't the Porte that caused the massacres in Armenia, but the Christian propaganda in Asia Minor where their cry, "Down with Islam," initiated the war of the crescent against the cross." [13]

Abdul Hamid II's reign, 1876-1909

For more details on this topic, see Hamidian massacres, Adana massacre.

Sultan Abdul Hamid II suspended the constitution early in his reign, assuming dictatorial powers. As the Ottoman Empire declined, Armenian political resistance stiffened, resulting in several massacres of Armenians throughout Abdul Hamid's reign.[14][15] By the last years of the 19th century, after a series of massacres in 1894 and 1895, the New York Times noted an apparent "policy of extermination directed against the Christians of Asia Minor".[16]

In 1908, the Ottoman Empire came under the control of the Young Turks, a secular movement aiming to restore constitutional and parliamentary rule.[17] The movement was welcomed by religious minorities throughout the Empire. In 1909, as the authority of the nascent Young Turk government splintered, Abdul Hamid II briefly regained his sultanate with a populist appeal to Islamism. 30,000 Armenians perished in the subsequent Adana Massacre.[15] When two U.S.-born missionaries were killed in the 1909 massacres, Ottoman authorities attributed the killings to "Armenians" who killed them as they "were helping to put out a fire in the house of a Turkish widow."[18] This report was later contradicted by an American priest who witnessed the killings, who suggested that the missionaries were killed by "Moslems".[19]
Young Turk leadership

For more details on this topic, see Young Turk Revolution, Dissolution of the Ottoman Empire

The Young Turk leadership recovered from the Sultan's 1909 countercoup. By this time, however, the Young Turk revolutionaries were already hardened in their distrust and resentment of Ottoman Christians. According to Erik Jan Zürcher of the University of Leiden,

Living in the urban centers of the southern Balkans made this generation acutely aware of the increasing gap between the Christian bourgeoisie on the one hand and the Muslim middle class on the other. This gap was evident in education, with superior schools being established both by the non-Muslim communities themselves and by European missionary organizations… The gap was also increasingly evident in the economy… The sons of the Muslim middle class… increasingly found their place in the state bureaucracy (which grew thirtyfold in the Nineteenth Century) and the officer corps of the armed forces. As such, they were in a paradoxical situation: they represented the authority and prestige of the state, but at the same time they lived in relative poverty, wages often being in arrears for months if not years…

Young Turk memoirs show us very clearly how aware they were of the growing gap between Muslims and non-Muslims. Born in the traditional Muslim quarters they gazed in awe at the villas the Greek and Armenian industrialists built along newly laid-out avenues with tramways and streetlights. The contrast defined their loyalties… The Young Turks developed a fierce Ottoman-Muslim nationalism, which defined the “other” very much in religious terms… [T]he Muslim – Non-Muslim divide would completely dominate politics and lead to the tragedies of the expulsion of Muslims from the Balkans and Greek-Orthodox from Anatolia, as well as to the wholesale slaughter of the Ottoman Armenians.[17]

 

[ImnoMensa]

Whats this all about??

Its about Nancy Pelosi and her cohorts hurting the Bush Administration by hurting the war effort again. Same old same old.

 

[dustin]

Nancy Pelosi's War

I want to go back to Friday afternoon. This is a story about the situation in Turkey. "Kurdish separatist rebels said on Friday they were crossing back into Turkey to target politicians and police after Ankara said it was preparing to attack them in the mountains of northern Iraq. As regional tensions rose, Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan cautioned that relations between Ankara and Washington were in danger over a U.S. congressional resolution branding as genocide massacres of Armenians by Ottoman Turks in 1915," nearly 100 years ago. "Washington harbours growing concerns about the possibility of a major Turkish military incursion to crush Kurdish rebels seeking a homeland in eastern Turkey. U.S. officials fear such an action could destabilise a relatively peaceful area of Iraq." Now, why is any of this happening? This is happening because the Democrats -- who are enable or who don't have the guts to actually vote to de-fund the war in Iraq -- are doing a sideshow here of bringing up a resolution that's already been passed and already been signed twice in this country, condemning Turkey for the genocide of the Armenians in 1915.

 

[ImnoMensa]

Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid and the Democratic traitors they lead have been waging a war against America and the Bush Administration since 2000.

Yes : A war against America. They have lent aid and comfort to our enemies, They have leaked sensitive information. They have fought laws that would enable the US to trap and gain information against terrorists. They have tried their damndest to defeat morale in the military. They have attacked military leaders. They have accused men in the armed services of cold blooded murder.

I dont have to call them traitors and saboteurs , someone else already did.
______________________________________________________________________
Congressmen who willfully take actions during wartime that damage morale, and undermine the military are saboteurs and should be arrested, exiled or hanged."

~ President Abraham Lincoln