From Crosses to Bulls’ Eyes: The Destruction of the Armenian Khachkars

While the rest of the world has been preoccupied with the death of Milosevich, another government no less destructive than that of Slobo has been quietly and shamelessly busy in eliminating the cultural traces of Armenians from the lands they came to occupy due to the rapproachment of the Soviet government with that of Ataturk’s Turkey. The land in question is Nakhijevan, now under Azeri occupation, and the artefacts are the centuries old Armenian Christian cross-stones which represent elaborate and beautiful carvings of crosses on rocks and stones going back centuries. Some time ago a number of representatives of the Armenian Church in Tehran had videotaped the destruction of the khachkars, as they are known in Armenian, and made it available here, and now the Foreign Ministry of Armenia has released some photos documenting the aftermath of the destruction effectively turning the grounds of those artefacts into a shooting range, I am sure where the Azeri Turks will learn how to shoot Armenian Christians because it does not make sense to have built the shooting range in the first place.

Noble People and Genocide

Did you know that noble people do not commit genocide? This is the logic behind the latest attempts of the apologists of the Turkish state, which has been needless to say founded on the corpses of countless innnocent victims of genocide and mass murder, to absolve the inheritor of the Ottoman Empire of any and every crime ascribing the impossibility to commit such crimes to silly mythologizing and impervious national identity. What makes the crime of crimes so abominable and evil so “banal”, to quote Hannah Arendt, is not to be found in an act wrought by a group of known criminals, who find their reward and their refuge in crimes petty or large, but the fact that a genocide can be commited by a noble people for supposedly noble aims.

Turkish Star Wars

Not coming to a movie theater near you is the Turkish Star Wars. I just came across some promo material really hilarious film clips made in Turkey and affectionately known as the Turkish Star Wars with the original Star Wars score and all. The Turksih Star Wars are like the Turkish Delight confections only on celluloid. This would be the version of the Star Wars if Turkey was ever to take over the world! George Lucas probably would not be directing it since he is Greek, or maybe would have changed his last name to Lucasoglu to make the film. Missing is Natalie Portman, although I assume the blonde beauty in the clip is supposed to be her Turkish counterpart. Y’all Star Wars fans, enjoy.

Link and Link

Guilty as Armenian

A Baku, Azerbaijan court has convicted and sentenced a newspaper editor to an one year prison term for accusing the Baku State University rector, the equivalent of a university president, of being an ethnic Armenian. The guy was sentenced to prison not because he was racist or anything, but because he had accused the rector of being an Armenian, and being Armenian is a crime you see in Azerbaijan, and equal to a curse word.

Adygozalov was immediately taken into custody after the verdict was read in Nizami District Court on February 23. The editor was convicted in connection with a September 15 article headlined “Rector-Armenian,” which accused the rector of Baku State University, Abel Magarramov, of being an ethnic Armenian and improperly using university funds to support the Armenian diaspora, according to the Baku newspaper Zerkalo. Magarramov won a seat in parliament in November 2005. Ascribing Armenian heritage to someone is considered a slur in Azerbaijan.

Actually not long ago the president of the Van Tniversity in Turkey was arrested on trumped up charges and to justify his arrest a Turkish MP had accused the said president of being an Armenian. There you have it!

Link and Link 

Freddy vs. Safarov

Via Blogian. I just discovered some cartoons depicting the cowardly murderer Ramil Safarov who murdered his Armenian counterpart while the latter was asleep and decapitated him. The two were attending a NATO organized language training school in Budapest. I have no idea what the accompanying article says, since I am not a Hungarian (any out there who can transalate this for me I would greatly appreciate) but the cartoons (and again cartoons, what the hades is happening to this world, cartoons are taking over the world) tell it all. For more info on the heinous murder here.

Reverse Evolution? This is Bloody Weird

Via SciScoop. World Science writes on a bizzare case of a Turkish family that has experinced something really bizzare:

An editor of a noted scientific journal says he has discovered a genetic defect that seems to set back the clock on human evolution by more than a million years. Its victims walk on all fours and mouth a primitive language, the scientist reported. He added that the syndrome may literally undo eons of evolution, and thus reflect with some accuracy what our ape-like ancestors were like.

[...]

“The patients had a rather primitive language… they spoke to each other using their own language, using only a few hundred words” which the parents could partly understand, Tan wrote. “They were mentally retarded; they could not count from one to ten. They were not aware of time and space. For instance, they did not know where they live (which country, which village, which city). They were unaware of year, season, day, and time. Otherwise, they had quite strong legs and arms.” “The sitting posture was rather similar to an ape,” Tan added. “They could not hold their heads upright; the heads were flexed forward with their skulls. They could not raise their heads to look forward. This head posture with flexed skull was rather similar to the head posture of our closest relatives, like chimpanzees.”

There is even a video. And here is a link to an article published in London School of Economics’ Centre for Philosophy of Natural and Social Science’s discussion papers section detailing the process. I don’t think this is a prank. Here is a follow up link. A PDF report by UK scientists.

Honoring a Mass Murderer - Turkish Style

O tempora, o mores! Armenia Now, and English language Armenian online weekly has an article detailing the extraordinary lengths some Tutkish leaders are going to honor a mass murderer whose maniacal obsession with the collective Turkish self identity cost the near annihilation of the Armenians and other Christian groups in the Middle East. The man-iac in question is of course Talaat Pasha, the mastermind of the genocide of the Armenians in 1915. Talaat was gunned down some 85 years ago in the heart of Berlin by an Armenian Soghomon Tehlirian, whose family was wiped out by the Talaat henchmen during the Yeghern, and whose case grabbed international headlines when he was acquitted of charges of murdering Talaat.

Now a group called “Project 2006″ led by the former president of the Turkish “unrecognized” Cyprus, plans to organize actions to rehabilitate this murderer in Germany and use scare tactics in Europe to stop defaming the good name of the Turks.

… Turkey intends to implement anti-Armenian actions as part of the special “Big Project-2006”. Special structures have been set up at the state level for its consistent realization. For instance, a Consultative Department led by the former president of the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus Rauf Denktash was established. It is supposed to organize a Talaat-pasha campaign. In a meeting in Istanbul on January 18 the Department in its turn elected an executive committee, which has already got down to the immediate preparations for a whole series of events timed to the 85th anniversary of the action of retribution. Part of these events will be held in Berlin on March 15-19. Some idea of the contents and orientation of these events can be formed from the appeals of the Consultative Department to the Bundestag (German Parliament) and compatriots living abroad. The appeal to Berlin contains a demand to “revoke the decision about the massacre of Armenians (the matter concerns the resolution adopted on June 16, 2005), not to publish in textbooks the lie about the massacre of Armenians”, as well as “stop the implantation of hatred towards Turks living in Germany.” It is said in the appeal to compatriots that “Big Project – 2006” sets itself the task of stirring a 70-million-strong Turkish nation, as well as four million Turks in Europe and a million Turks in the United States, against lies and contains a promise that “the West will soon see their strength”. These Turks must demand from the governments of European countries and instances of the European Union that they should invalidate all resolutions recognizing the Armenian Genocide. “The Western countries must drop unfair accusations of Turks, otherwise their capitals will be in flames as it was with Paris.” The appeal concludes with a brazen threat to the European countries and their peoples: “Meddling in the internal life of Turkey, you are dragging Europe into an abyss of internal discords.”

I am sure the Europeans like this kind of threats. No further comments. To the full article here.

Catholic priest murdered in Turkey

Reuters is reporting that a Roman Catholic priest has been shot dead inside his parish in the Black Sea port city of Trabzon.

An Italian Roman Catholic priest was shot dead in his church in the Turkish Black Sea city of Trabzon on Sunday, police said. They gave no more details, but CNN Turk television said police were looking for a young man aged about 17 years old seen fleeing the scene. CNN Turk showed a small crowd of onlookers near the Santa Maria church where the priest was killed. The state Anatolian news agency identified the dead man as Andrea Santaro, aged 60. Other Turkish media said he had been in Turkey about five years.

What I don’t understand is the following line from the report:

Violent attacks on Christian clergy are virtually unheard of in Turkey, which takes pride in its history as a meeting place of different cultures and religions.

Are these people out of their mind? Tolerance in Turkey with over 3 mln Christians massacred in the 20-th century alone! To the full Reuters report here.

New charges against Agos

BIA News Center is reporting that new charges have been brought against the publishers of the Armenian Turkish newspaper Agos the editor of which, Hrant Dink, was convicted by an Istanbul court for “insulting Turkishness” and given a six months suspended jail term only recently. This time, according to the report, Dink and others have been charged with an attempt to influence the judiciary through their columns when they opined on the attempt to shut down an academic conference that was to be held in Istanbul last year dealing with the Armenian Genocide. To go to the BIA report please click here.

Darfur - the genocide continues

As the news of more and more violence continues to pour in from Darfur the inaction in the face of it is even more appalling than before. And if one is to believe the latest report in the US News and World Report it may well be too little to late when or rather if the world powers finally start some sort of mission to halt the indiscriminate violence.

Until a couple of weeks ago, the town of Mershing was something of an oasis amid South Darfur’s nightmare landscape of village burning, looting, rape, and widespread killing. … Now, Mershing is described as a ghost town. Its homes and eight large refugee camps emptied in a panic as residents and aid workers fled the government-backed Janjaweed militiamen on horseback and camels who attacked and looted–retaliation against civilians for a rebel assault two weeks earlier that killed six government police officers. Mershing’s residents got no protection from local police or from African Union peacekeepers about 40 miles away, according to aid workers and U.N. officials. Some have taken refuge in other towns, but many are living in the open rocky scrublands, with little food or water, no security, and their fates unknown.

The full US News’ report can be accessed here.

Turkey’s Jews and Americans

The Associated Press reports about the most expensive Turkish film ever made and which, of course, tells how “American soldiers in Iraq crash a wedding and pump a little boy full of lead in front of his mother.They kill dozens of innocent people with random machine gun fire, shoot the groom in the head, and drag those left alive toAbu Ghraib prison - where a Jewish doctor cuts out their organs, which he sells to rich people in New York, London and Tel Aviv.” I wonder if the Assembly of the Turkish American Associations is going to initiate a letter writing campaign to protest the impugning the good name of Americans as they did when in an episode of the hit drama 24 there was a Turkish terrorist, or when The West Wing had an episode about the Turkish Islamist party AKP taking over the country and instituting Islamic law whereby a woman was beheaded for having premarital sex with his fiancee. Or better yet, will PM Erdogan himself go to the film director and ask him to recut the movie as when he went to the offices of the NY Times to meet the publisher and have him rescind his decision to allow his journalists to write articles about the Armenian Genocide without using the Turkish denialist position. I really do not think so for reasons too numerous to be listed.

The movie, which reportedly cost some $10 million, is the latest in a new genre of popular culture that demonizes the United States. It comes on the heels of a novel called “Metal Storm” about a war between Turkey and the U.S., which has been a best seller for months. One recent opinion poll revealed the depth of the hostility in Turkey toward Americans: 53 percent of Turks who responded to the 2005 Pew Global Attitudes survey associated Americans with the word “rude”; 70 percent with “violent”; 68 percent with “greedy”; and 57 percent with “immoral.” Advance tickets are already selling out across Turkey for the film, which has dialogue in Turkish, Arabic, Kurdish and English. [...] “The scenario is great,” Istanbul Mayor Kadir Topbas told The Associated Press after the film was shown at a posh opening gala Tuesday night. “It was very successful.” (more…)

Why, I am sure it was. Oh, did I tell you it’s going to open in Kyrgyzstan really soon?