Category: Authors

DAYDREAMS ARE UNPRODUCTIVE
ONLY THE FACTS COUNT
Mahmut Esat Ozan

In this day and age of the INTERNET revolution, the web sites have
been swarming the computer screens. They are everywhere. It’s almost
impossible to ignore them. Most of these web-sites are designed to
fulfill a necessary and beneficial function. Others are truly the
epitome of the expression ‘junk mail,’ or the paradigm of the word
‘trash.’ Yet they proliferate uncontrollably. Some of them are very
conspicuous, to say the least. At times their graphics are bleeding
with discordant colors, almost always with gaudy hues. They seem to
scream at the browsers, daring them to disregard the challenging
messages cleverly hidden within the bowels of their enticing, but
deceptive verbiage.

GREEK SOUL, GREEK ACTION
One such web-site caught my attention recently. The following
message was displayed in large letters on the screen:

“HELLENES
The struggle for the liberation of the last enslaved Greek lands:
North Epirus-(Albania), North Macedonia, East Thrace-(Turkish Trakya),
Asia Minor-(Anatolia), North Cyprus-(TRNC) has started.
The brilliant progress of our Greek ancestors has to continue in
the same manner. A historical responsibility has passed on upon us.”
OUR GOAL IS GREAT HELLAS. OUR CENTER IS CONSTANTINOPLE.”

Following these outrageous statements, a Greek Military Evzone-like
cartoon character appears and walks towards the Turkish flag, which is
spread out on the ground, and begins to urinate on it. This disgusting
event repeats itself continuously, on a loop, every three or four
seconds, until one decides to change the web site, or turn off the
computer.
There have been other similar cases: In their typical fashion, even
the official members of the Greek government cannot help but use the
most pejorative words to describe their fellow diplomats, the Turks. It
is quite ironic that right after Turkey was admitted to the European
customs union, the Greek government’s official spokesman Telemahos
Hytiris used the most friendly words he could muster and said the
following: “The Hellenic government ‘dropped’ the veto without securing
any compromise by the Turkish government. At the same time, Hellas was
opening the door of civilized Europe for the BARBARIC MONGOLOIDS, the
Turks.”
Here’s another gem of a statement I was able to glean recently. It
said, “…many web sites were created by Turkish “students” throughout
the world. And in their amateurish ways, they try to present liberated
Thrace in Hellas as a place where Turks are oppressed. But what can we
expect from a MURDEROUS BUNCH, who have even ‘converted’ the genocide of
2.5 million poor Armenians, into a massacre of Muslims and Jews.”

WHERE DOES THIS HATRED COME FROM?
It is not a well-kept secret that Greeks and Turks did not get
along too well in the past. Of all the nationalities integrated under
the aegis of the Ottoman rule, the Greeks and to a certain degree the
Serbs were most resentful of not being independent. It is only natural
that the governed should resent their rulers and the Turks were their
rulers for 400 years, until the middle of the 19th century.
Turks were also victorious in a fairly recent war in 1919-1922, a
Greek invasion instigated by the then British Prime Minister Lloyd
George, and the First Lord of the British Admiralty Winston Churchill.
This senseless intrusion onto Turkish soil in Anatolia, and their
humiliating defeat at the hands of their former rulers, the Turks, could
be counted as the prime source of their frustration. This, of course,
led to the Greeks’ unbearable inferiority complex.
There was a period of relaxation of tensions on both sides. A
rapprochement of sorts was initiated by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk during the
early Thirties. This lull lasted until the end of the Second World
War. I remember during those feverish days of the war Turkish
government-owned cargo ships smuggled tons of wheat cut from their
meager supplies of food stuffs, maneuvering through the hazardous,
mine-infested waters of the Aegean Sea to reach Greece, so that their
neighbors would not starve. In the process Turks lost scores of their
own citizens and vessels.
This feeling of closeness and empathy toward one another slowly
dissipated. Through the demise of Ataturk, then of the elderly leader
of Greece, Eleftherios Venizelos, the short-lived détente between the
two nations was no more. Taking its place was now the Greek experiment
with international Communism, which ended in 1946 with the inauguration
of the Marshall Plan, and by the full Nato membership of Greece and
Turkey in 1952.
The Tri-partite treaty of 1959-60 among Great Britain, Greece, and
Turkey, granting the Turkish and Greek Cypriots an independent status,
followed by massacres, the Greek Army Colonels’ coup, then the Turkish
military intervention to save the Turkish nationals, the 24 year-old
stalemate continuing on the island of Cyprus have all contributed to the
present day state of affairs between the two neighbors.

A LASTING PEACE IS NOT YET AROUND THE CORNER
As long as the Greek-American lobby, the Greek Orthodox Church, and
the ethno-centric Greek organizations operating as propaganda machines
are around us, there will be no chance for the cessation of hostilities
emanating from their side, targeting continuously the interest of
Turkish people everywhere.
The website mentioned earlier, is but one of duzens of similar
sites spewing venom, Greek style, against anything Turkish, 24 hours a
day. Never mind the fact that Turkey is four times the size of Greece
and six times more populated than their country, the arrogance displayed
by the likes of Theodoros Pangalos in Greece and Glafkos Klerides in
southern Cyprus is incomprehensible at best.
A further striking example of unbelievable audacity is witnessed in
the case of Greeks’ insistence in calling the city of Istanbul by its
previous name of CONSTANTINOPLE, though its name was changed 537 years
ago when the city was conquered by the Turks. Today no one in his right
mind dares to call New York by its old Dutch name of New Amsterdam;
Leningrad in Russia is now called St. Petersburg; the name of Stalingrad
is replaced by Volgagrad; In China the old Peking became Beijing; the
Dominican Republic’s Ciudad Trujillo adopted the name of Santo Domingo:
Zimbabwe’s old name was Rhodesia, and its capital, the former Salisbury,
proudly calls itself Harare. These changes have all been accepted
officially by everyone in the world. However, Greeks are determined to
give Istanbul the name of Constantinople.
Just to add a little color to this writing, let me give you a few
incomplete lines of a popular American song which dominated the HIT
PARADE TV programs for several weeks during the Fifties:

“…Take me back
to Constantinople,”
“No, you can’t go
back to Constantinople,
Now it’s
Istanbul, not Constantinople.”
“Why did
Constantinople get the works?”
“That’s nobody’s
business but the Turks’!”

.ATTACKS ON WHAT IS
CACROSANCT FOR THE TURKS
As if the above intransigence wasn’t enough, the Greeks now seem to
have started a different agenda comprised of bold-face lies, and savage
attacks against a legendary leader whom every Turk considers being
inviolable.
Not so long ago, very laudatory words were spoken on the pages of
Miami’s prominent Spanish daily, EL NUEVO HERALD. The article was
entitled: ATATURK, TURKEY’S GREAT HERO, written by a Cuban born writer
and dramatist, Rolando Francisco Bravo. Mr. Bravo was criticizing the
Greeks and Armenians who had intimidated a film actor who had promised
to portray Ataturk in a movie. Mostly-Greek-Americans, who constantly
claim to be the originators of democracy, human rights, and of fair
play, alongside with their ideological partners, the Armenian-Americans,
unfairly flooded the actor’s office and his home with thousands of
letters, telegrams, e-mail messages and threatening phone calls. What
made the author mad was their use of very pejorative ugly language
describing Ataturk. They were calling him a mass murderer and the
sodomizer of children. Mr. Bravo urged the British movie producer
Tarquin Olivier, the son of the famous actor Sir Lawrence Olivier to
find an actor worthy of his project and not to buckle under the pressure
of those ‘radical immigrants.’
A few days later, a nasty reply entitled THE CRIMES OF ATATURK
appeared on the pages of the same newspaper where the Bravo article was
published earlier. The letter penned by the Director of the AMERICAN
HELLENIC MEDIA PROJECT (AHMP), a lawyer of Greek origin “residing” in
south Florida. Our inquiries found him with no local address or phone,
and no local registration with Florida’s Bar.
His letter was replete with every kind of stereotypical falsehoods,
slanders and out and out ridiculous statistics imaginable. Among the
most unbelievable claims he had was the statement that the Turkish
troops upon “invading” Izmir (their own city), and burning it to a
crisp, had managed to “butcher 200,000 Armenians and Greeks.”
Given the fact that this alleged monstrous massacre took place in
only a single day boggles the mind. The Turkish troops recaptured the
city on September 9, 1922. Since we are told that all remaining
foreigners left the port of Izmir during the next 24 hours, his
outrageous figure of 200,000 could have made the Turks the world’s
greatest military logistic performers. What the Turks had accomplished
would have been a super human miracle of sorts.
I happen to have an American-educated nephew who works at the NATO
headquarters in Izmir. I asked him to do some research for me on the
population of Izmir at the time of the great fire, and the massacres
blamed on Turks. Cuneyt expeditiously sent me the following e-mail
pertaining to the break-down of different ethnic groups living in Izmir
(census circa 1915. The 1922 records were not available, they had
perished during the fire.)

Greeks……………….55,000

Jews…………………..21,000

Armenians……………10,000

Osmanli(Turks) 114,000

British,French,

German,Italian………..50,000

As one can see, the sum total is only 250,000 people. Since the
number of Greeks and Armenians did not go beyond 65,000 souls, in order
for the Turkish military to be able to massacre 200,000 people of their
ethnicity, they had to transport into the city of Izmir an additional
135,000 from other parts of Turkey so that they could comply with the
quota shown in the letter and ‘butcher’ them there. It is a mystery how
they accomplished this Houdiniesque legerdemain and how theTurkish Army
accomplished this feat in such a short time and then magically disposed
of the bodies of those unfortunate victims of theirs. Oh! I almost
forgot, the Turkish armed force units are also accused, in that letter,
of snatching the Greek Orthodox Archbishop of Izmir, the Metropolitan
Christosomos oout of his Cathedral while he was saying Mass and killed
him and dismembered his body in the street. The perplexing question is:
Why was he singled out? Wasn’t he and the others in the church part of
the 200,000 to be ‘butchered?
Though all of this doesn’t make sense to us, it is logical to the
Greeks and Armenians who have lied so many times that they believe their
own fabrications. It’s that simple.

Daydreams, or call them hallucinations, are unproductive. They
tend to make their perpetrators the laughing stock of true historians.
As fiendish, diabolical and contemptible as they may be, they are
nevertheless as transparently deceitful. And as long as we allow them to
pull the wool over the eyes of those who do not bother to search for the
truth, the unsuspecting bystanders will be watching and approving,
inadvertently, their dishonest political charades.

A QUANDARY OF THE INEXPLICABLE KIND
THE STRANGE BEHAVIOR OF TURKEY’S DETRACTORS
Mahmut Esat Ozan

The Turkish Times

It’s been ages now that I’ve been trying to find a way, in my mind, for
the solution of a long-standing personal dilemma. I’ve been wrecking my brain
attempting to formulate a logical explanation to satisfy myself. This
exhaustive
cranial exploration of mine concerns the existence of a phenomenon involving
Turkey and her many detractors. I’ve been searching and researching clues to
unearth any acceptable reason for the justification and rationalization of the
hostile actions of many, such as the members of the European Union community
and of the neighbors of Turkey. They all seem to have a synchromeshed sense
of belligerence towards Turks.
I’ve been asking myself the following question over and over again,
“‘wHAT IS THEIR PROBLEM?” Additional questions pop up in my mind, such as,
“WHY DO THEY BEHAVE THE WAY THEY DO?” The recent events involving ABDULLAH
OCALAN come to mind and revive old recollections. There he stands as a
notorious terrorist, whose bloody organization, responsible for thousands of
murders, is outlawed not only by the Turkish government, but also by Germany,
France, and the United States of America. And he is set free! This is a very
disturbing situation. Upon his illegal entry into Italy, we had hoped and
expected some repercussions, some popular movement leading to an indictment
for his dastardly actions of the past 15 years. This wishful thinking of many
has not materialized. Furthermore, when the world-famous, and universally-
respected international police agency, INTERPOL, was rendered impotent even
though it had a long-standing warrant for Ocalan’s arrest, but was not allowed
to incarcerate him in a jail and keep him under 24-hour surveillance,
everyone, with the exception of the Italian Communists, was saddened. To top
it off, he was rewarded by a life of leisure in a luxurious Renaissance villa.
This is part of my quandary.
Since, as a writer, I’m not in a position to figure out the answers to
those inquiries, the more I ask questions, the more I become frustrated. It
is the erratic and unexplainable behavior of many countries such as Italy and
the ones surrounding the Turkish Republic that discourages many Turks.
Everyone seems to be out to get Turkey. This priceless piece of Anatolian
real estate must be an irresistible magical attraction for them. And in real
estate terms the most desirable notion for success is location, location, and
location.
The country has just finished celebrating the 75th anniversary of the
foundation of that republic, and its occupants, the Turks, do not have an inch
of their soil to give away to anyone. The land area comprising Turkey may not
be huge, but if we are allowed to brag a bit, we could say easily that Turkey
is larger than TEXAS, with a population three times as much. The city of
Istanbul alone has more people living within its boundaries than the entire
population of Greece.
A variety of countries share this geographical area with Turkey. They
are Greece, Syria, Iraq, Iran and Armenia, as Turkey’s ages-old neighbors.
Most of them have been coveting a portion of this valuable Anatolian
topography, and hoping to get a part of it some day. Ordinarily, Bulgaria and
Russia would be included in this rapacious, hostile group. However, after the
dissolution of the old Soviet Empire, Turkey’s prominent construction
conglomerates played their cards right and underbid all European construction
firms, and found themselves in a position to assist the tottering Russian
economy, by default. They have been, ever since, constructing impressive
shopping centers, hotels and governmental buildings and public housing in many
parts of Russia. These firms have now an established reputation for good and
honest work, and tens of millions of dollars in the banks. Some Turkish
contractors have recently signed contracts to build a four-lane highway from
Edirne to Sophia and around Bulgaria. This is the only reason why neither one
of these two traditional enemies of Turkey wish to find their names on the
roster of trouble-causing adversaries of the Turks.
Unfortunately, on some other fronts things do not look as well. Time and
again Iran claims that it has no desire to foment trouble for its neighbor,
Turkey, by helping the infamous PKK terrorists. Nevertheless, every
investigative probe shows they are not telling the truth, and that they are
clandestinely subsidising the PKK and arming the Kurdish guerillas to the
teeth.
When it comes to Armenia, we see that the bankrupt republic of Yerevan is
still suffering from the Turkish embargo, still adamantly anti-Turkish and
anti-Azeri in its over-all foreign policy and is still being advised by the
Dashnak factions of the Kotcharian government. It looks like they are going
to miss the “Caucassus Oil Express” by a mile.
Yes, instead of patching up its long-existing differences with its
neighbor, Turkey, the Armenian government supports blatantly Ocalan and his
PKK terrorists. By the same token, it is not about to iron out its grievances
with the Azeri people, 20% of whose land they still occupy in the NAGORNO-
KARABAKH, causing the continuation of unheard of misery for over a million
refugees.
In the meantime, the Armenian and Greek propaganda machines in the United
States are cranking out unfavorable misinformation without batting an eye. A
Harut Sassounian writes in the CALIFORNIA COURIER that there was no doubt in
his mind that the Turkish government had forced four different religious
leaders to make statements against their will. Previously, the newly elected
Armenian Patriarch of Turkey, Archbishop Mesrob Mutafyan, the Greek Ecumenical
Patriarch Bartolomeos, Israel’s Chief Rabbi Arus Ratson, and Turkey’s
religious chief, Mehmet Muri Yilmaz had all criticized the actions of the
Italian Communist government of Prime Minister, Massimo D’Alema, for refusing
to extradite Ocalan to Turkey, his birth place. One even pleaded with Pope
John Paul II, asking him to intervene on behalf of the Turkish people, and
said the terrorist Ocalan did not even know Kurdish, emphasizing his
disconnect with the people of his own kind.
In another ridiculous letter written to the CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR,
the Executive Director of the American Hellenic Media Project, Mr. P.D.
Spyropoulos, referred to Turkey as a “militant Mideast backwater,” called the
reactions of the mothers of the Turkish martyrs “hysteria” and unabashedly
described the Turkish people as “a mob.” By the way, both “ethnic chetnicks”
disowned their religious leaders, who sided with Turkey, as being ‘”traitors.”
P.D. Spyropoulos is the same individual who had replied in one of his so-
called rebuttals concerning the article, “Who Burned Izmir?” Following a slue
of insults against Turks, he claimed that the liberating Turkish forces not
only burned their own city, but that they had also butchered 200.000 Greeks
and Armenians in the process, not knowing that the total Greek and Armenian
population of Izmir at that time did not even reach one half of that
ridiculous figure, proving him the champion PREVARICATOR of the century.
Now back to the main problem Turkey has been afflicted with for almost
two long decades.

THE OCALAN SYNDROME.

With the inauguration of the Marxist-Leninist terrorist organization in
Moscow in the late Seventies a new element was added to the list of sinister,
vulture-like characters waiting in ambush, in the wings. They are now
everywhere. They are present at all points of the compass: NORTH, EAST, WEST,
and SOUTH. The first letter of the names of their geographical locations
creates the word N.E.W.S., and the news they create remains associated with
the belligerent behavior displayed vis-a-vis the Turks. The favorable
attitude of the detractors of Turkey towards this terrorist organization has
never been explained in a convincing fashion, even by the most astute
political science experts alive today. As for myself, not being a schooled
psychoanalyst, nor a trained behavioral psychologist, find myself completely
helpless in passing judgement on this bizarre demeanor. Curiously, most
observers I reviewed so far on this subject, be they Turkish or otherwise,
seem to be as baffled about this phenomenon as I am. I have to admit I’m lost
for words confronting this abnormality of conduct. I call it,
“A QUANDARY OF THE INEXPLICABLE KIND.”

Mahmut Esat Ozan

In the past, when we, as Turkish people, tried to answer the
relentless unfounded salvos of Greeks and Armenians attacking us, we
were invariably confronted with a willful, systematic, but at the same
time a cowardly propaganda. In each and every one of those encounters
we were made uncomfortable by their vociferous claims that our words
were nothing more than meaningless utterances of revisionists, and
falsifiers of historical records, and that they, themselves were the
true adherents to history and to true facts.
In order to remedy, once and for all, this manipulation of the
truth, something had to be done. Someone had to tell them and all the
other detractors of the Turks, in plain language, that their struggle
had always been centered around a bogus indoctrination of people with
little or no knowledge on the subject at hand: The so-called “genocide”
for the Armenians and the oft-repeated “invasion” of the island of
Cyuprus. Their efforts in maligning Turkey and Turks had to be refuted
in such a way that neither the Greeks nor the Armenians could extricate
themselves from the argument, without losing face. With this point in
mind I decided to employ a new method, using only their own words to
refute their unsubstantiated claims. Thus, I would use the statements
expressed by their own kind, with a pertinent commentary or two made by
historians, anthropologists and statesmen exclusively from the Western
camp

A NEW APPROACH
AND A NEW CASE

A chance for a trial run on this issue presented itself recently as
an answer I had posted on-line, on the Internet, replying to the
uncalled-for attacks of Greeks and Armenians about a British movie
producer who had plans for a full length film on the life of Mustafa
Kemal Ataturk. Those plans had to be postponed because thousands of
e-mail letters, faxes, and telegrams accompanied by threatening phone
calls had finally intimidated the movie star who had accepted to portray
Ataturk on the silver screen.
Having read my above-mentioned on-line reply, a Greek-American
confronted me with an ugly personal message. The following is a small
sample of his diatribe:
“You Turks are pathetic. You can’t even accept the fact that our
Western civilization is founded on the pillars of Greek thought and
mind. ONE PLATO IS WORTH A THOUSAND ATATURKS. Where are your
Aristotles, Socrates’, Euripideses, Aristophaneses, Archimideses and the
Euclids? Both science and civil administration of the Western world is
of Greek origin.”
Given the promise I had made to myself earlier, I brought in the
expertise of a foreigner by relying on the “mongrelization of the
present-day Greeks” theory, espoused by several chroniclers of history
in the past, but best interpreted by a German anthropologist and
historian, Jakob Phillip Fallmerayer, who lived between 1790-1862.
Fallmerayer, in his book FRAGMENTE AUS DEM ORIENT BYZANS UND DES
ABENDLANDES, published in 1861, re-printed in 1900 wrote the following:

“Contrary to the views of the revisionists of ancient Greek history,
today’s Greeks do not have any continuity with their namesakes, the
Greeks of antiquity.”
According to the records of ancient history of the Balkans, several
respected historians believe similarly, that the inhabitants of Greece
of our day have no more connection with the ancient Greeks of the
mythological times than the ordinary FELLAHINE who live in Egypt today,
could be related to the descendants of the Pharaohs themselves.
It was King Philip II of Macedonia who had united the Thracian
Greeks and the rest of the natives of the areas he had conquered to
prepare them for an expedition against the Persians. His son,
Alexander, founded, later on, his vast dynasty on the ruins of the old
empire built by his father. Historians are unanimous on this one point
that the ancient Macedonians as well as today’s citizens of the
independent country of MACEDONIA are not Greeks at all. In reality, the
ancient Greeks had a name for them, “Barbarians’” a word which simply
means an alien, a foreigner.
The great Athenian statesman and orator Demosthenes spoke of King
Philip II of Macedonia in very pejorative terms when he said in part:
“…he,(Philip) not only is no Greek, nor related in any shape or
form to Greeks, but he is not even a true ‘barbarian’ from any place
that can be named with honors, but a pestilent knave from Macedonia,
whence it was never yet possible to buy a decent slave.”
This very same “Macedonian barbarian” referred to by Demostenes in
his speech, defeated his enemies, the Greeks, at the battle of Chaerones
in August 338 BC and appointed himself “Commander of the Greeks.”
Nonetheless, today’s inhabitants of those lands unabashedly call his
son, ALEXANDER THE GREAT, a noble Greek.

ARMENIANS ON ARMENIANS
AND SOME OTHER VIEWS

One more irate Armenians Turcophobe, who may have seen again
something I wrote on-line, was lecturing me in length about his
displeasure of my “hatred of everything non-Turkish.” Why was I the
target of such a harsh indictment?
“You deserve all that,” as he put it, “because you are a descendant
of that ‘wily and crafty redheaded Turk, born in Salonica of Greek and
Jewish parents and died of dreadful syphilis.” He went on saying,
“ataturk,”(notice how he spelled his name with a lower case letter ‘a’)
“He may be a hero to you, but actually he was a Genghiz Khan, who in
1920-22 ordered the complete destruction of the port of Smyrna, that
annihilated hundreds of thousands of innocent Greeks and Armenians”
His hysterical venom not yet depleted, he continued, “If you could
only get off the hashish for just long enough and stop deluding
yourself, you will realize that you are shooting yourself in the foot.”
The rest of his diatribe was as garnished with falsehoods and
fabrications as were the previous portions of it.
“Ever since” he said “the Turkish hordes with their scimitar – the
curved swords, marched from Central Asia into Asia Minor and Europe,
they have robbed, pillaged and destroyed every pillar of civilized
life. They have stolen Greek and Armenian lands, butchered their people
and raped their women. It was sad times for the Armenian people. That
was 900 years ago. But again in 1914-22 Talaat, Enver, and Hamid Pashas
followed suite with the genocide. Your people today are still at it
with the Kurds of Anatolia. Renounce the hashish-inflicted propaganda
of Turkey. Permit your adversaries to exercise their civic rights by
speaking their minds on a stupid movie about a sexual deviant and a
military misfit called ataturk. I don’t indulge in hate, but I hate
thieves, liars, and butchers of innocent children.
P.S. If you want a movie, go make one. And stop complaining.”
Again, in order not to deviate from my earlier plan, I told him, “I
do not wish to waste my time trying to refute each and every one of your
accusations. They were all either totally false or slanderous.
However, I will let you listen to the venerable Armenian historian
ASOGHIK, who recorded his impressions on the arrival of Seljuk Turks to
Anatolia. After that, when you lie again, you may feel a bit of remorse
of conscience.”
ASOGHIK wrote, “The Armenians of Byzantium have welcomed the Seljuk
conquest with lengthy celebrations in the streets and thanksgiving to
God for having rescued them from long years of Byzantine oppression.
Seljuk Turks gave protection to the Armenian Church, which the
Byzantines had been trying to destroy. They abolished the oppressive
taxes which the Byzantines had imposed on the Armenian Churches,
monasteries and priests, and in fact exempted such religious
institutions from all taxes. The Armenian community was left free to
conduct its internal affairs in its own way, including religious
activities and education, and there never was any time at which
Armenians or other non-Muslims were compelled
to convert to Islam. The Armenian spiritual leaders in fact went to
Seljuk Sultan Melikshah to thank him for his protection.”
Another respected Armenian historian MATHIAS of Edessa related,
“Melikshah’s heart is full of affection and good will for
Christians; he has treated the sons of Jesus Christ very well, and he
has given the Armenian people affluence, peace, and happiness.”
After the death of another Seljuk Sultan Kilic Arslan, the same
Armenian historian MATHIAS wrote,
“Kilic Arslan’s death has driven Christians into mourning since he
was a charitable person of high character.”
MATHIAS also related, “How well the Seljuk Turks treated the
Armenians is shown by the fact that some Armenian noble families like
the TASHRIK family accepted Islam on their own free will and joined the
Turks in fighting Byzantium.”
It was, however, the world-renowned historian Arnold Toynbee who
centuries later reinforced the words of ASOGHIK and of MATHIAS by saying
the following:
“The Ottoman institution came perhaps as near as anything in real
life could to realizing the ideal of Plato’s Republic.”
“Edson L. Clark, the British philosopher and historian, had this to
assert, “The Turks were far better men and far abler rulers than the
wretched tyrants they superseded…” “The Turkish dominions were better
governed and were more prosperous than most parts of Christian Europe.”
And the well-known American historian and novelist, Harold Lamb,
wrote this, “Few Europeans realized that the Turkish Ottoman Sultan
Suleiman was the head of the most democratic government of their time.”
An article which appeared on My 15, 1991 in this very newspaper had
another revelation. This time the person who was doing the revealing
was HOVHANNES KATCHAZNOUNI, the Prime Minister of the Soviet Armenian
Republic during World War I:
“At the beginning of the fall of 1914, when Turkey had not yet
entered the war, but had already been making preparations, Armenian
revolutionary bands began to be formed in Transcaucasia with great
enthusiasm, and especially, with great uproar…they fought against the
Turks because they could not refrain themselves from fighting. This was
an inevitable result of psychology on which the Armenian people
nourished itself during an entire generation that mentally should have
found its expression, and it did so…
“We overestimated the ability of Armenian people, its political and
military power, and importance of the services our people rendered to
the Russians. And by overestimating our very modest worth and merit, we
were naturally exaggerating our hopes and expectations…”
The Armenian historian VARTANIAN relates that “Ottoman Armenians
were completely free in their traditions, religion, culture and language
in comparison to Russian Armenians under the Czars. “The Ottoman Empire
was the Armenians’ only shelter against Russian oppression.”
Finally, here are the prophetic words of another Armenian writer
BORIAN, who says, “Czarist Russia, at no time, wanted to assure Armenian
autonomy: For this reason one must consider the Armenians who were
working for Armenian autonomy as no more than agents and spies of the
Czar, to attach Eastern provinces to Russia.”
The Russians thus have deceived the Armenians for years; and as a
result the Armenians have been left with nothing more than an empty
dream.

* * *

US ARMENIAN HATE GROUPS AND THEIR UNENDING MALEVOLENCE

The Livingston amendment, seeking to end a US aid ban on
Azerbaijan, Section 907, was defeated yesterday in the US House of
Representatives. V.Sonentz-Papazian, the executive director of the
Armenian National Committee of America, Western Region, began to
celebrate the fruit of their sinister machinations in the House, and
gloat over this malevolent deed of theirs, calling it a victory for the
Armenian-Americans.
Before going any further on this subject and offering comments on
this dastardly act, I, as an American tax-paying citizen, would like to
take this opportunity to thank first and foremost Cogressman Bob
Livingston (R-LA), for his amendment, and Congressmen Dana
Rohrabacker(R-Calif), Gerald Solomon(R-NY), and Sunny Calahan(R-Ala) for
their splendid efforts in trying to end the ban against Azerbaijan,
Section 907, which prohibited unfairly any aid to that country until it
lifts the economic blockade of Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh.
I also feel I should send a heart-felt expression of thanks to the
members sof the US Congress who voted for the ill-fated attempt to lift
the restrictions dictated by Section 907. Their numbers, 20
Republicans, and 10 Democrats, and their names will be etched indelibly
in my mind and heart. I thank dearly each and every one of them for
their heroic effort.
On the other hand, I’d like to convey my feelings to all who want to
listen,that the likes of Frank Pallone(D-NJ), George
Radanovich(R-Calif), John Porter(R-IL), Peter Visclosky(D-In), and
others such as Fazio, De Lauro, Palosi, Lowey, Skaggs, Walsh, Wolf,
Yates from different sections of the country have only one thing
mutually common in their make-up. Their knowledge of recent history of
the world is imperfect, to say the least. Their avarice for the
financial support they need to be elected and re-elected to their
high-salaried, lucrative posts is legendary. Unfortunately the
financial backers of theirs which keep them electable, time and again,
have been adamantly hostile to Turkish or Azeri causes.

FROM A MORAL LEGAL JUNGLE
TO AN IMMORAL DESERT

These political animals, these detractors of Azeris and of Turks,
who associate themselves with the members of the Armenian lobby, is
comprised of a bunch of morally-challenged, pathological
Turcophobes,who have little or no idea of what they are up to, and they
don’t seem to care, either. They’ve been offering their souls to the
highest bidders, and in this particular case the highest bidders are the
lowest adherents to truth and morality.
Their hate for anything Turkish can only be described as
unfortunate. They, like their brothers-in-hatred, the Greeks, have been
spending a major portion of their lives in the pursuit of hatred for
Turks. What a waste of precious time and human emotions. There is a
popular American saying: “You have to be taught to hate.” It was in
this country that I first noticed, with horror, the hate in the eyes and
the voices of some Armenians and Greeks. It was a sad lesson for me to
learn. However, the saddest thing for me to observe even today is the
fact that I feel I am devoid of any weapon to defend myself facing
these professional haters of Turks.
Many a time in the past,after I arrived to the United States of
America from Turkey, I agonized over a curious situation. From birth
to adulthood, I felt no one had prepared me there to fight these
adversaries who show no mercy or compassion towards me. I was a mere
descendant of Turks, whose ancestors were forced to share a common
destiny and sorrow with them in a time of war,an almost civil war-like
hostility period which took place almost a century ago. I often ask
myself “Why can’t I hate these people the way they hate me, openly,
incessantly, mercilessly, with the zeal of the most devout religious
missionary around.”
There were even times when I manifested a disgust against my
parents, against my relatives, against my teachers, against my
preachers, in other words, against all Turks who, from infancy took me
in their arms, fed me at their bosoms, taught me in their schools,
educated me in their society. I cursed them all!…aplease don’t
misunderstand me, not for them doing all those things to me. No!…I
cursed them for not teaching me how to hate my fellow men,(my enemies),
robbing me of my basic weapon to fight back, consequently, leaving me
naked, powerless against the unrelenting salvos of these programmed
assassins of the tolerance and culture of the nation of Turks.
These people, who foam at the mouth every time they hear the word
‘Turk” are none other than some sub-human characters which never existed
in any of the ficticious works of, say, Victor Hugo, Edgar Allen Poe,
Dante Aleghieri, or Dostoyevski, or for that matter, in Mary Shelly’s
Dr. Frankenstein. Neither one of those highly gifted writers could have
possibly created more evil, and hateful monsters than the enemies of
Turks. By the description of a well-known Greek scholar, Alexander
Pallis, we learn about this centuries-long bias against Turks, which
seems to have no end:
He says: :”From the fourteenth to the end of the seventeenth century
the Ottoman Empire was almost continuously at war with the Christian
Powers of Western Europe. The terror inspired by the Turkish name
among all the European peoples was largely responsible for the widely
spread popular belief that the Turks were a race of uncivilized
barbarians who, wherever they went, left nothing but smoking ruins
behind them and stamped out every vestige of civilization. Religious
fanaticism, coupled with the fear born of unbroken Turkish military
successes, resulted in creating among some detractors of the Turks a
state of mind which rendered them for the most part incapable of viewing
Turkey and the Turks with an objective and unbiased eye.”

Mahmut Esat Ozan
Past President, FTAA,
Florida Turkish-American
Association for Cultural Exchange
Miami, Florida