From: Yahoo [rdegraff@yahoo.com]
I did some research on Armenia
IN GOD WE TRUST !!!
Richard C De Graff
ARMENIA?
I am getting sick and tired hearing about the so called Armenia genocide by the Turks of the crumbling Ottoman Empire in 1915.
First, dear reader, I am an American through and through. My family escaped from the French Huguenots and migrated to Holland. After being in Holland for several decades they migrated to the Americas and Jeremiah, Isaac and Frederick De Graff founded Amsterdam NY. In1630. My son David has the deed signed by King George of England declaring “all the land they could protect”.
Secondly I never heard of Armenia until after 1975. I thought it was something one added to their garden salad until I had dinner at my secretary’s home with her husband and they told about the “Genocide by the Turks”.
Strange, why was I hearing about it after 50 odd years after it supposedly happened?
General Dwight David Eisenhower has film taken of Nazi Germany’s concentration camps “so some dumb bastard could not say it never happened 50 years from now.”
Well some not so clever Armenians saw how Jewish Germans survived WW ll and could prove the NAZI’s stole their property- the received repatriation in German Marks.
So these Armenians tried to tie up the Republic of Turkey. They got a lot of publicity for their nefarious efforts, but the history is all wrong.
I have done research on this subject. The first book was written in 1982 and published in 1983.
It is THE ARMENIAN FILE The Myth of Innocence Exposed by Kamuran Gurun. This is a heavy duty book written for Turkish people who have a keen interest in their rightful history. It is like Robert Caro’s books on Lyndon Baines Johnson a former President of the United States; it is also heavy duty reading for a foreigner.
The other book is a shocker of the surprised truth. Hovhannes Katchaznouni (The First Prime Minister of the Independent Armenian Republic) DASHNAGTZZOUTIUN HAS NOTHING TO DO ANYMORE (Report Submitted to the 1923 Party Convention)
Katchaznouni became a member of the Armenian National Council in 1917 and was the Gashnag representative until 1018.He served on the Armenian committee conducting peace talks with the Turks in Trabzon and Batoun. He then became the first prime-minister of the independent Armenian State in 1918. He held that position until August 1919. He was arrested after the Bolsheviks came into power in 1920. He left the country after the counter-revolutionary revolt against the Bolsheviks rule was extinguished in 1921.
OTTOMAN EMPIRE
1299-1923
The Ottoman Empire was unique to say the least. It covered Asia minor with Constantinople as its capital and control of lands around the Mediterranean basin, the Ottoman Empire was at the center of interactions between the Eastern and Western worlds for six centuries. Following a long period of military setbacks against European powers, the Ottoman Empire gradually declined into the late nineteenth century. The empire allied with Germany in the early 20th century, with the imperial ambition of recovering its lost territories, but it collapsed and was dissolved by the Allied Powers in the aftermath of World War I. [i]
They had some basic rules that apply to Armenia problem.
Religion was a basic tenant of the empire. They had freedom of religion as long as you obeyed their laws. Turkey is rich with religious history. The first seven churches that the apostle John wrote about are in Turkey. The Muslims are Sunni and Jesus mother retired there too. When the Holy Roman Empire broke up the Greek Orthodox Church was headquartered in Constantinople.
Missionaries were enthusiastically welcomed from all kinds of religious sects.
The Trojan War took there.
By 1914 there were Turkish Armenians living in Turkey as Turkish citizens.
Question? Why would Turkey commit genocide on the Armenians when 6.9% of their population is Armenian? Something is fishy here.
WW l
Now here is the problem. The Ottoman Empire is in its death throes and it takes side with Germany. It seems a natural because Germany is strong, Russia weak and the Allies are causing them a bundle of problems.
The Tsar of Russia has just recently annexed Georgia in 1801to its sphere of influence. (A stepping stone towards the Black Sea?) What Russia wanted was a warm water ports for its Navy and has its eyes on Constantinople straights and easy entry into the Mediterranean Sea. (It still does.) The areas if influences in Turkey in 1914-15 are Russia, Germany, France, Italy, USA, and the British!
So the Armenians side up to Tsarist Russia basically because the Ottomans are in shambles.
This is one of worst decisions world history. The Russian Revolution broke out in 1917 and the Bolsheviks took over.
Off with their heads. The Tsarist dynasty is no more. History has now shown us that communist dictators liquidate the opposition. Russia did such a good job that when Hitler started to take on Russia, the only competent General officer was General Zhukov from Vladivostok which is the farthest western city in Russia.( It borders China and North Korea.) He was so far away that Stalin probably thought he was harmless. He is now considered one of Russia’s greatest generals.
I make this point because Tsarist Russia or the Communist had no use for the Armenians so the smart ones were disposed of. (Modern day language calls it the “brain drain”) I can imagine how eager the communist were dreaming of straights of the Dardanelles and Constantinople were part of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republic.
The dates are important here. The Armenian File was published in 1983. So what happened in the 1920s?
But the Tip-off is Katchaznouni’s Report made in 1923. The Russians suppressed the report and it was not until April 2006 that the first edition of the COMPLETE report was published. There is now a third printing.
I believe the genocide is a major con job just to gain funds by politicians who have failed to bring prosperity to their constituents.
On May 19, 1919 Mustafa Kemal (Ataturk) landed in Samsun and the National Struggle started and would not end until 1923 after he had defeated all countries that want to break up Turkey. His defeat of the British and his leadership role of modern Turkey make him one of the greatest world leaders of the 20th century.
BERLIN (ArmRadio)–It was on March 15, 1921 that Armenian avenger Soghomon Tehlirian assassinated Talaat Pasha, one of the masterminds of the Armenian Genocide.
On April 2, 120th anniversary of Tehlirian’s birth, representatives of the Armenian community will gather on Hardenbergstraße in Berlin, the site where Talaat was assassinated, to hold an event in memory of Tehlirian
Tehlirian shadowed Talaat as he left his house on Hardenbergstraße on the morning of March 15, 1921. He crossed the street to view him from the opposite sidewalk, then crossed it once more to walk past him to confirm his identity. He then turned around and pointed his gun to shoot him in the nape of the neck.
Talaat was felled with a single 9mm parabellum round from a Luger P08 pistol. The assassination took place in broad daylight and led to Tehlirian’s immediate arrest by German police.
“I killed him, but I am not a murderer,” Tehlirian said of himself.
After a two-day trial, Tehlirian was found not guilty by the German court, and freed. He eventually moved to the United States and lived out his years in San Francisco.
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Especially when nuclear weapons are involved and you don’t—you can’t—know what the enemy is up to, and you’re scared. Then it helps (it helps a lot) to be calm.
The world owes an enormous debt to a quiet, steady Russian naval officer who probably saved my life. And yours. And everyone you know. Even those of you who weren’t yet born. I want to tell his story …
It’s October 1962, the height of the Cuban missile crisis, and there’s a Soviet submarine in the Caribbean that’s been spotted by the American Navy. President Kennedy has blockaded Cuba. No sea traffic is permitted through.
Photograph by NY Daily News Archive, Getty
The sub is hiding in the ocean, and the Americans are dropping depth charges left and right of the hull. Inside, the sub is rocking, shaking with each new explosion. What the Americans don’t know is that this sub has a tactical nuclear torpedo on board, available to launch, and that the Russian captain is asking himself, Shall I fire?
This actually happened.
The Russian in question, an exhausted, nervous submarine commander named Valentin Savitsky, decided to do it. He ordered the nuclear-tipped missile readied. His second in command approved the order. Moscow hadn’t communicated with its sub for days. Eleven U.S. Navy ships were nearby, all possible targets. The nuke on this missile had roughly the power of the bomb at Hiroshima.
“We’re gonna blast them now!”
Temperatures in the submarine had climbed above 100 degrees. The air-conditioning system was broken, and the ship couldn’t surface without being exposed. The captain felt doomed. Vadim Orlov, an intelligence officer who was there, remembers a particularly loud blast: “The Americans hit us with something stronger than the grenades—apparently with a practice depth bomb,” he wrote later. “We thought, That’s it, the end.” And that’s when, he says, the Soviet captain shouted, “Maybe the war has already started up there … We’re gonna blast them now! We will die, but we will sink them all—we will not become the shame of the fleet.”
Had Savitsky launched his torpedo, had he vaporized a U.S. destroyer or aircraft carrier, the U.S. would probably have responded with nuclear-depth charges, “thus,” wrote Russian archivist Svetlana Savranskaya, understating wildly, “starting a chain of inadvertent developments, which could have led to catastrophic consequences.”
But it didn’t happen, because that’s when Vasili Alexandrovich Arkhipov steps into the story.
Photo courtesy of M. Yarovskaya and A. Labunskaya
He was 34 at the time. Good looking, with a full head of hair and something like a spit curl dangling over his forehead. He was Savitsky’s equal, the flotilla commander responsible for three Russian subs on this secret mission to Cuba—and he is maybe one of the quietest, most unsung heroes of modern times.
What he said to Savitsky we will never know, not exactly. But, says Thomas Blanton, the former director of the nongovernmental National Security Archive, simply put, this “guy called Vasili Arkhipov saved the world.”
Arkhipov, described by his wife as a modest, soft-spoken man, simply talked Savitsky down.
The exact details are controversial. The way it’s usually told is that each of the three Soviet submarine captains in the ocean around Cuba had the power to launch a nuclear torpedo if—and only if—he had the consent of all three senior officers on board. On his sub, Savitsky gave the order and got one supporting vote, but Arkhipov balked. He wouldn’t go along.
He argued that this was not an attack.
The official Soviet debriefs are still secret, but a Russian reporter, Alexander Mozgovoi, an American writer, and eyewitness testimony from intelligence officer Orlov suggest that Arkhipov told the captain that the ship was not in danger. It was being asked to surface. Dropping depth charges left then right, noisy but always off target—those are signals, Arkhipov argued. They say, We know you’re there. Identify yourselves. Come up and talk. We intend no harm.
What’s Happening?
The Russian crew couldn’t tell what was going on above them: They’d gone silent well before the crisis began. Their original orders were to go directly to Cuba, but then, without explanation, they’d been ordered to stop and wait in the Caribbean. Orlov, who had lived in America, heard from American radio stations that Russia had secretly brought missiles to the island, that Cuba had shot down a U.S. spy plane, that President Kennedy had ordered the U.S. Navy to surround the island and let no one pass through. When Americans had spotted the sub, Savitsky had ordered it to drop deeper into the ocean, to get out of sight—but that had cut them off. They couldn’t hear (and didn’t trust) U.S. media. For all they knew, the war had already begun
We don’t know how long they argued. We do know that the nuclear weapons the Russians carried (each ship had just one, with a special guard who stayed with it, day and night) were to be used only if Russia itself had been attacked. Or if attack was imminent. Savitsky felt he had the right to fire first. Official Russian accounts insist he needed a direct order from Moscow, but Archipov’s wife Olga says there was a confrontation.
She and Ryurik Ketov, the gold-toothed captain of a nearby Russian sub, both heard the story directly from Vasili. Both believe him and say so in this PBS documentary. Some scenes are dramatized, but listen to what they say …
As the drama unfolded, Kennedy worried that the Russians would mistake depth charges for an attack. When his defense secretary said the U.S. was dropping “grenade”-size signals over the subs, the president winced. His brother Robert Kennedy later said that talk of depth charges “were the time of greatest worry to the President. His hand went up to his face [and] he closed his fist.”
Video Still From the PBS documentary, “Missile Crisis: The Man Who Saved the World.“
The Russian command, for its part, had no idea how tough it was inside those subs. Anatoly Andreev, a crew member on a different, nearby sub, kept a journal, a continuing letter to his wife, that described what it was like:
For the last four days, they didn’t even let us come up to the periscope depth … My head is bursting from the stuffy air. … Today three sailors fainted from overheating again … The regeneration of air works poorly, the carbon dioxide content [is] rising, and the electric power reserves are dropping. Those who are free from their shifts, are sitting immobile, staring at one spot. … Temperature in the sections is above 50 [122ºF].
The debate between the captain and Arkhipov took place in an old, diesel-powered submarine designed for Arctic travel but stuck in a climate that was close to unendurable. And yet, Arkhipov kept his cool. After their confrontation, the missile was not readied for firing. Instead, the Russian sub rose to the surface, where it was met by a U.S. destroyer. The Americans didn’t board. There were no inspections, so the U.S. Navy had no idea that there were nuclear torpedos on those subs—and wouldn’t know for around 50 years, when the former belligerents met at a 50th reunion. Instead, the Russians turned away from Cuba and headed north, back to Russia.
Photograph courtesy of U.S. National Archives, Still Pictures Branch, Record Group 428, Item 428-N-711199
Looking back, it all came down to Arkhipov. Everyone agrees that he’s the guy who stopped the captain. He’s the one who stood in the way.
He was, as best as we can tell, not punished by the Soviets. He was later promoted. Reporter Alexander Mozgovoi describes how the Soviet Navy conducted a formal review and how the man in charge, Marshal Grachko, when told about conditions on those ships, “removed his glasses and hit them against the table in fury, breaking them into small pieces, and abruptly leaving the room after that.”
Photo courtesy of M. Yarovskaya and A. Labunskaya
How Arkhipov (that’s him up above) managed to keep his temper in all that heat, how he managed to persuade his frantic colleague, we can’t say, but it helps to know that Arkhopov was already a Soviet hero. A year earlier he’d been on another Soviet sub, the K-19, when the coolant system failed and the onboard nuclear reactor was in danger of meltdown. With no backup system, the captain ordered the crew to jerry-rig a repair, and Arkhopov, among others, got exposed to high levels of radiation. Twenty-two crew members died from radiation sickness over the next two years. Arkhipov wouldn’t die until 1998, but it would be from kidney cancer, brought on, it’s said, by exposure.
Nuclear weapons are inherently dangerous. Handling them, using them, not using them, requires caution, care. Living as we do now with North Korea, Pakistani generals, jihadists, and who knows who’ll be the next U.S. president, the world is very, very lucky that at one critical moment, someone calm enough, careful enough, and cool enough was there to say no.
Thanks to Alex Wellerstein, author of the spectacular blog Restricted Data, for his help guiding me to source material on this subject.
22 thoughts on “You (and Almost Everyone You Know) Owe Your Life to This Man.”
Cornell Greensays: March 26, 2016 at 2:12 pm Bravo, Robert!An excellent article… and a cautionary tale, especially for those “bomb ’em back to the stone age” advocates among us. As if we are the only ones with bombs. Reply
FSWoodsays: March 26, 2016 at 8:10 pm Dad was a senior US Navy officer who on USN Destroyers for some years hunted Soviet subs. And knowing both him and my Mother, and guessing that other people can have similar character, I accept that at face vale — “Official Russian accounts insist he needed a direct order from Moscow, but Archipov’s wife Olga says there was a confrontation. She and Ryurik Ketov, the gold-toothed captain of a nearby Russian sub, both heard the story directly from Vasili. Both believe him and say so in this PBS documentary.” Reply
Robert Krulwichsays: March 27, 2016 at 2:01 pm FSW– I wondered myself. It seems strange — deeply strange — that the Soviets would have left such a monstrously important decision in the hands of field commanders. But apparently they did. And as nuclear weapons get downsized into nuclear arms, and then tactical nuclear devices, as the technology makes terrible things smaller and smaller, I hope the command system keeps the decisions and the decision-makers big and important, and most of all – steady. I don’t know who’s minding the store in Belgium at those nuclear plants, or who’s making decisions in those places I mention, but I’m getting more and more nervous. Reply
Vickie Kaspersays: March 27, 2016 at 8:04 am Good thing Donald Trump wasn’t involved in the decision. Reply
Jeanninesays: March 28, 2016 at 11:16 am My first thought exsactly!!!! Reply
FlyoverMikesays: March 28, 2016 at 3:01 pm Good thing Barack Obama wasn’t involved in the decision. Reply
Marc Lapointesays: March 28, 2016 at 6:22 pm Very good thing JFK and RFK were ! Reply
lgstarnsays: March 28, 2016 at 6:25 pm Right, he might have made peace with Cuba earlier. That would have been terrible. Reply
Marc Lapointesays: March 28, 2016 at 8:00 pm Apparently, JFK had a emissary speaking with Castro at time of his murder. Had he live , the world would be a very different place; just imagine no Vietnam war. Listen at the former president Eisenhower speak about the new world order and the power of the war industry. Reply
Charles J Gallagher Jrsays: March 28, 2016 at 7:09 am Arkhipov, possibly more than any other individual in history, did prevent a potential nuclear exchange. The article is excellent and generally accurate. In addition the four Foxtrot Class Commanding Officers were given oral orders before they departed: reach Cuba undetected or do not come back alive. They were also told that under extraordinary circumstances they should use the nuclear tipped torpedo without orders from Moscow. I was on the USS Charles P. Cecil (DDR-835) which held sonar contact on one of the four Foxtrots until it ran out of air and had to surface. Reply
Nitasays: March 28, 2016 at 12:07 pm Thank you for your service, sir. Reply
CJ Rolphesays: March 28, 2016 at 5:03 pm I was stationed at Charleston AFB when this happened…it was real scary! But not HALF AS SCARY as it is knowing this was going on!!! wow!!! Reply
Dr. Richard G. Macdonaldsays: March 28, 2016 at 9:50 am This edited Letter to Editor of the Peoria Journal Star in Peoria IL was published on Saturday, March 26. The paragraph of my wife being blocked performing her important position by NORAD during the Cuban crisis due to her ID card was edited out by the paper. I felt it was an analogy to voter ID restrictions now allowed by the ruling of SCOTUS. Enjoyed the article as I personally knew how close we were to war. I & my fellow Army doctors were in fascinating horror during those 10 days. Have many sidebar stories of that time which I experienced during those 10 days.Dr. Richard G. Macdonald To Forum PJSMar 22 at 3:53 PMAt this moment, I am sitting watching a base ballgame. It is a game between Cuba & Tampa Bay Rays in Havana Cuba. Everyone on that field and in the stands could immediately walk across our southern borders to freedom without even a wall stopping them. President Obama & Cuba President Raul Castro are sitting together high fiving each other for great outfield catches. Thanks to Congress and the Statue of Liberty, this ability to be accepted right now by our country without qualms while these two Presidents sit next to each other smiling is sign of our country’s greatness.Yet candidates for the office of the president not only think 50 years of failure is a sign of Cuban foreign policy success but now want to prevent every other country’s citizens being accepted with the same access to USA that Cuba now has. Matter of fact, a few of the candidates even brag about their heritage with Cuba and how their own family exists in the USA because of this privileged Congressional approval.As an enlisted man during the Bay of Pigs, the Berlin Wall being built and then as an officer; I had to make out a will & testament, get a yellow flu shot after standing in silence with my fellow hospital doctors in front of a black and white TV set watching President Kennedy saying we may be on the brink of atomic warfare.At the same time, my wife worked as an executive secretary for NORAD and couldn’t go to work to serve our country in high crisis as her Army dependent ID card was invalid until she obtained an Air Force ID. Reminds me of voting ID laws today by states afraid of people voting. The exception is that we aren’t on the brink of going to war with Russia in 1962 but the fear on IDs by elected office holders appears to be the same.As a Vet, I much prefer high fiving at a baseball game than using Shock & Awe to win over a country and its people.Richard G. MacdonaldTremont, IL 61568 Reply
A Pakistanisays: March 28, 2016 at 1:02 pm The blatant reference to “pakistani generals” and associating them with the likes of “jihadists” was very derogatory and sad to read. Please refrain from such remarks. You just offended 20 million people. Reply
Erik Scothronsays: March 28, 2016 at 2:50 pm No, he just offended you. Try to get a little perspective. Reply
Rhyssensays: March 28, 2016 at 2:54 pm Do be quiet, you (as a nation) are a danger to yourself and you don’t even realize it. And your comment is proof enough. Instead of taking this article as it is, your feathers get ruffled like a 12 year old girl who’s been told she cant have desert. You have 20 million generals in your country? You just offended your own civilians who mitigate for peace. Reply
gaurav rasailysays: March 28, 2016 at 1:09 pm never heard about that .all i knew was from the amercian point of view ..there are always those people in the middle of crisis who can keep calm and pull out danger with very highr risk and become reason of saving lives … Reply
Karolsays: March 28, 2016 at 2:11 pm Great story and I hope the state control of such dangeroues weapons era soon will be over. Reply
Florent Pirotsays: March 28, 2016 at 3:55 pm Interesting – didn’t knew Arkhipov was on board K19 and got irradiated.Talking about jihadists and the proliferation risk, here’s a link of interest (my work) : Metallic enriched uranium is actually being circulated because it is used in missiles, for oxydation purposes. Reply
Bob Crainsays: March 28, 2016 at 4:12 pm If you are surprised to find nuclear torpedoes in the hands of individual crews, read Command and Control, the Damascus Accident … by Eric Schlosser (sp?) Reply
Linsays: March 28, 2016 at 4:21 pm There is a similar story told by the aid of one of the Chiefs of staff of the military of the day of the confrontation. All of them were in Kennedy’s office waiting to see if the Soviet fleet would cross the red line that JFK had drawn as the “act of war” line. The guy in command of the American ships called to say that the Soviet ships had crossed the line. All the people in the room were commanding the president to give the order to attack. The guy telling his eye witness story said that President Kennedy sat there in his rocking chair with everyone yelling at him about how we “had to hit them.” This would surely have resulted in a nuclear war. His family had already been evacuated from Washington and the plane was standing ready to take him out to the caves in the Midwest. Finally, he said, with tears in his eyes, ” I can’t. I have children.” Now JFK was a decorated war hero. He was no wimp. A minute later, the phone rang. It was the commander again. It was a mistake. The Soviet fleet had not crossed the red line. They had stopped and turned around. When I heard that story, my first thought was that this was what JFK was sent to us for, for that one moment in history when one strong man stood against all his advisors and the opinion of the world and said, “I can’t. I have children” to save us all unknowingly from an error that would have had devastating consequences beyond the imagination.
About Robert Robert Krulwich is cohost of Radiolab, WNYC’s Peabody Award–winning program about “big ideas” and now one of public radio’s most popular shows. It is carried on more than 500 radio stations, and its podcasts are downloaded over five million times each month.In Curiously Krulwich, Robert looks for “the little things that catch my eye—that when I lean in, get bigger, richer, and much more compelling.”You can see more of Robert’s work at radiolab.com and follow him on Twitter at @rkrulwich.
When a series of bombs went off at the Brussels airport and in a subway station yesterday, killing 31 people and injuring more than 200, the reaction of the US press was immediate and overwhelming. Every major news outlet turned its website over to coverage of the suicide attacks, often accompanied by live tickers and infographics. “Brussels Attacks Shake European Security” reads the banner headline on today’s New York Times’ front page (3/23/16); the Washington Post (3/22/16) worried that the bombings “made clear that European capitals remain perilously vulnerable despite attempts to dismantle the militant network that perpetrated the worst terrorist attack in Paris in generations last November.”
It was a curious statement, given that just nine days earlier, another European nation’s capital had been the site of a remarkably similar suicide bombing. On March 13, a car bomb went off in Ankara, Turkey, killing 34 people and injuring 125. As in Brussels, the Ankara bombing, carried out by a Kurdish group opposed to Turkey’s military actions in Kurdish regions of Syria, targeted a transit hub—there a heavily trafficked bus stop—and the victims were likewise unsuspecting civilians going about their lives, including the father of international soccer star Umut Bulut (Guardian, 3/14/16), who was on his way back from one of his son’s matches.
If terrorists had set out to conduct a controlled experiment on how the US media covers mass deaths overseas, they couldn’t have planned it any better. The Ankara bombing was mostly relegated to smaller stories buried in the foreign section: The New York Times (3/14/16) ran a 777-word story on page 6, noting that the attack “raised questions about the Turkish government’s ability to protect its citizens”; the Washington Post (3/14/16) ran an even shorter story reporting that “initial reports suggested at least some of the casualties were civilians waiting at nearby bus stops” — a strangely inexact account, perhaps explained by the article’s dateline of Beirut, over 400 miles away. CNN at least had a reporter on the scene — Arwa Damon, an Emmy-winning Syrian-American journalist based in Istanbul — though she was limited to a series of five-minute reports running down the basics of the attacks.
Washington Post online edition (3/22/16)
The news reports following the Brussels bombings were dramatically different in both scale and tenor. Multiple stories on the bombings and on the growth of support for ISIS in Belgium, plus video of the bombings’ aftermath were the norm; the New York Times website added a series of interactive graphics showing the bombing sites in detail. Scrolling website tickers updated readers on related news both large and small: The Washington Post’s feed included the breaking news “Starbucks Closes All Belgian Stores,” while the Times ticker included a post reporting that Facebook hadn’t yet released a tool to overlay the Belgian flag on top of profile photos.
It was almost an exact repeat of last November, when bombings in Beirut and Paris on subsequent days received wildly disparate attention from the US news media, with the Beirut bombings that killed 43 getting just 1/40th the US media coverage of the next day’s Paris attacks that killed 136. And the wall-to-wall coverage of Paris and Brussels is called into even greater relief when compared with the numerous other terrorist incidents in recent months that have received little US attention, such as attacks in Bamako, Mali; Tunis, Tunisia; Istanbul, Turkey; Jakarta, Indonesia; Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso; Mogadishu, Somalia; and Grand-Bassam, Ivory Coast, between November and March that collectively took 117 lives (Public Radio International, 3/22/16).
The usual defense of US outlets that offer lesser coverage of deaths in other parts of the world cites readers’ and viewers’ increased interest when Americans are somehow involved — at its most base, the principle expressed in McLurg’s Law that a death in one’s home country is worth 1,000 deaths on the other side of the world. (This was on full display in the Chicago Tribune’s lead story on the Brussels bombings, which was headlined “Brussels Attacks: 3rd Bomb Found; Americans Hurt.”) But while US citizens were injured in Brussels — three Mormon missionaries caught in the airport blast received widespread coverage, including in USA Today (3/22/16) and on CBSNews.com (3/22/16) and NBCNews.com (3/22/16) — and none in Ankara, another Turkish bombing this month did have American casualties: Two Israeli-Americans, Yonathan Suher and Avraham Goldman, were killed along with two others in an ISIS suicide bombing in Istanbul on March 20. Their deaths earned brief stories in the New York Times (3/19/16) and Bloomberg News (3/19/16), but no mention elsewhere in the US news media.
Perhaps the greatest difference in post-bombing coverage, though, came in the lessons the media suggested that readers draw from the Brussels and Ankara attacks. Ankara’s bombing was treated as matter-of-fact, if not entirely unremarkable: The New York Times article’s first sentence (3/13/16) described it as merely “the latest of a string of terrorist attacks that have destabilized the country,” though it later acknowledged that it was the first of these that had targeted civilians. (By the US State Department’s definition of “terrorism”—which involves attacks on non-combatants—the earlier attacks would not be considered terrorism.) The Associated Press coverage (3/13/16) noted only that it was “the third in the city in five months,” without mentioned that the first two attacks were against military targets, not civilians.
The Brussels attacks, meanwhile, were presented as a “shocking turn of events” (Washington Post, 3/23/16), but one explained by Belgium no longer really counting as European at all. The Post’s Adam Taylor reported that the Brussels bombing “wasn’t exactly a surprise,” noting that the Belgian capital, “once best known as a center for European culture and politics,” was now “tainted” by its “links to extremism and terrorist plots.” The problem, it specified, was centered in Molenbeek, a Brussels suburb “just across the Canal not far from some of Brussels’ more fashionable areas,” which “first began to fill up with Turkish and Moroccan immigrants around 50 years ago” and is now beset by high unemployment and “many seedy and rundown shops.”
This New York Times article (3/22/16) originally suggested that security would require “crimping civil liberties.”
The New York Times, meanwhile, prominently featured a news analysis piece by Adam Nossiter (headlined “Brussels Attacks Underscore Vulnerability of an Open European Society”) warning that “the enduring vulnerability of Europe to terrorism in an age of easy travel and communications and rising militancy” would lead to
a new round of soul-searching about whether Europe’s security services must redouble their efforts, even at the risk of further crimping civil liberties, or whether such attacks have become an unavoidable part of life in an open European society.
Nossiter didn’t specify which civil liberties could be “crimped” — a term that had been toned down, by the time his article appeared on today’s print front page (3/23/16), to “impinging on.” He did suggest, though, that Belgium could face “widening derision as being the world’s wealthiest failed state” — something that raises the question of how the United States, with 31 mass killings in the year 2015 (according to USA Today’s ongoing “Behind the Bloodshed” count), should be categorized.
(Nossiter, a longtime Times correspondent, has a bit of a history of “news analysis” pieces showing the need for a bit more analyzing, including one arguing that the displacement of New Orleans’ poor could present an “upside” of Hurricane Katrina, and another citing the African Union’s refusal to cooperate with the International Criminal Court as representative of “the gulf separating the West and many African leaders” on human rights, notwithstanding that the US has itself refused to cooperate with the ICC on numerous occasions.)
Bloomberg News echoed the idea that freedom — either of civil liberties, of travel, or both — was to blame, noting “the vulnerability of open societies such as Belgium” while asserting that “a deluge of refugees from the Middle East is testing the 28-nation bloc’s dedication to open borders and stirring up anti-foreigner demagoguery” — a correlation that would be more believable if Europe hadn’t had a long history of xenophobia well before Syrian refugees began arriving in 2015.
There are certainly reasons why the Brussels bombings might be considered of greater direct concern to American residents than the one in Ankara—specifically, the involvement of ISIS, which as the target of US bombing is more likely to attack the US than a Kurdish group. (Much of yesterday’s reporting on the Brussels bombings focused on what they meant for possible attacks on the US, including former US House homeland security chair Peter King helpfully telling CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, “Even though there is no indication of an attack, it could happen.”)
Coverage in the London Independent did much more to humanize the victims of the Ankara attack than most US papers did.
Yet the deluge of coverage of the Brussels bombing, and the paucity of attention for Ankara, began even before the bombers’ identities were known. And US news outlets steered clear of any opportunities to humanize the Ankara victims — unlike the UK’s Independent (3/14/16), which reported on a widely shared Facebook post that asked “Will you be Ankara?” and compared the site of the attack to “a bomb going off outside Debenhams on the Drapery in Northampton, or on New Street in Birmingham, or Piccadilly Circus in London.”
Instead, the lasting impression for US readers is that deaths in Belgium are more newsworthy than an equal number of deaths in Turkey, and that if Belgium is to avoid sinking to the level of “failed nations,” it needs to address the outsiders who are dragging it down to a level unbecoming of its continent, or at least its western half. Europe, it’s clear, has no monopoly on anti-foreigner demagoguery.
Neil deMause is a contributing writer for FAIR, and runs the stadium news website Field of Schemes.
Brussels’ Zaventem Airport and a metro station near the heart of the E.U. were hit by explosions on March 22, sending the city into high terror alert. (Jenny Starrs/The Washington Post)
A series of coordinated attacks in Brussels on Tuesday morning killed dozens and injured hundreds. The Islamic State claimed responsibility for the devastation — an attack that some have been warning for years would be possible.
To really understand all that’s happening in the Belgian capital, we recommend you read these five stories.
1. Why is tiny Belgium Europe’s jihad-recruiting hub?,by Michael Birnbaum
With 350 citizens in Syria, Belgium has the highest number of foreign fighters per capita of any European country. The influence of those fighters, bitter divisions throughout the country and “ineffective” integration of immigration has made Belgium a breeding ground of terror activity.
Like other European nations, Belgium is experiencing the consequences of what critics call decades of ineffectiveness in integrating immigrants, including many Muslims.
2. Why is Brussels under attack?, by Adam Taylor
In recent years, Brussels has gone from being a cultural center to a city riddled with terror plots. Take, for instance, last week’s capture of Salah Abdeslam, thought to be the last surviving architect of the Paris attacks. Its success quickly became overshadowed by the thought of how vast this terror network could be.
While the discovery of Abdeslam was touted as a success, it also appeared to show that the number of people involved in the Paris attacks could be far larger than first thought. And worryingly, there were signs that Abdeslam and the network around him had been planning more attacks.
3. A decade ago, she warned of radical Islam in Belgium’s Molenbeek, by Steven Mufson
Just over a decade ago, Belgian journalist Hind Fraihi went undercover in Brussels’s Muslim-heavy district of Molenbeek. Her reports revealed a hot-bed of violent extremism bubbling up in the area that she says should have been a wake-up call for Belgium.
Now, she says, because Belgian authorities have not done enough to fight extremism, “there is a whole generation waiting to participate in these actions.”
4. Attacks in Brussels bypassed a city already on high alert, by Thomas Gibbons-Neff
The city started preparing for an attack after the assaults in Paris in November. But even being on high alert for a “possible and likely” attack for months wasn’t enough to prevent them.
“You can’t protect every target, everywhere, all the time,” one security official said. “They’ve been on complete alert, and still all these measures are still insufficient against a determined adversary.”
5. Turkey’s president warned of terror threat to Brussels just days before it happened, by Ishaan Tharoor
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan issued a foreboding statement in the wake of his country’s own terror attack on March 13. In it, he warned that attacks like the one in Ankara, the capital of Turkey, can happen anywhere, specifically citing Brussels as an example.
There is no reason for the bomb which exploded in Ankara not to explode in Brussels, where an opportunity to show off in the heart of the city to supporters of the terror organization is presented, or in any city in Europe. Despite this clear reality, European countries are paying no attention, as if they are dancing in a minefield. You can never know when you are stepping on a mine. But it is clear that this is an inevitable end.
Read more:
Blasts leave dozens dead at Brussels airport and metro station
Live updates: Attacks in Brussels
Ryan Carey-Mahoney is a producer on The Washington Post’s social media team.
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