Today, April 24th, is Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day, yet the mass slaughter of Christians by Muslims around the world is far from over

The opening sentence of U.S. Congress House Resolution 296, which passed on the hundredth anniversary of the Armenian genocide (in 2019, during the Trump Administration, after being passed over by several other U.S. administrations following decades of lobbying in the U.S. against such a resolution by Turkish leaders), correctly mentions “the campaign of genocide against Armenians, Greeks, Assyrians, Chaldeans, Syriacs, Arameans, Maronites, and other Christians.”

Raymond Ibrahim That last word—”Christians”—is key to understanding this tragic chapter of history: Christianity is what all of those otherwise diverse peoples had in common, and therefore it—not nationality, ethnicity, territory, or grievances—was the ultimate determining factor concerning who the Turks would and would not “purge.”

As one Armenian studies professor asked, “If it [the Armenian Genocide] was a feud between Turks and Armenians, what explains the genocide carried out by Turkey against the Christian Assyrians at the same time?”

Below is a summary of that tragic event which transpired during World War I (1914-1918):

More than one million Armenians perished as the result of execution, starvation, disease, the harsh environment, and physical abuse.  A people who lived in eastern Turkey for nearly 3,000 years [and 2,000 years before the invading Turks arrived] lost its homeland and was profoundly decimated in the first large-scale genocide of the twentieth century.  At the beginning of 1915 there were some two million Armenians within Turkey; today there are fewer than 60,000….  Despite the vast amount of evidence that points to the historical reality of the Armenian Genocide, eyewitness accounts, official archives, photographic evidence, the reports of diplomats, and the testimony of survivors, denial of the Armenian Genocide by successive regimes in Turkey has gone on from 1915 to the present.

The evidence is, indeed, overwhelming.  As far back as 1920, U.S. Senate Resolution 359 heard eyewitness testimony concerning the “mutilation, violation, torture, and death which]have left their haunting memories in a hundred beautiful Armenian valleys, and the traveler in that region is seldom free from the evidence of this most colossal crime of all the ages.”

In her memoir, Ravished Armenia, Aurora Mardiganian described how she was raped and thrown into a harem (consistent with Islam’s rules of war).  Unlike thousands of other Armenian girls who were discarded after being defiled, she managed to escape. In the city of Malatia, she saw 16 Christian girls crucified: “Each girl had been nailed alive upon her cross,” Aurora wrote, “spikes through her feet and hands, only their hair blown by the wind, covered their bodies.” 

According to another professor, Joseph Yacoub, author of Year of the Sword: The Assyrian Christian Genocide, the “policy of ethnic cleansing was stirred up by pan-Islamism and religious fanaticism.  Christians were considered infidels (kafir).  The call to Jihad … was part of the plan” to “combine and sweep over the lands of Christians and to exterminate them.”   Several key documents, including a Syriac one from 1920, confirm that “there was an Ottoman plan to exterminate Turkey’s Christians.”

Yacoub recounts many “atrocities carried out by Turks and Kurds from town to town and from village to village without exception.” In one instance, Turks, Kurds, and other “Sunnis,” selected “eighteen of the most beautiful young girls” and hauled them into a local church, “where they were stripped naked and violated in turn on top of the Holy Gospel.”  An eyewitness recalled that the “outrages” committed against “even children” were “so horrible that one recoils; it makes the flesh creep.”

After describing the massacres as an “administrative holocaust,” Winston Churchill observed that “The opportunity [WWI] presented itself for clearing Turkish soil of a Christian race.”  Or, in the unequivocal words of Talaat Pasha, the de facto leader of the Ottoman Empire during the genocide:

Turkey is taking advantage of the war in order to thoroughly liquidate its internal foes, i.e., the indigenous Christians, without being thereby disturbed by foreign intervention….  The question is settled. There are no more Armenians.

Not only has this genocide gone unpunished; NATO member Turkey has resumed the genocide against the very descendants of those whom the Turks nearly exterminated over a century ago—namely Armenians and Assyrians.

In late 2020, Muslim Azerbaijan initiated hostilities against Christian Turkey in the context of the Nagorno-Karabakh dispute. Turkey quickly joined its Azerbaijani co-religionists and arguably even spearheaded the war against Armenia, though the dispute clearly did not concern it.  As Nikol Pashinyan, Armenia’s prime minister, rhetorically asked, “Why has Turkey returned to the South Caucasus 100 years [after the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire]?”  His answer:  “To continue the Armenian Genocide.”

Turkey sent  sharia-enforcing “jihadist groups,” from Syria and Libya,  including the pro-Muslim Brotherhood Hamza Division—which kept naked women chained and imprisoned—to terrorize and slaughter the Armenians.  All these Muslim groups committed numerous atrocities (see here, and here), including by raping an Armenian female soldier and mother of three, before hacking off all four of her limbs, gouging her eyes, and mockingly sticking one of her severed fingers inside her private parts.

More recently still, in late 2022, Turkey launched thousands of attacks—air, mortar, drone, artillery, etc.—several miles deep into Syria’s northern border.  This is precisely where most of the religious minorities—Christians, Yazidis, and Kurds—that had a few years earlier experienced a genocide at the hands of the Islamic State (“ISIS”) live. Dozens more were killed, and buildings and infrastructures destroyed.  In response, Genocide Watch issued a Genocide Emergency Alert on December 7, 2022:

These military attacks by Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s regime are part of a wider Turkish policy of annihilation of the Kurdish and Assyrian [Christian] people in northern Syria and Iraq. Turkey has committed war crimes and crimes against humanity, including bombing, shelling, abduction, torture, and extrajudicial killings. The attacks are part of Turkey’s genocidal policies towards Kurds, Christians, and Ezidis.

Charmaine Hedding, president of the Shai Fund, said that  Turkey’s ground forces consisted of former ISIS, al-Qaeda, and Tahrir al-Shams jihadists who  “are committing massive human rights abuses and have an agenda to create a caliphate, and they will eradicate the religious minorities in this area.” Gregory Stanton, president of Genocide Watch, concluded by saying that “Turkey is a genocidal society… Turkey has conducted so many genocides in history… Going back many centuries, it [Turkey] has been anti-Christian, and has tried to slaughter as many Christians as possible.”

Therefore, today, on Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day, it is critical to remember the true background and significance of that tragic event—Muslim hate for Christians—and to know that it is still ongoing.  As Charmaine Hedding said during the webinar on Turkey’s genocidal assault on Christians in Syria, “This genocide is a pattern we see, and it’s certainly nothing new….  For those who say ‘Not on our watch!’ or ‘Never again!’—here it is, happening again!”

From 1915 – 1923, some 1.5 million Christians were brought through what is now Turkey and walked to their deaths near Deir-al-Zour in modern Syria. One hundred years on, only a handful of survivors remain to tell the stories of the Armenian genocide by the Ottoman Turkish Muslims, which they witnessed.