{"id":84593,"date":"2026-10-22T07:47:56","date_gmt":"2026-10-22T11:47:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/stateofthenation.info\/?p=84593"},"modified":"2026-10-22T07:52:18","modified_gmt":"2026-10-22T11:52:18","slug":"84593","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stateofthenation.info\/?p=84593","title":{"rendered":"

The same perps also stealthily carried out the Armenian Genocide……<\/span><\/b><\/h1>"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Jewish Role in the Armenian Genocide and Bloodbath of Christians<\/h1>\n

Jonas E. Alexis
\nThe Unz Review<\/p>\n

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Note:<\/b><\/i> The historical essay presented here is extracted from a chapter of my book, <\/b>Zionism vs. the West<\/b><\/i>. For the sake of brevity, I have not included the complete set of footnotes in this version of the essay. However, all footnotes appear in the corresponding chapter of the book. To assist readers and researchers, I have included at the end of this essay a bibliography of the principal sources consulted in the preparation of that chapter.<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

When the Jewish false messiah Shabbetai Zevi converted to Islam on September 16, 1666\u2014the year his followers believed the Messiah would bring redemption\u2014his followers split into three groups. One of the groups actually believed that Shabbetai did not fail by converting to Islam; they believed that \u201cone cannot know the mysteries of God\u2019s chosen.\u201d A large number of Jewish families, about three hundred of them, followed him. Those became known as Donmeler or Donme, meaning converts, and they didn\u2019t mix with other Muslims until the twentieth century. They had their own schools, mosques, and even their own cemeteries, indicating that they were like the conversos of Europe. Jewish historian Marc David Baer writes, \u201cShabbetai Tzevi\u2019s conversion was not profound, in the sense that it was not based on profound belief in Islam, and that rather, it was quite superficial, because he had been compelled to change religion.\u201d The Donme proved this point when they migrated to Salonika, a cosmopolitan Jewish city in the empire.<\/span><\/p>\n

One of the groups that followed Shabbetai actually believed that his conversion to Islam was the right move. \u201cThey found ample justification in Judaism for this double play. Moses, after all, with whom Shabbetai Tzevi compared himself, remained for a long time in disguise in Egypt. Shabbetai Tzevi\u2019s order not to intermarry with Muslims is a near-literal rendering of a passage from the corpus of Jewish law, the Talmud.\u201d The disciples of Shabbetai were commanded not to mingle with other Muslims or to intermarry, and superficially \u201cavoided relations with Jews,\u201d but the end result was \u201cpublic secrecy,\u201d a key aspect of Freemasonry. Endogamy was so strong that Donme leaders threatened those who intended to leave with the death penalty.<\/span><\/p>\n

In a nutshell, they converted for good reason. \u201cBut their religion was not the religion of Islam\u2026They became Muslim, but not in order to fulfill its commandments and believe in its faith.\u201d The same people \u201ccontinued to believe in his messianic calling and his religious beliefs and practices, which emerged at the intersection of Kabbalah and Sufism.\u201d Shabbetai died in 1676, and by 1683, not even ten years, Shabbataeans began to emerge as a force to be reckoned with.<\/span><\/p>\n

Baer compares Shabbetai to Jesus in that Jesus put an end to the Old Testament law. For their turn, Shabbetai and his followers \u201cestablished a breakaway movement that emphasized divine renewal, which derived from Judaism but radically diverged from it, abrogating the original laws and becoming something quite different, even if like the first Christians, they too claimed to have discovered the true understanding of the religion and the means of fulfilling divine purpose.\u201d But their conversion was allowed because in 1454, minority groups, known as millet, were permitted to form their own enclaves and pursue their own interests. Later, in the seventeenth century, the Ottomans gave permission to European states to protect non-Muslims in the empire.<\/span><\/p>\n

By 1876, Armenian, Greek, and Jewish schools flourished in the empire. It is reported that in 2005, there were about 60,000 Armenian Orthodox Christians, 20,000 Jews, 20,000 Assyrian Orthodox Christians, 3,000 Greek Orthodox Christians, 2,500 Protestants, 2,000 Assyrian Catholics, 2,000 Armenian Catholics, 300 Armenian Protestants, and Chaldean Catholics. Baer declares that \u201cthe Republic of Turkey has in fact never been led by a secret Jew,\u201d but in the same breath he produces this contradictory statement: \u201cA group of people who seem to have acted as crypto-Jews did exist for over two centuries in Ottoman Salonika.\u201d This same group, the Donme, had \u201can even greater transformative role\u201d in politics and on the intellectual and bourgeois elite, for Salonika itself \u201cwas a site of great political fermentation of the Young Turk revolutionary movement and the center of the Committee of Union and Progress [also called CUP] and socialist organizations.\u201d One of the members who played an essential role in the CUP movement was Mehmed Reshid.<\/span><\/p>\n

Born in Russia in 1873, he and his family fled to the Ottoman Empire in 1874, where he was raised in Istanbul. While in the Military School of Medicine, which was considered a revolutionary cell where religion was mocked and Abdulhamid referred to as \u201cthe great despotic Satan,\u201d Reshid got together with a number of students and founded the CUP, a movement that got its start in \u201cpolitically recalcitrant activities.\u201d Reshid became a major in the military and eventually wrote a book on the CUP revolution in 1908, and although his political voice was not as sound as Dr. Nazim, an individual we will meet later, he did become district governor and mayor in many provinces from 1908 until 1914.<\/span><\/p>\n

But Reshid did the next best thing: \u201cDuring his professional progress Reshid gradually radicalized and scapegoated the Christians as the reason for the Empire\u2019s erosion and wretched condition. By 1914 he was thoroughly convinced that the Ottoman Christians were abusing their ostensibly privileged positions and therefore were to blame for the Empire\u2019s depressed economy.\u201d During his reign he searched churches and houses without warrants in order to find what he called \u201cthe enemy,\u201d or deserters, and arrested them.<\/span><\/p>\n

In April 1915 he arrested as many as 600 Armenian men and tortured them in order to extract confessions from them. His methods were so horrible that some prisoners \u201cwent mad under the torture.\u201d And the extracted confessions were mainly fabrications. \u201cThe prisoners were beaten, burnt with hot irons, had their nails pulled out with pliers, and suffered prolonged bastinado.\u201d Any prisoners who survived the torture were slaughtered at the end of May 1915. By this time, Reshid already had a cadre of Christians incarcerated and moved on to a greater target: their religious leaders. \u201cBlanket arrests of priests and monks were carried out and their houses were ransacked.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

In the midst of all that, Armenian Catholic Bishop Ignatius Maloyan warned his parishioners to be faithful to the government and not lose their faith. By May 1915, Reshid was arresting priests and bishops and killing them in broad daylight. Christian villages such as Kabiye, Qarabash, and Qitirbel \u201cwere subjected to brutal arms searches\u201d and \u201cthe village men were tortured with bastinado, and dozens were taken away to the capital, filling the prison and the caravanserai.\u201d On May 22, 1915, Qarabash was invaded and two of its priests, \u201cPaulus and Behnam, were trampled to death under the hooves of the horses. The women were raped, the houses burnt, and valuables seized.\u201d The plunderers did the same thing in the village of Kabiye, where men \u201cwere tortured with hot iron pins, while women and girls were raped in the church. Within five hours, the militia and the tribesmen had hacked the villagers to death with axes. Many were crammed into haylofts and barns and burnt alive.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

In the Diyarbekir district, Reshid ordered the arrest of all Christian notables. The general, Hilmi Bey, refused and demanded an explanation. Another general took over and \u201cproceeded with the persecutions\u201d and ended up incarcerating dozens of Christians. Other places suffered the same fate. Henry Riggs, a missionary, lamented to the American ambassador Morgenthau that \u201cthe Armenian pastor of Cungus had \u2018died a violent death in prison there.\u2019 The same fate had befallen preachers in Hani and Lice.\u201d By the summer of 1915, \u201cthe entire Christian elite of Diyarbekir was in prison, where some had already died under torture.\u201d When the mayor of Lice refused to follow Reshid\u2019s orders in persecuting the Armenians, he was discharged and was murdered.<\/span><\/p>\n

Shortly thereafter, Reshid ordered the Armenian population in Lice exterminated. Men were arrested, led to a cave named Gohe Gumho, stripped of their clothes, \u201cand finally had their throats slit.\u201d Virtually any official who resisted the persecutions of Christians ended up dead. The village of Henne, which had 400 Christian families, \u201cwas invaded and rid of its male population within a day. After the militia had finished the men they returned to the village, where the terrified women had assembled together in houses. They were raped, deported, or left to die in hunger and misery. Similar events took place in the villages of Fum, Simsim, Cum, Tappa and Naghle.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

In the town of Palu, the men were driven to a bridge and had their throats slit \u201cand were thrown into the water.\u201d This happened over and over. \u201cIn another village, the militia rode in and collected all men into the church. The men and the boys came back out with their hands tied behind them. They were taken away to the banks of the Murad river and butchered with long knives. The militia then carried off pretty women and children for personal use, and did not hesitate to throw babies in the river to drown.\u201d Some Christians, seeing that there was no end to this torture, rape, and murder, ended up converting before emigrating to Istanbul or Western Europe.<\/span><\/p>\n

By the fall of 1915, \u201cthe Christian population of Diyarbekir province was thoroughly dispossessed, deported, and critically reduced in numbers.\u201d Within one year, from 1915 until 1916, Major Noel estimated that about 45,000 Gregorian Armenians, 6,000 Catholic Armenians, 7,000 Chaldeans, 2,000 Catholic Syriacs, 96,000 Jacobite Syriacs, and 1,200 Protestants were dispossessed, tortured, or murdered. \u201cWhatever their precise numbers, the Christian population of Diyarbekir province was all but eradicated. Entire villages, neighbourhoods, parishes, and extended families were destroyed or reduced to destitution in the genocidal persecution of 1915.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

The Christians in Mardin were largely Arabic-speaking Catholics, and Reshid ordered the mayor of that city, Hilmi Bey, to persecute the Christians who were widely known as unarmed and honorable people. When Hilmi saw no good reason to persecute those Christians, Reshid sent Aziz Feyzi to bribe the Muslims \u201cto destroy the Mardin Christians.\u201d They did. When Bishop Maloyan refused to convert, General Memduh \u201cpulled out his handgun and shot the bishop in the head.\u201d Those who were not tortured perished in different ways:<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cOn Sunday 30 May 1915 Major Rusdu handcuffed 807 notables including Bishop Tchilgadian, and led them through the Tigris Gate. On the shores of the Tigris the men were loaded on seventeen large Tigris rafts under the pretext that they would be deported to Mosul. Militiamen accompanied the notables on the rafts as they sailed one hour downstream to the \u2018intersections of two rivers,\u2019 a violent torrent where the Batman creek joins the Tigris, south of Besiri. This area was the home of the Raman tribe. At this gorge, Major Rusdu had all rafts moored by the left bank of the river and ordered the Christians to compose reassuring letters to their families in which they were compelled to write that they were safely underway to Mosul. The men were then stripped of their clothes and valuables and massacred by Rusdu\u2019s men near the villages of Shikefta and Bezawan\u2026 All men were slaughtered and dumped in the river, with the exception of Bishop Tchilgadian, who was forced to witness the bloodbath as a form of psychological excruciation before being led back to Diyarbekir. After the massacre, Omer and Mustafa were invited to Aziz Feyzi\u2019s house, where they celebrated their accomplishment. The men were later received at the governorship, where Reshid congratulated them for their bravery and patriotism. Reshid also appealed to the Interior Ministry to have his militia rewarded and awarded medals for their outstanding performances. His wish was granted by the Directorate for General Security, and the militia members received financial benefits and were decorated with medals.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

This is not the end. Reshid and his men repeated the horror one week later with 674 Christians and thirteen rafts. They were quickly stripped of their clothes, slaughtered, and thrown in the river. Walter Holstein, the German vice-consul at Mosul, declared that \u201cfor several days, corpses and human limbs have been floating down the river here.\u201d Further investigation led him to document that the governor of Diyarbakir had intended to commit crimes against the Christians in that region, and he wrote a reactionary letter to his colleagues in Istanbul complaining that the perpetrators must not go unpunished. At other times, bishops were forced to sign papers saying that Christians had been dying of natural causes, a complete fabrication. One bishop who refused to sign \u201cwas thrown into prison and tortured to death while his wife was raped by several militiamen before being killed. Finally, a large nail was hammered through Tchilgadian\u2019s head before he was burnt to ashes\u2026The other priests and monks were strangled to death with thick ropes.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

The basic ideology behind killing Christians can be summarized in three words, \u201cBurn\u2014Destroy\u2014Kill,\u201d an order given to Reshid by Mehmed Talaat, one of the Donme whose ideology was influential in the founding of the Young Turks revolutionary movement. Historians such as Baer and Gocek argue that Reshid used Social Darwinism to \u201ccut out the tumor (Christians) in the body of the nation (Turks), and this required violent measures in order to liberate the economy and people (Muslims).\u201d Another historian declares that \u201cSocial Darwinism, hygienic discourse, a cult of raison d\u2019etat, and political resentments blend together in his extraordinary vindication.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Social Darwinism is based on cutthroat competition and \u201csurvival of the fittest.\u201d In its ideological form, Social Darwinism can be used (and has been used) by revolutionaries in order to spread their wicked ideologies. It was propagated as a theoretical framework in the work of Thomas Malthus, Charles Darwin, Francis Galton, and Herbert Spencer in the nineteenth century and was used in practical form in the early 1920s by the eugenic movement to sterilize and sometimes eliminate the \u201cunfit.\u201d Countries such as Austria had already implemented eugenic ideology or Social Darwinism as far back as 1907. A number of American intellectuals caught on the modus operandi of the intellectuals of that era and spread the same gospel in the United States through various means. Eugenics proposed all kinds of wicked laws in order to stop the \u201cunfit\u201d from procreating\u2014laws such as involuntary sterilization and segregation of the mentally handicapped were promoted and implemented in practical measures. By the middle of the twentieth century, America had all kinds of laws promoting these wicked ideologies, and the handicapped and the weak were called \u201cimbeciles,\u201d \u201cidiots,\u201d and other unprintable names.<\/span><\/p>\n

In general, Social Darwinism had a dark history from its inception, and there is no doubt that Reshid knew how far he could take that concept. Moreover, Reshid and the CUP used Social Darwinism as a weapon because it would later destabilize the Armenian Christians. One historian declared that \u201cthe key players in the CUP had formed a highly destructive view of the Anatolian Christians as \u2018a mortal worry,\u2019 as a race and a privileged class to be combated; as a \u2018tumor\u2019 requiring an operation.\u201d But the Christians could not be liquidated if the government protected them. Therefore the unfit, for Reshid, were Sultan Abdulhamid, the Ottoman Christians, and all the Armenians. As Reshid began to gain political ground, he \u201cfueled dispositions that bore the imprint of social and national hate and of social, economic, ethnic, and demographic engineering.\u201d Not only that, for Reshid, \u201cthe absence of multiculturalism\u201d was a must. Stalin later did the same thing with the Soviet Koreans, Finns, Germans, Kalmyks, Karachays, Balkars, and Greeks. This form of Social Darwinism\u2014or ethnic cleansing\u2014would reappear once again in 1948 when Israel was establishing itself as a nation.<\/span><\/p>\n

The expansion of Reshid\u2019s ethnic cleansing was noticeable, and by June 1915 he ordered as many as 1,060 Armenian men and women of Khanchepek neighborhood to either convert to Islam (or again his own Jewish or Freemasonic interpretation of it) or face torture or death. The population refused. Reshid and his men then proceeded to strip them of their clothes, and massacre on a large scale began once again, where many of the women were raped and sold as slaves. \u201cThe corpses were either thrown in wells or trenches, or left on the plain to rot, \u2018the men on their stomachs, the women on their backs.\u2019\u201d From June to October 1915, women and children by the thousands were raped and killed. In the district of Kiki, Kurdish tribesmen, who had been paid by Reshid and his militiamen, abducted women and children and slaughtered the 300 remaining victims.<\/span><\/p>\n

On the first day of July, Reshid\u2019s militiamen and tribesmen again invaded a village where the terrified people quickly fled to a nearby church. That was of no use. The men went inside the church and once again began to slaughter and decapitate men and women. \u201cA little girl who crawled out from under the corpses was battered to death when she refused to convert to Islam. Approximately seventy women were raped in the church before being put to the sword. After the massacre Kurdish women entered the church and used daggers to stab to death any survivors. The bodies were disposed of by being thrown into wells or burnt to ashes.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

The next day, the militiamen invaded the village of Eqsor, and the process of human liquidation started all over again; \u201cchildren were thrown from roofs and mutilated with axes,\u201d people were crammed into houses and burnt alive, and pretty women were raped and abducted. On the third day, the village was reduced to complete horror in the strictest sense of the word. Ugur Umit Ungor declares that there was a report saying that Reshid \u201ctook 800 children, enclosed them in a building and set light to it, burning the children alive.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Ungor writes that the report is suspect (though he did not elaborate about why), but given Reshid\u2019s overriding ideology, it was not improbable. In 1915, for example, the militiamen entered Nusaybin and abducted all the Christian men with no distinction. \u201cIn the middle of the night the men were led away to a desolate canyon, butchered one by one, and thrown into the ravine. Many were decapitated, and each victim was urged to convert to Islam before being killed and hurled down the abyss\u2026within two days, the population of Nusaybin dropped from 2,000 to 1,200, as 800 Christians were destroyed. The Jewish community of 600 persons was left unharmed.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Almost the same thing happened in Cizre, where Reshid ordered his militiamen to incarcerate all the Christian men, and tortured them \u201cunder the pretext that they had arms hidden in secret depots. They were bound with ropes and chains, and marched out the city, where they were stripped of their belongings and murdered. The naked bodies were dumped downstream in the Tigris\u2026The pollution the decaying corpses caused to the Tigris was of such a nature that the population of Mosul was forbidden to drink from the river for a month.\u201d In Cizre, it was reported that 4,750 Armenians\u20142,500 Gregorians, 1,250 Catholics, 1,000 Protestants\u2014and 250 Chaldeans and 100 Jacobite Syriacs were slaughtered.80 After so many complaints by German diplomats, particularly Holstein, Talaat ordered Reshid to slow down the liquidation process, but by this time it was almost too late, for non-Armenian Christian communities \u201chad already been largely destroyed.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Though publicly Talaat ordered Reshid to slow down, he wrote a private letter saying that Reshid ought to slow down only in killing Armenian Christians, not other Christians. Reshid was never prosecuted for his crimes, even though he disobeyed Talaat\u2019s command in slaughtering Christians, which proved Talaat was not serious about stopping the death of Christians. Talaat only asked Reshid to slow down because, as he indicated in the letter, the German ambassador had been complaining too much about slaughtering Christians like sheep. The German report declared that Reshid and his plunderers had \u201crounded up some 700 Christians (mostly Armenians) in one night\u2014among them the Armenian bishop\u2014by means of gendarmes specially from Diyarbekir and had them slaughtered like sheep. Reshid Bey is continuing his bloody labors among the innocent, whose numbers\u2014the district governor assures me\u2014have presently exceeded 2,000.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Reshid eventually committed suicide in February 6, 1919. In his personal diary, he admitted that \u201che alone was held responsible\u201d for the mass murder and torture that had befallen the Armenians. Members of the CUP were happy when the events leading up to World War I began to erupt. One Young Turk journalist, Huseyin Cahit Yalcin, declared that World War I \u201chad come like a stroke of good fortune\u201d for Turkey. \u201cThe day had finally come,\u201d he continued, that \u201cthe Turks would make an historical reckoning with those\u2026whom they had been previously unable to do so.\u201d Yalcin made it clear that during that process, the Turks would inflict \u201crevenge\u201d upon others, \u201cthe horrors of which had not yet been recorded in history.\u201d This began to happen from the first day of the war, where Young Turks began to oppress, harass, and persecute dissenters, including Christians.<\/span><\/p>\n

Since World War I was in their favor, they formed militia bands in 1914 to provoke Russia and Persia. These irregular militias include criminals, murderers, outlaws, bandits, and thieves. In the winter of 1914, these militias went into Armenian villages and neighborhoods and raped, plundered, and massacred their victims. In December, however, the Russian army defeated them. But the war was not over. The CUP blamed the Armenians for their defeat and, as a result, went and plundered them again. Church properties were looted and vandalized, and Armenians and people in Christian communities were falsely accused and brutally slaughtered. To inflict revenge, the CUP had to be organized, ideologically and politically. Salonika\u2019s \u201cWorkers Solidarity Federation, headed by a Bulgarian Jew, Avram Benaroya, was considered by the Second International to be the spearhead of the proletarian struggle in the East. It was a center of Masonic activity.\u201d Baer moves on to document that Donme such as Hasan Akif also played an influential role in tobacco businesses and other related areas, and Hamdi Bey was mayor in 1893.<\/span><\/p>\n

Moreover, we learn that \u201cthe role of the Donme in the CUP, like their role in Freemasonry, was significant. They immediately responded when the CUP opened its first branch in Salonika in 1896 and began publishing news about its activities aimed specifically at the Donme.\u201d The Donme \u201cplayed a significant role in turn-of-the-century Ottoman politics and an important founding supporting role in the revolutionary movement. In 1899, the Donme Mazlum Hakki and the Jew Albert Fua, an important early CUP ideologue, began to publish a political journal in Paris.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

No revolutionary movement, of course, can function without significant funding, and \u201cthe banker, textile merchant, director of one of the largest banking and commercial houses in the city, and head of the Chamber of Commerce Mehmet Kapanci used his wealth to fund the organization.\u201d Kapanci in particular was interested in funding the revolution because the key players in the revolution \u201cwere Freemasons and believed that the sultan was stifling society with his despotism.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

In a nutshell, Donme intellectuals saw themselves as the vanguard of a subversive ideology, as saviors who would bring about heaven on earth, but this could not happen without destroying the old order\u2014and, in this instance, the Armenian Christian population. As one scholar put it, \u201cAs perverted as this sounds, destroying the Armenians was the quasi-therapeutic process for the young Turks and gave them a renewed sense of power over their Christian subjects.\u201d The CUP called the Armenians \u201cinternal enemies,\u201d and they were to be dealt with brutally. Ahmet Emin Yalman, who presided over the daily Sabah (Morning) and the translation bureau of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, encapsulated the moment when he declared:<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cWe journalists decided to take open action\u2026to electrify the public. We staged a small revolution of our own in Istanbul. Famous writers in disfavor with the Sultan were all invited to write patriotic poems and articles welcoming the new liberty. We held the first street demonstrations, called a meeting of all sorts of writers, and organized a press association. Decisions were made immediately to communicate to the public excitement of the new era.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

The majority of Donme communities were raised to be revolutionary. When one Domne Sabiha Sertel \u201cgreeted her older brother Celal Dervish when the revolution started, she said: \u2018It means you are also now a CUP supporter.\u2019 \u2018What do you think?\u2019 he replied. \u201cWe were raised as revolutionary youth in Salonika. We also became Masons.\u201d As revolutionaries, they were not too far removed from Lenin\u2019s ideologies. For example, \u201ca revolutionary millionaire of Jewish background named Alexander Parvus (Israel Lazarevich Gelfand, or Helphand), who resided for a period in Istanbul and had close relations with the Young Turks, arranged Lenin\u2019s return.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

But Baer does not recognize the Donme as real Jews, presumably for political reasons, since scholars before him have. Gershom Scholem declared that the Donme \u201cbecame formally Muslims but remained Jews at heart\u2014 though Jews of a most peculiar kind.\u201d It is the same thing that other Jewish historians have been saying for decades, that those who participated in the Bolshevik revolution were non-Jewish Jews, thereby downplaying their predisposition to revolutionary and subversive activity. Baer is in contradiction with himself when he writes, \u201cShabbetai Tzevi\u2019s conversion was not profound, in the sense that it was not based on profound belief in Islam, and that rather, it was quite superficial, because he had been compelled to change religion.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

If his conversion was not profound, could it be that he was still Jewish? Could it be that his followers were still Jewish? Scholem interprets this as an indication that the messiah could apostatize for a greater purpose. \u201cThe apostasy of the Messiah is a necessary act in the fulfillment of his mystical, and also of his historical function. The Messiah has not really become a Turk; rather he is now as ever a Jew. Only henceforth he lives on two levels\u2014the exoteric and the esoteric one\u2014which until his return in the full splendor of Messianic dominion must remain in contradiction. This theory fit very nicely the actual behavior of Sabbatai Zevi.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Although the Donme were different from the regular orthodox Jews, their appeal to Kabbala and Freemasonry as a ideological study, their endogamic networking, their emphasis on ancestral bloodlines, their predisposition to revolutionary activities, their indirect allegiance to Shabbetai Zevi, offer enough proof for them to be identified as a Jewish sect, despite the fact that some of them did not see themselves as Jews. Baer continues to distance himself from some of the implications that readers may draw from his book by saying that \u201cthe Donme played a role in the modern transformation in part because their values are associated with bringing about new ways of thinking about and being in the world, not least political reforms.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

But in order to bring about \u201cnew ways of thinking,\u201d the traditional order, be it Christian or Muslim, must be transformed. \u201cBy 1908, the Donme sense of political radicalism meant deposing the sultan and installing a liberal constitution and parliament. This made them a real and perceived danger to monarchs and those who defended them. Not without substantiation, after the fall of the empire, such progressives, many of whom were members of Masonic orders, were accused of not identifying solely with their country, and thus were considered incapable of being good citizens. Freemasons were viewed as sinister, secret political societies became suspect, and most prominent leaders were executed.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

In other words, after the 1908 revolution, the Donme began to be viewed as revolutionaries in the metaphysical and political sense of the word. They were subverters who sought to turn their country upside down, and they came to be seen as \u201cfake Muslim proponents\u201d who were bent on spreading Freemasonry and immorality among the pious, genuine Muslims. They \u201cplayed a substantial role in Freemasonry, the CUP, the Constitutional Revolution of 1908, and Ottoman politics following the revolution.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Moreover, the movement\u2019s intrinsic animosity toward Christians, which is essential to the Talmud, Freemasonry and Kabbalah, is close enough. The essential point is that the Donme played a major role in establishing Freemasonry as the fountainhead of the Young Turks revolution. Just like the French revolution, which operated under the banner of \u201catheism\u201d and \u201creason\u201d in the public but under the banner of Freemasonry in private, and just like Soviet Russia, which used \u201catheism\u201d as its pretension, the Young Turks were started in 1908 by a number of students as a form of atheism: biological materialism. They used \u201cscientific\u201d metaphors to beat their enemies over the head and propound their own ideology. Soon the voice of French Enlightenment writers began to resonate in their discussion. Man, La Mettrie and d\u2019Holbach told us, is just a machine and nothing more.<\/span><\/p>\n

Since the French Revolution came before Darwin, the CUP added this new dimension to their Enlightenment ideology: survival of the fittest. But they also began to devise the same motto as that of the Enlightenment writers\u2014liberty, equality, fraternity. Middle East historian Michelle Campos declares that members of the CUP \u201cunderwent secret initiation rites; and once initiated, they carried around a membership card.\u201d One member declared that one of the group\u2019s requirements was that members had to protect the secrecy of the group.<\/span><\/p>\n

Just like during the French Revolution, \u201cFreemason lodges had emerged as an institutionalized setting for social interaction and the creation of new social ties of solidarity\u2026From the mid-nineteenth century, Freemasonry provided a fertile philosophical and organizational ground for Ottoman liberal thinkers and reformers.\u201d Campos goes on to cite another historian, saying, \u201cBy the end of the [nineteenth] century, there was hardly a city or town of importance without at least one lodge.\u201d In 1909, defunct Masonic lodges such as the Scottish rite and the Grand Orient were reestablished in the Ottoman Empire by members of the CUP. By 1910, Freemasonry blossomed in the empire and at least seven new lodges were functioning in Istanbul alone. Masonic lodges also flourished in places such as Salonica, Jaffa, and Jerusalem. By the same year, the Temple of Solomon lodge in Jerusalem was already in session. Soon the ideology spread to places like Paris and Cairo. This was so common that in some places, it was proper for businessmen \u201cto request letters of introduction with a Masonic stamp of approval.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Campos declares that \u201cin Egypt, Freemasonry provided an outlet for political and social organization in the aftermath of British colonization, and Masons played a prominent role in the 1882 \u2018Urabi revolution.\u2019\u201d Baer adds, \u201cMasonic lodges were considered the centers of atheism in the empire,\u201d and Muslim critics were outraged that \u201cthe government had given Freemasons permission to build them in the seat of the caliphate, even participated in their opening ceremonies.\u201d The movement was also \u201cmarked by a materialist, positivist (replacing religion with science), social Darwinist (survival of the fittest), and anti-religious political theory, which opened Young Turks to accusations of atheism.\u201d \u201cFaith in science,\u201d another historian notes, \u201cheld a central place in the modernist philosophy of the Young Turks.\u201d Science, in this instance, was used as a form of \u201csocial engineering.\u201d (This form of ethnic cleansing showed up again in a slightly different fashion when Louis Wirth began to implement it in largely Catholic neighborhoods in the United States.)<\/span><\/p>\n

In order to link their revolutionary heritage to the French revolution, \u201cthe CUP\u2019s Paris-based official publication, Mes veret (Consultation), was dated according to the positivist French revolutionary calendar, which began on January 1, 1789, and not according to the Muslim calendar.\u201d The CUP\u2019s primary goal during its early stages was \u201cto assassinate Sultan Abdulhamid II or dethrone him in a coup d\u2019\u00e9tat.\u201d In 1896, Reshid planned to hire a number of \u201cbloodthirsty anarchists\u201d to assassinate Abdulhamid. A year later, when he was working at the hospital of Haydarpasa, it was discovered that he was part of a revolutionary organization, and as a result was sent to exile in Libya in 1897.<\/span><\/p>\n

Reshid gained the confidence of soldiers returning from the Greco-Turkish War in the same year and began to propound his same old revolutionary activity. But this time he and his cohorts were more careful. They \u201cseemed to promote Islam in public, in private they disparaged it, and they hoped it would eventually play no public role.\u201d One Donme, Sukru Hanioglu, \u201cargues that they used Islam in order to persuade the public to follow their program, which was anything but Islamic.\u201d In order to do that, they \u201cdid not attempt to reconcile Islam with modern sciences and ideas, and they developed a positivist-materialist ideology by deliberately misinterpreting Islamic sources.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

But throughout this revolutionary uprising, Reshid had \u201ca deadly hate\u201d for the government due to his \u201cradical personality.\u201d Since the CUP was based on the theological foundation of Freemasonry, Reshid\u2019s \u201cdeadly hate\u201d progressively shifted to Armenian Christians. As such, Turkey\u2019s survival was based on the war between \u201cTurkishness versus Christianity,\u201d and Armenian Christians were \u201cleeches\u201d that needed to be eliminated. As he put it, \u201cWe will liquidate them before they eliminate us.\u201d He expanded on this further:<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cEither they us, or we them. In this situation, I thought to myself, \u2018Hey, Dr. Reshid! There are two alternatives: Either the Armenians will liquidate the Turks, or the Turks will liquidate them!\u2026 Faced with the necessity of having to choose, I did not hesitate for long. My Turkishness triumphed over my identity as a doctor. Before they do away with us, we will get rid of them, I said to myself\u2026The Armenian bandits were a load of harmful microbes that had afflicted the body of the fatherland. Was it not the duty of the doctor to kill the microbes?\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

He then bragged about slaughtering 120,000 Armenians over a few short periods. But what Reshid referred to as \u201cTurkishness\u201d was really ethnic cleansing, which, whether he liked it or not, was consistent with his Freemasonic ideology. By August 1914, Reshid was already preparing to exterminate the Armenian Christians. He slaughtered them in brutal ways, burned their stores, and looted their property. Other members of the CUP had already threatened to destroy the Armenians.<\/span><\/p>\n

Abdulhamid II<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

The Donme played a major role in the overthrow of Abdulhamid II, the emperor of the Ottomans, because he underestimated the Donme and believed that Shabbetai Zevi\u2019s conversion was genuine. Before Abdulhamid II was Murad V, who was said to be a Freemason and was in power because the Freemasons put him there in 1876, but he lasted only three months before being replaced by Abdulhamid II. Abdulhamid II was no friend of Freemasonry and was a devout Muslim. He genuinely believed that his foes had sprung from Armenian and Christian sects and missionaries, but he was shocked to discover that they came from the Donme, people of whom he knew very little.<\/span><\/p>\n

Abdulhamid II summoned his friendly rabbi in order to know more about Shabbetai and Jewish sects. After a few days\u2019 research, the rabbi told the emperor that Shabbetai was a saint, allaying his fears about the movement. But the emperor failed to make connections. Dr. Nazim was a leading light in the movement and was \u201cthe director of the municipal hospital in Salonika and scion of a leading Kapanci Donme tobacco merchant family.\u201d Another interesting fact about Dr. Nazim was that he was \u201cabout as representative of the Donme as Leon Trotsky was of Russian Jews. Young Turk ideology was far more extreme, and the two diverged.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

In 1908, Abdulhamid II suffered the great coup d\u2019\u00e9tat which the revolutionary organization had been seeking from its inception. Baer tried to refute the literature that has been written about Turkey saying that Jews and Crypto-Jews have tremendous power in the country, but they could not have done the job entirely. Baer writes, \u201cAfter their initial conversion, the Donme were accepted as Muslims for two centuries, and by the end of the nineteenth century, they had risen to the top of Salonikan society. From that vantage point, they were able to bring about new ways of thinking, and of being in the world, in the Ottoman Empire.\u201d Though they \u201cfervently maintained a separate ethno-religious identity and firm social boundaries, preserved by detailed genealogies, endogamous marriage practices, and separate schools and cemeteries,\u201d what united them in terms of categorical rejection of the Logos was their animosity toward Christians and a complete attack on the social cohesion in Turkey. This is the central point that Baer fails to address. He writes, \u201cThe Donme helped transform Ottoman Salonika into a cosmopolitan city by promoting the newest innovations in trade and finance, urban reform, and modern education, combining morality and science, literature, architectures, and local politics.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

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But persecuting Christians? Baer admitted, however, that they were \u201ca driving force behind the Committee of Union and Progress, the secret society of Young Turks that dethroned the last powerful sultan, Abdulhamid II, following the 1908 revolution.\u201d As a result, \u201cfor the first time their Islamic faith and practice were also doubted.\u201d Moreover, their morality and ethics were based on \u201cthe intersection of Jewish Kabbalah and Islamic Sufism,\u201d a particular religion which, like the Kabbalah in its esoteric form, \u201cremained secret and ethnically defined.\u201d It was the \u201cSufi brotherhoods and Freemasons\u201d that \u201cplayed in oppositional politics in that era aiding the CUP and favoring the overthrow of Abdulhamid II.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Freemasonry<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

Freemasons, the key players behind the revolutionary movement, \u201clet the CUP use their lodges after 1906.\u201d After the 1908 revolution, leaders in the revolutionary movement frequented \u201clodges to pay tribute.\u201d Newspapers that opposed the movement were attacked and closed, and more lodges were opened to foster the revolution. \u201cThe Sufi role in revolutionary politics was significant, but it was the Freemasons who were more important in opposition politics than the CUP before 1895. Freemasons played such an active role between 1870 and 1918 that the assassins of an Ottoman stateman in 1913 claimed that \u2018their aim was to recapture power that had too long been in the hands of the Freemasons.\u2019\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Sultan Murad V, for example, \u201chad come to power in a coup d\u2019etat facilitated by Freemasons in 1876. The nucleus of the Young Turks sprang from the members of a Masonic lodge established by those who had brought that sultan to the throne.\u201d Salonika, where a cadre of Donme resided, was the nucleus of CUP Masonic lodges. Baer stresses that \u201cFreemasons declared themselves \u2018the main force\u2019 behind the 1908 revolution, supported the CUP in power, and thrived after Abdulhamid II was deposed. Freemasonry played a key role in that revolutionary era.\u201d These Freemasons were largely Donme. But Baer defends them by saying that they were, in the end, \u201cneither Jews nor orthodox Muslims.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Although Baer understands that Freemasonry governed the revolutionary movement, he does not seem to grasp the full force and power of that ideological substratum. The Donme were students of the Kabbalah, and they wanted their own autonomous court and jail, which came as a shock to the state, a sign that they were indirectly lighting the revolutionary flame and therefore were responsible for creating conflict. The vast population, largely Christians, resented their propaganda and social reform. Abdulhamid II charged them with being \u201ca habitual source of sedition.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

This charge was not without evidence, for \u201cthere were close links between secret societies of Freemasons and the diverse members of the CUP, a secret society imitating Masonic practices and meeting in Masonic lodges. Secrecy afforded political organization.\u201d Emmanuel Carasso was a quintessential traitor to the sultan. He \u201creceived medals of honor from the very sultan he worked to overthrow\u201d and he was \u2018one of the leaders of the CUP in Salonika\u2019\u201d who \u201cheaded the Italian rite Mecedonia Risorta\u2026Once the CUP came to power, it established its own exclusive Masonic lodge in 1909, Le Grand Orient Ottoman, in order to reduce the power of foreign-affiliated lodges\u2026Many prominent Donme were Freemasons as well as Sufis, which facilitated their entry into the CUP.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Other subversive organizations such as the Veritas Obedience were filled with Jews. That organization had 150 members in 1908, and Baer declares that 129 of them were Jews and 15 others were Muslims or Donme. Lodges during that era were a function of Jewish cells\u2014L\u2019Avenir de l\u2019Orient had 60 members in 1911, and only 23 members were Turkish. \u201cJews and Donme were prominent in the clubs of Freemasons where the CUP met in Salonika.\u201d In addition, \u201cgiven Salonika\u2019s secret CUP cells and secret Masonic membership and revolutionary cells in the Third Army,\u201d subversive activities were allowed to function unchecked or undetected by the police. The Donme\u2019s mission, as we shall develop later, was primarily to obliterate the Christian population of about twenty million people, of which the Christian Armenians made up just ten percent.<\/span><\/p>\n

Persecution of Muslims and Christians<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

Although the Donme to a large degree were indistinguishable from other Muslims and they were even officially considered Muslim, largely because Ottoman authorities taught that they were true Muslims, they proved their Kabbalistic leanings indirectly by persecuting and eliminating Christians. First, they began to label Christians and non-Turkish Muslims as \u201cparasitical,\u201d \u201cexploiters, \u201cbloodsuckers,\u201d \u201ctumors,\u201d \u201cmicrobes,\u201d and socially inferior. And as such they were to be expelled, deported, exterminated and tortured. In the process, they were asked to \u201cassimilate\u201d by embracing Islam (or the Donme version of it). This practice was known as forcible Islamization, and \u201cwas used as a means to destroy an ethno-religious group.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Moreover, \u201cthe traditional subordination of the Armenians as Christians allowed the Unionists to target them all the more easily, not just as enemies of the state, but also as aliens to the nation.\u201d A few Christians did convert, but the vast majority did not. Dr. J. K Marden, an American missionary in that region, wrote that \u201cin the town of Marsovan, from 13,000 Armenians, over 11,500 were deported and about 1,500 accepted Mohammedanism as an alternative to sure death.\u201d Many of those people \u201cdid it for the sake of their women and children, feeling that it would be a matter of only a few weeks before relief would come.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Even then, those converts were not allowed to regain their property and were instead dispersed into other regions. It must be kept in mind that \u201cthe sole requirement for staying was to abandon Christianity.\u201d The same event was happening in other places such as Syria, where the CUP had a stronghold. When the refugees moved from one region to the next, they were often forced by those people to convert. Those who did not were left to starve. About 150,000 Armenians were \u201cforcibly Islamized\u201d between Hama and Damascus. Once again it must be kept in mind that this form of assimilation \u201cwas as much a structural element of genocide as physical destruction.\u201d During this process, \u201cyoung Christian boys and girls were taken from their families and raised according to Muslim customs and traditions. They were dispersed to Muslim villages in which there were no Armenians, forced to marry Muslims, or placed in orphanages.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

But this forcible Islamization was not limited to Damascus and Hama; it was happening all across the country. Even the children had to go through that process; others were sold into slavery. Human trafficking\u2014mostly girls and women\u2014was quite prevalent, and Armenian girls were being sold in Cilicia and other places such as Damascus, where they were placed on the block naked \u201cso that bidders might better judge their worth\u2026Armenian women were sold like pieces of old furniture, at low prices, varying from one to ten liras, or from one to five sheep.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

During the Islamization process, many children were put in Muslim orphanages or given to Muslim families. \u201cThe older girls were married off by force to Muslim men.\u201d During the deportation process, \u201cyoung girls and boys were killed outright or abandoned to die of hunger and disease. In some places, along with their mothers, they were drowned in the Black Sea.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

One of the girls who suffered under this deportation process was Aghavni Kassabian, the daughter of an Armenian Christian merchant who was tortured by Reshid\u2019s militiamen. During their deportation, they were able to pack only a few things. On the fifth day traveling through the desert, her mother \u201chad gone delirious and died of exhaustion. On the sixth day, all of their possessions were gone, either consumed or stolen by the gendarmes. One night she was raped by a gendarme\u2026Aghavni herself was abducted by a Kurdish nomad and she bore him two children, before she escaped to the remainder of her extended family in the United States.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

During that process, the Armenians \u201cwere reduced to virtual non-existence in the desert.\u201d A German living in Aleppo lamented, \u201cMany raped female corpses were lying around naked\u2026Many of them had stakes driven in their anus.\u201d At the same time, foreign missionary schools, orphanages, and religious institutions were being harassed by the government, which started deporting teachers and professors. One archival document declared that fifty years of work by those institutions were being brought to ruin. Those institutions were closed down and the buildings were commandeered by the government \u201cunder the pretext of necessities of war.\u201d During the deportation process, \u201crape, sexual abuse, and prostitution of Armenian women were extremely widespread.\u201d Military commanders told their soldiers, \u201cDo to [the women] whatever you wish.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Just like the German women who suffered after World War II, the Armenian women went through similar horrors, for \u201cthe rape of women and girls are ordinary and daily facts,\u201d one eyewitness declared. In Cilicia alone, \u201cthe rapes of children of both sexes could not even approximately be counted or described. Girls eight and ten years of age were violated and then murdered. The creation of a harem by nearly every senior official involved in the deportations and annihilations, the organization of sex parties, the trafficking of young girls as \u2018presents,\u2019 and still more abuses of young girls and women could be endlessly elaborated.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

In essence, the entire Armenian population was charged \u201cwith treason and sedition,\u201d and forcible Islamization was one of the processes that \u201caimed to complete the destruction of the Armenians.\u201d Between 1915 and 1923, \u201cthe Armenian population of Anatolia and historic West Armenia was eliminated.\u201d The mostly Christian population had been in existence for at least three thousand years. It was said that the king of Armenia converted to Christianity in the fourth century, \u201cmaking his country the first to formally recognize the new faith.\u201d But all of that changed when Freemasonry took the stage in nineteenth century Turkey. Some historians do not know the role that Freemasonry played in that era, but they know that \u201ca prosperous middle class emerged\u201d during that era \u201cthat became the envy of the Turkish population and a source of distrust for the Ottoman government.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

As the Armenians began to regain their national confidence, those \u201cprosperous middle class,\u201d largely Freemasons, \u201cincreased their demands for reforms in Armenia, where conditions continued to deteriorate.\u201d \u201cThe Ottoman leaders decided that the only way to save the Turkish state was to reduce the Christian population. Beginning in April 1915, the Armenians of Anatolia were deported to Syria and the Armenian population of West Armenia was driven to Mesopotamia.\u201d \u201cKilling units were organized to slaughter the Armenians\u2026the Young Turk government also disposed of large numbers of Armenians through starvation. In the absence of even minimal sanitation, let alone health care, epidemics broke out in the concentration camps and contributed to the death toll.\u201d The Armenians from the east and west and European Turkey \u201cwere all driven from their homes\u201d by the autumn of 1915; most were given only three days to pack their belongings. Women and children had to head into the Syrian desert, where \u201cexhaustion, exposure, and fright took a heavy toll especially on the old and the young.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Moreover, \u201cat remote sites along the routes traversed by the convoys of deportees, the killing units slaughtered the Armenians with sword and bayonet. In a random frenzy of butchering, they cut down persons of all ages and of both genders.\u201d Those who were allowed to stay to keep their homes and till the earth were summoned by the government; \u201cvirtually all the men turned themselves over without an inkling that their government contemplated their murder. They were immediately imprisoned, many were tortured, and all of them were taken away, sometimes in chains, and felled in mass executions.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Once the convoys reached the desert, \u201ctens of thousands died from exposure to the scorching heat of the summer days and the cold of the night in the open. Men and women dying of thirst were shot for approaching the Euphrates River. Women were stripped naked, abused, and murdered. Others despairing of their fate threw themselves into the river and drowned. Mothers gave their children away to Arab Bedouins to spare them from certain death. The killing units completed their task at a place called Deir el-Zor. In this final carnage, children were smashed against rocks, women were torn apart with swords, men were mutilated, others were thrown into flames alive. Every cruelty was inflicted on the remnants of the Armenian people.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

On April 24, 1915, the government moved on to arrest intellectuals, lawyers, educators, and high-ranking clergy in Constantinople, and \u201cmany were never heard from again.\u201d Because some historians do not seem to grasp the ideological substratum of this whole issue, they are unable to understand why a regime would try to eliminate such a small minority of Christians; some historians say that \u201cthe measures\u201d by the government \u201cwere intended to yield a permanent outcome,\u201d which is another way of saying that they intended to eliminate the Armenian Christians once and for all. The same historian continues, \u201cAt no time throughout its existence had the Ottoman state taken such a step against an entire population\u2026It cannot be a matter of accident, or coincidence, that persons of the same ethnic background become the object of mistreatment.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Of course, the answer to the puzzle has to do with a categorical and metaphysical rejection of Logos. The Donme were different from other Jews, but their rejection of Logos and their animosity toward Christians were an essential part of the messianic spirit, which always brings tension. The ideological substratum that brought tension in the Turkish revolution was Freemasonry, a covert principle carried out by practical measures in obliterating Armenian Christians and other ethnic groups. This is almost the same phenomenon that happened in Soviet Russia. Stalin deported ethnic groups like Koreans, Finns, Germans, and Greeks to Siberia by the millions between 1937 and 1949.<\/span><\/p>\n

But the population that suffered most were the Christians, since Russia, in its traditional national identity, was imbued with Christian traditions and symbols. Even architecture was based upon a Christian worldview, and Russia had adapted the \u201cByzantine canons of church building.\u201d Two scholars in particular noted that Russia\u2019s Christian roots go back as early as the eleventh century, where the Christian worldview was responsible for developments that later made Russia into a force to be reckoned with. This Christian worldview, they wrote, \u201cproduced impressive results\u201d and added \u201cliterary and artistic attainment to the political power and high economic development characteristic of the age.\u201d After Oleg, \u201cthe first historical ruler of Kiev,\u201d died in 913, his widow converted to Christianity in either in 954 or 955 and though Kiev had its ups and downs through the centuries, the Christian roots were still there. Shortly after her death, Kievan Russia started to be called \u201cthe great adventure.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

The Bolshevik Revolution challenged those \u201cimpressive results\u201d and overturned thousands of years of Russian Christian history and tradition. Just like Sigmund Freud, who identified himself as a Semite out to conquer Rome (Christianity) through psychoanalysis, the Bolsheviks saw themselves as revolutionaries out to tear down Christian Russia. We have already seen that this was the primary reason why the CUP uprooted the Armenian and Assyrian Christians, which had \u201ca harmonious community,\u201d and which were considered two of the oldest communities in Turkey.<\/span><\/p>\n

No Armenian Genocide?<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

The late Princeton Middle East Jewish historian Bernard Lewis, along with people such as Heath Lowry, spent years advancing arguments that denied or minimized the Armenian Genocide. Their work contributed to a wide campaign to challenge the historical characterization of the mass killings and deportations of Armenians during the final years of the Ottoman Empire. Moreover, the Israel Lobby and Jewish organizations, including the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), have played an influential role in efforts to pressure Congress and the U.S. State Department to avoid formally recognizing the Armenian Genocide. Lewis and other scholars were also accused of having financial or professional relationships with the Turkish government that influenced their positions on the issue. As one scholar put it, \u201cBernard Lewis became the active accomplice of a political fraud.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

What is particularly striking is that Lewis wrote a book titled Race and Slavery in the Middle East<\/i> but did not address allegations concerning the role of slavery and human trafficking during the Armenian Genocide. Like other Jewish historians and some Western intellectuals who place the blame for African slavery at the feet of helpless Europeans, even though nineteenth-century African slavery was largely a Jewish enterprise, Lewis placed responsibility for slavery in the Middle East primarily on Muslims while giving the D\u00f6nme a free ride. After all, Hollywood producers have long claimed to tell us the whole truth in films such as Django Unchained<\/i>.<\/span><\/p>\n

Finally, Lewis tells us that the French Revolution had a profound influence on Muslim leaders and thinkers but never mentions that many of those leaders and thinkers were D\u00f6nme. Some historians may fail to mention the D\u00f6nme out of ignorance, but Lewis was not ignorant. However, he seems to hint at it when he declared that \u201cSecularism,\u201d such as the French Revolution, \u201chas no great attraction for Muslims, but in a Western movement that was non-Christian, even anti-Christian, and whose divorce from Christianity was stressed by its leading exponents, the Muslim world might hope to find the elusive secret of Western power without compromising its own religious beliefs and traditions.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

When Robert Jay Lifton of the City University of New York mentioned the Armenian Genocide in one of his books, he received a letter from the Turkish ambassador questioning his statements. Heath Lowry, then chair of Ottoman Studies at Princeton, had reportedly drafted a letter for the ambassador outlining how Turkish officials could pressure scholars who mentioned the Armenian Genocide in their work. When Lowry was caught, he eventually admitted that he had \u201cgoofed.\u201d The Turkish government, of course, appeared pleased with Lowry\u2019s efforts and later donated $750,000 to Princeton.<\/span><\/p>\n

In volume 32 of the Turkish Encyclopaedia<\/i>, it declares that Reshid, the revolutionary who slaughtered Christians by the thousands, was a perfect patriot. Moreover, the Turkish education system taught students for years that the Christian Armenians were responsible for the genocide. Yet that is not all. The Turkish government has gone so far as to create a fifth column in the United States. Lifton and another scholar wrote, \u201cThe government of Turkey has channeled funds into a supposedly objective research institute in the United States, which in turn paid the salary of a historian who served that government in its campaign to discredit scholarship on the Armenian Genocide.\u201d Lewis, Lowry, and more than sixty others have been saying this since 1985. And during the 1980s and 1990s, the scholarly world has neglected to deal with the torturous nature of Armenians, both Christians and non-Christians, and the issue of the Donme was virtually untouched during the past two decades.<\/span><\/p>\n

In 2000, a number of historians and scholars of all stripes stepped forward and declared that the Armenian Genocide was a historical event, but Lewis and others had already done enough damage in the scholarly world. Hypocritically, while Israel loudly calls for the world to recognize the Nazi holocaust, the state of Israel for years has refused to accept the Armenian Genocide, and didn\u2019t even start the progress of acknowledging it until 2011. What is even more heartbreaking is that while many Jewish organizations make sure that Nazi perpetrators get convicted and Nazi survivors get the world\u2019s attention, Armenian Genocide survivors have gotten little time in the public eye. The late Bishop Williamson was fined for so-called \u201cHolocaust denial,\u201d and Holocaust revisionists such as Germar Rudolf spent years behind bars for raising questions that deserved serious scientific and historical scrutiny regarding Nazi Germany. Yet Bernard Lewis was able to deny the Armenian Genocide without legal penalty and went on to hold tenured positions at prestigious institutions such as Princeton University.<\/span><\/p>\n

Conclusion<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

The Armenian Genocide was largely led by Jewish revolutionaries, although some historical writers have recently tried to deny the ethnic composition of that movement. At the beginning of his study, They Can Live in the Desert but Nowhere Else: A History of the Armenian Genocide<\/i>, historian Ronald Grigor Suny writes, \u201cWhatever else they were, the Young Turks who carried out the genocide were never purely Turkish ethnonationalists, never religious fanatics, but remained Ottoman modernizers in their fundamental self-conception. They were primarily state imperialists, empire preservers, rather than the founders of an ethnic nation-state.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

From reading Suny\u2019s book, few readers would come away with the impression that the leading members of the Young Turk movement were Jewish revolutionaries. It is clearly a politically sensitive subject, and many historians avoid discussing it in detail. The central point of this study, however, is that the Armenian Genocide could not have taken place without the Young Turk revolutionaries. I have argued repeatedly elsewhere that these revolutionaries belonged to a broader subversive and ideological tradition that, over the centuries, has been at the forefront of attacking Logos and its expression in human civilization.<\/span><\/p>\n

The historical argument is straightforward. The D\u00f6nmeh were crypto-Jews, and I argue that they played a major role in establishing the Young Turk movement. The Young Turks, in turn, were primarily responsible for carrying out the Armenian Genocide. This does not mean that every member of the Young Turks was a D\u00f6nmeh, just as not every Bolshevik was Jewish. Rather, the argument is that the Young Turk movement included influential D\u00f6nmeh figures and displayed Jewish characteristics that reflected their revolutionary outlook.<\/span><\/p>\n

Therefore, the Young Turks saw themselves as revolutionaries determined to overthrow the existing social and political order. They sought to dismantle traditional institutions and replace them with a new vision of society. In that sense, the movement was not simply a Turkish nationalist movement but part of the Jewish revolutionary project that has a history of attacking Logos and the moral and political order.<\/span><\/p>\n