The Jihad-Genocide of the Armenians

by MARK KRIKORIAN April 24, 2015 4:00 AM 

I saw the souls of them that were beheaded for the witness of Jesus, and for the word of God, and which had not worshipped the beast – Revelation 20:4 

The caliphate wages jihad against Christians. Victims are beheaded, crucified, and burned alive. Christian girls are sold into slavery. Centuries-old monuments are destroyed by jihadis. These events are ripped from the headlines — of 1915.

Friday marks the 100th anniversary of the start of the Armenian Genocide. On April 24, 1915, the Ottoman Caliphate launched a “decapitation strike” against the Armenian people by arresting and killing hundreds of their intellectual, political, religious, and business leaders in Constantinople, so as to make organized resistance impossible. That done, the extermination campaign began in earnest in the following weeks.

More than 1 million Armenians were murdered, along with large numbers of Christian Assyrians and Greeks, with the goal of engineering a Christenrein Anatolia. The remainder would have been killed as well — and the very name “Armenia” relegated to historical atlases, like Babylonia or Gaul — had not makeshift Armenian forces defeated the Ottomans trying to finish the job in the formerly Russian-occupied sliver of Armenia in 1918, after the withdrawal of Russian forces following the Bolshevik coup d’état six months earlier. Among the survivors was my maternal grandmother; most of her family was killed, but as a 15-year-old girl, she was sold into slavery, managing to escape later. My other three grandparents were already here, but their families were not heard from again.

The parallel with today’s depredations by ISIS’s so-called caliphate and other jihadists is not coincidental. Andrew Bostom points to what happened to the Armenians as an example of “jihad genocide,” traditional jihad “adapted to the conditions of modern warfare.” Bat Ye’or has written, “The genocide of the Armenians was a jihad,” adding that it was “the natural outcome of a policy inherent in the politico-religious structure of dhimmitude.” Perhaps the most disturbing continuity between the two caliphates was seen last fall in the town of Deir ez-Zor in eastern Syria, considered the Auschwitz of the Armenian Genocide. Then part of the Ottoman Empire, it was a major destination for death marches and boxcars and served as a sort of open-air concentration camp, where as many as 400,000 Armenians were killed. Decades later, the Armenian Church built a major memorial complex there, including the remains of many victims. ISIS took the town in September 2014. Its first order of business was to dynamite the church.

Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/417365/jihad-genocide-armenians-mark-krikorian