From Jihad Watch:
Islamic Apartheid: Coming Soon to Europe
Zenit News, a Rome-based international Catholic news agency, reports on the latest example of Turkey sliding away from its secular constitution, back toward the intolerance that characterized the Ottoman Empire. No, the Turks aren’t kidnapping first-born boys to serve as janissaries… yet. Here’s what is happening:
Not even the Mongols of the 14th century, when they killed 40 monks and some 400 faithful, succeeded in making one of the most ancient Christian convents in the world disappear, but perhaps Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan of Turkey, can.
The convent in question belongs to a church that suffered Islamic conquest in the 8th century, the Syrian Orthodox, and the story of that church and this convent is a microcosm of Islamic intolerance in action. The convent of Mor Gabriel in the region of Turabdin, in southeastern Anatolia, was founded in 397. Zenit notes that Mor Gabriel isn’t just an ancient church; known to Syrian Christians as the "‘second Jerusalem,’ Mor Gabriel is in fact the See of the Metropolitan Mor Timotheus Samuel Aktas and the cultural and spiritual center of the dwindling Syro-Orthodox community of Turkey and of numerous Syriacs who've emigrated to the West. Just 50 years ago, some 130,000 Syriacs lived in the region of Turabdin… but today their number has decreased to just a few thousand.” Indeed, the once thriving monastic complex “today houses a small community of three monks and 14 sisters.”
Now the Islamic supremacists who are inexorably taking power in Turkey (thanks to democratic “reforms”) want to seize and liquidate what little is left of this ancient Christian community. Zenit cites a concerted campaign against Mor Gabriel “initiated in 2008 by the leaders of three Kurdish villages dominated by a tribe supported in Parliament by one of their leaders, Suleyman Celebi, who is a Parliamentarian with the pro-Islamic ruling party of Erdogan.” The Kurds are accusing the monks of:
•Trying to convert Muslims to Christianity (so much for religious freedom in this aspiring EU member state), a charge the monks deny.
•Residing on a site where a mosque once stood, “an unfounded and even absurd accusation, given that Mor Gabriel well precedes the birth of Islam.” Not that such considerations of logic or history ever cut much ice with Muslims before. The “history” in question is part of the jahiliyya, in any case, so what is the point of studying it?
•Stealing Turkish public land to use for farming.
The last accusation was the only one the Turkish state was able to use against the monks. In a decision made public on Jan. 27, Zenit reports, Turkey's highest appeals court ruled that “12 plots of monastery land with a total area of 99 hectares (244 acres) are to be considered ‘forests’ and hence belong ‘ipso facto’ to the Turkish state.” This land was what the monks used to grow their own food, and observers characterized the court's decision variously as "highly political and ideological," "a spectacle trial" and a "farce."
Are citizens of European countries—who might soon be stuck with Turkey as the EU's largest, most populous member—objecting to this act of historical cleansing? Hardly, Zenit reports. Only in Germany have any politicians raised the alarm. There, “several parties, including the Social Democratic fraction in the Bundestag (Lower Chamber) and even Die Linke (the Left), denounced [the decision].... Erika Steinbach, spokeswoman of the German parliamentary group for Human Rights and Humanitarian Aid... [said] it symbolizes 'the repression of Christianity in Turkey....The negative trend in religious freedom in Turkey is incompatible with human rights,' said Steinbach, according to the Assyrian International News Agency.”
In Turkey, Zenit noted:
For now, representatives of many religions prefer to stay silent. They fear -- as the case of Mor Gabriel demonstrates -- attracting the hostility of the authorities and having to face long and above all costly legal battles, only to lose their "de facto" liberty.... [T]he only solution to undo this knot that is "completely incompatible" with the European Convention on Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms, is a change in the Constitution and criminal code of Turkey.
This was also admitted last October by the then head of the "Diyanet" (Directorate for Religious Affairs), professor Ali Bardakoglu. "The solution is to allow a religious institution to be autonomous. Turkey is ready for this," he said, according to the daily Radikal. The following month, Bardakoglu lost his post.
For the monks of Mor Gabriel, the only way not to lose their land is, therefore, to follow the example of the ecumenical patriarchate of Constantinople and turn to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. Metropolitan Samuel Aktas told the Economist that is just what he's going to do: “I have remained silent in the face of these injustices; but no longer so."
"The purpose of the threats and the lawsuit seems to be to repress this minority and expel it from Turkey, as if it were a foreign object," the head of the Aramaic Federation, David Gelen, told AsiaNews back in 2009. "Turkey must decide whether it wants to preserve a 1,600-year-old culture, or annihilate the last remains of a non-Muslim tradition. What is at stake is the multiculturalism that has always characterized this nation, since the time of the Ottoman Empire."
That last statement might make good politics, and I don't blame the Aramaic Federation one bit for trying to use such rhetoric to further its case. But it soft-pedals the reality of dhimmitude, the cruel subjection that has always, from the beginning of Ottoman conquest, characterized the treatment of non-Muslims in Turkish lands. He makes a good point, however: In one Muslim land after another, we are seeing that Muslims are not satisfied with dominance and deference. What they want is ethnic cleansing, to render their countries Christrein Christenrein as they have been since 1948 Judenrein. Perhaps this is because modern mores and world media scrutiny make the literal practice of dhimmitude hard to maintain. Since so far no Muslim country has the stones to collect the jizya, and these captives communities have in many cases been reduced to relative poverty, there is no practical advantage to keeping Christians around. Starving cows give no milk, so you might as well be rid of them—as Muslims are energetically ridding Iraq of its residual Christians.
The lesson for Europe is clear: Turkey does not belong in the European Union. The case of Mor Gabriel should become one of the talking points of European politicians who are trying to stop this final, most threatening Turkish invasion. They should add the restoration of all such religious property to dispossessed ethnic groups (why not include historic synagogues, even where the local Jews have been driven out?) to the list of non-negotiable conditions Turkey must meet before it is even considered for membership. The more Islamic Turkey becomes, the more intransigent its politicians will be on such issues. Let the cycle of recriminations grow worse and worse, and the gap between Europe and Turkey become so wide that it cannot be patched up by what Turkey-skeptics rightly call A Bridge Too Far.
Posted by Roland Shirk on February 24, 2011 8:43 PM
Islamic Apartheid: Coming Soon to Europe
Zenit News, a Rome-based international Catholic news agency, reports on the latest example of Turkey sliding away from its secular constitution, back toward the intolerance that characterized the Ottoman Empire. No, the Turks aren’t kidnapping first-born boys to serve as janissaries… yet. Here’s what is happening:
Not even the Mongols of the 14th century, when they killed 40 monks and some 400 faithful, succeeded in making one of the most ancient Christian convents in the world disappear, but perhaps Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan of Turkey, can.
The convent in question belongs to a church that suffered Islamic conquest in the 8th century, the Syrian Orthodox, and the story of that church and this convent is a microcosm of Islamic intolerance in action. The convent of Mor Gabriel in the region of Turabdin, in southeastern Anatolia, was founded in 397. Zenit notes that Mor Gabriel isn’t just an ancient church; known to Syrian Christians as the "‘second Jerusalem,’ Mor Gabriel is in fact the See of the Metropolitan Mor Timotheus Samuel Aktas and the cultural and spiritual center of the dwindling Syro-Orthodox community of Turkey and of numerous Syriacs who've emigrated to the West. Just 50 years ago, some 130,000 Syriacs lived in the region of Turabdin… but today their number has decreased to just a few thousand.” Indeed, the once thriving monastic complex “today houses a small community of three monks and 14 sisters.”
Now the Islamic supremacists who are inexorably taking power in Turkey (thanks to democratic “reforms”) want to seize and liquidate what little is left of this ancient Christian community. Zenit cites a concerted campaign against Mor Gabriel “initiated in 2008 by the leaders of three Kurdish villages dominated by a tribe supported in Parliament by one of their leaders, Suleyman Celebi, who is a Parliamentarian with the pro-Islamic ruling party of Erdogan.” The Kurds are accusing the monks of:
•Trying to convert Muslims to Christianity (so much for religious freedom in this aspiring EU member state), a charge the monks deny.
•Residing on a site where a mosque once stood, “an unfounded and even absurd accusation, given that Mor Gabriel well precedes the birth of Islam.” Not that such considerations of logic or history ever cut much ice with Muslims before. The “history” in question is part of the jahiliyya, in any case, so what is the point of studying it?
•Stealing Turkish public land to use for farming.
The last accusation was the only one the Turkish state was able to use against the monks. In a decision made public on Jan. 27, Zenit reports, Turkey's highest appeals court ruled that “12 plots of monastery land with a total area of 99 hectares (244 acres) are to be considered ‘forests’ and hence belong ‘ipso facto’ to the Turkish state.” This land was what the monks used to grow their own food, and observers characterized the court's decision variously as "highly political and ideological," "a spectacle trial" and a "farce."
Are citizens of European countries—who might soon be stuck with Turkey as the EU's largest, most populous member—objecting to this act of historical cleansing? Hardly, Zenit reports. Only in Germany have any politicians raised the alarm. There, “several parties, including the Social Democratic fraction in the Bundestag (Lower Chamber) and even Die Linke (the Left), denounced [the decision].... Erika Steinbach, spokeswoman of the German parliamentary group for Human Rights and Humanitarian Aid... [said] it symbolizes 'the repression of Christianity in Turkey....The negative trend in religious freedom in Turkey is incompatible with human rights,' said Steinbach, according to the Assyrian International News Agency.”
In Turkey, Zenit noted:
For now, representatives of many religions prefer to stay silent. They fear -- as the case of Mor Gabriel demonstrates -- attracting the hostility of the authorities and having to face long and above all costly legal battles, only to lose their "de facto" liberty.... [T]he only solution to undo this knot that is "completely incompatible" with the European Convention on Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms, is a change in the Constitution and criminal code of Turkey.
This was also admitted last October by the then head of the "Diyanet" (Directorate for Religious Affairs), professor Ali Bardakoglu. "The solution is to allow a religious institution to be autonomous. Turkey is ready for this," he said, according to the daily Radikal. The following month, Bardakoglu lost his post.
For the monks of Mor Gabriel, the only way not to lose their land is, therefore, to follow the example of the ecumenical patriarchate of Constantinople and turn to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. Metropolitan Samuel Aktas told the Economist that is just what he's going to do: “I have remained silent in the face of these injustices; but no longer so."
"The purpose of the threats and the lawsuit seems to be to repress this minority and expel it from Turkey, as if it were a foreign object," the head of the Aramaic Federation, David Gelen, told AsiaNews back in 2009. "Turkey must decide whether it wants to preserve a 1,600-year-old culture, or annihilate the last remains of a non-Muslim tradition. What is at stake is the multiculturalism that has always characterized this nation, since the time of the Ottoman Empire."
That last statement might make good politics, and I don't blame the Aramaic Federation one bit for trying to use such rhetoric to further its case. But it soft-pedals the reality of dhimmitude, the cruel subjection that has always, from the beginning of Ottoman conquest, characterized the treatment of non-Muslims in Turkish lands. He makes a good point, however: In one Muslim land after another, we are seeing that Muslims are not satisfied with dominance and deference. What they want is ethnic cleansing, to render their countries Christrein Christenrein as they have been since 1948 Judenrein. Perhaps this is because modern mores and world media scrutiny make the literal practice of dhimmitude hard to maintain. Since so far no Muslim country has the stones to collect the jizya, and these captives communities have in many cases been reduced to relative poverty, there is no practical advantage to keeping Christians around. Starving cows give no milk, so you might as well be rid of them—as Muslims are energetically ridding Iraq of its residual Christians.
The lesson for Europe is clear: Turkey does not belong in the European Union. The case of Mor Gabriel should become one of the talking points of European politicians who are trying to stop this final, most threatening Turkish invasion. They should add the restoration of all such religious property to dispossessed ethnic groups (why not include historic synagogues, even where the local Jews have been driven out?) to the list of non-negotiable conditions Turkey must meet before it is even considered for membership. The more Islamic Turkey becomes, the more intransigent its politicians will be on such issues. Let the cycle of recriminations grow worse and worse, and the gap between Europe and Turkey become so wide that it cannot be patched up by what Turkey-skeptics rightly call A Bridge Too Far.
Posted by Roland Shirk on February 24, 2011 8:43 PM
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