Saturday, April 22, 2017

A FORGOTTEN PEOPLE: THE PLIGHT OF ASSYRIAN CHRISTIANS IN TURKEY.

Turkey continues to crack down on the pitiful remnants of Christianity in the country, as this Armenian Weekly article shows:


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"The sculpture, an Assyrian winged bull known as a lamassu, was removed on Jan. 8, after Turkey placed an unelected district governor in charge of the Diyarbakir municipality under the emergency decree issued after the abortive coup of last year.

The Turkish government has been escalating its pressure on Christians and their cultural heritage. The Christian co-mayor of Mardin, Februniye Akyol, 28, was removed from her post by the Turkish government on Nov. 16, 2016, and replaced by the governor of the city, Mustafa Yaman.

Born and christened Fabronia Benno, the former mayor hails from Tur Abdin, the heartland of Syriac Christians in southeastern Turkey. However, Benno had to run for office under her official Turkish name, Februniye Akyol, because of the institutionalized prohibitions by the Turkish government on non-Turkish languages. In 2014, she became the first Christian woman to lead one of Turkey’s metropolitan municipalities.

The Assyrian people, as well as Chaldeans and Syriac Christians, have inhabited the Middle East since the beginning of recorded history. The scholar Hannibal Travis wrote in his comprehensive article ‘‘Native Christians Massacred − The Ottoman Genocide of the Assyrians during World War I,” that: “The Assyrian homeland is in northern Mesopotamia, present-day Iraq, where the ancient cities of Assur and Nineveh were built. For 300 years, Assyrian kings ruled the largest empire the world had yet known. The Assyrian Church of the East records that the Apostle Thomas himself converted the Assyrians to Christianity within a generation after the death of Christ. Christianity was ‘well established and organized’ in Mesopotamia by the third century CE.”



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"Once the rulers of the greatest empire in history, Assyrians have been turned into a persecuted minority in their native lands as a result of continued massacres and pressure at the hands of Muslims and the absence of support or protection from the West. According to the Assyrian International News Agency (AINA), every fifty years there has been a massacre of Assyrians.

“The Assyrians and other Ottoman Christians, like the Jews, had suffered from centuries of discrimination and official segregation; were charged with being agents of foreign powers and scapegoated for military defeats and looming threats in a rhetoric of ethnic elimination; and were physically and culturally exterminated in large numbers by means of massacres, rapes, expulsions, and attacks on homes and religious institutions carried out by genocidal state apparatuses and local irregular forces,” Travis explains.

The Assyrian Genocide, commonly known as Seyfo (sword), took place between 1914 and 1923 in the Ottoman Empire.

The Assyrian claim for autonomy was never realized, which made the Assyrian community completely vulnerable at the hands of the oppressive governments in the region. For example, the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne, which set the boundaries of republican Turkey, did not recognize Assyrians as a distinct community with their own religious and national identity and failed to offer special protections for them.

Today, only around 25,000 Assyrians/Chaldeans/Syriacs remain in Turkey. And the official denial of their language, nationality and culture continues. Only some of the Kurdish-governed municipalities in Turkey have taken actual steps to revitalize the Christian heritage in the region. The recently removed Assyrian sculpture had also been erected by the pro-Kurdish Diyarbakir municipality."



While the Moroccan community in Belgium is resource number one for jihadists, terrorists and criminals, the threat posed by the Turkish community is of a different nature: their fierce nationalism is proof that they first and foremost consider themselves Turks and not Belgians. And anyone who has witnessed a rally of these (mainly) pro-Erdogan zealots realizes that these people don't feel themselves Belgians to even the slightest degree:


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If you think these people are Belgians, I have a bridge across the Bosphorus to sell you. The Turkish diaspora in Belgium voted overwhelmingly "yes" for more constitutional power for Erdogan (read: for more islamic supremacist theocracy): a staggering 78 per cent.



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Same situation, although to a lesser degree, in Germany, where around 63% of Turks voted for giving Erdogan more power. The discrepancy between the percentages is due to the fact that in Germany, the Kurds, who are understandably anti-Erdogan, constitute a far larger proportion of the Turkish community than in Belgium. Either way... the fanaticism of these "New Germans" does not bode well for the future.


The demographic evolution in Europe being what it is - a catastrophy for white Europeans - what is it that our moral betters makes fell so secure that they are convinced our offspring will not suffer the same fate at the hands of the neo-ottoman usurpers vis-à-vis the sorry remnants of Assyrian Christianity?



MFBB.

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