Turkey threatens war over Cyprus-Israel agreement
Supposedly “modern,” but no longer secular, Muslim Turkey continually seeks to extend its reach over as much territory as it can, at the expense of both Christians and Jews. The Turkish government is threatening war over the recent economic agreement between Israel and Greek Cyprus.
As Iron Fist points out, “The time to stop the Ottoman Empire II is before it has become an empire…”
Report: Turkey upset over Israel-Cyprus deal
(h/t: Nevergiveup)
Roee Nahmias
Published: 12.19.10, 23:03 / Israel NewsIsrael-Cyprus exclusive economic zone set / Zvi Lavi
An agreement meant to prevent disputes over oil and gas fields may stir diplomatic crisis in Mediterranean: Turkish sources said Sunday that Foreign Ministry officials had summoned Israel’s Ambassador to Turkey Gabby Levy and expressed discontent over an agreement signed between Israel and Cyprus, which demarcates the exclusive economic zone within the territorial waters of the two countries and divides their rights to search for oil and gas reservoirs in the Mediterranean Sea.
According to a report published by a Turkish website, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan firmly opposes any maritime agreement between Cyprus and countries in the eastern Mediterranean, because it undermines the status of Turkish Cyprus and its stake of the territorial waters.
During the meeting with Levy, officials at the Turkish Foreign Ministry stressed that “Turkey opposes the agreement until a just and inclusive solution is reached in the Cyprus conflict.”
Turkey is the only country in the world that recognizes Turkish Cyprus.
The report also stated that Turkey would not hesitate sending its naval forces to the area, in order to thwart any oil field exploration.
[…]
The ministry emphasized the importance of the agreement and stated it was “the first time Israel’s western border was set.”On Friday, Infrastructure Minister Uzi Landau and Cyprus’ Foreign Minister Markos Kyprianou signed an agreement that set the exclusive economic zone within the territorial waters of the two countries. The clarification of the borderline is essential in protecting Israel’s rights to oil and underwater gas reservoirs in the future.
The stealthy Islamic takeover of modern Turkey
Islamic expansionism is written into the Koran and is in no way optional for Muslims. The historical lesson is that jihad will eventually be waged, either stealthily or openly, in any and every country or territory where there is a significant Muslim population. This is particularly true of Turkey, given the fact that, for many centuries, it controlled a brutal jihadist empire.
Any non-Muslim national leader who intends to carve out a “sphere of influence” within the Muslim world by appeasing, or making alliances with, Muslim leaders, is quite simply deluded. This applies not only to Jimmy Carter, but also to every US president since Ronald Reagan left office.
Allowing Turkey to remain within NATO is sheer madness; all the more so is any thought of admitting Turkey to the EU.
by Michael Rubin
Commentary
July/August 2010…Gone, and gone permanently, is secular Turkey, a unique Muslim country that straddled East and West and that even maintained a cooperative relationship with Israel. Today Turkey is an Islamic republic whose government saw fit to facilitate the May 31 flotilla raid on Israel’s blockade of Gaza. Turkey is now more aligned to Iran than to the democracies of Europe. Whereas Iran’s Islamic revolution shocked the world with its suddenness in 1979, Turkey’s Islamic revolution has been so slow and deliberate as to pass almost unnoticed. Nevertheless, the Islamic Republic of Turkey is a reality—and a danger.
The story of Turkey’s Islamic revolution is illuminating. It is the story of a charismatic leader with a methodical plan to unravel a system, a politician cynically using democracy to pursue autocracy, Arab donors understanding the power of the purse, Western political correctness blinding officials to the Islamist agenda, and American diplomats seemingly more concerned with their post-retirement pocketbooks than with U.S. national security. For Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, it is a dream come true. For the next generation of American presidents, diplomats, and generals, it is a disaster.
[…]
Turkey’s Islamic revolution began on November 3, 2002, when Erdogan’s Justice and Reconciliation Party (AKP) swept to power in Turkey’s elections. Through a lucky quirk of the Turkish election system, the AKP’s 34 percent total in the popular vote translated into 66 percent of the Parliament’s seats, giving the party absolute control.Initially, Erdogan kept his ambition in check. He understood the lessons to be learned from the undoing of his mentor, Necmettin Erbakan, the first Islamist to become prime minister. After taking the reins of power in 1996 with far less power in Parliament, Erdogan’s predecessor sought to shake up the system—to support religious schools at home and to reorient Turkey’s foreign policy away from Europe and toward Libya and Iran. This became too much for the military, which exercised its power as guardians of the constitution and demanded Erbakan’s resignation. Afterward, Turkey’s Constitutional Court banned the party to which Erdogan belonged because of its threats to secular rule.
Erdogan himself had been banned from politics because of a 1998 conviction for religious incitement. And so he initially managed the newly created AKP from the sidelines only, working through Abdullah Gul, the lieutenant who served as caretaker prime minister after the party’s 2002 victory. Gul pushed through a law to overturn the ban against Erdogan, and the latter became prime minister in March 2003. Learning the lessons of Islamist failures of the past, Erdogan sought to calm Turks who feared the AKP would dilute Turkey’s separation of mosque and state. As mayor of Istanbul, Erdogan described himself as a “servant of Sharia,” or Islamic canon law. But after his party’s 2002 victory, he declared that “secularism is the protector of all beliefs and religions. We are the guarantors of this secularism, and our management will clearly prove that.” He took pains to eschew the Islamist label and instead described his party as little more than the Muslim equivalent of the Christian Democrats in Europe—that is, all democracy and religious in name only…
Turkish jihadism is nothing new
The revival of Islamic expansionism in Turkey under Recep Tayyip Erdogan is nothing new. Vast numbers of Greeks and other Christians were slaughtered at the hands of the Turks – with the disgraceful complicity of western Europe – in the early twentieth century.
HELLENIC GENOCIDE: Was it a “Catastrophe,” or a “Devastation?”
by Stella L. Jatras
There is an effort by the Greek government to remove the offending word, “Genocide” and referring to the massacre of Greek martyrs in Asia Minor at the hands of Turkish forces during the early part of the last century as a “Catastrophe.” Other reports state that the term “Genocide” would also be referred to as a “Devastation.” Does the Greek government actually believe that by doing so it will incur the appreciation of the Turkish government? And which is it to be? Is it a “Catastrophe,” or is it a “Devastation?” Either way, the fact that Greek Christians also bore the wrath of Muslim Turks and were slaughtered under hideous and barbaric conditions, “Catastrophe” or “Devastation” is merely a slap on the wrist and an insult to the memory of the Greek martyrs.
In her book, “Not Even My Name,” Thea Halo writes, “But the most dramatic change in Turkey was the slaughter of 1.5 million Armenians, 750,000 Assyrians, and 353,000 Pontic Greeks, and the cruel death marches to exile of 1.5 million more Greeks of Turkey; death marches on which countless other Pontians lost their lives, all between 1915 and 1923. This genocide, euphemistically termed ethnic cleansing, and relocation, eliminated most, if not all, of the Christian minorities in Turkey, and brought to a tragic end the 3,000 year history of the Pontic Greeks in Asia Minor.” Extermination of an entire race of people, as were the Pontic Greeks, is not a “Catastrophe,” nor a “Devastation.” It is a “GENOCIDE.” Yet the slaughter of Greek martyrs in Asia Minor is mostly ignored even by Greek-American politicians who plead on the floor of the House of Representatives for the recognition of the Armenian genocide, but make no mention of the fact that the Greek population in Asia Minor also suffered cruelly at the hands of the Turks. Sadly, I have spoken with Armenians who didn’t even know that their fellow Orthodox Christians were also being slaughtered during that horrible period in history.
On Sunday, September 7, 1997, I attended the 75th Anniversary of the Destruction of the City of Smyrna which was sponsored by the Federation of Hellenic Societies of Greater Baltimore-Washington Region (in cooperation with The Council of Hellenes Aborad (SAE), The American Hellenic Institute, The Greek American Monthly, Diaspora, and The Asia Minor Holocaust Memorial Society.) According to their estimates, 3.5 million Christians were martyred. Of those, 1.8 were Armenian and 1.7 were Greek. However, we may never know the true number of Christian martyrs.
THE MAGNITUDE OF THESE TRAGIC EVENTS ARE CLEARLY RECORDED.
In his book, “Passage to Ararat,” Michael Arlen writes that Turkish women were given the dagger (Hanjar) to give the final stab to dying Armenians in order to gain credit in the eyes of Allah as having killed a Christian.
Another interesting note in history is that during the Asia Minor genocide, there were ships in the Smyrna harbor from Great Britain, the United States, France, Japan and Italy, among others. To escape the massacring Turks, the Christian population swam out to these ships.
The ships’ crews, however, hit the hands of those trying to board so that they would fall back into the sea or literally push them back into the sea. Their excuse? They did not want to offend the Turkish government. Only the Japanese captain took pity on the victims and allowed them on board. To confirm this tragic event, author Nicholas Gage writes in his book, “Greek Fire,” and gives the following account: “Foreign battleships [i.e., warships] – English, American, Italian and French – were anchored in the harbor, sent by the major powers initially in support of Greek forces but later told to maintain neutrality. They would or could do nothing for the 200,000 refugees on the quai. The pitiful throng – huddled together, sometimes screaming for help but mostly waiting in a silent panic beyond hope — didn’t budge for days. Typhoid reduced their numbers, and there as no way to dispose of the dead:
“Occasionally a person would swim from the dock to one of the anchored ships and tried to climb the ropes and chains, only to be driven off. On the American battleships the musicians onboard were ordered to play as loudly as they could to drown out the screams of the pleading swimmers. The English poured boiling water down on the unfortunates who reached their vessel. The harbor was so clogged with corpes that the officers of the foreign battleships were often late to their dinner appointments because bodies would get tangled in the propellers to their launches.”
Gage also describes how a young Aristotle Onassis later “walked through the city to find his father’s warehouse at Daragaz Point burned to the ground, though the office on the Grand Visier Hane still stood, despite the fires, guarded by Turkish soldiers. Mutlilated corpses were everywhere. A cluster of women’s heads bound together like coconuts by their long hair floated down a river toward the harbour.”
An especially moving portrait of the genocide is the account of the mutilation of Greek Metropolitan Chrysostomos of Smyrna. According to eye-witness testimony from G. Mylonas, of the academy of Athens, “the mob fell upon Chrysostomos,” and committed some of the most horrendous acts of cruelty. “All the while, Chrysostomos, his pale face covered with blood, had his face turned upward, continuously praying, ‘Holy Father, forgive them, for they know not that they are doing.’ Every now and then, when he had the strength to do so, he would raise his right hand and bless his persecutors. A Turk realized what Chrysostomos was doing, and got so furious that he cut off the Metropolitcan’s hand with his sword. Metropolitan Chrysostomos fell to the ground, and was hacked to pieces by the angry mob.”
The Armenian community is to be commended for its dedication and passion in remembrance of their Armenian martyrs. It is past time for the Greek community to show the same dedication and passion. They can start by calling or writing our congressmen and senators.
The American Hellenic Media Project (AHMP) is one of many organizations circulating a petition protesting the Greek government s denial of the Hellenic genocide. AHMP (ahmp@hri.org) writes: “Greece s current administration is planning to remove references to the world “genocide” from a parliamentary law already in existence that recognizes the genocide of Asia Minor s Greek communities by the Turkish state during the early part of the 20th century.” For those of you who have the capability and wish to sign the petition, please go to: http://www.greece.org/genocide and to http://www.greece.org/genocide/petition_form.html and your vote will be electronically recorded by the Hellenic Electronic Center. For further information, you can also write them at P.O. Box 596, DE, 19703-0596, or to ask a question, you can e-mail them at action@hec.greece.org. If you prefer, you can send a brief note directly to: GreekParliament@hec.greece.org.
“A cluster of women’s heads bound together like coconuts by their long hair floated down a river toward the harbour,” is not exactly my idea of its being just a “Catastrophe,” or a “Disaster.” Indeed not.
To read about the Author Stella Jatras: Click Here
(Posting date 2 July 2007)HCS encourages readers to view other articles and releases in our permanent, extensive archives at the URL http://www.helleniccomserve.com/contents.html.
Some background on the bloody Turkish takeover of northern Cyprus
Cyprus Action Network of America (CANA) for educational and enlightenment purposes and with the author’s permission, decided to avail to the wider public in the diaspora the most valuable content of the book “From Enosis to Occupation”. The book by researcher/journalist and author from London Mrs. Fanoulla Argyrou, was published in Nicosia in 1995. It was financed by H. B. the late Archbishop of Cyprus Mr. Chrysostomos A’. The book had three introductions. One by H. B. Archbishop Chrysostomos A’, the president and secretary of the Refugee Association “Adouloti Kyrenia” and by academic and historian Mr. Petros Papapolyviou (today an academic with the University of Cyprus).
From Union to Occupation” was Mrs. Argyrou’s second book (out of eight so far) and came as an addition to her first which was titled “This is how they destroyed Cyprus”. Both books refer to British released official government documents, released at the National Archives in London researched by the author, and which refer to the tragedy of Cyprus. Plans for partition, plans for federation, maps and details that saw the light for the very first time. Documents that show how the British viewed the Greeks in Cyprus, how they tried to de-hellenise the Greeks of Cyprus, how they depended on the local population for the imposition of their plans, the role of the Communist Party AKEL during the 1947 constitutional discussions, and finally how a liberation struggle for Union with Greece ended up with the Turkish occupation.
Please download the book by visiting the homepage of Cyprus Action Network of America (CANA) and please link to the book on your sites and blogs.
For more information, download this PDF book in both English and Greek: ΑΙΜΑΤΗΡΗ ΑΛΗΘΕΙΑ – BLOODY TRUTH
Originally published on 1389 Blog.
