By Serge Trifkovic FrontPageMagazine.com | December 23, 2002

(One in a series of excerpts adapted by Robert Locke from Dr. Serge Trifkovic’s new book The Sword of the Prophet: A Politically-Incorrect Guide to Islam)

Most people take for granted that the Middle East is a Moslem region of the world. What they forget is that this region, which was of course the birthplace of Christianity, has a long history of Christian communities. These, however, have been the most readily-accessible targets of jihad, so they have been under relentless attack for centuries.

Let’s start in the late 19th century, when most of the Middle East was ruled, either actually or nominally, by the Ottoman Turkish Empire. This empire was in a state of terminal decline and governmental incompetence, making it a constant source of worry to the European great powers of the day. Thought had been given to carving it up among those powers, but this was never done for fear of starting a war and creating an even worse mess than already existed.

One of the tendencies of the crumbling Ottoman state was to lash out against the Christians under its rule. The tragedy of Christian communities under Turkish rule, as then-British Prime Minister William Gladstone saw it, was not “a question of Mohammedanism simply, but of Mohammedanism compounded with the peculiar character of a race.” He wrote of the Turks:

“They were, upon the whole, from the black day when they first entered Europe, the one great anti-human specimen of humanity. Wherever they went a broad line of blood marked the track behind them, and, as far as their dominion reached, civilization disappeared from view. They represented everywhere government by force as opposed to government by law. — Yet a government by force can not be maintained without the aid of an intellectual element. — Hence there grew up, what has been rare in the history of the world, a kind of tolerance in the midst of cruelty, tyranny and rapine. Much of Christian life was contemptuously left alone and a race of Greeks was attracted to Constantinople which has all along made up, in some degree, the deficiencies of Turkish Islam in the element of mind.”

“The attitude of the Moslems toward the Christians and the Jews is that of a master towards slaves,” reported the British Vice Consul in Mosul (an Ottoman city in what is now Northern Iraq) a little later in 1909, “whom he treats with a certain lordly tolerance so long as they keep their place. Any sign of pretension to equality is promptly repressed.” This, of course, is the old story of dhimmitude or the second-class citizenship of non-Moslems under Moslem rule.

The Ottomans lurched from outrage to outrage. Regular slaughters of Armenians in Bayazid (1877), Alashgurd (1879), Sassun (1894), Constantinople (1896), Adana (1909) and Armenia itself (1895-96) claimed a total of two hundred thousand lives, but they were only rehearsals for the genocide of 1915. The slaughter of Christians in Alexandria in 1881 was only a rehearsal for the artificial famine induced by the Turks in 1915-16 that killed over a hundred thousand Maronite Christians in Lebanon and Syria. So imminent and ever-present was the peril, and so fresh the memory of these events in the minds of the non-Moslems, that illiterate Christian mothers dated events as so many years before or after “such and such a massacre.” Across the Middle East, the bloodshed of 1915-1922 finally destroyed ancient Christian communities and cultures that had survived since Roman times—groups like the Jacobites (Syrian Orthodox), Nestorians (Iraqi Orthodox), and Chaldaeans (Iraqi Catholic).

The rest of the article is here

-- Anonymous, December 23, 2002