“It’s not possible for a Muslim to commit genocide."
- Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir
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| Were these human beings, President Bashir? |
I wonder if Norwegian schoolchildren are taught about Sudan’s genocide or what Atatürk did to millions or Armenians? The answer to the former isn't clear, but if Norwegian schools teach the same position held by the Labour government and its partner, the Socialist Left Party, then the answer is apparently, "No!"
"There is no legal evidence that the 1915 events in the Ottoman Empire were "genocide."
- Kjetil Elsebutangen, Norwegian Foreign Ministry
In fact, the very word “genocide” was not coined to describe what Hitler did to Jews, Poles, and Gypsies, etc., in World War II. It was coined by Raphael Lemkinin, a Polish-Jewish legal scholar, in 1943 to describe what the Ottoman Turks and, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk's forces in particular, perpetrated against the Armenian people during World War I, now called the Armenian Genocide. Yet, the Muslims in Turkey, who were “incapable of committing genocide,” didn’t just kill millions of Armenians either. They killed Greeks (500,000) and Assyrians (750,000), too.
Then, there were the forced deportations involving death marches, starvation in labour camps, concentration camps, etc. - were referred to as "white massacres" - which caused untold number of indirect deaths.
Most people have heard about the Kraków Ghetto and Amon Göth's cleansing of the ghetto on 13 March 1943 as the Jews were herded off to the Płaszów concentration camp, but many have never heard of the Great Fire of Smyrna. Hundreds of thousands of Greeks, Armenians, and Assyrians had been herded into "Infidel Smyrna" (Gavur Izmir). In September 1922, however, Kemal's forces occupied the town. They sealed off the Armenian quarter and began systematically butchering the 25,000 inhabitants. They set fire to it to incinerate any survivors, according to Niall Ferguson and other historians with some putting the death toll at over 100,000.
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