The Armenian Genocide -The Marxist Nazi Ottoman Islamist ISIS Pogrom Against Christianity Continues to This Day

Dr. Ileana Johnson Paugh / Canada Free Press

“Around the world, Christians are facing violence, persecution, brutality in a way we have not seen in generations.”  – Rey Flores, “The Wanderer”

The hypocritical “war on women” movement is deafly silent, no real effort to save the captives, and good men are doing nothing when faced daily with photographs of Christian hostages on their knees, clad in orange jumpsuits, about to be beheaded, when women and girls are kidnapped, raped, genitally mutilated by ISIS, and driven into a life of slavery as forced converts to Islam.

One year later, the Clarion Project says, “ #BringBackOurGirls” are still sex slaves to Boko Haram, sold into slavery for 2,000 rials each, about $12.

The Christian genocide continues unabated. ISIS is demanding $100,000 per hostage, for the 250-300 Assyrians who were captured in the Hasaka province.

The Pope spoke about the Armenian genocide during Mass in the Armenian Catholic rite at St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome.  Church leaders and the Armenian President Serzh Sargsyan were in attendance. He spoke about humanity witnessing “three massive and unprecedented tragedies” in the 20th century.  “The first, which is widely considered, ‘the first genocide of the 20th century,’ struck your own Armenian people,” he said. The Nazi Holocaust and Stalin’s mass killings were followed by other genocides in Cambodia, Rwanda, Burundi, and Bosnia.

As Christians, it is our duty and responsibility to keep alive the memories of those killed, the Pope said. “Concealing or denying evil is like allowing a wound to keep bleeding without bandaging it,” Pope Francis continued.

BBC News reported on April 12, 2015 that Turkey was angry with Pope Francis’ description of the mass killings of Armenians under Ottoman rule in WWI as “genocide.”  Turkey plays down the genocide as smaller numbers of deaths resulting from the WWI clashes in which ethnic Turks have also suffered.  Most Western scholars regard the 1.5 million Armenians civilians, who were deliberately deported between 1915-1916 to desert regions where they succumbed to starvation and thirst, as genocide. “Thousands also died in massacres.” Countries like Belgium, Canada, Argentina, France, Italy, Russia, and Uruguay recognize the mass killings of Armenians as genocide.

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan offered condolences in 2014 for the first time to the grandchildren of all the Armenians who were massacred in 1915. This year marks a century since the atrocities were committed, and,  until all countries recognize that the genocide had occurred, it is an incomplete mourning exacerbated by the denial stories to this day.

Why were Armenians massacred by the Turks? To understand the reason, you must understand who the Armenians were, how, and why they lived under the Ottoman Empire, and their status as non-Muslims, “non-believers,” and second-class citizens.

Armenians are ancient people who lived in Anatolia some 2500 years ago. They had their own distinctive alphabet and culture. There are 6 to 7 million Armenians today, half living in the Republic of Armenia, while the rest are scattered in the U.S., Russia, France, Lebanon, and Syria.

In the year 301 A.D., the King of Armenia was the first ruler to adopt Christianity as the official state religion, even before the Roman Emperor Constantine’s conversion to Christianity. Captured by the Ottoman Empire in the 15th century, Armenia was absorbed into the Islamic Ottoman Empire, along with a large swath of European lands. As subject of the Sultan, Armenians had less freedom, had to pay higher taxes, were discriminated against, and were not allowed to serve in the military.

Unhappy with the second-class citizen status, by the end of the 1800s, Armenians demanded equality. In the 1890s the Bloody Sultan who was presiding over a weak government, used massacres as a way to maintain law and order.  In 1894-1896 200,000 Armenians were killed during the Hamidian massacres under the rule of Abdul Hamid II, a foreshadowing of what was to come in 1915.

When the Young Turks forced the Sultan out in 1908, Armenians were allowed to serve in the military. In 1912-1913 the Christian regions of Greece, Serbia, and Bulgaria gained their independence from the Ottoman Empire.