Terrorism: No antecedents in Islamic history, and no justification in terms of Islamic theology, law, or tradition...

Professor Bernard Lewis (a British-American historian specializing in oriental studies and history of Islam) writes of jihad as a distinct "religious obligation", but suggests that "it is a pity" that people engaging in terrorist activities are not more aware of their own religion:

"Muslim fighters are commanded not to kill women, children, or the aged unless they attack first; not to torture or otherwise ill-treat prisoners; to give fair warning of the opening of hostilities or their resumption after a truce; and to honor agreements. ... At no time did the classical jurists offer any approval or legitimacy to what we nowadays call terrorism. Nor indeed is there any evidence of the use of terrorism as it is practiced nowadays."

Source: Bernard Lewis and Buntzie Ellis Churchill, Islam: The Religion and the People, Wharton School Publishing, 2008, p. 151.

In Lewis' view, the "by now widespread terrorism practice of suicide bombing is a development of the 20th century" with "no antecedents in Islamic history, and no justification in terms of Islamic theology, law, or tradition." (p. 153)

He further comments that "the fanatical warrior offering his victims the choice of the Koran or the sword is not only untrue, it is impossible" and that "generally speaking, Muslim tolerance of unbelievers was far better than anything available in Christendom, until the rise of secularism in the 17th century." (p. 146)

Source: "Bernard Lewis" in Wikipedia.

The Nazi flag was openly flown from the famous Armenian-owned Tokatliyan Hotel

Professor Stanford J. Shaw, The Jews of the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Republic, New York University Press, New York (1991).

Page 254:

"During the 1930s, in reaction to Nazi propaganda, as had been the case in the Ottoman Empire during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it was not so much Turkish Muslims but, rather, Christians, who persisted in their anti-Semitic attitudes and activities. In 1938, when it appeared increasingly that the 'New Order' might dominate Europe, the Nazi flag was openly flown from the famous Armenian-owned Tokatliyan Hotel. The resulting Jewish-organized boycott of the hotel was supported by most Turks and condoned by the government, though opposed by Nazi sympathizer Yunus Nadi in his newspaper Cumhuriyet,.."

The Jews were Massacred along with the Turks

The main body of the book mentioned below is the diary of Errikos Sevillias (a Jew who was born in Athens in 1901 and suffered during the Nazi invasion of Greece). Nikos Stavroulakis translated the book into English and wrote an introduction. In his Introduction, Stavroulakis gives a brief history of Jews in Greece. The following excerpts are taken from the Introduction.

Introduction, Historical Outline (by Nikos Stavroulakis), page viii:

By the third quarter of the 15th century the Ottoman Empire had supplanted the Byzantine. Ottoman policy toward minorities was based on Islamic Law, which recognized both Jews and Christians as a separate millet (nation) with religious and, to an extraordinary extent, legal autonomy within their own communities. This tolerant millet system encouraged the immigration of Jews from Europe who had been feeling the brunt of Christian persecution, notably, in the late 15th century, in Spain. This immigration was welcomed by the Ottomans because of the economic stimulation it brought. In 1492 when Ferdinand and Isabella proclaimed the Edict of Expulsion for the Jews of Spain, Sultan Beyazid II proclaimed that Jews from Spain would be welcome in the Ottoman Empire, and over 20,000 Sephardic or Iberian Jews arrived in Thessaloniki the same year. Soon afterwards 36,000 Jews left Sicily, many of them to settle in the Balkans.

Within a generation a Judea-Spanish culture had been transplanted to many centers in the Ottoman Empire. This was not always done smoothly. Many of the Sepharadim were Marranos, Jews who had converted to Christianity in the 14th century, thereby being able to participate in much of Europe's cultural and intellectual life. Their reconversion to Judaism was sometimes difficult, and their pride and sense of cultural superiority caused friction in their dealings with Romaniot Jews. Whatever the difficulties, the former Romaniot communities of Constantinople, Edirne (Adrinople), Thessaloniki, and Rhodes were forced by the weight of numbers and cultural superiority to adopt not only the minhag but also the language of the newcomers. A new, and certainly one of the most exciting periods of Balkan Jewry began. In 1497 the first book printed in Constantinople was published in Hebrew, well over two hundred years before the first Greek books were printed in Balkans. Some Jews, notably Joseph Nasi (1520-1579) during the reigns of Suleiman the Magnificent and Selim II, rose to high positions in the Ottoman service.

The Greek War of Independence brought disaster to the Jewish communities in the Peloponnesos, where the revolution erupted in 1821. The Jews, because of their close association with the Ottoman administration, were massacred along with the Turks. The Jewish communities of Mistras, Tripolis, and Kalamata were decimated; the few survivors moved north to settle in Chalkis and Volos, still under Ottoman rule. Patras lost its ancient Jewish community, which was refounded only in 1905.

Page xi (second paragraph):

The absence of Jews in Athens immediately following the Greek War of Independence is ominous, indicating that they either fled or were massacred as were the Turks.

Source: Athens-Auschwitz (by Errikos Sevillias), Translated and Introduced by Nikos Stavroulakis, Lycabettus Press, P.O. Box 17091, 100 24 Athens, Greece, 1983.

The following are passages from a web site:

http://diatribe-column.blogspot.fr/2013/04/revolution-unblinkered.html

“Everywhere, as though at a preconcerted signal, the peasantry rose, and massacred all the Turks—men, women and children—on whom they could lay hands. In the Morea shall no Turk be left. Nor in the whole wide world. Thus rang the song which, from mouth to mouth, announced the beginning of a war of extermination... Within three weeks of the outbreak of the revolt, not a Muslim was left, save those who had succeeded in escaping into the towns.” W. Alison Phillips. [The War of Greek Independence 1821 to 1833, New York, 1897, p. 48.]

Take for example, one of the early successes of the revolution, the capture of Navarino in the summer of 1821. After a long siege and through the mediation of General Gordon, it was agreed that the unarmed muslims in the town would give up their property and be offered safe passage to Egypt. When the surrender took place however, it soon became apparent that the Greeks had neither the intention nor even the means of providing this promised secure passage. When the gates of the city finally opened, a Greek priest, Phrantzis bore witness to an appalling crime:

“Women, wounded with musketballs and sabre-cuts, rushed to the sea, seeking to escape, and were deliberately shot. Mothers robbed of their clothes, with infants in their arms plunged into the sea to conceal themselves from shame, and they were then made a mark for inhuman riflemen. Greeks seized infants from their mother's breasts and dashed them against rocks. Children, three and four years old, were hurled living into the sea and left to drown. When the massacre was ended, the dead bodies washed ashore, or piled on the beach, threatened to cause a pestilence...”

This was not an isolated occurrence. A month later, in September, a combined force led by Kolokotrones and Petrobey Mavromihalis captured Tripolitsa. Historian W Alison Philips tells a horrific tale of mutilation and slaughter:

“For three days the miserable inhabitants were given over to lust and cruelty of a mob of savages. Neither sex nor age was spared. Women and children were tortured before being put to death. So great was the slaughter that Kolokotronis himself says that, from the gate to the citadel his horse’s hoofs never touched the ground. His path of triumph was carpeted with corpses. At the end of two days, the wretched remnant of the Mussulmans were deliberately collected, to the number of some two thousand souls, of every age and sex, but principally women and children, were led out to a ravine in the neighboring mountains and there butchered like cattle."

Based on the accounts of one hundred European officers who were present at the scene, and did nothing to intervene, William St. Clair wrote:

"Upwards of ten thousand Turks were put to death. Prisoners who were suspected of having concealed their money were tortured. Their arms and legs were cut off and they were slowly roasted over fires. Pregnant women were cut open, their heads cut off, and dogs' heads stuck between their legs. From Friday to Sunday the air was filled with the sound of screams... One Greek boasted that he personally killed ninety people. The Jewish colony was systematically tortured... For weeks afterwards starving Turkish children running helplessly about the ruins were being cut down and shot at by exultant Greeks... The wells were poisoned by the bodies that had been thrown in…”

Although the total estimates of the casualties vary, the Turkish, Muslim Albanian and Jewish population of the Peloponnese had ceased to exist as a settled community after the early massacres. Some estimates of the Turkish and Muslim Albanian civilian deaths by the rebels range from 15,000 out of 40,000 Muslim residents to 30,000 only in Tripolitsa. According to historians W. Alison Phillips, George Finlay, William St. Clair and Barbara Jelavich, massacres of Turkish civilians started simultaneously with the outbreak of the revolt, while Harris J. Booras considers that the massacres followed the brutal hanging of Ecumenical Patriarch Gregory V of Constantinople. Finlay has claimed that the extermination of the Muslims in the rural districts was the result of a premeditated design and it proceeded more from the suggestions of men of letters, than from the revengeful feelings of the people. St. Clair wrote that: "The orgy of genocide exhausted itself in the Peloponnese only when there were no more Turks to kill."

Source: Dean Kalimniou, NKEE (Melbourne's Neos Kosmos English Edition Newspaper), Saturday 6 April 2013.

"The Turks of Greece left few traces. They disappeared suddenly and finally in the spring of 1821 unmourned and unnoticed by the rest of the world....It was hard to believe then that Greece once contained a large population of Turkish descent, living in small communities all over the country, prosperous farmers, merchants, and officials, whose families had known no other home for hundreds of years...They were killed deliberately, without qualm or scruple, and there was no regrets either then or later." - William St. Clair

Source: William St. Clair. That Greece Might Still Be Free The Philhellenes in the War of Independence. London: Oxford University Press, 1972.

The following passage from Professor Stanford J. Shaw's book is relevant and points to events in later times:

Page 205:

"Those Jews who survived these assaults in Southeastern Europe fled particularly to Salonica, whose Jewish population increased substantially as a result, from 28,000 in 1876 to 90,000 in 1908, more than half the total population, though even there increased persecution by local Greeks led many Jews to flee elsewhere in the Ottoman Empire, particularly to the great port of Izmir. Despite all the pressure from Ottomans and foreign Jews alike, the ritual murders and other assaults by Christians on Jews went on and on. Greek efforts to decimate the Jewish population of Salonica culminated in 1912 and 1913, following Greek conquest of Salonica during the first Balkan War, when many of its Jews, were either killed or terrorized into leaving..."

Source: Professor Stanford J. Shaw, 'The Jews of the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Republic,' New York University Press, New York (1991).

In 1861, the historian George Finlay wrote:

"In the month of April 1821, a Muslim population .. was living, dispersed in Greece, employed in agriculture. Before two months had elapsed, the greater part was slain-men, women and children were murdered without mercy or remorse…The crime was a nation’s crime, and whatever perturbations it may produce must be in a nation’s conscience, as the deeds by which it can be expiated must be the acts of a nation."

According to the historian C.M. Woodhouse, the entire Turkish population of cities and towns were collected and marched out to convenient places in the countryside where they were slaughtered.

A Prussian officer wrote:

"The Ancient Greeks no longer exist. The place of Solon, Socrates and Demosthenes has been taken by blind ignorance. The logical laws of Athens have been replaced by barbarism".

Finlay, pp. 201-203:

"Jews, who were perceived as infidels by the Greeks, were killed as readily as Muslims."

Jews and Christians lived as Prosperous Minorities in the Classical Islamic Empires

Professor Stanford J. Shaw writes:

For the most part, then, Jews and Christians lived as prosperous minorities in the classical Islamic empires of the Umayyads of Damascus and Spain and the Abbasids of Baghdad, preserving their religions and freedoms within their own religiously-based communities and paying a special poll tax called harac [haraj] or cizye [jizya] in return for the protection of the Muslim rulers and exemption from military service while living with great comfort and prosperity. There were limitations, there were some marks of discrimination, so that one could say that Jews and Christians were not as equal as Muslims, but compared to the active persecution to which Jews were subjected in the Christian lands of Europe, the world of Islam was paradise for them [31].

[31] On the Jews in Islamic Spain in particular see Eliyahu Ashtor, The Jews of Moslem Spain (Philadelphia, 1973).

Source: Stanford J. Shaw (Professor of Turkish History, University of California Los Angeles), Christian Anti Semitism in the Ottoman Empire, Belleten, C. LIV, 68 (1991).

Professor Justin McCarthy (Professor of History, University of Louisville) writes:

"For religious and practical reasons the Ottoman government protected the religious freedom and religious autonomy of its people. .. For more than five hundred years religious communities kept their faiths and their identities. In contrast to the religious persecution in Europe in the same period, the Ottoman practice of religious toleration is especially noteworthy... Nowhere in the long history of the Ottoman Empire is there any example of a government plan to make all the population Muslims." 

Source: Justin McCarthy and Carolyn McCarthy, Turks and Armenians, Washington DC, 1989, pp. 14-15.

Greek author-historian Nikos Stavroulakis writes:

"By the third quarter of the 15th century the Ottoman Empire had supplanted the Byzantine. Ottoman policy toward minorities was based on Islamic Law, which recognized both Jews and Christians as a separate millet (nation) with religious and, to an extraordinary extent, legal autonomy within their own communities. This tolerant millet system encouraged the immigration of Jews from Europe who had been feeling the brunt of Christian persecution, notably, in the late 15th century, in Spain."

Source: Athens-Auschwitz (by Errikos Sevillias), Translated and Introduced by Nikos Stavroulakis, Lycabettus Press, P.O. Box 17091, 100 24 Athens, Greece, 1983.

Norman Daniel, a prominent scholar of American philanthropy in the Middle East, writes:

".. during much of the nineteenth century the Christian subjects of Turkey had enjoyed a degree of religious freedom that was not accorded to dissenters from the established faith in some of the more enlightened kingdoms of Europe."

Source: Norman Daniel, American Philanthropy in the Near East. 1820–1960 (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1970), 161.

Armenians should look to their own history

Extracts from a letter dated December 11, 1983, published in the San Francisco Chronicle, as an answer to a letter that had been published in the same journal under the signature of one B. Amarian.

"We have first hand information and evidence of Armenian atrocities against our people (Jews). Members of our family witnessed the murder of 148 members of our family near Erzurum, Turkey, by Armenian neighbors, bent on destroying anything and anybody remotely Jewish and/or Muslim. Armenians should look to their own history and see the havoc they and their ancestors perpetrated upon their neighbors. Armenians were in league with Hitler in the last war, on his premise to grant themselves government if, in return, the Armenians would help exterminate Jews. Armenians were also hearty proponents of the anti-Semitic acts in league with the Russian Communists."

Signed Elihu Ben Levi, Vacaville, California.

Greek Atrocities in Anatolia: A Small Sample

Professor Stanford J. Shaw, 'The Jews of the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Republic,' New York University Press, New York (1991).

Page 239:

The Greek army that occupied much of southwestern Anatolia starting in May 1919 slaughtered thousands of Jews and Muslims in the course of its attack, not only during its initial landings at Izmir, but also in the interior during the subsequent two years, and particularly during its final retreat to Izmir, when it ravaged and burned Bursa and other towns and villages along the way. Albert Nabon, Principal of the AIU [Alliance Israelite Universelle] Boy's School in Izmir, reported to the Alliance on 6 July 1919:

"The city was put on fire and sacked, the people dispoiled of all they possessed. There is no food, putting the entire population on general, and our co-religionists in particular, in danger of suffering greatly from these privations"

going on to describe how most Jews, not only from Izmir but also from Greek attacks at Aydin, Bergama and Manisa, took refuge in his school, where they were suffering from overcrowding, lack of food, and medicine. [90]

Page 240:

Jewish notables, like the Muslims, were beaten and executed, many Jewish homes and shops were ravaged and burned, and hundreds of Jews were deported to almost certain death in the countryside. As the Greek army retreated in panic late in the war, moreover, it burned the Jewish and Muslim quarters of Izmit, Manisa and Bergama, destroying synagogues, yeshivas and hospitals as well as homes and businesses while killing hundreds and forcing the remainder of the non-Christian population to flee in panic, ...[95]

[90] Similar reports came from Nabon to the AIU on 2 July 1919 (no.23/915), 9 July 1919 (no.26/927), 12 July 1919 (no.27/932) and 14 July 1919 (no. 28/933). In Nabon's report of 17 July 1919 (no.30/935), he stated that the Greeks at Aydin had burned 200 Jewish houses and 13 shops, had dispoiled all the local Jews of their money and property, and had strangled two Jews as well as driving the remainder to seek refuge in the local AIU school: 'At Aydin, Manisa, Tire and everywhere else, our Jews live in an atmosphere of suspician by the Greek inhabitants' who suspect that they favor the Turks. On 23 July 1920 Nabon reported that all the Jews had left Izmir, the synagogue had not been burned, but the Greeks had taken all its valuables as well as the property of local Jews, and the streets were full of bodies.

[95] Univers Israelite, 2 September 1921, p.467-48, quoted in Guleryuz; see also Galante, Anatolie II (1939), 70-100; and 'Manissa', EJ XI, 878-79.

Prepared by: Murat Yazıcı

Greek Efforts to Decimate the Jewish Population of Salonica

Quotes from Professor Stanford J. Shaw, 'The Jews of the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Republic,' New York University Press, New York (1991).

Page 205:

Those Jews who survived these assaults in Southeastern Europe fled particularly to Salonica, whose Jewish population increased substantially as a result, from 28,000 in 1876 to 90,000 in 1908, more than half the total population, though even there increased persecution by local Greeks led many Jews to flee elsewhere in the Ottoman Empire, particularly to the great port of Izmir. Despite all the pressure from Ottomans and foreign Jews alike, the ritual murders and other assaults by Christians on Jews went on and on. Greek efforts to decimate the Jewish population of Salonica culminated in 1912 and 1913, following Greek conquest of Salonica during the first Balkan War, when many of its Jews, were either killed or terrorized into leaving...

page 206:

Though Greece was obligated by the post World War I treaties to allow Jews and other minorities to use their own languages in education and to practice their religions without hindrance, a law was issued in 1923 which forbad all inhabitants from working on Sunday, stimulating a new Jewish exodus as it was intended to do. Between 1932 and 1934 there was a series of anti-Semitic riots in Salonica, with the Cambel quarter, where most of the remaining Jews lived, being burned to the ground. This was followed by regulations requiring the use of Greek and prohibiting Hebrew and Judea-Spanish in the Jewish schools. A start was made also on expropriating the land of the principal Jewish cemetery in Salonica for use by the new University in order to derive the Jews out [47]. By killing and driving out large numbers of Jews, the Greeks left a substantial Greek majority in the city for the first time, and starting Salonica Jewry on the way to its final decimation by the Nazis during the occupation of Greece starting in 1941.

Salonica and Izmir of course were not the only places of refuge for Jewish refugees entering the Empire during its last century of existence. Istanbul, Edirne, and other parts of Rumelia and Anatolia received thousands more. Nor were Jews the only refugees received and helped by the government of the Sultan. Thousands of Muslims accompanied them in flight from similar persecutions wherever Balkan christian states gained independence or expanded. The Russian conquest of the Crimea and the Caucasus starting in the late eighteenth century, and particularly during and after the Crimean War, combined with the same independence movements in Southeastern Europe that had caused so much suffering and flight among its Jews caused thousands of helpless, ill, and poverty-stricken Muslim refugees to accompany them into the ever shrinking boundaries of the Ottoman Empire, with the Istanbul government struggling mightly but vainly to house and feed them as best it could. From 1850 to 1864 as many as 800,000 Crimean Tatars, Circassians, and other Muslims from north and east of the Black Sea had entered Anatolia alone, as many as 200,000 more came during the next twenty years, while 474,389 refugees entered in 1876-1877 as a result of the Ottoman wars with Russia and the Balkan states, with an equal number gaining refuge in the European portions of the Empire.

[47] Robert Mantran, 'La structure sociale de la communaute juive de Salonqiue a la fin du dix-neuvieme siecle', RH no.534 (1980), 391-92; Nehama VII, 762; Joseph Nehama (Salonica) to AIU (Paris) no.2868/2, 12 May 1903 (AIU Archives I-C-43); and no.2775, 10 January 1900 (AIU
Archives I-C-41), describing daily battles between Jewish and Greek children in the streets of Salonica. Benghiat, Director of Ecole Moise Allatini, Salonica, to AIU (Paris), no.7784, 1 December 1909 (AIU Archives I-C-48), describing Greek attacks on Jews, boycotts of Jewish shops and manufacturers, and Greek press campaigns leading to blood libel attacks. Cohen, Ecole Secondaire Moise Allatini, Salonica, to AIU (Paris), no.7745/4, 4 December 1912 (AIU Archives I-C-49) describes a week of terror that followed the Greek army occupation of Salonica in 1912, with the soldiers pillaging the Jewish quarters and destroying Jewish synagogues, accompanied by what he described as an 'explosion of hatred' by local Greek population against local Jews and Muslims. Mizrahi, President of the AIU at Salonica, reported to the AIU (Paris), no.2704/3, 25 July 1913 (AIU Archives I-C-51) that 'It was not only the irregulars (Comitadjis) that massacred, pillaged and burned. The Army soldiers, the Chief of Police, and the high civil officials also took an active part in the horrors...', Moise Tovi (Salonica) to AIU (Paris) no.3027 (20 August 1913) (AIU Archives I-C-51) describes the Greek pillage of the Jewish quarter during the night of 18-19 August 1913.

Prepared by: Murat Yazıcı