From: dbd@urartu.sdpa.org (David Davidian)
Subject: Mid-Winter 1993 Review of Turkish Genocide Apology
Summary: anti-Armenianism x-posted to the universe 
Organization: S.D.P.A. Center for Regional Studies
Date: Wed, 27 Jan 1993 02:59:46 GMT

In historical revision <9301252249@zuma.UUCP> sera@zuma.UUCP (Serdar Argic)
generated a response to article <1jpoa5$4ur@agate.berkeley.edu> boyle@kirkuk.
berkeley.edu (Joseph Boyle) who noted::

[JB] state, if the Serbs manage to force establishment of one.  But, since you
[JB] brought it up, Turkey's ideology is exclusive as to language and inclusive
[JB] as to religion -- they have made a point of equal rights for the Jewish
[JB] community, for example.  So your example is particularly irrelevant for
[JB] B-H, Serbia, and Croatia, where people are divided by religion but speak
[JB] dialects of the same language.  

Ever heard of a Donme? It's a Crypto Jew. They live in Turkey. They were forced
to hide their Jewishness. There must have been heavy oppression of these Jews
for them to hide their Jewishness. 

[(*] I tend to agree here. Ottoman Empire and its people have unselfishly given 
[(*] home, protection, and freedom to the Jews over the centuries, including to 
[(*] thousands and thousands of them during the Second World War (then Turkey). 
[(*] Here is a partial list of the scholarly work on Turkish Jews (more than 
[(*] 100 of them can be listed). 

OK, let's pick a Jewish scholar and read about life in Turkey for Jews and 
other minorities during WWII. During a war is when the real characteristics of
a society and its governing mechanism are exposed. 

From: _Diaspora; An Inquiry Into The Contemporary Jewish World_, Howard
      Sachar, page 199.

"After World War I, the Ottoman Empire was dismantled and Turkey became a 
 republic under an aggressively modernizing leader, Mustafa Kemal. The initial
 decades of postwar republican rule were uneasy ones for Jews. As an integral 
 feature of the national transformation, the Kemal regime forcibly secularized
 or eliminated the religious institutions of Turks and non-Turks alike. Thus, 
 the Alliance Israelite Universelle schools, in which the largest number of 
 Jewish children received their education, were closed; and so, gradually,
 were other private schools. Even in the few surviving afternoon synagogue 
 classes, Hebrew was not taught at all. Ladino, the traditional dialect of 
 Sephardic Jews, gradually was abandoned even as a spoken language. Possibly 
 half of the country's seventy-five synagogues (in 1920) were confiscated and,
 like Turkey's mosques and churches, often were transformed into museums. In 
 the prevailing climate of Turanian chauvinism, the Jews were now regarded as 
 a "non-Turkish" element. For the first time since their settlement in this 
 land, they were barred from the civil service, deprived of import and export 
 licenses, and subjected to discriminatory taxes. Indeed, 

		in 1942, a mounting wave of pro-Nazi xenophobia
		produced the notorious Varlik Vergisi, a property
		tax that ruined thousands of Jewish -- and Greek
		and Armenian -- businessmen, before it was dropped
		finally under Allied pressure in 1944.

 It was principality those Jews whose estates had been devoured by the Varlik 
 Vergisi, as well as other, poorer Jews, who departed for Western countries 
 and Israel in the post-World War II years. The Turkish government made no 
 effort to block their departure or the transfer of their meager savings. By 
 1967, as a result, not more than 42,000 Jews continued on in Turkey, and 
 since then the figures	have been reduced to 21,000..."

Ah, yes...the classic strip quote!

[(*] Great humanitarian dewey:
[(*] 
[(*] Source: John Dewey: "The New Republic," Vol. 40, Nov. 12, 1928, pp. 268-9.

It was 1924, not 1928, see below!

[(*]"Happy the minority [Jews] which has had no Christian nation to protect it.
[(*] And one recalls that the Jews took up their abode in 'fanatic' Turkey
[(*] when they were expelled from Europe, especially Spain, by Saintly 
[(*] Christians, and they have lived here for centuries in at least as much 
[(*] tranquility and liberty as their fellow Turkish subjects, all being 
[(*] exposed alike to the rapacity of their common rulers. To one brought up, 
[(*] as most Americans have been, in the Gladstonian and foreign-missionary 
[(*] tradition, the condition of the Jews in Turkey is almost a mathematical 
[(*] demonstration that religious differences have had an influence in the 
[(*] tragedy of Turkey only as they were combined with aspirations for a 
[(*] political separation which every nation in the world would have treated as
[(*] treasonable. One readily reaches the conclusion that the Jews in Turkey 
[(*] were fortunate..." 

[(*] He also stated that:
[(*] 
[(*] "they [Armenians] traitorously turned Turkish cities over to the Russian 
[(*]  invader; that they boasted of having raised an army of one hundred and
[(*]  fifty thousand men to fight a civil war, and that they burned at least
[(*]  a hundred Turkish villages and exterminated their population."

Ha! 150,000 Armenians in the Russian Army, of which 120,000 fought in Europe,
leaving 30,000 to fight in Asia and Turkey!

Let's look at what John Dewey really had to say in the same article [(*] strip
quoted from. Let's see what Turkish Genocide Apology neglected to scribe!

" As we walked the streets [of Brusa] we passed alternately by closed shops
  and houses formerly kept by Greeks and Armenians who are now dead or
  deported in exchange for Turks in Greece..."

Why where Greeks and Armenians "dead" in Bursa? Dewey only knew what his 
employers told him. Armenians were not exchanged for Turks in Greece.

In a most appauling quote Dewey, again wrote in same 1924 article:

" We passed through the Jewish quarter [of Bursa], and found the Jews still
  in possession of their homes and property, the more flourishing perhaps
  because of the total absence of their former commercial competitors, the 
  Greeks and Armenians..."

Dewey stated that the Jews in Turkey flourished because the Turks eliminated
their competition! If this is true then Greeks and Armenians have a problem
with Turkish Jews - if false then Dewey is a lackey. I prefer the latter.

In another article by the same employee [1] of the Turkish State, John Dewey 
apologizes for Turkish reaction to any Greek and Armenian favoritism:

 " And if Turkish authorities made sensitive and sore by what seems to them 
   persistent foreign favoritism to Greeks and Armenians at the expense of
   Turkish political independence and unity, sometimes act abruptly, is not 
   for a hundred percent American, nor for any other nationalist, to be too 
   quick or too loud in condemnation" [2]

Dewey never knew anything more about the Armenians and Greeks than what his
Turkish employers reiterated to him. But it seems he was a "good employee",
by apologizing for Turkish atrocities against Greeks and Armenians!

Good reference ... Turkish Historical Society!!!

Isn't it amazing what history says when the book is opened and the author is
exposed !!!

		- - - Turkish-suggested Reference - - -

[1] "In 1924, the Ministry of Education of Turkey invited Dewey to observe
     the state of the school system. The American educator spent two months
     in the country, but unfortunately the schools were not in session". See
     _John Dewey's Impressions_, Introduction and Notes by William Brikland,
     1964, Teachers College Colombia University, pages 12-13.

[2] _Secularizing a Theocracy_, John Dewey, in _The New Republic_ September
    17, 1924, Volume 40. Written while in Constantinople August, 1924.


-- 
David Davidian <dbd@urartu.sdpa.org>  | "Who, after all, speaks today of the 
S.D.P.A. Center for Regional Studies  |  annihilation of the Armenians?" 
P.O. Box 382761                       |         -Adolf Hitler, August 25, 1939
Cambridge, MA 02238                   |          from: Nuremberg Document L-3