From: sera@zuma.UUCP (Serdar Argic)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.turkish,talk.politics.mideast,talk.politics.soviet,soc.culture.greek,soc.culture.europe,soc.history
Followup-To: soc.culture.turkish
Subject: The power of history shames "sipa of delco".
Date: Sun, 20 Dec 92 19:00:28 EST
Reply-To: sera@zuma.UUCP (Serdar Argic)
Distribution: world

In article <199212200300.AA06485@kocrsv01.delcoelect.com> c23st@kocrsv01.delcoelect.com (Spiros Triantafyllopoulos) writes:

>I see that I have been wasting my time all along... No matter what I write
>I always get the party line about fear and Enosis nightmares...

Why would it bother "sipa of delco"? So the power of "history" shames you.

  <<In 1865, immediately after enactment of the new Organic Statute for the
  Jewish community, and just as Jewish capital from Europe was beginning
  to have an effect in Istanbul, local Armenians and Greeks started a pogrom
  against Jews immediately across the sea of Marmara at Haydarpasa, terminus
  of the Anatolia railroad, with three hundred Jews massacred and many more
  beaten and raped before the disturbance was stopped after the Sultan sent
  his personal guard across the bay to protect the Jews [39].

  In later years, ritual murder attacks against Jews, carried out mostly
  by native Greeks, Armenians, and, in Arab provinces, by Maronites and
  other Arab Christians, often with the assistance of the local European
  consuls, took place throughout the empire. There were literally thousands
  of incidents continuously until World War I, in Southeastern Europe as far
  west and north as Monastir and Kavalla, in Istanbul, at Gallipoli and
  the Dardanelles, at Salonica, and in all the Arab provinces as far south
  as Damascus and Beirut and in Egypt at Cairo and Alexandria. These
  invariably resulted from accusations spread among Ottoman Christians
  by word of mouth, or published in their newspapers, often by Christian
  financiers and merchants anxious to get their Jewish competitors out of
  the way or to divert onto the Jews Muslim anger at reports of Christian
  massacres of Muslims in Southeastern Europe or Central Asia, resulting
  in individual and mob attacks on Jews, and the burning of their shops
  and homes.

  Individual experiences were horrible. Jews constantly went in fear of
  Armenian or Greek attacks in the streets of Ottoman cities. In Egypt
  and Syria, it was usually the Greeks who led the way, in many cases
  with the assistance of local Armenians and Syrian Christians, whose
  Greek, Arabic and French-language newspapers often printed all the
  rumors they could find regarding Jews, evidently with the desire of
  instigating violence. The Syrian Arab Christians in particular spread
  their long-standing anti-Semitic hatreds from Syria to Egypt, where
  their monopoly of the local press and their espousal of popular causes
  such as Egyptian nationalism and opposition to the British rule, enabled
  them to spread their anti-Jewish message among the Muslim masses with
  little question or opposition."

[39] El Tiempo, 28 April 1926; Galante, Istanbul I, 185; Galante, Documents V,
     340-41.

Serdar Argic

                     'This war quickly developed into one of extermination. 
                      We closed the roads and mountain passes that might 
                      serve as ways of escape for the Tartars [Turks] and 
                      then proceeded in the work of extermination.'
                                                       (Ohanus Appressian)