American Minute with Bill Federer
Byzantine Empire, Ottoman Empire, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk "Father of Modern Republic of Turkey" versus Adnan Menderes "Great Riot of Istanbul"
|
|
The
Western Roman Empire
fell on September 4, 476 AD, but the
Eastern Roman Empire
continued nearly another 1,000 years.
Its capital city was
Constantinople,
founded by
Emperor Constantine
in 330 AD, regarded for centuries as the largest and greatest city on earth.
Constantinople
was located where the East and West met, being situated where the
Black Sea
empties into the
Mediterranean Sea,
and
trade routes
from the
Far East and Central Asia
connected to
Europe.
|
|
The
Eastern Roman Empire
was also called the
Byzantine Empire,
after the area's original Greek colony called
Byzantium,
founded in 657 BC by
Byzas.
|
|
The
Byzantine Empire
had many notable emperors, such as:
- Theodosius the Great, 379-395;
- Zeno, 474-491;
- Justinian & Theodora, 527-565, built the Hagia Sophia Cathedral;
- Heraclius, 610-614
- Basil I, 867-886;
- Basil II, 976-1025;
- Alexios I Komnenos, 1081-1118, requested help from the West -- the First Crusade;
- Constantine XI, 1449-1453, last emperor.
|
|
Unfortunately, just as the
Western Roman Empire
fell, in part, do to the
loss of virtue,
the
Byzantine Eastern Roman Empire
was plagued with religious disputes, civil wars, revolts, court intrigues, assassinations, and coups.
In fact, the word
"Byzantine"
came to have the definition of "devious, clandestine, stealthy, secretive, surreptitious,
labyrinthine power struggle."
|
|
Rivalry
between
political parties
blinded both sides from recognizing
a greater threat.
Demetrius, in challenging his brother Constantine XI's claim to the throne, brought tens of thousands of Muslim warriors across the Bosporus to the walls of Constantinople, not realizing they had an agenda of their own to take over the entire country.
Constantinople
was conquered by
Ottoman Sultan Mehmet II
on May 29, 1453, and the Byzantine Empire soon collapsed.
|
|
In the
fall of Constantinople,
untold thousands of Christians were raped, killed, enslaved or deported.
|
|
The world's largest Christian church for nearly a millennium, the
Hagia Sophia,
was converted into a
mosque.
|
|
The Hagia Sophia had Islamic minarets erected around it, and the church's four acres of Bible-themed gold mosaics were covered with white wash and Qur'an verses.
The Turkish government has never offered to give ownership of the church back to Orthodox Christians.
|
|
The
Ottoman Empire
was
one of the largest empires in the world
for over 6 centuries.
Towards its end, internal and external factors weakened it, resulting in it being referred to as the "sick man of Europe."
Then
oil
was discovered in Iran in 1908 by the British, who formed the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, now BP.
|
|
The Turkish Oil Company was formed in 1911, with oil being drilled in Mosul, Baghdad, and Basra.
Kaiser Wilhelm
industrialized Germany, and needed oil, so he arranged an alliance with
Ottoman Sultan Abdul Hamid II.
Oil pulled the
Middle East
into
World War I.
Sadly, during this period a tragic genocide of Armenians, Greeks, Assyrians, and other minorities took place.
|
|
After the war, the victorious European powers, primarily
Britain
and
France,
exerted control over former
German and Ottoman territories.
|
|
France
attempted to take control of
Turkey
, but the
Turks
rallied and maintained their independence.
The
Ottoman Turkish Empire,
founded in 1299, was replaced by the
Republic of Turkey
in 1922.
Constantinople
was renamed in 1930 to
Istanbul,
derived from the Greek "
eis-ten-polin
" meaning
"to the city."
|
|
The courageous
leader
who kept
Turkey
independent of
European control
was
Mustafa Kemal Ataturk.
|
|
He helped found the
Republic of Turkey
and served as its
first President.
Ataturk
successfully reinvented
Turkey
into a prosperous, modern, secular state, leading it from 1924 to 1938.
|
|
Ataturk
distanced his country from its former fundamentalist intolerant past.
This policy was also pursued by
Shah Reza Pahlavi
in his country of
Iran,
|
|
and
by
Gamal Nasser
in
Egypt.
|
|
Arabia
went in the other direction.
Mostly mountains of worthless sand,
Arabia
ruled by
Sharif of Mecca,
Hussein bin Ali,
who helped
Britain
defeat the
Turkish Ottoman Empire
in
World War I.
After the war,
Britain
installed his son
Faisal
as
King of Iraq,
and his son
Abdullah
as
King of Jordan.
|
|
When
Hussein bin Ali
waffled on a treaty, the
British
allowed the fundamentalist wahhabi Arab
Abdulaziz ibn Saud
to take over Arabia.
In 1938,
Standard Oil Company
discovered
oil
in
Saudi Arabia,
causing it to become the
wealthiest country in the Middle East,
the
main exporter
of both
oil
and fundamental Islamic
wahhabism.
|
|
Ataturk
is considered the
father of modern Turkey.
"Ata" is the Turkish word for "father."
He abolished the position of the
Sultan,
stating:
"He is a weak ruler who needs religion to uphold his government ...
Even before accepting the
religion of the Arabs,
the
Turks
were
a great nation."
|
|
Ataturk
ended the Islamic
Caliphate,
thus preventing Muslim religious leaders from controlling government affairs.
In an effort to cut ties, he replaced Arabic Islamic names with Turkish names.
He introduced the western use of last names.
Ataturk
abolished use of Arabic and Persian script, replacing it with the Latin alphabet.
He abolished turbans and fezes (the red felt cap with a black tassel) and required men to wear western pants and suits.
Ataturk
banned beards on men, and even required Muslim prayer leaders to be beardless.
|
|
He replaced Arabic muezzin’s call to prayer and made praying a private affair.
He abolished sharia courts, and made Friday a workday, instituting the Western idea of the “weekend” being Saturday and Sunday.
Ataturk
outlawed polygamy and elevated the status of women, appointing the first female judges, and insisting on education of girls.
|
|
He abolished women wearing of scarves,veils, chadors or burqas - the full-length body dress worn by Muslim women, and requiring women to wear skirts.
Women were allowed to vote in 1930.
Ataturk
stated:
"If henceforward the
women
do not share in the social life of the nation, we shall never attain to our full development. We shall remain irremediably backward, incapable of treating on equal terms with the civilizations of the West."
Instead of a caliphate, students were taught republican ideals of
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
and
Montesquieu.
|
|
Ataturk
empowered the
military
to be
custodians of maintaining a secular government,
with responsibility to remove political leaders who drifted toward Islamic fundamentalism:
"Mohammedanism
was based on
Arab nationalism
above all nationalities ...
... The purpose of the religion founded by Muhammad, over all nations, was to drag (them into)
Arab national politics
... (It) might have suited tribes in the desert.
It is no good for a modern, progressive state."
|
|
Similarly,
Egypt's President Gamal Nasser
told a political gathering in 1958:
"I met with the head of the Muslim Brotherhood and he sat with me and made his requests.
What did he request? The first thing he asked for was to make wearing the hijab mandatory in Egypt and demand that every woman walking in the street wear a tarha (scarf), [audience laughter] Every woman walking! [someone in audience shouted 'let him wear it!'] ...
|
|
.. And I told him, if I make that a law they will say that we have
returned to the days of Al-Hakimbi Amr Allah,
who forbade people from walking at day and only allowed walking at night ..."
|
|
Nasser
continued:
"My opinion is that every person in his own house decides for himself the rules, And he replied 'No, as the leader, you are responsible.'
I told him, 'Sir, you have a daughter in the School of Medicine and she is not wearing a tarha. Why didn’t you make her wear a tarha? If you (audience applauded) ...
If you are unable to make one girl - who is your daughter - wear the tarha, you want me to put a tarha on 10 million woman myself? (sustained laughter).
|
|
Pro-western views
were also embraced in other Middle Eastern countries, such as
Syria;
|
|
Iran
was pro-American, with
Shah Reza Pahlavi of Iran
(1919-1980), being friends with
U.S. Presidents Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon,
and
Ford.
|
|
Iran
had a secular government till it was
betrayed by Jimmy Carter,
who helped ushered in the
Ayatollah.
|
|
ISTANBUL'S GREAT RIOT & POGROM
Ataturk’s
effort to transform
Turkey
suffered a temporary set back after his death.
Turkish leaders spiraled into being more nationalistic and fundamentalist.
Turkey passed laws barring Greeks from 30 different trades and professions. In 1942, a capital gains tax was passed to reduce the number of Greek businesses.
Politicians began speaking openly against the 100,000 Greek Christians still living in Constantinople, now
Istanbul.
|
|
In 1950,
Adnan Menderes
became Prime Minister of Turkey.
|
|
Menderes
gave a speech supporting the
return of the Caliphate.
He re-opened thousands of mosques which had been closed, brought back the Islamic call to prayer in the Arabic language, and encouraged Muslims to follow Islam more fundamentally.
|
|
Menderes
orchestrated a provocation whereby a Turkish University Student was to place explosive charges in the Turkish Consulate and in the
birthplace of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk
in Thessaloniki, Greece.
|
|
The plan was to blow it up on September 3, 1955 and blame it on the Greek Christian minority.
Though the bomb never went off, the newspapers ran with the story anyway - a version of fake news blaming the Greeks.
Mobs were incited to violence and retaliation.
Menderes
arranged for government trucks to block off the streets to the Greek neighborhoods, then provided shovels, pickaxes, crowbars, ramming rods and gas, to the 300,000 rioters.
|
|
Similar to Antifa organized riots, in just a few hours, Istanbul's Greek Christian neighborhoods were pillaged.
Thousands of shops, houses, churches and graves were destroyed.
It was
like the "Kristall Nacht" of November 9, 1938,
when Nazis in Germany and Austria smashed and vandalized Jewish stores and neighborhoods in the
"Istanbul Pogram" of September 6, 1955.
For nine hours, mobs erupted in a mad frenzy, laying waste to Greek homes, businesses and churches.
|
|
Greek women and young boys were targeted for public rape.
Turkish author Aziz Nesin witnessed Greek Christian men beaten and circumcised in the streets by marauders.
|
|
Sixteen Greek Orthodox clerics were killed.
Historian Spero Vryonis, Jr., author of
The Mechanism of Catastrophe,
recorded that rioters desecrated cemeteries and overturn tombstones. A British journalist witnessed one graveyard where "the contents of every coffin spilled into the streets."
|
|
Over a dozen Greek and Orthodox clerics were killed.
Rioters destroyed:
- 1,000 Greek homes;
- 4,348 Greek-owned businesses;
- 110 hotels;
- 27 pharmacies;
- 23 schools;
- 21 factories;
- 73 of the 81Greek Orthodox Churches in the city; and
- 3 monasteries.
|
|
Armenian and Jewish shops were also destroyed.
Like modern riots,
Turkish police were ordered to "stand down,"
and
passively watch the
rioters,
who were
given space
wreak mayhem.
|
|
The World Council of Churches estimated the damage at over 150 million dollars.
The mob chanted "Massacre the Greek traitors" and "Down with Europe."
|
|
In one church arson attack, Father Chrysanthos Mandas, was burned alive.
Greek cemeteries were desecrated with relics of saints burned or thrown to dogs.
|
|
Noel Barber, a journalist for the
London Daily Mail,
wrote on September 14, 1955:
"The church of Yedikule was utterly smashed, and one priest was dragged from bed, the hair torn from his head and the beard literally torn from his chin.
|
|
... Another old Greek priest (Fr. Mantas) in a house belonging to the church and who was too ill to be moved was left in bed, the house was set on fire and he was burned alive.
At the church of Yenikoy, a lovely spot on the edge of the Bosporus, a priest of 75 was taken out into the street, stripped of every stitch of clothing, tied behind a car and dragged through the streets. They tried to tear the hair of another priest, but failing that, they scalped him, as they did many others."
|
|
Another eyewitness was
Ian Fleming,
a reporter for the
London Sunday Times,
who later became well-known for writing the
James Bond
detective stories.
Ian Fleming
was covering the INTERPOL (International Police) Conference in Istanbul.
|
|
Ian Fleming's
column "The Great Riot of Istanbul," printed September 11, 1955, described how "hatred ran through the streets like lava."
(Phillip Mansel,
Constantinople: City of the World's Desire,
1453-1944, Harmondworth, U.K., Penquin, 1995, p. 425).
|
|
Fleming
reference the Istanbul riot as as background information in his James Bond spy novel,
From Russia, with Love
(1957).
The riots were reported in the
Illustrated London News, TIME Magazine
and
Reader's Digest,
which described Istanbul as "a city gone mad."
|
|
After the 1955
Istanbul Pogrom,
over 100,000 more Greeks departed.
The discrimination continued and in 1958,Turkish nationalist students campaigned for a boycott on all Greek businesses.
In 1964, the Turkish government deported 50,000 more Greeks.
|
|
The New York Times
printed, Nov. 26, 1979:
"According to the most recent statistics, the Christian population in Turkey was diminished from 4,500,000 at the beginning of this century to just about 150,000. Of those, the Greeks are no more than 7,000. Yet, in 1923 they were as many as 1 to 2 million."
|
|
When the dust settled, citizens of Turkey came to realize that
Adnan Menderes
was responsible.
He was tried and executed in 1961 for his part in overseeing these atrocities.
|
|
In August of 1995,
Sen. Alfonse D'Amato (NY)
introduced U.S. Senate Resolution 160 calling on President Bill Clinton to proclaim September 6 as a
Day of Memory
for the victims of the
1955 Istanbul Pogrom.
(104th Congress, U.S. House of Representatives, Library of Congress, 1995-07-08):
|
|
"Whereas, in September 1955, there existed a Greek minority population of 100,000 in Istanbul, Turkey;
Whereas, on the night of September 6-7, 1955, a pogrom against the Greek community began in Istanbul;
|
|
Whereas anti-Greek rioters attacked, pillaged, gutted and destroyed more than 2,000 Greek homes, 4,200 Greek shops and stores, 73 Greek Orthodox churches, 52 Greek schools, eight Greek cemeteries, all three major Greek newspaper plants, and dozens of Greek factories, hotels, restaurants, and warehouses in Istanbul;
Whereas 15 Greeks were killed in the pogrom or died subsequently, and 32 were seriously injured;
|
|
Whereas as many as 200 women were raped by rioters;
Whereas the United States Consul General in Istanbul reported that police stood idly by or cheered on the rioting mobs;
Whereas the State Department received confirmation of `elaborate advanced planning for widespread destruction of the property of the indigenous Greek community,' involving careful preparations by many individuals;
|
|
Whereas American journalist Frederick Sondern, Jr., writing at the time for
Readers Digest,
described the events of that night as...one of the wildest eruptions of mob fury and hysteria in modern times ...';
Whereas homes of Greek officers stationed at NATO headquarters in the Turkish city of Izmir were also attacked and destroyed;
|
|
Whereas rioters attacked and burned down the Greek Consulate in Izmir and the Greek Pavilion at the Izmir International festival;
Whereas Turkish authorities failed at the time to convict a single rioter, out of thousands, for any crime committed during the pogrom;
|
|
Whereas five years later, after a military coup in Turkey, the former Prime Minister and acting Foreign Minister at the time of the pogrom were charged with, and convicted of, numerous criminal actions, including the instigation of the anti-Greek riots;
Whereas the pogrom marked the beginning of the end of the Greek community's presence in Istanbul, numbering about 2,000 in 1995; and
Whereas September 6, 1995 will mark the 40th Anniversary of the pogrom:
Now, therefore, be it Resolved, That it is the sense of the Senate that the President should--
|
|
(1) take all appropriate steps to observe and commemorate the loss of life and property, and the numerous injuries and offenses, which took place during the
pogrom by proclaiming September 6, 1995 as a day of remembrance
for the victims of these attacks; and
(2) urge all Americans to honor the victims of the pogrom in the appropriate manner."
|
|
Turkey
once again continued as a secular, tolerant state.
Recent developments, though, are raising concern.
From 2003 to 2014, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan was Prime Minister of Turkey.
In 2014, he became President.
|
|
Though democratically elected,
The Economist
reported (2/4/16):
“Mr Erdogan made a telling remark ... ‘Democracy is like a train,’ he said, ‘you get off once you have reached your destination.’”
|
|
Fears of intolerance have left, as of 2006, only 5,000 Greek Christians, mostly elderly, in Istanbul, the former ancient capital of the Christian world.
|
|
London's Daily and Sunday Express
reported April 22, 2016, "Islamist Turkey seizes ALL Christian churches in city and declares them 'state property'"
|
|
The New York Times
reported April 23, 2016, "Turkey's Seizure of Churches and Lands Alarms Armenians."
|
|
The
American Center for Law and Justice
reported:
"The government of Turkey – led by an Islamic party – has begun increased crackdowns on Christians, and Pastor Andrew Brunson, if convicted, may face years in prison based on extremely serious – and false – charges."
|
|
Bloomberg
reported (7/18/18) on Pastor Andrew Brunson, "Turkey Keeps U.S. Pastor Jailed, Straining Ties With Washington."
Rather than following the example of
Adnan Menderes,
perhaps, in the future, leadership will once again follow the more successful and tolerant example of
Ataturk, the Father of Modern Turkey.
|
|
Schedule Bill Federer for informative interviews & captivating PowerPoint presentations: 314-502-8924
[email protected]
American Minute is a registered trademark of William J. Federer. Permission is granted to forward, reprint, or duplicate, with acknowledgment.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|