Money doesn't talk – it lectures

At JihadWatch today, Robert Spencer quotes an article by Paul Stenhouse in the Australian magazine Quadrant noting the establishment of a new “Chair of Islamic Studies and Interfaith Dialogue, within a Centre of Inter-Religious Dialogue at the Fitzroy campus of the Australian Catholic University, Melbourne” with a “thoroughgoing commitment to promoting a certain kind of Islam through a Catholic university, and filtering it through all the faculties to ‘future leaders.’ ” For Stenhouse, this brought to mind “a by-now virtually unobtainable book, Moslems in Europe and America by Ali al-Montasser al-Kattani, published in Iraq in 1976 by Dar Idris. It called for the establishment of chairs of Islamic Studies in universities in Europe, America, the West Indies and other countries, and the setting up of committees of Muslims to select other Muslims to occupy these chairs. At the same time it called for an end to any aid, moral or financial, that might already be being given to established chairs of Islamic Studies held by Christians or Jews.”

This prompts Spencer to wonder whether this could be “the smoking gun of MESA Nostra” (JihadWatch commentator Hugh Fitzgerald’s moniker for the Middle East Studies Association) – that is, the blueprint for the steady encroachment on Middle East Studies Departments by Muslims and their academic toadies. A similar idea was also propounded by London University Institute of Education instructor A.L.Tibawi (described in Robert Irwin’s “Dangerous Knowledge: Orientalism and Its Discontents,” pp. 319-22) in his “Second Critique of English-Speaking Orientalists and Their Approach to Islam and the Arabs” (London: The Islamic Cultural Centre, 1979). In “Appendix IV: Note on Arab Subventions to English universities, Tibawi wrote that:

“Arab financial assistance to Western universities is a very recent development that came in the wake of the accession of hitherto poor countries to considerable wealth as a result of the exploitation of oil resources. It is very difficult to discover when or how the process started or which universities were the first recipients of money from Arab or Muslim countries.”

After bewailing the scholarship of an unnamed professor at subvention recipient Cambridge University (probably William Montgomery Watt – see Irwin, pp. 267-8) who had the temerity to “publish views offensive to Muslim sentiments, namely that the Qur’an is not a divine revelation but Muhammad’s own composition” and discussing grants then being made to institutions in both the U.K. and the U.S., Tibawi proposed that:

“Since Arab financial assistance is likely to continue and may even increase, the situation calls for a simple suggestion to regularise it ... It would be appropriate to channel all financial assistance through a committee in London (and a similar one in Washington) composed of the ambassador of the country concerned, an Arab academic and the director of the Islamic Cultural Centre. This committee should have the power to review existing arrangements with a view toward confirming them, or recommending changes in the terms or termination. All future applications should be submitted through this committee, which, after due consideration, would refer to the government concerned with the appropriate recommendation. In due course the decision in every case should be communicated through the committee. It must be agreed to put an end to all personal patronage and backdoor approaches, especially by persons known to be unfriendly to Arabs and Islam, and to establish the principle of accountability of the recipients.”

Half-stepping on a hit case

Both Gates of Vienna and the Eastern Star News Agency have translations today of an article in the Swedish press by freelance journalist Nuri Kino taking to task the Swedish authorities for their lassitude in investigating the Dec. 11 murder of Professor Fuat Deniz at his institution's campus in Örebro, Sweden. Deniz, whose research focused on the genocide campaign carried out against Assyrian Christians by Muslims of the Ottoman Empire at the same time as the better-known Armenian genocide, was struck in the neck with an edged weapon; a manner of killing mandated in at least two verses (8:12 and 47:4) of the Qur'an.

Kino, like Deniz a Swedish Assyrian originally from Turkey, went to Örebro to check things out. He found that:

* No security or "any other form of support" had been offered by Swedish authorities to Deniz's family; a "nervous" widow and a three-year-old daughter.

* Deniz's campus office had not been sealed off.

* Deniz's academic colleagues, including those who have received threats, expressed "shock" at the "lack of knowledge regarding ethnic, political and religious clashes" on the part of the police.

* Despite declaring on radio news that a security-camera picture of a blood-spattered man taken in a store the day of Deniz's killing is "uesless," Örebro police have ignored an offer of assistance from a technical specialist in cleaning up such pictures.

* When Kino called Örebro police, he was told that their public information officer was on vacation and the lead prosecutor in the investigation is out sick - without anyone acting in his stead. Moreover, "police in Örebro will be reducing the number of police on duty over the coming holiday period."

* A spokescreature at the National Criminal Police Corps murder commission, from which assistance in the investigation was sought by Örebro police, told Kino that "Those that work at The National Criminal Police Corps murder commission have taken their Christmas holiday and won't return until the second of January. They have their holidays and they definitely deserve it as they are never home."

So as the already-cold trail of Fuat Deniz's killer gets even colder, the so-called defenders of justice in Sweden can't be bothered to pursue it. They're too busy feasting, guzzling and relaxing. What an absolute disgrace!

And speaking of disgrace, the performance of the Anglophone mainstream media on this story has been no less shameful. A search of the following sites for Fuat Deniz's name reveals not so much as a word of coverage:

The Associated Press
Reuters
The BBC
The New York Times
The International Herald Tribune
The Washington Post
The Los Angeles Times
The Times of London
The Telegraph (UK)
The Guardian (UK)

Apparently the assassination of an internationally eminent genocide researcher is just too picayune to garner the attention of the media elite. Had Baron Bodissey at Gates of Vienna not broken this story in the U.S., we would know nothing of it.

'Tis the season ...

... to cut throats.


The blog Sweetness & Light, which assembled a stomach-turning collection of photos of Muslims around the world celebrating Eid al-Adha (the "festival of sacrifice" with which the holy month of Ramadan concludes) last year, has another assortment of grotesqueries from this year's blessed event.


This is what the president of the United States, in a White House message Wednesday wishing "our Muslim citizens ... a memorable celebration," declared "helps ensure the important values of compassion and devotion are passed on to future generations." (Emphasis mine.) Nor should it be supposed that this sort of thing only goes on overseas, as a story from a North Carolina TV station, telling of Muslim efforts to overturn a judge's ban on a "mass slaughter of lambs" by "hundreds of Muslim families" at a Smithfield, N.C. farm, shows. The ban was imposed not because of the ritual's primitive savagery but because of agricultural officials' concern over the farm's lack of sanitary facilities. The judge pointed out that the ban "doesn't prevent the free exercise of religion because the families are allowed to slaughter their own lambs at a state-licensed facility."

On Eid al-Adha, a greeting and a goof-up

At Jihad Watch today, Robert Spencer analyzes the implications of a seemingly innocuous White House greeting to Muslims on the occasion of Eid al-Adha, the annual "festival of sacrifice" with which the holy month of Ramadan concludes. He points out that when President Bush praises Muslims for "honor[ing] Abraham's obedience" (in being willing to sacrifice his son at God's command), he is unwittingly praising a faith that, in a Qur'anic verse (60:4), calls Abraham an "excellent example" when he declares his "enmity and hatred forever" for those who do not "believe in Allah and in Him alone" – but not when Abraham pledges to his pagan father to pray for forgiveness for him. The president, he observes, "is thus inadvertently reinforcing a worldview that takes for granted the legitimacy of everlasting enmity and hatred between Muslims and non-Muslims – and doing so precisely in the context of trying to build bridges between Muslims and non-Muslims."

I voted for George W. Bush twice, but I am heartily sick of his ignorance of and deference to Islam. Unhappily, his successor is unlikely to be any better in this regard.

Rejoinder to a Turkish partisan

(This began as a comment to the foregoing post, but ended up becoming one in itself.)

In view of the calumnies to which my American countrymen have long been subjected by “Turkey and the Turks” – exemplified by the odious film
“Kurtlar Vadisi Irak” (“Valley of the Wolves Iraq”), which depicted an American Jewish doctor harvesting organs from dead Iraqi civilians at Abu Ghraib for sale to rich clients in New York and Tel Aviv – your yelping about a “smear campaign” is ironic, to say the least. However that may be, proof is not needed to advance a suspicion – and if more indicators are needed than the Qur’anically mandated way in which Fuat Deniz was slaughtered and the threats cited by his colleagues, here’s another, reported today by the Swedish paper Länstidningen i Södertälje and noted here: a threat made on Aug. 31 by four Turkish district governors to the former head of the Assyrian Federation in Sweden, Simon Barmano. Objecting during their visit to Sweden to a proposed memorial to the Assyrian genocide victims to be erected in Södertälje, the Turks warned Barmano to “stop highlighting the genocide or your people will get hurt.”

As to what you risibly call the “so-called Armenian and Assyrian genocides,” their existence has been irrefutably established not only by the accounts of contemporaries such as U.S. Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire Henry Morgenthau and the German missionary and historian Johannes Lepsius, but by the scholarship of, among others, Vahakn Dadrian, whose books “Warrant for Genocide” and “The History of the Armenian Genocide” are extensively documented by primary and secondary sources in Turkish, Armenian, English, German and French. That none of this evidence has ever led to Nuremburg-style tribunals is due largely to raisons d’état. In the aftermath of World War I, as the historian Bat Ye’or notes, “Alibis advanced to exonerate the populations which had collaborated in these cruelties resulted from the international context and the will of the colonial powers to follow a policy of appeasement toward their Muslim populations. These powers – Russia, Britain, France, and Italy – ruled over millions of Muslims in the Caucasus, Asia, the Indies, Egypt, the Levant, and the Maghreb; consequently, they tried to minimize this tragedy ... to resume good relations with Turkey and other Muslim populations, particularly those of Syria and Iraq who were hostile to the British and French protectorates.” (Bat Ye’or, “The Decline of Eastern Christianity Under Islam,” p. 198.) In the aftermath of World War II, the U.S. and its allies needed a bulwark on the Soviet Union’s southern flank, hence the exoneration advanced in a Harvard University Press publication in 1951 by Lewis V. Thomas: “By 1918, with the excision of the total Armenian Christian population from Anatolia and the Straits area ... Turkification and Moslemization had been advanced in one great surge by the use of force ... Had Turkification and Moslemization not been advanced there by the use of force, there would certainly not today exist a Turkish Republic, a Republic owing its strength and stability in no small measure to the homogeneity of its population, a state which is now a valued associate of the United States.” (Lewis Thomas and Richard Frye, “The United States and Turkey and Iran,” p. 61. Emphasis mine.) And this year, Turkey’s importance as a transit point for materiel and supplies for the war in Iraq immunized it from even the toothless sanction of a congressional resolution condemning the Armenian genocide. (“U.S. and Turkey Thwart Armenian Genocide Bill,” New York Times, Oct. 26, 2007.)

Lastly, that “Ottoman archives are now wide open for anyone who wish to examine them” is rather less than exculpatory, given that “Major General Seeckt, the last German Chief of Staff at [Ottoman General Headquarters], whisked away substantial parts of these records when departing from Turkey at the end of the war.” Despite a promise by Seeckt “to return only those files which basically concern the Turkish military,” it could not be “ascertained whether those files were in fact returned, and if so, to what extent, when, and to what branch of the Turkish government.” (Dadrian, “The History of the Armenian Genocide,” p. 280.) Moreover, if Ottoman archives are so accessible, why is a panel of the European Parliament requesting that they be opened?

In view of the fact that Fuat Deniz had dedicated his academic career to the kind of “highlighting the genocide” that had elicited a Turkish warning of reprisals, in view of the threats cited by his colleagues, in view of the concordance of the fatal wounds inflicted on him with the commands of at least two verses of the Qur’an, and in view of the assassin’s Islamist motives in the murder of Hrant Dink in Istanbul Jan. 19, suspicions that Deniz’s murder was politically – and Islamically – motivated are unavoidable. My own will stand until a court finds otherwise.

A slaughter in Sweden

On Tuesday evening, Fuat Deniz, 40, a lecturer in sociology at Örebro University in Örebro, Sweden, was attacked with an edged weapon in a campus building. His assailant inflicted multiple wounds on his neck, from which, despite surgeons’ efforts to save him, he soon died. He left behind a widow, Runa, and a three-year-old daughter.

Deniz was a Christian Assyrian who immigrated to Sweden from Turkey with his family as a child. His forebears were survivors of one of the great historical crimes of the last century: the Ottoman Empire’s jihad genocides against its Christian minorities during World War I and thereafter. That Ottoman Muslims – Turks, Kurds and Arabs – carried out a genocide against the Armenians of that empire has been firmly established (depsite continuing Turkish denials) due to the work of Vahakn Dadrian and others, but their simultaneous butchery of Assyrians, Nestoreans and Greeks is far less well-known.

Fuat Deniz was trying to change that. His academic research focused on the Assyrian genocide, an episode on which he had become an authority. In fact, he was slated to speak Sunday at an international conference on Assyrian identity and the Assyrian genocide held at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands.

He never made it – and his academic colleagues are now in fear for their own lives. For, according to Professor David Gaunt of Sweden’s Södertörn University College, who worked with Deniz, this was only the latest incident in a campaign of intimidation carried out against academics in his field. In a story in Saturday’s edition of the Swedish newspaper Svenska Dagbladet, Gaunt told of being tailed by security police during travels in Turkey and subjected to a smear campaign in the Turkish press. Moreover, Gaunt told the paper, “On several occasions at our seminars people would attend claiming to be journalists, only to then walk around photographing delegates.”

“All those interested in Christian minorities in Turkey are considered a threat,” he added.

And they are a threat to more than just Turkish sensitivities. At a European Parliament conference held Mar. 26 in Brussels, panelists declared that Turkey, which is trying to gain admittance to the European Union, must acknowledge its Ottoman-era genocides and open its archives from the period before being allowed to do so. Speakers included members of the European Parliament from Sweden and Germany – and Professor Gaunt.

Turkey has a great deal to cover up, as an extensively documented article in the Canadian journal Genocide Studies and Prevention reveals. Writing in the journal’s December 2006 issue, Florida International University Law School Professor Hannibal Travis argues that “the hesitation to recognize the Assyrian genocide is unjustified, for the evidence is overwhelming that Turks and their Kurdish allies massacred tens, and more likely hundreds, of thousands of Assyrians in order to exterminate the Christian population.” Citing contemporary American and British press dispatches, the famous British Foreign Office “Blue Book,” eywitness accounts from both victims and German military officers assigned to the Ottoman Empire (a German ally) during World War I, and many other sources, Travis paints an appalling picture of massacre, plunder, rapine and scarcely imaginable suffering. As many as a quarter of a million Assyrians and other Christians perished along with the more than one million Armenians who died.

The evidence also makes clear that, like the attacks on the Armenians, this was emphatically a jihad genocide. As Travis notes, “On November 14 1914, less than two weeks after the Ottoman Empire declared war on the Entente (Great Britain, France, and Russia), the Sultan, still acting as a figurehead for the Young Turk regime, declared a jihad or holy war ‘against the enemies of Islam, who have proven their hostility by their attacks on the Caliphate.’ The next day, a key CUP (Committee of Union and Progress – the ‘Young Turks’) official led a march through Istanbul ‘meant to demonstrate the people’s agreement with the Sultan’s declaration of holy war against the enemies of Islam.’ The sheikh al-Islam, a CUP appointee and the highest religious authority in the Ottoman regime, endorsed the declaration of jihad and proclaimed it in print; violence against Christian Armenians quickly followed. These declarations of jihad ‘incited wrath toward Christian minorities in the Ottoman lands and ... later facilitated the government’s program of Genocide against the Armenians’ – and, as it happened, the Assyrians.”

That Fuat Deniz’s killer, who remains at large, was carrying on the jihad tradition is strongly indicated by the cause of the professor’s death: multiple wounds with an edged weapon to the neck. This is the manner of killing directly mandated by Islam’s prophet Muhammad in two Qur’anic verses:

Sura 8, Verse 12 – Remember thy Lord inspired the angels (with the message): “I am with you: give firmness to the Believers: I will instill terror into the hearts of the Unbelievers: Smite ye above their necks ...”

Sura 47, Verse 4 – Therefore, when ye meet the Unbelievers (in fight), Smite at their necks ...

Should this prove to be the case, Fuat Deniz would not be the first descendant of jihad genocide survivors to pay with his life for resisting Turkish Muslims’ decades-long antagonism toward the truth. On Jan. 19, newspaper editor Hrant Dink was gunned down in front of the Istanbul office of his bilingual Turkish-Armenian weekly newspaper, Agos. With his resolute candor about the Armenian genocide, Dink had long been a thorn in the side of Turkish authorities, who charged him repeatedly with the “crime” of “insulting Turkishness.” His confessed killer, a teenager who was heard to shout “I shot the infidel” as he was leaving the scene, was later shown after his arrest in a video clip on Turkish television, unrepentantly posing with the crescent-emblazoned Turkish flag as his police captors beamed in approval.

Kudos to Baron Bodissey at Gates of Vienna for breaking this story on this side of the pond.

Minarets and bayonets

Mosques are our barracks,
domes our helmets,
minarets our bayonets,
believers our soldiers.
This holy army guards my religion.

- Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, adding his own lines to a 1912 Turkish poem at a Dec. 12, 1997 public gathering in Siirt, Eastern Anatolia. Erdogan addressed the International Islamophobia Conference in Istanbul described here.