The Armenian Genocide

My apologies for coming to this subject a bit late; it was a hot topic a few months ago. However, it takes me a while to think things through.

Firstly, the Armenian genocide cannot be disputed by anyone who cares to look at the evidence. This evidence has, for example, been extremely thoroughly reviewed by Adrian Morgan of the Western Resistance blog in a three part article available here, here and here.

It is easy to understand why the Islamists in Turkey want to deny the Armenian genocide, if that is, you can understand the need for an offence of "Insulting Turkishness". (This law was used, for example, in 2005 to prosecute the nobel-prize winning novelist Orhan Pamuk for writing about the massacre of Kurds and Armenians in Anatolia in 1915.)

But, I digress. The reason that the Armenian Genocide (and the Assyrian Genocide) is so important is that it gives the lie to the myth of Islamic tolerance of religious minorities:-

It [i.e. Muslim rule] protected Jews from Christians and Eastern Christians from Roman Catholics. In Spain under the Umayyads and in Baghdad under the Abbasid Khalifahs, Christians and Jews enjoyed a freedom of religion that they did not allow each other or anyone else.

Muslim apologists make claims like that above while pointing to the treatment of Jews in Europe. Looking at the vile anti-semitic content of Arab media, one wonders what would happen if Israel lost one of its wars with its Arab neighbours.

Even if this myth was true, it is inaccurate to compare the fate of Jews in Europe with that of non-Muslims under Muslim rule. While the Jews were a tiny minority in Europe, in the early days, a Muslims minority often ruled a majority non-Muslim population. Killing or expelling them would have de-populated the entire country!

Even now, the Coptic population of Egypt is estimated to be 6 to 10% of the total population. Jewish populations in Europe were never anywhere near this level..

At first, conversion to Islam was actively discouraged so as not to diminish the revenue aquired from the high levels of taxation on non-Muslims (jizya). Muslim converts were thus given the second-class status of mawali who had almost as much a tax burden as the non-Muslims.

The lands conquered by Islam in the early years of Islamic expansion were, at that time, some of the most Christianised parts of the World. The combination of taxation, persecution and exclusion of non-Muslims from many aspects of society is the foundation on which most of the Muslim nations of North Africa and the Middle East have been built.

The Islamicisation of these areas has been extensively documented by Bat Ye'Or in her book "The Decline of Eastern Christianity under Islam". For a briefer treatment, read this on-line article on the dhimmi (non-Muslims in a Muslim state).


The Armenian Genocide is estimated to have killed between 600,000 and 1.5 million people between 1914 and 1923. The Assyrian Genocide is estimated to have killed 275,000 people between 1914 and 1918. These were Christians living under the supposedly benevolent rule of the Ottoman Caliphate.