Turkey: fascistic, racist, tyrannic and extremely nationalistic!
Reader comment on article: The Citizen of the 21st Century: How Far, How Fast?

Submitted by Christian Aramean (Netherlands), Aug 5, 2002 at 20:14

Shlomo (as we say in our Aramaic dialect)/Shalom Dr. Pipes,

I am also an advocate of your frequently sound analyses. This time, however, I too think that you were in need of some correction with regard to your expressions about the compatibility of "Islam" (or the "Islamic World") with Democracy. Furthermore, I stress again an important, but sad fact already noted by one of your repliers.

What Gerald Gerjekian wrote, was well-written. He took the words right out of my mouth when he wrote about Turkey that "this 'so-called' democracy was built on a foundation of the bones of the Armenians, Assyrians [i.e. Arameans/Syriacs], Greeks, Arabs, who they ethnically cleansed"!

Theoretically speaking Turkey MIGHT BE qualified as a democratic Republic indeed, but practically and factually it is simply a purely and extremely nationalistic country.

If you visit the country on PERSONAL behalf (and in all secrecy), you'd experience it yourself too...A vivid fact are, for example, the vast majority of Syriac Orthodox Christians who fled the country after they survived --thank God-- several atrocities, genocides, ethnic cleansings and onomastocides, by both Ottomans/Turks and Kurdish tribes.

The FORGOTTEN GENOCIDE of 1914-15 is the darkest period in their modern history, when 2/3 of all the Aramean Christians were brutally and merciless slaughtered like innocent sheep. MORE THAN 95% of those who lived originally in an area called "Tur-Abdin", in southeastern Turkey, live currently outside THEIR original homeland.

Thus the Arameans are a small, homeless people and continue to live like broken pieces of a fine jewel scattered throughout this modern world - they are furthermore unknown to the world.

Kind regards,

An emotionally tortured son of a former persecuted CHRISTIAN (i.e. Syriac Orthodox) ex-citizen of that so-called democratic Turkey living in the Aramean Diapora today.

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