11 10 2007-ZAMAN: Armenians ‘massacred 10,000 Jews,’ claims report Print

Wednesday , 10 October 2007
http://www.turkishweekly.net/news.php?id=49435
Recent remarks by New York-based Jewish lobby organization the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) about the alleged Armenian genocide have added further fuel to a long-standing debate over the World War I-era deaths of Anatolian Armenians.
However, recent studies conducted in Ottoman archives reveal another side to the period, suggesting that Armenian gangs killed about 10,000 Jews in Anatolia and the Caucasus around the same time, according to a news story in the latest issue of Aksiyon news magazine.

The recent remarks by the ADL that the Armenian genocide claims should be accepted -- a stance which was later softened by the qualification that it was a matter for historians -- caused uneasiness among the global Jewish community, Aksiyon noted. At the time Lenny Ben-David, former undersecretary at the Israeli Embassy in the US, had cautioned the Israeli government to act wisely on the issue. In his article published in the Oct. 5 issue of the Jerusalem Post, titled “Turkey and Armenia: What Jews should do,” In the piece, Ben-David referred to the arguments that Armenians killed hundreds of thousands of Muslims and hundreds of Jews in the early 20th century. An examination of the Ottoman archives and documents shows Armenian gangs are estimated to have killed somewhere in the region of 2 million Muslims between 1914 and 1919. The same archives also suggest thousands of Jews were killed by Armenians. Though the definite number is not known, it is reckoned to be approximately 10,000.

Aksiyon’s story also explains that Gad Nassi, a researcher and author who has made studies on Sabetayist, Ladino-speaking and Crypto Jewish communities, took down the massacre stories of living witnesses. At that time the Ottoman Empire sponsored the detailed studies of the atrocities perpetrated against Muslims by Armenians in collaboration with Russians. According to the reports prepared from these studies, officials saw a pile of the corpses of 300 Jewish people who had set off from Hakkari to search for their relatives, only to be intercepted and killed by Armenians. International Strategic Research Organization (ISRO/USAK) Chairman Sedat Laçiner maintains that the lack of a Jewish population in southeastern Anatolia can be attributed to massacre by Armenians.
10 October 2007
Todays Zaman

Annette Melikian