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Armenian Genocide reminder of evil and call to vigilance: expert

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  • Armenian Genocide reminder of evil and call to vigilance: expert

    Armenian Genocide reminder of evil and call to vigilance: expert

    February 14, 2015 - 18:00 AMT


    PanARMENIAN.Net - The genocide of Armenian Christians almost exactly
    100 years ago provides a graphic reminder of evil and a call to
    vigilance, since Christians across the Middle East still suffer
    persecution, an expert on the atrocity told Dallas Baptist University
    audiences, the Baptist Standard reports.

    Artyom Tonoyan, the grandson of Armenian Genocide survivors, described
    the massacre of his people and current implications during the annual
    T.B. Maston Lectures at DBU earlier this week.

    Armenians, who populated part of modern Turkey, originated as a
    political entity between 3,000 and 4,000 years ago, noted Tonoyan, a
    lecturer at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities' Institute for
    Global Studies and a research associate at East View Information
    Services in Minneapolis. He is a graduate of DBU and Baylor
    University.

    Armenian society and culture rose and fell several times across the
    centuries, Tonoyan said. Their pilgrimage to Christianity began in the
    first century B.C., when the apostles Bartholomew and Thaddeus
    traveled to Asia Minor and told them about Jesus. They became the
    first to embrace Christianity as a state religion in 301 B.C., more
    than a decade before Rome.

    But with the rise of Islam, "Armenian civilization underwent an
    existential crisis," he added. "Armenians were forced to islamize."

    The Ottoman Empire, which fully embraced Islam and dominated the
    region for most of the second millennia, discriminated against the
    Armenian Christians, he said. For example, Armenians could not own
    firearms and were barred from representation in court. They were not
    allowed to own horses or build a home taller than their Muslim
    neighbors' houses.

    During the final throes of the Ottoman Empire in the 18th and early
    19th centuries, "Armenians were singled out as cancerous" and a
    "parasitic entity," he said. Young Turkish leaders found the Armenians
    offensive because, despite political discrimination, the Armenians
    prospered financially and controlled the Ottoman economy.

    Shortly after the Ottoman Empire entered World War I, on April 24,
    1915, the empire launched a horrendous siege against its Armenian
    residents.

    Authorities rounded up practically every Armenian leader--"poets,
    doctors, professors, composers, teachers"--in a purge that predated the
    Jewish Holocaust by decades.

    About 400,000 Armenian men were killed almost immediately. Elderly
    men, women and children were rounded up, their property confiscated,
    and forced on a "death march" into the same desert where the Islamic
    State dominates today, Tonoyan said. The marches pushed them to the
    geographical and political edges of the empire.

    Five thousand Armenian villages were destroyed, he said. Hundreds of
    churches were confiscated and converted to mosques, stables and
    restaurants.

    "Our own family was cut down," Tonoyan said. Ottomans forced his
    grandfather, then a boy, to watch the rape of his own mother and
    sister. The last image Tonoyan's great-grandfather saw before his
    murder was the rape of his wife and daughter.

    Even though the Armenian Genocide occurred a century ago, Christians
    around the world, and particularly in the Middle East, are being
    persecuted today, he said. Some of the persecuting countries, such as
    Saudi Arabia, are strong U.S. allies.

    "This is the greatest ethical dilemma facing the American Christian
    church," he said. "What are we to do as Christians? Sit back and
    relax, ... or do something? Christians are dying for their faith by the
    hundreds and thousands. I cannot keep silent."

    U.S. Christians should start by praying for their persecuted fellow
    Christians in hostile regions of the world, Tonoyan urged. He also
    called on Christians to insist their senators and representatives pay
    attention to persecution and demand change.

    "Please, whatever you do, do not remain silent," he pleaded. "Your
    brothers and sisters need you."


    http://www.panarmenian.net/eng/news/188291/
    https://www.baptiststandard.com/news/texas/17478-resist-religious-persecution-grandson-of-armenian-genocide-survivors-pleads



    From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
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