ABSTRACT
This chapter evaluates the characteristics of the Ottoman rule and traces the origins of its genocidal policies, built on discrimination, stigmatization, religious intolerance—hatred toward infidel Christian Armenians. These policies secured wide-ranging participation of the masses in periodic massacres and the WWI Genocide of Armenians—the Indigenous peoples of the eastern highlands of the Ottoman Empire. Based on Armenian literary responses and testimonies to Turkish atrocities, this chapter presents religion as a major influence on both victims and perpetrators. Armenians, as a targeted people of faith, accepted martyrdom for the sake of the Christian God. Muslim men and women killed in a gratifying religious ritual to the God of Islam. Religious intolerance was incited and used as a stratagem in the realization of the Young Turk grand scheme of pan-Turkism. This goal was impossible to achieve without the large-scale involvement of the Muslim masses. The genocidal atmosphere continues today. Armenians live in the final stage: the perpetrator’s denial. This stage involves revising and distorting history, and destroying religious and cultural edifices—evidence of Armenian presence in Turkey. Pan-Turkism, armed by religious intolerance, is exported and implanted in Armenia’s neighboring Azerbaijan, resulting in Armenian-Azeri conflicts and wars, and culminating in the most recent Azerbaijani brutal aggression with direct Turkish participation.
