mastermind Archives

Armenian Genocide mastermind’s own account of the massacres: article

February 10, 2016 By administrator

harut-sassounian-small-1 BY Harut Sassounian

Publisher of the California Courier Harut Sassounian presents the article “Talaat’s Personal Account of The Armenian Massacres,” unveiling excerpts from the Genocide ringleader’s memoirs.

The article reads:

In my last week’s column, I reported that Talaat Pasha, the mastermind of the Armenian Genocide, had told British intelligence officer Aubrey Herbert in 1921 that he had written “a memorandum on the Armenian massacres.”

I would like now to present brief excerpts from Talaat’s lengthy account published in the November 1921 issue of Current History, the monthly magazine of the New York Times, titled: “Posthumous Memoirs of Talaat Pasha,” and subtitled: “The former Grand Vizier’s own account, written shortly before his assassination, of why and how Turkey entered the war – Secret alliance that preceded the conflict – Causes of the Armenian massacres as stated by the man who ordered them.”

In an introductory note, Current History editors explain how they obtained a copy of this revealing report: “…After Talaat’s death, the manuscript passed into the possession of his wife, who remained in Germany; she permitted the Paris correspondent of Vakit to reproduce the most interesting portions of it. These have been translated from Turkish for Current History by M. Zekeria, a native of Constantinople. They represent about fifty pages of the original manuscript, the opening sentence of which, “I do not tell all the truth, but all I tell is truth,” aroused a great sensation in Turkey.”

In his memoirs, as in his interview with Aubrey Herbert, Talaat tries to exonerate himself by blaming everyone else — Armenians, Russians, even Turks — for the Armenian massacres. He does not deny “the deportations of the Armenians, in some localities of the Greeks, and in Syria of some of the Arabs,” but claims that such reports “were exceedingly exaggerated.” Talaat then adds: “in saying this, I do not mean to deny the facts.”

The former Grand Vizier confesses: “I admit that we deported many Armenians from our eastern provinces, but we never acted in this matter upon a previously prepared scheme. The responsibility for these acts falls first of all upon the deported people themselves. Russia, in order to lay hand on our eastern provinces, had armed and equipped the Armenian inhabitants of this district, and had organized strong Armenian bandit forces in the said area.”

Attempting to repair his tarnished image, Talaat acknowledges the Turkish brutalities against Armenians: “I admit also that the deportation was not carried out lawfully everywhere. In some places unlawful acts were committed… I confess it.”

Talaat proceeds to provide excuses for not pursuing perpetrators of the Armenian massacres who “were short-sighted, fanatic, and yet sincere in their belief.”

To set the record straight, Talaat’s claims that Armenians stabbed Turkey in the back during WWI are completely false. Minister of War Enver Pasha, Commander-in-Chief of the Ottoman Armed Forces, in a letter to the Bishop of Konya, praised the bravery of Turkish-Armenian soldiers fighting against the Russian Army in the winter of 1914-1915.

Ironically, Talaat’s assertion that his government would have taken brutal actions against Armenians even at “a time of peace” reconfirms long-standing Turkish genocidal practices as previously demonstrated by the Hamidian and Adana massacres of Armenians which were carried out when there were no wars.

Turkish film ‘Mastermind’ purports to reveal Jewish conspiracy

May 3, 2015 By administrator

Anti-Semitic documentary, based in part on Erdogan speech, claims Jews have conspired to dominate the world for 3,500 years; Turkish ruling party said to be encouraging such conspiracy theories.

Israel Jewish Scene

A documentary recently aired on pro-government Turkish news channel A Haber has sparked a new debate about anti-Semitism in Turkey, home to approximately 17,000 Jews.

The film, called Üst Akıl (Mastermind) and also published on major pro-government newspaper websites such as Sabah, claims that Jewish people have conspired to dominate the world for 3,500 years.

Several academics, journalists, and Etyen Mahçupyan, former adviser to Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu, appear in the film, which is based in part on a speech given by President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan last December.

Mastermind opens with the speech, in which Erdoğan describes “operations” against Turkey. “Behind all these there is a mastermind,” he explains, before telling his audience “you know who it is.”

The narrator then says this mastermind, who “rules, burns, destroys, starves the world, creates wars, organizes revolutions and coups, establishes states within states, (and is) the curse of the entire world,” can be found “in Jerusalem, where the sons of Israel live,” before delving into a conspiratorial tirade of historical manipulation.

“This is pretty much the worldview in the AKP now,” says writer and political commentator Mustafa Akyol, referring to Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party.

“The message they’re pumping into society is (that there is) a global Jewish conspiracy against the AKP.”

Akyol explains that anti-Semitism and conspiracy theories in Turkey far predate the AKP, but the party has ushered in an atmosphere wherein these beliefs flourish.

“Unfortunately, conspiracy theory is a national problem,” he says. “But the AKP is now shamelessly aggressive with them, and this so-called documentary is the zenith.”

The AKP started off as a reformist, Islamic-inspired political party in 2001, distancing itself from the conspiracy theories of some of Turkey’s fully Islamist parties.

However, according to Akyol, the party became increasingly paranoid, anti-Semitic and conspiratorial following challenges to its rule such as the widespread Gezi Park protests in spring 2013 and investigation of high-level government corruption in December of that year. The Gezi Park protests, in which 8 people died and around 8,000 were arrested, began as an environmental protest against government plans to urbanize the park but flared into wider dissent, due to heavy handed tactics by riot police and wide spread resentment of the Erdoğan government.

“They decided to interpret these not just as Turkish affairs but a global plot to topple them,” he says.

In one often-ridiculed instance during the protests, Erdoğan’s top economic advisor Yığıt Bulut even alleged that foreign forces were trying to assassinate the then prime minister using telekinesis.

Akyol says the military coup ousting then Egyptian president and Muslim Brotherhood member Mohamed Morsi in July 2013 also scared the pro-Brotherhood AKP.

“In their mind, the coup in Egypt was manufactured by America and Israel to get rid of Ikhwan (the Muslim Brotherhood), and the same thing would have happened in Turkey,” had Erdoğan not prevented it, according to Akyol.

Furthermore, opposition to Israeli policy often transforms into anti-Jewish sentiment.

“Israel isn’t just seen as a nation-state which is heavy-handed in its counter-insurgency,” Akyol says. “It’s seen as ‘the Jews.’ From anger against Israel you jump into a general dislike of the Jews.”

According to the Pew polling agency, 86 percent of Turks see Israel unfavorably.

Dr. Louis Fishman, an American-Israeli specialist in Turkish affairs, worries the anti-Semitism in Turkey is no longer “isolated to the back shelves of bookstores,” but is shifting into the official mainstream.

“The fact that there are anti-Semites or anti-Semitic propaganda in Turkey isn’t the main point. You have anti-Semitism everywhere in the world,” Fishman told The Media Line. “The problem is they’re on state-propagated TV.”

“It’s not just that the state is ignoring it,” he says. “The state is inherently part of it.”

Deputy Prime Minister Bülent Arınç’s said earlier this month that “no one in Turkey is anti-Semitic,” and condemned other countries for “lagging behind Turkey,” in tolerance. However, even high-level AKP officials have publicly made anti-Semitic comments.

During Israel’s Operation Protective Edge in the Gaza Strip last summer, widely condemned in Turkey, AKP deputy Samil Tayyar tweeted, “May your race vanish and may you always have your Hitler.”

Ankara mayor and prominent AKP member Melih Gökçek supported pop star Yıldız Tilbe during the conflict in Gaza after she tweeted, “May Allah bless Hitler.”

Former Deputy Prime Minister Beşir Atalay accused “international Jewry” of being behind the Gezi protests because they are “jealous of Turkey’s growth.”

Though Ataly later retracted his statements, none of the other officials apologized nor were condemned for their anti-Semitic remarks.

Erdoğan himself has made public comments about the “interest rate lobby,” often code-word for a Jewish plot, and said Judaism is “demeaning” to women at an award ceremony in Bursa in February.

Dr. Aykan Erdemir is a member of parliament from the secularist opposition Republic People’s Party (CHP) and one of the founding members of the International Panel of Parliamentarians for Freedom of Religion or Belief.

Erdemir says hate speech in the media and politics encourages such views in regular society.

“(Erdogan) has in a way inculcated a lot of prejudice and hate in Turkish society,” he says. “How? Through education, through government-mouthpiece media, through hateful and spiteful government announcements and declarations.”

He worries Turkish society has internalized this government-propagated hate, in the years since AKP came to power in 2002, and that the damage will last for decades.

“Outing the AK Party is a simple task, but undoing hate, intolerance and prejudice, that’s a very long process,” he told The Media Line.

Turkey ranked 17th in a report by the Anti-Defamation League last year, with 69% of Turks labelled anti-Semitic, compared to the world average of 26%.

Between July 17 and 18 last year during the strikes in Gaza, 30,926 Turkish-language tweets were sent by 27,309 users praising Hitler and the Holocaust, according to a survey by research group Gonzo Insight.

Erdemir says that during the AKP’s tenure, “there have been some baby steps vis-à-vis extending minority rights, and I salute them for that. But ultimately, most of this ends up being window dressing,” pointing out that anti-Semitic rhetoric has risen to unprecedented levels.

“Erdoğan said anti-Semitism is a crime against humanity, but then he attacked an aggrieved Soma miner with the words ‘you sperm (or spawn) of Israel,’” Erdemir says, referring to an incident during the Soma mining disaster last May when Erdoğan was caught on video allegedly making the slur.

Mois Gabay, a 31-year-old Jewish Turk who frequently contributes to the Jewish newspaper Şalom, says it’s important to acknowledge the progress made under the AKP.

He mentions the recent opening of the government-restored Great Synagogue in Edirne, Europe’s third largest. “It was such an amazing thing for us,” he says.

Other steps have also been taken.

The Holocaust Memorial Day in January was given more pomp than usual, being held in the capital Ankara and attended by a high-level government official for the first time.

Several old churches and synagogues have been restored and reopened by the government and $2.5 billion worth of minority-owned properties seized by the state in the past have been returned.

Though anti-Semitic speech runs rampant, the government-organized pogroms and minority-targeting taxes of the twentieth century are a thing of the past, and anti-Semitic attacks are exceedingly rare.

“I’m feeling more positive about the atmosphere now, but still feeling negative about the manipulation of the media,” Gabay says.

“It’s become normal to write things against Jews because there’s no punishment for it,” he says, adding that it has worsened in the last two years.

Though hate crime legislation was passed last year, Gabay would like to see a hate speech law.

“The laws have to be changed and have to be more functional for all minorities,” he says.

Though anti-Semitism and other forms of hate speech have been known to creep into even mainstream secularist newspapers, the worst offenders are the Islamist ones such as Yeni Akit, which is distributed onboard Turkey’s national airline, and whose editor regularly meets with Erdoğan and flies in his presidential jet.

During the Soma disaster the paper’s headline proclaimed “The boss’s son-in-law is a Jew.” Last September Yeni Akit columnist Faruk Köse called on Turkey’s Jews to be taxed to pay for buildings damaged in Gaza during Operation Protective Edge.

Gabay told The Media Line that quite a few young Jewish people are leaving Turkey, and he asserts that one reason is because they don’t feel comfortable being bombarded by such hate speech.

Dr. Fishman, who lived in Turkey for 10 years, says this is no surprise.

“If you’re a Jewish family, your people are cursed regularly on the nightly news … you read Yeni Akit and see this anti-Semitism. Do you really want your children to grow up in this atmosphere?”

Dr. Erdemir submitted questions addressing anti-Semitism to parliament last September, but says there wasn’t much of a response.

Turkey: Unraveling the AKP’s ‘Mastermind’ conspiracy theory “Jewish plot for global domination”

March 22, 2015 By administrator

By Mustafa Akyol

On March 16, A Haber, a Turkish “news channel” that acts more like a propaganda outlet for Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his incumbent Justice and Development Party (AKP), broadcast a sensational “documentary.” Titled “The Mastermind,” the two-hour film was billed as an expose of the great international conspiracy targeting Erdogan’s “New Turkey.” It was also a sequel to “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” the early 20th century anti-Semitic hoax claiming to describe a Jewish plot for global domination.

Erdogan himself introduced the very term “mastermind,” or “ust akil,” to Turkish political language some five months ago, as I explained in Al-Monitor. No wonder the A Haber documentary (available here in full) begins with Erdogan telling his followers in a speech: “Don’t be misled. Don’t think that these operations are against my persona, our government, our party. Friends, these operations are rather directed against Turkey itself — its unity, its peace, its economy, its independence. And as I have said before, behind all these steps there is a mastermind. People ask me, ‘Who is this mastermind?’ Well, you have to figure that out. And actually, you know what it is.”

It is implied that the documentary is a response to Erdogan’s call, that it has “figured out” the identity of the mastermind, which many Erdogan supporters already know: It is “the Jews.” Theirs is the mind, the documentary tell us, that “rules the world, burns, destroys, starves, wages wars, organizes revolutions and coups, and establishes states within states.”

To explain why Jews do all these horrible things, the documentary goes back 3,500 years, right to the time of Moses. It describes the Exodus from Egypt, lists the Ten Commandments and mentions the Ark of the Covenant. Turkish academic Ramazan Kurtoglu then explains that Jews are very angry today because the Ark of the Covenant is lost. That is why, he argues, when the United States occupied Iraq in 2003, the real plan was to search for the old manuscripts that would help the Jews find the Ark. (It is hard to understand why “Jews” would dislike other people because their ark is missing; you just have to trust the documentary on that.)

The film then jumps to three “important figures,” or three great Jews, who supposedly left their mark on world history. The first is Maimonides, a “rabbi” who allegedly argued that “Jews are masters, other human beings are slaves.” The second is — guess who — Charles Darwin, who the documentary confidently describes as Jewish. (This is of course wildly inane and ignorant, for Darwin was born and raised a Christian.) Then comes Leo Strauss, the American political thinker whose ideas inspired the neoconservatives.

Then we hear from a series of Turkish “experts” who explain how “the children of Israel” want to dominate the world, subjugate other peoples and thus surround the world like a “giant octopus.” A “historian” asserts that Darwin proposed his theory only to depict non-Jews as “animals” — an idea that he believes is rooted in Judaism. At every stage, the film reminds us how the Judaic “mastermind” has oppressed humanity for thousands of years, making the world a stage for a perpetual war between good and evil.

After all these shocking revelations, the documentary arrives at the real subject: Turkey. We are told that the mastermind is particularly worried about Turkey and hates to see it as an “independent” power disrupting all its evil schemes. The Ottoman Empire collapsed due to the conspiracies of the mastermind, we are told, and the politics of Republican Turkey have been constantly manipulated. Every military coup or political assassination in Turkey was organized by the mastermind, who toppled great leaders such as Sultan Abdul Hamid II, Adnan Menderes and Turgut Ozal. But now the mastermind is more worried than ever before, because Turkey is finally breaking its chains under the glorious leadership of Erdogan.

All in all, the “documentary” is a piece of anti-Semitic bilge. Although it is not an official AKP production, there is no doubt that it is pro-AKP (and pro-Erdogan) propaganda. Among the “experts” who speak in the film are AKP grandees such as Yigit Bulut, top adviser to Erdogan, and Etyen Mahcupyan, top adviser to Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu. (To be fair, Mahcupyan, a Turkish Armenian, does not seem to endorse the rhetoric about Jewish conspiracies, but he does not oppose it either.)

What does this mean? Is the AKP clearly an anti-Semitic party now, threatening Turkey’s tiny Jewish community? Well, one could make counterarguments. Since the AKP came to power in 2002, Turkey’s non-Muslim communities, including Jews, have enjoyed some significant reforms. The AKP leadership also gathers the leaders of “minority communities” and delivers embracing messages, such as in the Jan. 2 meeting held by Davutoglu. Just last week, Erdogan made a “get well soon” call to Turkey’s chief rabbi. Moreover, the real target of the A Haber film seems to be the Jews’ Turkish “spies” rather than Jews themselves. The bulk of the film demonizes the Gezi Park protesters and the Gulen movement, which are seen as Erdogan’s “enemies within.”

Still, there is no doubt that this shameful film represents a new and dangerous low in AKP propaganda, which, in the past two years, dramatically turned into a factory of political hatred and paranoia. It certainly alarms Turkey’s Jewish community, and worries the millions of “Jewish spies,” i.e., Erdogan’s political opponents. Moreover, it only makes the already conspiracy-prone Turkish society more delusional, making Turkey a growingly irrational and irrelevant country in the world.

Mustafa Akyol

Columnist

Mustafa Akyol is a columnist for Al-Monitor’s Turkey Pulse, a columnist for the Turkish Hurriyet Daily News, and a monthly contributing opinion writer for The International New York Times. His articles have also appeared in Foreign

Source Al-monitor

Israel Bombs Gaza While Hamas’ Kidnapping Mastermind Sits in Turkey

August 19, 2014 By administrator

By World News

As Israeli war planes pound Hamas positions in Gaza, the man the country really wants is sitting pretty in Turkey.

Israel Defense Forces began a campaign of retribution against Hamas targets in Gaza on Monday after troops found the murdered bodies of three teenage boys abducted last month near their settlement of Gush Etzion.

But the Hamas commander who is seen by Israel as responsible for a wave of kidnapping attempts in the West Bank is actually based in Turkey. Saleh al-Arouri, that senior Hamas operative, makes his home inside the territory of a NATO ally.

“The Israelis say he was one of the key operational leaders who has been calling for and overseeing these various kidnapping plots over the past two years,” said Matthew Levitt, the director of the Stein Program on Counterterrorism & Intelligence at The Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “It’s not that he was necessarily on the phone with these kidnappers, but kidnapping in general has been a key focus for Hamas operatives in the last two years and al-Arouri has been encouraging it.”

Now that the man who Israel believes has significant responsibility for the murder of the three teenagers is in Turkey, it could further complicate relations between Ankara and Jerusalem, two former allies that have tried recently to repair a broken relationship.

Turkey has cooperated at times with Israel and the West on contingency planning for Syria during its civil war. But the Turks also maintain close ties to the political wing of Hamas, a group Israel and the United States still designate as a terrorist organization. Indeed, Turkey’s foreign minister, Ahmed Davutaglu, on Monday talked to Khalled Meshall, the head of the Hamas political bureau, in a telephone call.

Senior Israeli officials confirmed for The Daily Beast that al-Arouri is the Hamas leader who has encouraged, funded and coordinated a campaign to ramp up kidnappings in the West Bank and that al-Arouri now resides in Turkey. Jonathan Schanzer, the vice president for research at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, said, “al-Arouri is a senior Hamas figure with a logistical, operational and financial role in the group’s activities in the West Bank. Any attack that takes place in the West Bank will ultimately raise questions about his involvement.”

Israeli security services last month named two Palestinian Hamas activists, Amer abu Aysha and Marwan Qawasmeh, as the prime suspects in the kidnapping of Naftali Fraenkel, Eyal Yifrach, and Gilad Shaar, the three Israeli teenagers who were found dead under a pile of stones in an open field near Hebron. But the mastermind of the Hamas kidnapping strategy is al-Arouri, Israeli officials say. These officials, however, are loath to talk about him on the record.