Victor Sharpe
In 1974, a flotilla
set sail from Turkey. No, it wasn’t destined for the Gaza coast carrying
thugs and jihadists masquerading as human rights activists – as ill armed
Israeli commandos discovered to their cost. No, this was a flotilla of
naval ships sailing towards Cyprus as a full fledged invasion force,
illegally employing U.S. arms and equipment.
Later, after Greek
Cypriot resistance had been crushed in the north of the island, Turkish
forces began to ethnically cleanse almost half of the island from its
Greek population, The Turkish military employed hundreds of U.S. tanks
and airplanes and 35,000 ground troops, with the result being a land grab
by Turkey of 37.3% of Cyprus. Turkey later sent additional flotillas to the
island; ships containing 150,00 Turkish settlers who proceeded to colonize
the land after some 200,000 Greeks had been driven out and made into refugees.
The capital city of
Cyprus, Nicosia, remains today a city divided with barbed wire marking the
border like an ugly scar. Though relatively quiet today, pockmarks still cover
the walls where bullets struck civilians and snipers held sway. This was how Jerusalem and its Jewish residents
also suffered during the illegal Jordanian occupation from 1948 until 1967.
This division of the city left its eastern half and the biblical
and ancestral Jewish homeland of Judea and Samaria, known by the world as the
West Bank, under Arab occupation.
In 1948, the Jewish population
of Jerusalem’s Old City were expelled by the British officered Jordanian Arab
Legion. Only in 1967 were they able to reclaim their homes throughout the
eastern half of the Holy City and in the ravaged Jewish Quarter after Israel
was forced to fight a defensive war against Jordan, Egypt and Syria. Fifty
seven ancient synagogues were desecrated by the Arabs and Jewish gravestones in
the Mount of Olives were torn up and used as latrines by the Arab Legion.
Just as now Nicosia is a city
divided against itself, so too was Jerusalem before its liberation and
reunification. In Cyprus, churches were desecrated and left in ruins. Cyprus
and Israel both now endure Turkish aggression. Turkey, with its new found
Islamic triumphalism and alliance with the Islamic Republic of Iran, has become
a threat to the Jewish state and has become even more obdurate towards any hope
of a peaceful settlement with the Greeks in divided Cyprus.
It is interesting to note that
just as Britain held and abused the terms of the Palestine Mandate conferred
upon it with the express agreement to establish within much of its borders
a Jewish National Home, so too did Turkey’s occupation of Cyprus. Its use of the terms Greek Cypriot
and Turkish Cypriot came to be viewed as a classic “divide and rule”
tactic.
Britain and the U.S. helped
formulate in the United Nations what became known as the Annan Plan, named for
the UN Secretary General, Kofi Annan. But this plan was grossly unfair to the
Greek population of the island. Most problematic was the document’s inability
or unwillingness to address the core issue: Turkey’s original and premeditated
invasion and aggression.
During their reign,
the Ottoman Turks occupied vast areas of the Middle East, Eastern Europe,
the Balkans and Greece including Cyprus. They held their empire from 1517 to 1917 and in that
time, as Islamic states have always done to their non-Muslim populations,
treated them as dhimmis; discriminated against, second class citizens.
Throughout the long
years of occupation, the dhimmis often
suffered horrendous crimes committed against them, including in Cyprus.
For example, massacres of Cypriot civilians occurred throughout the island and
in the city of Famagusta a massacre of the Greek Christian
population broke out with the public hanging of Archbishop Kyprianos,
three Bishops and Greek Cypriot dignitaries in Nicosia.
Many Christians and Jews
were treated as second class citizens with no right to hold office in the
Ottoman state. They were discriminated against and forced to pay the jizya, the onerous
tax paid by all “infidels” to the Muslim authorities. It was, and remains in
some Muslim territories, a veritable protection racket enshrined in Sharia law.
Some Jews who faced
expulsion or conversion in Spain and Portugal during the Catholic Inquisition
of Ferdinand and Isabella in 1492 and thereafter, converted in mass public
events to remain in the Iberian peninsula. However, most retained in secret their Jewish faith in
order to retain their beliefs. Similarly, many Greek Christians in the
mainland and in Cyprus converted to Islam but secretly these “Linovamvakoi”
continued to worship in underground churches and keep Greek culture alive.
In 1978, the Turks sold Cyprus
to the British in order to replenish their dwindling financial reserves. Turkey
was already fast becoming known as the “sick man of Europe” and would later
ally itself with Germany during the First World War, resulting in the
destruction of the Ottoman Turkish empire and the liberation of vast
territories - including the liberation in 1917 of Jerusalem.
The 1923 Treaty of Lausanne ended any notion of a legitimate
Turkish claim to the overwhelmingly Greek populated island. After World War 2,
many British territories began to seek their independence from the Crown. In
1947, the Indian sub-continent was partitioned between the largely Hindu state
of India and a smaller bifurcated Islamic state of East and West Pakistan. The
result was a bloody conflict between the two religions. East Pakistan later
became present day Bangladesh.
In Mandatory Palestine, a
territory which had never existed in all of recorded history as an independent,
and certainly not an Arab independent state, the Jewish community had supported
Britain during the war against Nazi Germany, but had also struggled for its own
independence in the tiny territory left to them after Britain’s earlier
betrayal of the Mandate in 1921/22. In this, Britain arbitrarily removed from
the Mandate all the relatively vast territory east of the River Jordan up to
the borders of the newly formed Iraqi state and created yet another
artificial Arab state – now known as the Kingdom of Jordan.
The Cypriot people also demanded
to be freed of the British yoke following the example of other Crown Colonies
and territories. But
Turkey reneged on the earlier treaties and a campaign of violence and a land
grab was instituted, funded by Turkey.
Cyprus finally
gained its independence from Britain on 16th August 1960. In December 1963, Turkey
sent commandos into northern Cyprus. Despite UN and international condemnation,
Turkey mounted indiscriminate air strikes using chemical weapons
and napalm on civilians. And in 1974, we know what took place – a full
scale Turkish invasion.
In a moral
world it would be eloquent justice for flotillas containing true humanitarians
to sail towards Turkey to publicly demand restoration of the national integrity
of Cyprus and removal of all Turkish military occupation; of the rights of the
Kurdish people for an independent State of Kurdistan; of full admittance of the
horrors perpetrated against the Armenian people; and for Turkey to come to
its senses regarding the embattled State of Israel by accepting the Jewish
state’s inalienable right to defend itself against Arab and Islamist
aggression emanating from Gaza.
To this day Turkey
is ratcheting up its Islamic ambition to restore the old hateful Ottoman
Turkish empire and Caliphate instead of showing any remorse for the
atrocities that it and the Ottoman Empire perpetrated against the occupied
non-Muslim peoples. It refuses more than ever any recognition or
acknowledgment of its crimes against humanity in the past and in the
present.
Meanwhile, the
Obama Administration, the United Nations, and a deeply immoral world looks
on in silence as yet another flotilla of lies and violence prepares to set sail
from Turkey and Iran to create a maritime pipeline of advanced and ever lethal
missiles for Hamas in Gaza to use against Israeli civilians.
FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributor Victor Sharpe is a freelance
writer and author of Volumes One and Two of Politicide:
The attempted murder of the Jewish state.
No comments:
Post a Comment