In 1822, the Ottomans dispatched 40,000 Turkish troops to the Greek island of Chios with orders to kill all infants under three-years-old, all males over 12-years-old, and all females over 40-years-old, except those willing to convert to Islam. Some 20,000 Greeks were killed and the island was depopulated, eradicating a 2,000 year culture. Two years later, Ottoman soldiers burned the island of Kasos to the ground and killed 7,000 of its inhabitants. Eventually, Europeans navies dispatched by Britain and France, and a navy dispatched by Russia, intervened to stop the atrocities.
In 1876, 8,000 Turkish troops were dispatched to the Bulgarian town of Batak where, after promising to withdraw in exchange for the Bulgarians disarming, they beheaded or burned alive 5,000 of the city’s now-unprotected civilians. The massacre was part of a broader Turkish campaign in which 15,000 Bulgarians were eventually murdered, and which a British investigator described as “perhaps the most heinous crime” of the 1800s. Eventually, the Russians intervened to stop the atrocities.
I only bring these up because Israel and Greece just signed a military cooperation pact, and Israel and Bulgaria just signed a military cooperation pact, and European Union officials are slamming Turkey for sabre-rattling, and the Russians today committed to patrolling Eastern Mediterranean waters in response to borderline explicit Turkish military threats against Cyprus’s gas drilling. Read more at COMMENTARY MAGAZINE »
