Genocides

"It may look amazing, but the reality that what happened in 1915 was a mass murder was accepted by everybody having lived in that period, and was never the object of an argument. Of course the word soykirim [genocide] (being a term belonging to the post World War II period) was not used in those days. To describe what had happened in 1915, words such as "katliam" [massacre], "taktil" [killings], "teb'id" [taking away, expulsion, expelling], "kital" [massacre] were used. Mustafa Kemal has dozens of speeches in which he defines the treatments reserved to Armenians as "cowardice", or "barbarity", and names these treatments "massacre". In September 1919, the American General Harbord, who visited Mustafa Kemal in Sivas, says "he, too, disapproved the Armenian Massacre." According to Mustafa Kemal, "the massacre and deportation of Armenians was the work of a small committee who had seized the power.""

"What I want to explain is the following: the fact that what happened in 1915 was a mass murder was not even the subject of an argument in any manner from the viewpoint of the actors of that period, with Mustafa Kemal at their head. The main discussion of that period was organized around the axis of the deliberations of Paris, and it was about how the "Turks" should be punished for the Armenian Massacre. To put the criminals on trial was one form of punishment. Another form was the partition of Anatolia. That is, the Western Powers were hiding their imperial ambitions mainly behind the reality of Armenians having been killed. Mustafa Kemal and his friends accepted the reality that those responsible of the massacre should be punished, but opposed that this punishment be in the form of the partition of Anatolia. Today, rather than producing lies and legends, if we make the position of Mustafa Kemal on this subject our departure point, and continue our discussion from there, we shall have covered a fairly long distance."

"A discussion of the Armenian Genocide could reveal that this Turkish state was not a result of a war fought against the imperial powers, but, on the contrary, a product of the war against the Greek and Armenian minorities. It could show that a significant part of the National Forces consisted either of murderers who directly participated in the Armenian Genocide or of thieves who had become rich by plundering Armenian possessions."

"I would like to ask a very simple, ordinary question. Would you wish to be an Armenian in 1915? No, you wouldn't. Because now you know you would have been killed. Please stop arguing about the number of murdered or the denials or the attempts to replace pain with statistics. No one is denying that Armenians were murdered, right? It may be 300,000, or 500,000, or 1.5 million. I don't know which number is the truth, or whether anyone knows the true number accurately. What I do know is the existence of the death and pain beyond these numbers. ...we are talking about human beings. When we hear about a baby pulled from a mother's hands to be dashed on the rocks, or a youth shot to death beside a hill, or an old woman throttled by her slender neck, even the hard-hearted among us will be ashamed to say, 'Yes, but these people killed the Turks.' Most of these people did not kill anyone. These people became the innocent victims of a crazed government powered by murder, pitiless but also totally incompetent in governing. This bloody insanity was a barbarism, not something for us to take pride in or be part of. This was a slaughter that we should be ashamed of, and, if possible, something that we can sympathize with and share the pain. What is more important for me is the fact that many innocent people were killed so barbarically. When I see the shadow of this bloody event on the present world, I see a greater injustice done to the Armenians. I have nothing in common with the terrible sin of the past Ittihadists, but the sin of not allowing grief for the dead belongs to all of us today. Do you really want to commit this sin? Hundreds of thousands of human beings were murdered. Hundreds of thousands of lives snuffed out. The fact that some Armenian gangs murdered some Turks cannot be an excuse to mask the truth that hundreds of thousands of Armenians were murdered. A human being of conscience is capable of grieving for the Armenians, as well as the Turks, as well as the Kurds. We all should. Babies died; women and old people died. They died in pain, tormented, terrified. Is it really so important what religion or race these murdered people had? Even in these terrifying times there were Turks who risked their lives trying to rescue Armenian children. We are the children of these rescuers, as well as the children of the murderers. Instead of justifying and arguing on behalf of the murderers, why don't we praise and defend the rescuers' compassion, honesty, and courage? There are no more victims left to be rescued today, but there is a grief, a pain, to be shared and supported. If nothing moves in you when you hear a baby wail as her mother is murdered, I have nothing to say to you. Then add my name to the list of "traitors." Because I am ready to share the grief and pain with the Armenians. Because I still believe there is something yet to be rescued from all these meaningless and pitiless arguments, and that something is called 'humanity.'"

"I was condemned by the Turkish authorities for condemning and recognizing the genocide. I spent the years of 1985-1987 in Istanbul's jail as a political prisoner together with my wife and newborn child...Turkey's whole intelligentsia is now in shame for distorting the historical reality and not recognizing the Armenian Genocide...I am here today to declare that I assume historical responsibility. Recognition for me is not only a moral but also political and public matter, because as German Bernhard Schlink says: "The one who lives in peace with the criminal also becomes responsible...I am grateful to you also for allowing me, a man representing a society that committed crimes, to remember and pay homage to the memory of every victim and to ponder about the disgrace and dishonor of my nation. I dream that every Armenian who lost his or her ancestor during the years of the genocide will return and find a secure place in the country that is called Turkey today. I hope that my dreams will come true. If it is fulfilled, and that must be fulfilled, at that time I will apply for Turkish citizenship and will say: I am yours. And I am here again.""

"Surely a few Armenians aided and abetted our enemy, and a few Armenian Deputies committed crimes against the Turkish nation... it is incumbent upon a government to pursue the guilty ones. Unfortunately, our wartime leaders, imbued with a spirit of brigandage, carried out the law of deportation in a manner that could surpass the proclivities of the most bloodthirsty bandits. They decided to exterminate the Armenians, and they did exterminate them."

"These left-overs from the former Young Turk Party, who should have been made to account for the millions of our Christian subjects who were ruthlessly driven en masse from their homes and massacred, have been restive under the Republican rule."

"You Armenians... never forgot where you live... you accursed ones have brought many perils on the head of our esteemed government... paved the way for foreign assault... You must know that the Young Turks have awakened now... Turkish youth... shall not delay the execution of their assigned duties... The Turkish sword to date has cut down millions of giavours, nor has it lost its intention to cut millions more hereafter. Know this that the Turks have committed themselves, and have vowed to subdue and to clean up the Armenian giavours who have become tubercular microbes for us."

"Jamal Pasha [then Turkish military ruler in Palestine] planned from the outset to destroy the entire Hebrew settlement in Eretz Yisrael, exactly as they did the Armenians in Armenia"

"[What actually happened in 1915-16] was no accident, this was not a marginal or small thing, it was not a geographically or demographically limited thing, virtually the entirety of Ottoman Armenians has been ordered to be rounded up, socially deracinated, uprooted, dispossesses, and deported for no reason other than that they were Armenians and, secondly, that there was very strong evidence that the accompanied violence and massacres had not started spontaneously or despite the best intentions of the state to protect the convoys of the deportees. Rather, there was strong evidence to the effect that there were orders issued, disseminated, and executed through the Teşkilât-ı Mahsusa and that this in turn triggered secondary and tertiary rounds of violence and massacres once it became clear that the Armenians were fair game and that the shooting season was open on them. It fits the clauses of the 1948 UN convention [on genocide] comprehensively, and in that light, if we are permitted to take those categorizations and apply them to an event that occurred 33 years earlier, then we have to say, "Yes, it was genocide""

"At that time (1915) there were 1 million and 750 thousand Armenians living in Eastern Anatolia. The deportation order issued by the ruling military triumvirate was drawn up so as to include all the Armenians in the region, without exception. These things are documented in writing. There was no mention of massacres or slaughter. The provincial governors and garrison commanders were directed to deport the Armenians to the region south of Turkey's current borders. However, it's clear that, in addition to these official orders, separate, non-written orders were given to the most rapacious members of the "Teskilat-i Mahsusa" ["Special Organization"], who worshipped violence and were not bound by adherence to any normal moral code. Those who issued these orders had them carried out via a special organization, the Teskilat-i Mahsusa... It is clear that Bahaettin Sakir, who operated as the Teskilat-i Mahsusa's man for Enver, Cemal, and Talat, set up death squads in the region. Some of these people were convicted criminals who were saved from the gallows and released from prison just to carry out such activities... The whole affair is that simple and clear. In addition to them, Turkish and Kurdish tribes also attacked the convoys of Armenians being deported. In addition to these actual massacres, there were the terrible losses caused by the deportations carried out in appalling conditions of deprivation. Everywhere in the Western world, there are photographs of these incidents which we can't bear to look at. The first time I encountered these visual records, I cried and could hardly breathe for several minutes. They are no different from the images of the concentration camps, or the massacres in Africa. For there are huge numbers of people in these pictures."

"By 1912-13, and especially after the traumatic Balkan wars, the unionist leadership had already acquired a comprehensive ethnic cleansing mentality. They had arrived at the crystallization of their own version of Social Darwinistic, violent, anxious, and, therefore, malicious and malevolent unionist nationalism. That is to say, it was their ideology that was telling them "we cannot have a patriotic self defense unless and until we have an Anatolia that has been comprehensively Turkified." That is to say, they had acquired a nationalist ideological perspective of regarding all non-Turks as suspect, hostile elements. It was this ideology that led to the tehcir and the accompanying orders. It was this ideology, in turn, which lead to the horrors of 1915... it was the Ottoman state versus all Armenians. It was state declaring war on its subjects."

"All that I have seen and heard surpasses all imagination. Speaking of "thousand and one horrors" is very little in this case, I thought I was passing through a part of hell... everywhere it is the same Governmental barbarism which aims at the systematic annihilation through starvation of the survivors of the Armenian nation in Turkey."

"One of the expressions of Cetin Altan that I like the most is "the propaganda of Turks aiming at Turks." On all international issues, we very much like to propagandize to each other — a propaganda which is not based on realities. On the issue of the "so-called genocide," too, we like very much to propagandize to ourselves. First of all, we start by indicating that the allegation is about a "so-called" genocide. ...the Council of the Higher Education, YOK...sent a series of instructions to university rectors and deans and aimed to begin to train educators on this issue. YOK would determine in advance what and how scientists would think about the "Armenian Deportation," and the latter would work in the light of that. There you are — a scientific study in the Turkish style! ...it was decided by the Commission of the Instruction and Education that the subjects relating to the Armenian, Pontus Greek and Assyrian allegations...are groundless. ...every effort will be made so that, first, it is recognized that the "so-called Armenian Genocide" is a "so-called" one, then, by means of propaganda, those denials will be taught to children and youth and will be engraved in their minds. It is written in the editorial of the weekly "Agos" that the same is requested from Armenian schools; it is required that young Armenians also form sentences denying "the groundless Armenian allegations. In reality, this propaganda is more deceptive for Turkish children: the Armenian child will hear one way or another from his family, relatives and eyewitnesses still living why the number of Armenians living in this country dropped from 2 million to 60,000. He will also know that he needs to say at school the opposite of what he hears at home. What happened in history did happen. It is impossible to fight against realities. Should German people defend Hitler, who assassinated millions of Jews for the simple reason that he is German? 1915 is one of the painful pages of the Ottoman history: on this date, the Committee of Union and Progress committed a huge crime against humanity. Why should I take the responsibility for that crime, and oppose the historical truths by asserting that all of this did not take place? Why shall we mislead young brains with lies? What kind of damage does such a propaganda cause in the brains of the youth. What will this society gain, by educating the youth with legends that are unreal?"

"I have the honor to report to the Embassy about one of the most severest measures ever taken by any government and one of the greatest tragedies in all history. Practically every male Armenian of any consequence at all here has been arrested and put into prison. A great many of them were subjected to the most cruel tortures under which some of them died. Several hundred of the leading Armenians were sent away at night and it seems to be clearly established that most, if not all, of them were killed. Last week there were well founded rumors of a threatened massacre. I think there is very little doubt that one is planned. Another method was found, to destroy the Armenian race. This is no less than the deportation of the entire Armenian population, not only from this Vilayet, but, I understand, from all six Vilayets comprising Armenia. There are said to be about sixty thousand Armenians in this Vilayet and about a million in the six Vilayets. All of these are to be sent into exile; an undertaking greater, probably, than anything of the kind in all history. For several days last week there were rumors of this but it seemed incredible. On Saturday, June 28th, it was publicly announced that all Armenians and Syrians [Assyrians of the Armenian Apostolic faith] were to leave after five days. The full meaning of such an order can scarcely be imagined by those who are not familiar with the peculiar conditions of this isolated region. A massacre, however horrible the word may sound, would be humane in comparison with it. In a massacre many escape but a wholesale deportation of this kind in this country means a lingering and perhaps even more dreadful death for nearly every one. I do not believe it possible for one in a hundred to survive, perhaps not one in a thousand. Whatever the destination may be, the journey from here in that direction at this season of the year is very difficult for one who has made careful preparations and travels by wagon. It is for the most part an extremely hot plain in which there s very little water or vegetation. There are places where there is no water at all during an entire day's journey by wagon. A crowd of women and children on foot will, of course, require several days to traverse the same distance. They cannot go from here to Urfa in less than fifteen or twenty days. ...there will be days when neither food nor water can be obtained. People on foot cannot carry enough food or water on their backs to last them between towns. Under the most favorable conditions the journey is a very fatiguing one. For people traveling as these Armenians who are going into exile will be obliged to travel it is certain death for by far the greater part of them. The fate of these people can readily be imagined. The method is perhaps a little more cultured than a massacre but it it will be far more effective and thorough. It is quite probable that many of them will be robbed and murdered en route as the roads are now filled with bands of pillaging Kurds. In any case, it is quite certain that almost all will die in one way or another before they ever reach their destination. It is impossible for me to give any adequate idea of the panic in this locality that has resulted from the announcement of this order of expulsion. Every one who is obliged to leave is trying to get together a little money to take on the journey. The Turks are, of course, taking advantage of the situation to get things at practically nothing. Robbery and looting were never undertaken in a more wholesale manner. Turkish men and Turkish women are entering the houses of all the Armenians and taking things at almost any price. The scene reminds one of a lot of hungry vultures hovering over the remains of those who have fallen by the way. I have never seen a more pathetic or tragic scene. All feel that they are going to certain death and they have good reason to feel that way. All the real estate belonging to the Armenians will be confiscated by the Government. The effect industrially and commercially of the expulsion of the Armenians from this region is going to throw it back in the middle ages. Tomorrow the exodus of one-half of the population of this region commences. Were there people not so entirely subdued I should expect to see some stirring scenes. As it is, I can hardly think it possible that the authorities will succeed in sending everyone into exile, but a yet there does not seem to be any sign of their relenting or of their granting many exemptions."

"Now it has just been announced by public crier that on Tuesday, July 13th, every Armenian without exception, must go. If it were simply a matter of being obliged to leave here and go somewhere else it would not be so bad, but everyone knows it is a case of going to one's death. I have visited their encampment a number of times and talked with some of the people. A more pitiable sight cannot be imagined. They were almost without exception ragged, filthy, hungry and sick. This is not surprising in view of the fact that they have been on the road for nearly two months with no change of clothing, no chance to wash, no shelter and little to eat. There are very few men among them, as most have been killed on the road. All tell the same story of having been attacked and robbed by the Kurds. Most of them were attacked over and over again and a great many of them, especially the men were killed. Women and children were also killed. Many died, of course, from sickness and exhaustion on the way and there have been deaths each day that they have been there. Several different parties have arrived and after remaining a day or two have been pushed with no apparent destination. Those who have reached here are only a small portion, however, of those who started. By continuing to drive these people people on in this way it will be possible to dispose of all of them in a comparatively short time. The condition of these people indicated clearly the fate of those who have left and are about to leave from here. I believe nothing has been heard from any of them as yet and probably very little will be heard. The system that is being followed seems to be to have bands of Kurds awaiting them on the roads to kill the men especially and incidentally some of the others. The entire movement seems to be the thoroughly organized and effective massacre this country has ever seen. Not many men have been spared, however, to accompany those who are being sent into exile, for a more prompt and sure method has been used to dispose of them. Several thousand Armenian men been arrested during the past few weeks. These have been put into prison and each time that several hundred had been gathered up in that way they were sent away during the night. There have been frequent rumors that all of these were killed and there is little doubt that they were. All Armenian soldiers [In the Turkish army] have likewise been sent away in the same manor. On Monday many men were arrested both at Harput and Mezreh and put in prison. At daybreak Tuesday morning they were taken out and made to march toward an almost uninhabited mountain. There were about eight hundred in all and they were tied together in groups of fourteen each. That afternoon they arrived in a small Kurdish village where they were kept over night in the mosque and other buildings. During this time they were without food or water. On Wednesday morning they were taken to a valley a few hours distant where they were all made to sit down. Then the gendarmes began shooting them until they had killed nearly all of them. Some who had not been killed by bullets were then disposed of with knives and bayonets. A few succeeded in breaking the rope with which they were tied to their companions and running away, but most of these were pursued and killed. A few succeeded in getting away, probably not more than two or three. No charge of any kind had ever been made against any of these men. They were simply arrested and killed as part of the general plan to dispose of the Armenian race. Last night several hundred more men, including both men arrested by the civil authorities and those enrolled as soldiers, were taken in a different direction and murdered in a similar manner. The same thing has been done systematically in the villages. A few weeks ago about three hundred men were gathered together at Ichme and Haboosi, two villages four and five hours' distant from here, and then taken up to the mountains and massacred. There seems to be a definite plan to dispose of all the Armenians men...The evident plan of the Government is to give no opportunity for any educational or religious work to be done here by foreign missionaries. Some Armenian women will be taken as Moslem wives and some children will be brought up as Moslem, but none of them will be allowed to come under foreign influences. The country is to be purely Moslem and nothing else."

"Greater misery could not be imagined, the dead and the dying are everywhere...The whole country is one vast slaughterhouse."

"If the Turkish Government were asked the reasons for which the Armenian men, women, and children were killed, and their honor and property placed at any man's mercy, they would reply that this people have murdered Moslems in the Vilayet of Van, and that there have been found in their possession prohibited arms, explosive bombs, and indications of steps towards the formation of an Armenian state, such as flags and the like, all pointing to the fact that this race has not turned from its evil ways, but on the first opportunity will kill the Moslems, rise in revolt, and invoke the help of Russia, the enemy of Turkey, against its rulers. That is what the Turkish government would say. I have followed the matter from its source. I have inquired from inhabitants and officials of Van, who were in Diarbekir, whether any Moslem had been killed by Armenians in the town of Van, or in the district of the Vilayet. They answered in the negative, saying that the Government had ordered the population to quit the town before the arrival of the Russians and before anyone was killed but that the Armenians had been summoned to give up their arms and had done so, dreading an attack by the Kurds, and dreading the government also; the government had further demanded that the principal notables and leading men should be given up to them as hostages, but the Armenians had not complied. All this took place during the approach of the Russians towards the city of Van. As to the adjacent districts, the authorities collected the Armenians and drove them into the interior, where they were all slaughtered, no Government official or private man, Turk or Kurd, having been killed. As regards Diarbekir, you have read the whole story in this book, and no insignificant event took place there, let alone murders or breaches of the peace, which could lead the Turkish Government to deal with the Armenians in this atrocious manner. At Constantinople, we hear of no murder or other unlawful act committed by the Armenians, except the unauthenticated story about the twenty activists to which I have already referred. They have not done the least wrong in the Vilayets of Kharpout, Trebizond, Sivas, Adana, or Bitlis, nor in the province of Moush. I have related the episode at Zeitoun, which was unimportant, and that at Urfa, where they acted in self defense, seeing what had befallen their people, and preferring death to surrender. As to their preparations, the flags, bombs and the like, even assuming there to be some truth in the statement, it does not justify the annihilation of the whole people, men and women, old men and children, in a way which revolts all humanity and more especially Islam and the whole body of Moslems, as those unacquainted with the true facts might impute these deeds to Mohammedan fanaticism."

"We knew that the Armenians have committed no act justifying the Turks in inflicting on them this horrible retribution, un-precedented even in the dark ages. What, then, was the reason which impelled the Turkish Government to kill off a whole people of whom they used to say that they were their brothers in patriotism, the principal factor in bringing about the downfall of the despotic rule of Abdul-Hamid and the introduction of the constitution, loyal to the empire, and fighting side by side with the Turks in the Balkan War? The Turks sanctioned and approved the institution of Armenian political societies, which they did not do in the case of other nationalities. It is that, previous to the proclamation of the Constitution, the Unionists [Young Turks] hated despotic rule, they preached equality, and inspired the people with hatred of the despotism of Abdul-Hamid. But as soon as they had themselves seized the reins of authority, and tasted the sweets of power, they found that despotism was the best means to confirm themselves in ease and property, and to limit to the Turks alone the rule over the Ottoman peoples. On considering these peoples, they found that the Armenian race was the only one which would resent their despotism, and fight against it as they previously fought against Abdul-Hamid. Annihilation seemed to be the sole means of deliverance; they found their opportunity in a time of war, and they proceeded to this atrocious deed, which they carried out with every circumstance of brutality — a deed which is contrary to the law of Islam..."

"Genocide often occurs during war, for example, the Armenian genocide during WWI, and the Holocaust of Jews and Gypsies during WWII, but should not be confused with the civilian war dead. This is a common trick of genocide deniers, to compare figures of one and the other, for example, the Muslim war dead during the First World War and Armenian victims of genocide. War does not cause genocide. It masks it, justifies the release of aggression and cruelty, provides a cover for the perpetrators, immunity from sanctions, and enables them to deny their responsibility by blaming the victims. Some preconditions of genocide can be illustrated by examining the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire...The first precondition is exclusion of the victim from the universe of obligation of the dominant group. This is reinforced by an ideology of exclusion, defining the victim as an alien or enemy, such as the Aryan myth and the Pan-Turanian myth. Such groups are viewed by the dominant group as people who do not belong, to whom nothing is owed, who do not have to be accounted for, and to whom one need not account. Most often in the twentieth century such ideologies are rationalizations of the aim of an elite to create a so-called pure or homogeneous ethnic state — one people, one state. Everyone who does not fit in must be eliminated, either by expulsion or genocide. Second, there is a problem attributed to the victim or an opportunity seemed to be impeded by the victims. The victims may be seen as a real or symbolic threat. Sometimes the victims rebel, have rebelled, or do not accept their place, and the perpetrators choose to eliminate them rather than share power with them. And the Ottoman Empire, Bosnia, and Kosovo are certainly examples of this. Finally, there's a calculus on the part of the perpetrators that they can get away with it. War generally provides immunity from oversight and intervention by hostile powers. Further, major powers have committed genocide or overlooked genocides and genocidal massacres by their clients in the past. The knowledge by the genocidaires that there have been no sanctions against previous uses of genocide reinforces their readiness to commit genocide. It is clear that the Ittihadist faction that took control of the Ottoman Empire in 1912 was the organizer of the Armenian genocide in 1915. The First World War presented the ruling triumvirate with an opportunity, as Djemal Pasha put it, to "free ourselves through the world war from all conventions which meant so many attacks on our independence." He went on to say that "We had determined on radical reform... " But he does not say that the "radical reform" was to eliminate the Armenian problem by eliminating the Armenians. That that was their plan was confirmed at the time by Lord Bryce and Arnold Toynbee, Ambassador Morgenthau, and German officials who were there as allies of the Ottoman government. Yet the Armenian genocide was more than a precedent for what could be done in World War II. It was a model of what could be done with impunity that resonated in the memories of German soldiers, officials and civilians who took part in the First World War...the success of any genocide depends not only on the power of the genocidaire and the response of the bystanders in the state in which it occurs but also on the response of other states. For several decades Turkey and Turkish state funded organizations in the U.S. and elsewhere have denied that there was an Armenian genocide. Not only were Armenians' rights to restitution denied, their memories were publicly denied."

"For the better part of six months, from April to October 1915, practically all the highways in Asia Minor were crowded with these unearthly bands of exiles. As far as can be ascertained, about 1,200,000 people started on this journey to the Syrian desert.... The gendarmes whom the government had sent, supposedly to protect the exiles, in a very few hours became their tormentors. They followed their charges with fixed bayonets, prodding any one who showed any tendency to slacken the pace. . . . They even prodded pregnant women with bayonets.... Detachements of gendarmes would go ahead notifying the Kurdish tribes that their victims were approaching and Turkish peasants were also informed that their long waited opportunity had arrived. The Government even opened the prisons and set free the convicts, on the understanding that they should behave like good Moslems to the approaching Armenians. Thus every caravan had a continuous battle for existence with several classes of enemies. . . . The men who might have defended these wayfarers had nearly all been killed or forced into the army as workmen, and the exiles themselves had been systematically deprived of all weapons before the journey began."

"I left here on the sixteenth of September, 1915, for Aleppo. I first saw the Armenians at Afion Karahissar where there was a big encampment — probably of ten thousand people...and their condition was deplorable. The next place where there was a large encampment was at Osmanieh, where there was said to be about fifty thousand; their condition was terrible. From Osmanieh, I traveled by carriage to Rajo and passed thousands of Armenians en route to Aleppo. They were going in ox-carts, on horseback, donkeys and on foot, the most of them children, women and old men. I spoke to several of these people, some of whom had been educated in the American Mission Schools. They told me that they had traveled for two months. They were without money and food and several expressed their wish that they could die rather than go on and endure the sufferings that they were undergoing. From Kadma on to Aleppo I witnessed the worst sights of the whole trip. Here the people began to play out in the intense heat and no water...The destination of all these Armenians is Aleppo. Here they are kept crowded in all available vacant houses, khans, Armenian churches, courtyards and open lots. Their condition in Aleppo is beyond description. I personally visited several of the places where they were kept and found them starving and dying by the hundreds every day...there are hundreds dying daily in Aleppo from starvation and the result of the brutal treatment and exposure that they have undergone on the journey from their native places...In Damascus I found conditions practically the same as in Aleppo; and here hundreds are dying every day. From Damascus, they are sent still farther south into the Hauran, where their fate is unknown. Several Turks, whom I interviewed, told me that the motive of this exile was to exterminate the race, and in no instance did I see, any Moslem giving alms to Armenians, it being considered a criminal offence for any one to aid them. All along the road I met thousands of these unfortunate exiles still coming into Aleppo. The sights I witnessed on this trip were more pitiful than those I had seen on my trip to Aleppo. There seems to be no end to the caravan which moves over the mountain ridge from Bozanti south; throughout the day from sunrise to sunset, the road as far as one can see is crowded with these exiles. There are very few young men in these caravans, the majority are women and children, accompanied by a few old men over fifty years of age. Many of these people go without bread for days, and they become emaciated beyond description. I saw several fall from starvation, and only at certain places along this road is there water. Many die of thirst. None of these people have any idea where they are going or why they are being exiled. They go day after day along the road with the hope that they may somewhere reach a place where they may be allowed to rest. There seems to be no cessation of the stream of these Armenians pouring down from the North, Angora and the region around the Black Sea. Their condition grows worse every day. The sights that I saw on my return trip were worse than those on my trip going, and now that the cold weather and winter rains are setting in, deaths are more numerous."

"I, as an ethnically Turkish citizen, am not guilty, but am responsible for what happened to the Armenians in 1915. I did an analysis of the Deputies of the first National Assembly, I have found enough documentation that implicates about 25-30% of the Deputies of having participated in the massacres against the Armenians... Not only was there no accountability and no punishment for those who committed crimes against the Armenians, but many of the perpetrators unfortunately then became leaders of the Turkish Republic."

"The population is showing true Moslem resignation in the way it is bearing the existing situation — the ruin and desolation of individuals and community, the holocaust of all and everything for a war which no one desired, but which was forced upon them by Enver Pasha, and which will lead to the ruin and dismemberment of all that still remains of the Ottoman Empire. The Germans and the "Committee of Union and Progress" are hated and detested by all...for the Germans and the Committee constitute the one genuine, solid organisation at present existing in Turkey — a masterly and most rigorous organisation, which does not hesitate to use any weapon whatever; an organisation of audacity, of terror, and of mysterious, ferocious revenge. . . As for the Armenians, they were treated differently in the different vilayets. They were suspect and spied upon everywhere, but they suffered a real extermination, worse than massacre, in the so-called 'Armenian Vilayets.' from the 24th June onwards, the Armenians were all "interned" — that is, ejected by force from their various residences and despatched under the guard of the gendarmerie to distant, unknown destinations, which for a few will mean the interior of Mesopotamia, but for four-fifths of them has meant already a death accompanied by unheard-of cruelties. The official proclamation of internment came from Constantinople. It is the work of the Central Government and the "Committee of Union and Progress." The local authorities, and indeed the Moslem population in general, tried to resist, to mitigate it, to make omissions, to hush it up. But the orders of the Central Government were categorically confirmed, and all were compelled to resign themselves and obey. It was a real extermination and slaughter of the innocents, an unheard-of thing, a black page stained with the flagrant violation of the most sacred rights of humanity... There were about 14,000 Armenians at Trebizond — Gregorians, Catholics, and Protestants. They had never caused disorders or given occasion for collective measures of police. When I left Trebizond, not a hundred of them remained. ...the city in a state of siege, guarded at every point by 15,000 troops in complete war equipment, by thousands of police agents by bands of volunteers and by the members of the "Committee of Union and Progress"; the lamentations, the tears, the abandonments, the imprecations, the many suicides, the instantaneous deaths from sheer terror, the sudden unhingeing of men's reason, the conflagrations, the shooting of victims in the city, the ruthless searches through the houses and in the countryside; the hundreds of corpses found every day along the exile road; the young women converted by force to Islam or exiled like the rest; the children torn away from their families or from the Christian schools, and handed over by force to Moslem families, or else placed by hundreds on board ship in nothing but their shirts, and then capsized and drowned in the Black Sea and the River Deyirmen Deré — these are my last ineffaceable memories of Trebizond, memories which still, at a month's distance, torment my soul and almost drive me frantic. If they knew all the things that I know, all that I have had to see with my eyes and hear with my ears, all Christian powers that are still neutral would be impelled to rise up against Turkey and cry anathema against her inhuman Government and her ferocious "Committee of Union and Progress," and they would extend the responsibility to Turkey's Allies, who tolerate or even shield with their strong arm these execrable crimes, which have not their equal in history, either modern or ancient. Shame, horror and disgrace!"

"The first implementation of the CUP regime's goal of creating a homogeneous nation was the elimination of the Armenians from Anatolia in 1915...It was a prerequisite for homogenisation in the name of modernisation that both internal and external conditions served to justify their policies under the rhetoric of state security and interests."

"Massacres and deportations were organized in the spring of 1915, under a definite system, the soldiers going from town to town. Young men were first summoned to the government building in each village and then marched out and killed. The women, the old men and the children were, after a few days, deported to what Talaat Pasha called "Agricultural Colonies," from the high, breeze-swept plateaus of Armenia to the malarial flats of the Euphrates and the burning sands of Syria and Arabia. The dead, from this wholesale attempt on the race, are variously estimated at from five hundred thousand to a million, the usual figure being about eight hundred thousand. Driven on foot under a hot sun, robbed of their clothing and such petty articles as they carried, prodded by bayonets if they lagged, starvation, typhus, and dysentery left thousands dead by the trail side."

"Turkey initiated a policy of annihilation against the Armenians."

"We must already be thinking of resettlement of millions of men from Germany and Europe. Migrations of people have always taken place. Are we really going to remain a nation of have-nots forever? We have the capacity to rouse and lead the masses against this situation. We intend to introduce a great resettlement policy; In 1923 little Greece could resettle a million men. Think of the biblical deportations and the massacres of the Middle Ages and remember the extermination of the Armenians."

"Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?"

"The systematic butchery of the uprooted and deported Armenians have assumed such a scope...it was not only tolerated but openly promoted by the government. It meant the extermination of the Armenians. Despite government assurances to the contrary, everything points to the goal of the destruction of the Armenian people."

"It should be borne in mind, however, that it was not until after the declaration of the constitution that the idea "Turkey for the Turks" took definite shape and developed into the scheme of accomplishing its purpose by the final extinction of all the Christian populations of that blood-soaked land..."

"The Turk massacres when he has orders from headquarters and desists on the second when commanded by the same authority to stop."

"The extermination of the Christians of Turkey was an organized butchery, carried out on a great scale... This part of the story would not be complete if I passed over in silence the systematic extermination... of the Greeks and Armenians of the Pontus. The flourishing communities of Amasia, Caesaria, Trebizonde, Chaldes, Rhodopolis, Colonia, centers of Greek civilization for many hundreds of years have been practically annihilated in a persistent campaign of massacre, hanging, deportation, fire and rape. The victims amount to hundreds of thousands, bringing the sum total of exterminated Armenians and Greeks in the whole of the old Roman province of Asia up to the grand total of one million, five hundred thousand."

"The last act in the fearful drama of the extermination of Christianity in the Byzantine Empire was the burning of Smyrna by the troops of Mustapha Khemal. The murder of the Armenian race had been practically consummated during the years 1915-1916, and the prosperous and populous Greek colonies, with the exception of Smyrna itself, had been ferociously destroyed."

"The Turks were now making a thorough and systematic job of killing Armenian men. The squads of soldiers...were chiefly engaged in hunting down and killing Armenians."

"[After the Balkan wars of 1913] Turkism, as a racialised articulation of citizenship, emerged as the dominant discourse of the period. ...Turkism is defined here as...Turkishness as the determinative identity of the citizens of the empire. (In) March 1913, the Turkish Force Committee was founded. It explicitly claimed to cultivate the new Turkish citizens...the founders argued (that)from now on, the empire should be left to the real owners, the Turkish race. What was different from the Turkism that existed before the Balkan Wars was the idea that Turkism not only needed to become dominant, but it had to become so in an urgent manner. This sense of urgency combined with the dominance Turkism now enjoyed led Turkism to materialise into various events and acts in a very short period of time. Turkism...was manifest in...the displacement and elimination of Armenian citizens of the Ottoman Empire. The institutionalisation of Turkism meant the homogenisation of the citizenship in the empire. After the Balkan Wars, Armenians, or any other element in the empire other than the Turks, were not peoples who had to be educated, governed and Ottomanised but were enemies to be executed urgently or in some distant future. With Turkism, Armenians were Armenians. Race could not be changed. Turkism desired a racially homogeneous citizenry; a nation acquiring its sovereignty from its racial basis. In 1913, the CUP decided to establish youth clubs all around the empire. They were called the Tu¨rk Gu¨cu¨ Cemiyetleri (Societies of Turkish Power). The motto of the societies was: 'the force of the Turk is always enough for everything' ...their aim was to serve the Turkish race and avoid its decline by...'gathering the Turks under one roof and protecting them from hazardous influences' The interesting point about the societies is that the statements produced within them construct the decline in the social and political functions of the race as inscribed into the bodies of the Turks. The Turks were already healthy and strong. Other races in the empire changed this condition... by living at the expense of the Turkish race... the other races were never as strong and healthy as the Turks. Therefore the hybridity of the population of the empire worsened the condition of the Turks. It was time again to go back to the purity of the origins of the Turkish race. That is why other races had to be eliminated. Turkism constructed an imminent threat posed by the Armenians and took action to exterminate that threat. Turkism operated as state racism. Enver Pasha, by then the head of the CUP, argued that by expelling the Armenians from the empire, the Turks in the Ottoman Empire would once again be healthy and clean. Otherwise the Turks would slowly cease to exist, just as an unhealthy person approaches death when not taken care of. In other words, the existence of the Turkish race depended on eliminating the unclean elements including other races, in this case the Armenians. Turkism and the Armenian tragedy in this sense can be seen as a function of the biological racism. Turkism, as racialised citizenship, negated the life of Armenian citizens in the empire."

"Hundreds of individual cases of persecution such as blackmailing, beating, imprisoning, etc., could be stated but which would lend no further weight to the general statement of outrages that are being practiced daily upon a defenseless and inoffensive people that demand nothing more than to be given a chance to eke out at best a miserable existence. The government has been appealed to by various prominent people and even by those in authority to put an end to these conditions, under the representations that is can only lead to the greatest blame and reproach, but all to no avail. It is without doubt a carefully planned scheme to thoroughly extinguish the Armenian race."

"In the Spring of 1915, when the snow was beginning to melt on the Armenian plateau, the government in Constantinople began work on the systematic annihilation of Armenians. The Armenians were driven to the South, avoiding routes from where Armenians were already cleansed. The town of Urfa, nearby the Syrian desert, which was the terminus for the driven Armenians, was the last one to be cleansed of Armenians. By the Summer of 1916, the Armenian community had been removed and fragmented. The largest nucleus [of Armenians] outside Constantinople, consisted of laborers found outside Adana, working on the Baghdad railroad. There were no Armenian villages left. The history of the Armenian genocide is the history of Armenian women and urchins. The men were murdered right at the start. From primary sources, both Ottoman and other, it appears that in the East where a war was being fought with Russia, the Armenians were murdered on the spot. Elsewhere, they were deported, whereby their houses were not destroyed but confiscated. Their personal possessions, such as money and jewelry were looted from them. For the reason for the implementation of the genocide, you should ask Talaat. Both pan-Turkism and Islamic fervor existed well before the genocide. the provocation thesis, which states that Armenian were the fifth column and would have turned on the Turks the moment the Russians advanced, is a concoction that was hatched at the German embassy in Constantinople in May 1915. The Ottoman Empire was extensively centralized. A good bureaucracy held it all together. The telegraphic system of communication was exemplary. Special military units were instituted for the purpose of carrying out the genocide. No one was allowed to murder Armenians without the consent of these military units. Those who disregarded the rules were dealt severely."

"The Armenian genocide is the Ottoman government's answer to the Armenian Question: Deportations can only be analyzed in terms of expropriation. It was grand theft. It was the surgical separation of Armenians from their movable and immovable property. The Ottoman government was very careful of not wasting any assets while being not concerned about the fate of the Armenians. To make the expropriation permanent, you have to replace the Armenians. The expropriation was part of a settlement program; this process created a surplus population and this surplus population was taken care of. The Armenians were mathematically a surplus population. Killing or, in the case of children and women, assimilating them solved that problem. What took place was genocide, not massacres. I use the word `genocide' because it adequately describes the phenomenon. It's the only term we have that describes it. If one day we have a better word, fine. The English, German, and Turkish languages have only one word to describe. That this has a negative consequence on the Turkish government is something I can't change; I can't change history. I'm not prepared to haggle over it. If a Turkish scholar says it too politicized and he or she doesn't want to use the word, then let him/her take a different subject. If you want to be part of this debate, apply proper terminology and if you don't want to do it, you aren't a scholar."

"The destruction of the Armenians was undertaken on a massive scale...This policy of extermination will for a long time stain the name of Turkey."

"In Turkey, more than 1,200,000 Armenians were put to death for no other reason than they were Christians … After the end of the war, some 150 Turkish war criminals were arrested and interned by the British Government on the island of Malta. The Armenians sent a delegation to the peace conference in Versailles. They were demanding justice. Then one day, the delegation read in the newspapers that all Turkish war criminals were released. I was shocked. A nation was killed and the guilty persons were set free. Why is a man punished when he kills another man? Why is the killing of a million a lesser crime than the killing of a single individual? I identified myself more and more with the sufferings of the victims, whose numbers grew, as I continued my study of history. I understood that the function of memory is not only to register past events, but to stimulate human conscience. Soon contemporary examples of genocide followed, such as the slaughter of the Armenians in 1915. It became clear to me that the diversity of nations, religious groups and races is essential to civilization because every one of those groups has a mission to fulfill and a contribution to make in terms of culture.... I decided to become a lawyer and work for the outlawing of Genocide and for its prevention through the cooperation of nations. A bold plan was formulated in my mind. This consisted [of] obtaining the ratification by Turkey [of the proposed UN Convention on Genocide Ed.] among the first twenty founding nations. This would be an atonement for [the] genocide of the Armenians. But how could this be achieved? . . . The Turks are proud of their republican form of government and of progressive concepts, which helped them in replacing the rule of the Ottoman Empire. The genocide convention must be put within the framework of social and international progress. I knew however that in this conversation both sides will have to avoid speaking about one thing, although it would be constantly in their minds: the Armenians."

"The evidence...from German, Austrian and Turkish sources in my view leads inescapably to the conclusion that the extermination of the Armenians was actually planned by a clique within the Young Turk leadership and executed by the sinister Special Organization [Teshkilati Mahsusa] of the army."

"The Turks have embarked upon the total extermination of the Armenians in Transcaucasia, also (May 1918)... On the basis of all reports and news coming to me here in Tbilissi [Georgia] there hardly can be any doubt that the Turks systematically are aiming at the... extermination of the few hundred thousand Armenians whom they have left alive until now."

"The decision to expel the woman, children and old men, was the result of a hatred against the Armenians, and involved a wild objective on the part of the Turkish government to obliterate this race... the massive arrests of the men were carried out not only in the near of the front but throughout the empire... and in the corridors of the Turkish Ministry of War one heard people tell with cynical grins the story of how all these thousands died a natural death or how they were victims of accidents — as registered in official records..."

"The Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust were the quintessential instances of genocide in the modern era. Three reasons may be cited for this claim. First, there were instances of what we shall call "total genocide" or what the United Nations has called "genocide-in-whole" to distinguish such instances from massacre and "genocide-in-part." Both catastrophes were the products of state-initiated policies whose intended and actual results were the elimination of the Armenian community from the Ottoman Empire and of the Jewish community from most of Europe, respectively. Second, both victimized groups were ethnoreligious communal minorities that had been partially integrated and assimilated into the larger society. Their destruction was not only a war against foreign strangers, it was a mass murder that commenced with an attack on an internal domestic segment of the state's own society. The genocide of the Armenians should be understood not as a response to "Armenian provocations" but as a stage in the Turkish revolution, which as a reaction to the continuing disintegration of the empire settled on a narrow nationalism and excluded Armenians from the moral universe of the state. It should be obvious from the overwhelming evidence that exists in the state archives of major powers (the above being but a small representative sample) that the 1915 genocide of the Armenians was premeditated and the isolated cases of armed resistance by the Armenians were deliberately provoked by the Turkish government so as to exploit it as justification for a general campaign of race extermination. That being so, bringing up the much discredited myth of Armenian disloyalty in the context of the 1915 Armenian Genocide is as offensive to the victims as well as to well-informed non-Armenians as bringing up the Nazi rationalization of an alleged "international Jewish conspiracy" would be in the context of the Nazi Holocaust. Because both the Armenians under Ottoman rule and the Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe perished not for something they did or failed to do, but for who they were."

"In a realisation of their plan to resolve the Armenian Question by destroying the Armenian race, the Turkish Government is not stopped neither by our representatives, nor by the public opinion of the west."

"Those who fell by the wayside. Scenes like this were common all over the Armenian provinces in the spring and summer months of 1915. Death in its several forms—massacre, starvation, exhaustion—destroyed the larger part of the refugees. The Turkish policy was that of extermination under the guise of deportation."

"Deportation of and excesses against peaceful Armenians is increasing and from harrowing reports of eye witnesses it appears that a campaign of race extermination is in progress under a pretext of reprisal against rebellion."

"The Sultan's proclamation [of war] was an official public document, and dealt with the proposed Holy War [Jihad] only in a general way, but about this same time a secret pamphlet appeared which gave instructions to the faithful in more specific terms...It was a lengthy document full of quotations from the Koran, and its stile was frenzied in its appeal to racial and religious hatred. It described a detailed plan of operations for the assassination and extermination of all Christians except those of German nationality."

"This attempt of the Armenians to defend themselves against the Turkish attack in Van was promptly misrepresented in a communique' which was sent by Enver Pasha and the Turkish Government to Berlin, and thence spread all over the world, as an attack by bands of Armenian insurrectionists who, in the rear of the Turkish army had fallen prey upon the Muhammedan population. Out of 180,000 Moslems in the Vilayet of Van only 30,000 had succeeded in escaping! In a later report issued by the Turkish embassy in Berlin on October 1, 1915, the story was further embellished: "No fewer than 180,000 Moslems had been killed. It was not surprising that the Moslems had taken vengeance for this". Some 18 Turks, answering to the number of Armenians they had killed in Van, had turned into 180,000! This astonishing impudent lie has a kind of foundation. According to statistics there should be 180,000 Moslems, including 30,000 Turks and 150,000 Kurds, in the Vilayet of Van. The Turks fled westwards when the Russian army advanced, while the 150,000 Kurds remained where they were, and were molested neither by the Russians nor the Armenians"

"When I returned to Aleppo in September 1915 … a new phase of Armenian massacres had begun which aimed at exterminating, root and branch, the intelligent, industrious, and progressive Armenian nation. . . . In dilapidated caravansaries (in Aleppo) I found quantities of dead (many corpses being half-decomposed) and others, still living among them, who were soon to breathe their last. . . . masses of half-starved people, the survivors of so-called 'deportation convoys.' I was told, to cover the extermination of the Armenian nation with a political cloak, military reasons were being put forward... After I had informed myself about the facts and had made enquiries on all sides, I came to the conclusion that all these accusations against the Armenians were, in fact, based on trifling provocations, which were taken as an excuse for slaughtering 10,000 innocents for one guilty person, for the most savage outrages against women and children, and for a campaign of starvation against the exiles which was intended to exterminate the whole nation. What we saw with our own eyes here in Aleppo was really only the last scene in the great tragedy of the extermination of the Armenians. It was only a minute fraction of the horrible drama that was being played out simultaneously in all the other provinces of Turkey. The German Consul from Mosul related, in my presence, at the German club at Aleppo that, in many places on the road from Mosul to Aleppo, he had seen children's hands lying hacked off in such numbers that one could have paved the road with them. The Consuls are of opinion that, so far, probably about one million Armenians have perished in the massacres of the last few months. Of this number, one must reckon that at least half are women and children who have either been murdered or have succumbed to starvation. The Arabs of the village declared that they had killed these Armenians by the Government's orders. A newspaper reporter was told by one of these gentlemen "Certainly we are now punishing many innocent people as well. But we have to guard ourselves even against those who may one day become guilty." On such grounds Turkish statesmen justify the wholesale slaughter of defenceless women and children. A German Catholic ecclesiastic reported that Enver Pasha declared, in the presence of Monsignore Dolci, the Papal Envoy at Constantinople, that he would not rest so long as a single Armenian remained alive. The object of the deportations is the extermination of the whole Armenian nation."

"After the massacres of Djarbekir, the tide of carnage and persecution rolled over the provinces of Adana and Northern Syria (Zeitun, Urfa, Marrash, etc) which were at the time crowded with deportees from Central and Northern Anatolia...The provinces of Van, Bitlis, Djarbekir... were the only ones which suffered massacres in the true sense of the word. In the remaining vilayets of the Empire persecution took the form of deportations, which effected almost the same results as the massacres. there can be no doubt that the massacres and deportations took place in accordance with a laid-out plan for which the responsibility lay with the retrograde party, headed by the Grand Vizier Talat Pasha and the civil authorities under his orders. They aimed to make an end first of the Armenians, then of the greeks and other Christians, Ottoman subjects, in the Empire. We glean ample verification for this from the masacres of Sairt, Djesiret, and the surrounding districts, during which perished no less then two hundred thousand Nestorian Christians, Syrio-Catholics, Jacobites, etc, who had no connection whatever with the Armenians, and who had always been the Sultan's loyal subjects. Officially we are forbidden to give the deportees any ration without a written order signed by the civil authorities of the province from which they came, along with other idiocies invented by Talat Pasha in order to kill the poor devils with starvation."

"I learned from them some extremely alarming details regarding the Armenian situation, which made me comprehend perfectly their fully justified fear as to the future fate of their small protégés. I caught sight of the military commander of the place dictating orders to his officers, while a group of kiatihs or secretaries deciphered an enormous heap of telegrams. That unaccustomed activity made me suspect that the storm was about to break. And I was not mistaken. Next morning, which was the twentieth of April, 1915, we stumbled, near El-Aghlat, upon mutilated Armenian corpses strewing the length of the road. One hour later we saw numerous gigantic columns of smoke surge up from the opposite shore of the lake, indicating the sites where the cities and hamlets of the provinces of Van were being devoured by flame. Then I understood. The die was cast. The Armenian "revolution" had begun...April 21. At dawn I was awakened by the noise of shots and volleys. The Armenians had attacked the town. Immediately I mounted my horse and, followed by some armed men, went to see what was happening. Judge of my amazement to discover that the aggressors had not been the Armenians, after ail, but the civil authorities themselves! Supported by the Kurds and the rabble of the vicinity, they were attacking and sacking the Armenian quarter..., I succeeded at last, without serious accident, in approaching the Beledie reis of the town, who was directing the orgy; whereupon I ordered him to stop the massacre. He astounded me by replying that he was doing nothing more than carry out an unequivocal order emanating from the Governor-General of the province … to exterminate all Armenian males of twelve years of age and over. I, as a soldier, could not prevent the execution of this decree, which was purely civil in character, however much I desired. So I ordered the gendarmes to retire, and waited until the hell was over. At the end of an hour and a half of butchery there remained of the Armenians of Adil-Javus only seven survivors... The civil authorities of the Sultan kill noiselessly and preferably by night, like vampires. Generally they choose as their victim's sepulchre deep lakes in which there are no indiscreet currents to bear the corpse to shore, or lonely mountain caves where dogs and jackals aid in erasing all traces of their crime. Among them I noticed some Kurds belonging to a group of several hundred which, on the following morning, was to help in killing off all the Armenians still in possession of some few positions and edifices around the town. Seeing that the enemy's fire was dwindling down, and unable to endure any longer the odor of scorched flesh from the Armenian corpses scattered among the smoking ruins of the church... Pursued by Kurdish bullets, which felled them by the dozen, the Armenians ran hither and thither like frightened rabbits; and not a few of them sat upon the ground, stupefied, awaiting death like sheep bound to the sacrificial altar, without making the slightest attempt to save themselves. Only a small group of young men kept defending themselves desperately, their backs to a wall, until, overcome at last by sheer exhaustion, they fell one after another under the cutlasses and bullets of the Kurds, who used the sword whenever possible in order to keep from wasting cartridges."

"Another issue that confronts all democracies as they move to the future is how we deal with the past. The United States is still working through some of our own darker periods in our history. Facing the Washington Monument that I spoke of is a memorial of Abraham Lincoln, the man who freed those who were enslaved even after Washington led our Revolution. Our country still struggles with the legacies of slavery and segregation, the past treatment of Native Americans. Human endeavor is by its nature imperfect. History is often tragic, but unresolved it can be a heavy weight. Each country must work through its past. And reckoning with the past can help us seize a better future. Now, I know there's strong views in this chamber about the terrible events of 1915. And while there's been a good deal of commentary about my views, it's really about how the Turkish and Armenian people deal with the past. And the best way forward for the Turkish and Armenian people is a process that works through the past in a way that is honest, open, and constructive."

"The Armenian population which is being expelled from its homeland is not only being subjected to the greatest misery but also to a total extermination (27 June 1915) — The manner in which the Armenian are being deported for resettlement purposes is tantamount to death a verdict for the affected people. (1 July 1915) — the time will come when Turkey will have to account for this policy of extermination (13 August 1915)."

"Thirty thousand Kurds and a million Armenians were killed in Turkey. Almost no one dares speak but me, and the nationalists hate me for that."

"Pamuk has made groundless claims against the Turkish identity, the Turkish military and Turkey as a whole. He should be punished for violating Articles 159 and 312 of the Turkish penal code. He made a statement provoking the people to hatred and animosity through the media, which is defined as a crime in Article 312."

"The Van uprising certainly was an act of desperation. The local Armenians realized that general massacres against the Armenians had already started and they would be the next target. In the course of the summer 1915 the Turkish government with inexorable consequence brought its bloody task of extermination of an entire nation to an end...The gruesome destruction of the Armenian nation in Asia Minor by the Ittihadist government was an act which was barbaric and which to the highest degree outrages all human senses."

"The criminal gangs who were released from the prisons, after a week's training at the War Ministry's training grounds, were sent off to the Caucasian front as the brigands of the Special Organization, perpetrating the worst crimes against the Armenians … The Ittihadists intended to destroy the Armenians, and thereby to do away with the Question of the Eastern Provinces.... In order to justify this enormous crime [of the Armenian genocide] the requisite propaganda material was thoroughly prepared in Istanbul. [It included such statements as:] the Armenians are in league with the enemy. They will launch an uprising in Istanbul, kill off the Ittihadist leaders and will succeed in opening up the straits [to enable the Allied fleets to capture Istanbul]. These vile and malicious incitements [were such, however, that they] could persuade only people who were not even able to feel the pangs of their own hunger. … among those Armenians who were atrociously wasted, despite the fact that they were most innocent, guiltless, and who had committed no crime whatsoever, were the Armenians of Bursa, Ankara, Eskiehir, and Konya."

"I defended the Armenians who, even though they were completely innocent, were murdered simply because they were Armenians. The dictates of justice and the state's badge required such intervention."

"The partisans of Ittihad are unabashedly conceding that their ultimate aim [Endziel] is the total annihilation (ganzliche Ausrottung) of the Armenians of Turkey, adding, "After the war we no longer will have any Armenians in Turkey.""

"They [the Ittahadist leaders] have fabricated, for the benefit of Allied Powers, an alleged revolution stirred up by the Dashnak party. They have inflated the importance of isolated incidents and acts of self-defense by the Armenians and used it as an excuse to deport the bordering population. On the way. the Armenians have been murdered, on orders of the Committee, by gangs of Kurds and Turks and at times, even by gendarmes."

"The failure to do justice in the Armenian Genocide can be traced in important part to the overlapping, interlocking dynamics of economics, international law, and mass murder. The more predatory aspects of international law dovetailed well with the destructive social patterns of the Turkish killing. The law proved to be incapable of prosecuting genocide without drawing more "conventional" aspects of colonialism, national development, and international trade into the dock as crimes as well. The legal and economic precedents set in the wake of World War I had considerable impact on the course of the Holocaust during World War II, just as the more widely understood political precedents did. Hitler himself repeatedly raised the international community's failure to do justice in the wake of the Armenian Genocide to explain and justify his own racial theories, and the Germans' pattern of "learning through doing" genocide was similar in important respects to that of the Turks. While the two crimes were different in important respects, they both were led by ideologically driven, authoritarian political parties that had come to power in the midst of a deep social crisis. Both the Ittihad and the Nazis-each originally a marginal political party-managed to perpetrate genocide by enlisting the established institutions of conventional life-the national courts, commercial structures, scholarly community, and so on-in the tasks of mass persecution and eventually mass murder. In both cases, the ruling party achieved its genocidal aims in part by offering economic incentives for persecution, the most basic of which were the opportunity to share in the spoils of deported people and the ability to transfer the costs of economic crisis onto the shoulders of the despised group."

"The deportation and destruction of the Armenians was decided by the Young Turks Committee in Constantinople."

"Kill every Armenian man, woman, and child without concern."

"The Armenian Genocide is proven in all its components — among them intent. The converging evidence is well in excess of that generally judged abundant in establishing other historical truths. The genocide was a horrendous crime. The evidence is there — province by province, city by city, village by village, hamlet by hamlet, with its countless variations according to time and place yet all the same in the vast process of extermination — genocide. A deliberate plan, carefully organized and brutally executed. The deniers and rationalizers offend the dignity of the historian and of all humanity."

"It can no longer be denied that the Turks... have undertaken the extermination of the Armenians race and it appears that they have largely succeeded in it. With certain air of gleefulness Talaat recently told me that in Erzerum, for example, there should be remaining not a single Armenian... Turkey today is under a maniacal spell due to the realization that she carried out the extermination of the Armenian race with impunity."

"In fact most of the available evidence points to the conclusion that a systematic decimation of the Armenian population in the eastern provinces had already been decided on by the Ittihad ve Terakki regime, and that the troubles in Van and elsewhere merely served as a convenient excuse for getting a program of mass deportations and large-scale extermination."

"By February 1916, 1.5 million Armenians were destroyed … the first step toward the recovery of the economic predominance in Turkey … there was joy in the government circles that the long-desired opportunity finally presented itself..."

"Until recently, in fact at the beginning of this year, the Armenians were regarded as the most reliable element, indeed the only reliable people within the Christian elements in Turkey. One could read it in all the newspapers and the important Turkish dignitaries confirmed this on every occasion, which presented itself...Since March, an about-turn has taken place which is as general and consequent as if the Turks had never known up until now what dangerous people had been living within their midst."

"The Turks are vigorously carrying through their cruel intention, to exterminate the Armenian people,"

"It is evident that deportations of Armenians is not motivated by military considerations, the minister of the Interior Talaat Bey recently in a conversation with Dr. Mortsmann presently in the Imperial Service, declared openly that the Porte wants to profit from the World War for radically finishing their internal enemies – the Christians before the intervention of outside powers."

"The manner in which the matter of relocation is being handled demonstrate that the government is in fact pursuing the goal of annihialating the Armenian race in Turkey."

"The Turkish denial [of the Armenian Genocide] is probably the foremost example of historical perversion. With a mix of academic sophistication and diplomatic thuggery -- of which we at Macquarie University have been targets -- the Turks have put both memory and history into reverse gear.""

"[When asked what Turkish people think about the Armenian Genocide] — Sadly, young people in Turkey know nothing about the subject, All they know is nationalist things written in school textbooks. And because they lack that knowledge, they believe that the Armenians plot bad things against their country. … maybe future generations will address the subject in a more reasonable and calm manner."

"In 1982, I refuse to take part in a colloquium whose subject is close to my heart. Organized by two Israeli professors of psychiatry, this symposium on genocide, which I am to chair, is scheduled for early June in Tel Aviv. Everything is set. Scholars and historians from several continents have accepted our invitation, among them Armenians. After all, they have ideas on this subject which has touched them closely. How could one forget the massacre of their parents and grandparents at the hands of the Turkish army? At the last moment, we encounter a major hurdle. Under pressure from Turkey, the Israelis urge me to revoke our invitation to the Armenians. I refuse. It would be too humiliating. And to humiliate is to blaspheme. The pressure increases. I am given to understand that if a single Armenian participates in the conference, Israeli-Turkish relations will suffer. And that there would be consequences for Jews in certain Arab countries. Jewish emissaries from Istanbul confirm this to me with documents. No matter, I will not offend our Armenian guests. I resign as chairman... 'A human life weighs more than all the books written about human life.'"

"The Abkhaz separatist forces committed widespread atrocities against the Georgian civilian population, killing many women, children, and elderly, capturing some as hostages and torturing others … they also killed large numbers of Georgian civilians who remained behind in Abkhaz-seized territory."

"When they [Abkhaz] entered Gagra, I saw Shamyl Basaev's battalion. I have never seen such a horror. They were raping and killing everyone who was captured and dragged from their homes. Abkhaz commander Arshba raped 14 years old girl and later gave an order to execute her. For the whole day I only could hear the screams and cries of the people who were brutally tortured. On the next day, I witnessed the mass execution of people on the stadium. They installed machine guns and mortars on the top and placed people right on the field. It took couple of hours to kill everybody."

"The Abkhaz separatists killed people of other nationalities as well, including those who tried to protect Georgians. After the city was seized, the streets were covered with bodies. Separatists destroyed the Baramidze, Chkhetia, Baramia, Gvazava, Dzidziguri, Absandze, Shonia, and Kutsia families, as well as many others."

"The shelling of Sokhumi is the most disgusting thing in this war... All the residents of Sokhumi remember the first shelling. It took place on 2 December 1992. The first rocket fell on Peace Street. They struck at crowded places. The next strategic 'target' was the town market which was hit with great precision. Eighteen people were killed that day. There were always lots of people in the market."

"And out of group of 12 front line soldiers, 2 were Abkhazian, 2 were Armenian, 1 Armenian locally from Sukhumi, 1 from Yerevan who was too young to go fight the good fight in Karabakh, and the rest were either from the North Caucasus or from places like in Siberia. What were they motivated by? Looting. They had been promised houses with tangerine gardens. They had been promised cars."

"While the death toll in the trenches of Western Europe were close to 2 million by the summer of 1915, the extermination of innocent civilians in Turkey (the Armenians, but also Syrian and Assyrian Christians and large portions of the Greek population, especially the Greeks of Pontos, or Black Sea region) was reaching 1 million."

"The two present threats to Turkish territorial integrity—by the Greeks and the French—and the one potential threat—an Armenian state—reproduced the proximate CUP ‘rationale’ for the 1915–16 genocide, and the forthcoming violence was sometimes of the same order."

"The nation, beginning with the areas of trade and language, was to be cleansed from “foreign elements” in order to establish a national culture and economy….As noted, the 1914 cleansing was initially attempted through a severe economic boycott and by other intimidating measures."

"Turkish denialism of the genocide of 1.5 million Armenians is official, riven, driven, constant, rampant and increasing each year since the events of 1915 to 1922. It is state-funded, with special departments and units in overseas missions whose sole purpose is to dilute, counter, minimise, trivialise and relativise every reference to the events which encompassed a genocide of Armenians, Pontian Greeks and Assyrian Christians in Asia Minor."

"It is believed that in Turkey between 1913 and 1922, under the successive regimes of the Young Turks and of Mustafa Kemal (Atatürk), more than 3.5 million Armenian, Assyrian and Greek Christians were massacred in a state-organized and state-sponsored campaign of destruction and genocide, aiming at wiping out from the emerging Turkish Republic its native Christian populations. This Christian Holocaust is viewed as the precursor to the Jewish Holocaust in WWII. To this day, the Turkish government ostensibly denies having committed this genocide."

"Most of the Armenians had already been massacred during the reign of the Sultan, in 1915—1916; Kemal attempted to continue the genocide of Armenians in Transcaucasia, and of Greeks on the coast of the Aegean. Especially heartrending and horribly bloody was the genocide of the Greeks in Smyrna (Turkish Izmir) where they had lived since the tenth century BC."

"The period of transition from the collapse of the Ottoman Empire to the foundation of the Turkish Republic was characterized by a number of processes largely guided by a narrow elite that aimed to construct a modern, national state. One of these processes was the deliberate and planned elimination, indeed extermination, of the Christian (and certain other) minorities... Much less scholarly work has been done on the genocide of the Greeks of Asia Minor and Thrace."

"Yet this was only the beginning of a wave of ethnic conflict that would fundamentally transform the social structure of the lands between the Aegean and the Black Sea. The Greek population of western Anatolia and the Black Sea littoral (the Pontus) had numbered around two million on the eve of the First World War. Their communities were very ancient; they had been there for more than two thousand years, a fact to which magnificent edifices like the theatre at Ephesus bore witness. They continued to thrive in the modern world, as any visitor to the busy waterfront of Smyrna could see. Yet as early as October 1915 the German military attaché reported to Berlin that Enver wanted 'to solve the Greek problem during the war . . . in the same way that he believes he solved the Armenian problem'. The process began in Thrace. It was in fact more plausible for the Turks to portray the Greeks as a fifth column, since the Greek Prime Minister Eleftherios Venizelos strongly favoured Greek intervention on the side of the Entente powers and, although King Constantine resisted until finally driven to abdicate in June 1917, the presence of an Anglo-French force at Salonika from October 1915 cast doubt on the credibility of Greek neutrality. Viewed from Salonika, the First World War was the Third Balkan War, with Bulgaria joining Germany and Austria in the rout of Serbia; indeed, it was to shore up the disintegrating Serbian position that the Entente powers had sent their troops to Salonika."

"To the appalled George Horton, who desperately tried to buy a few Greeks and Armenians safe passage with his own money, the destruction of Smyrna was 'but the closing act in a consistent programme of exterminating Christianity throughout the length and breadth of the old Byzantine Empire; the expatriation of an ancient Christian civilization'. The idea persists that religion was the principal motivation for what happened. Yet the emergent Turkish republic was not an Islamic state; on the contrary, Kemal would later introduce the separation of religion and state and abort moves towards parliamentary democracy precisely in order to stop a nascent Islamist opposition from reversing this. In reality, what happened between 1915 and 1922 was more ethnic cleansing than holy war. As Horton himself noted bitterly: 'The problem of the minorities is here solved for all time.' The New York Times detected the sexual dimension of Turkish policy, reporting that 'the Turks frankly do not understand why they should not get rid of the Greeks and Armenians from their country and take their women into their harems if they are sufficiently good looking.'"

"Kemal saw no need to massacre all the Greeks in Smyrna, though a substantial number of able-bodied men were marched inland, suffering assaults by Turkish villagers along the way. He merely gave the Greek government until October i to evacuate them all. By the end of 1923 more than 1.2 million Greeks and 100,000 Armenians had been forced from their ancestral homes. The Greeks responded in kind. In 1915 some 60 per cent of the population of Western Thrace had been Muslims and 29 per cent of the population of Macedonia. By 1924 the figures had plunged to 28 per cent and zero per cent, their places taken by Greeks."

"The Armenian genocide, the massacres of the Pontic Greeks and the agreed 'exchanges' of Greek and Turkish populations after the sack of Smyrna illustrated with a terrible clarity the truth of the Archbishop of Aleppo's warning: when a multi-ethnic empire mutated into a nation state, the result could only be carnage. It was as if, for the sake of a spuriously modern uniformity, the basest instincts of ordinary men were unleashed in a kind of tribal bloodletting. There was certainly no meaningful economic rationale for what happened. Along the Anatolian coast it is still possible to find ruined villages whose inhabitants were forced to flee in 1922 but which were never subsequently reoccupied. At least five hundred people must once have lived in the village of Sazak, not far from what is now the holiday resort of Karaburun. With its well-built stone houses and its steep cobbled streets, Sazak has the air of vanished peasant prosperity. Now it is a ghost town, visited only by wandering goats and sea mists - a desolate memorial to the death throes of an empire."

":WHEREAS the denial of genocide is widely recognized as the final stage of genocide, enshrining impunity for the perpetrators of genocide, and demonstrably paving the way for future genocides;"

":WHEREAS the Ottoman genocide against minority populations during and following the First World War is usually depicted as a genocide against Armenians alone, with little recognition of the qualitatively similar genocides against other Christian minorities of the Ottoman Empire;"

":BE IT RESOLVED that it is the conviction of the International Association of Genocide Scholars that the Ottoman campaign against Christian minorities of the Empire between 1914 and 1923 constituted a genocide against Armenians, Assyrians, and Pontian and Anatolian Greeks."

":BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED that the Association calls upon the government of Turkey to acknowledge the genocides against these populations, to issue a formal apology, and to take prompt and meaningful steps toward restitution."

"One begins with (attempted) comprehension of the motives, intent, scale, implementation, and operation of the Holocaust. To understand it is necessary to look at similar phenomena, and so one attempts an unravelling of the Armenian, Pontian Greek, Rwandan, Burundian, and Aboriginal experiences"

"An estimate of the Pontian Greek death toll at all stages of the anti-Christian genocide is about 350,000; for all the Greeks of the Ottoman empire the toll exceeds half a million, and may approach the figure of 900,000 that a team of US researchers found in the postwar period."

"The Turkish army entered Smyrna on September 9. 1922 and soon thereafter the city went up in flames. A fire razed most of the Armenian quarter. It is estimated that 50,000 Christians were killed in the city during this period. No indigenous Christians remained in Smyrna after this holocaust that had deeply stained relations between the two peoples."

"... the massacre of Armenians and other Christians in eastern Anatolia in the 1890s; ...and then the organized killing and deportation of Armenians, Greeks, and others in the Ottoman empire from 1915 to the early 1920s."

"…carefully planned atrocities aimed at the Greeks' complete destruction"

"Historians, perhaps concerned not to magnify these events by comparison with those of 1915-16, tend to avoid the term genocide to describe them. In my formulation, however, these events would constitute partial genocide...""

"Unlike the Armenian case, in each of these other instances the scope, scale and intensity of the killings was limited, though this does not rule out comparison...The persistence of genocide or near-genocidal incidents from the 1890s through the 1990s, committed by Ottoman and successor Turkish and Iraqi states against Armenian, Kurdish, Assyrian, and Pontic Greek communities in Eastern Anatolia, is striking.... I have concentrated here on the genocidal sequence affecting Armenians and Kurds only, though my approach would be pertinent to the Pontic Greek and Assyrian cases."

"In the genocide of various minority nationalities that followed, the Turks massacred over 350,000 Greeks."

"For CUP's leaders, attacking the country's Greeks was a means to purify the core regions of Turkey. Talaat Pasha made clear that this was his intent … As the war continued, the Turkish campaign against the Greek civilians expanded to include the Pontic Greeks who lived on the Black Sea. The road to persecution here was quite similar to that elsewhere on the war's eastern fronts. Military threats and setbacks - in this case defeats by Russia - convinced Turkey's leaders to begin a campaign against a civilian population accused of treason … Subject to state-sponsored terror despite their status as Ottoman subjects, during World War I Turkey's Greeks experienced persecution just short of full-scale ethnic cleansing"

"Then, in a “Report on the preparation of a volume on genocide,” dated March–May 1948, a less ambitious project comprising ten chapters, two of which covered extra-European colonial cases: “2.The Indians in Latin America” and “10. The Indians in North America (in part).” The Holocaust, a term Lemkin never used, was not included, although the Armenians and Greeks in Turkey were, as well as the Early Christians, and the Jews of the Middle Ages and Tsarist Russia.14 To continue to deny, as many “founders of genocide studies” deny, that he regarded colonialism as an integral part of a world history of genocide is to ignore the written record."

"… Given these political and cultural ties, wholesale attacks on the Ottoman Greeks would have profoundly angered not only the Entente Powers, but Germany and Austria-Hungary as well, the allies upon whom the Ottomans were deeply dependent. Under these conditions, genocide of the Ottoman Greeks simply was not a viable option. (...) Massacres most likely did take place at Amisos and other villages in the Pontus. Yet given the large numbers of surviving Greeks, especially relative to the small number of Armenian survivors, the massacres were apparently restricted to the Pontus, Smyrna, and selected other "sensitive" regions."

"The Turkish state which emerged at the collapse of the Ottoman Empire contained several minorities within its interior, in an attempt to move towards a homogeneous population the Turkish state, which has passed through varying phases of dictatorship and democracy, has used any means possible, including genocide and deportation, to eliminate the Armenians, Greeks and Kurds remaining within Anatolia"

"…had been its Greek populace, the Turks massacred as many Greeks there as possible, to so1ve that ethnological problem by genocide, a term a later and more delicate…"

"The genocide against the Pontic Greeks occurred as part of a larger pattern of genocide also targeting the Armenians and Assyrians...It has been estimated that the loss of life among Anatolian Greeks in World War I and its aftermath was more than 735,000, among Pontian Greeks about 350,000."

"…the killing of the 275,000 Pontian souls who where slaughtered outright or were victims of the 'white death' of disease and starvation - a result of the routine process of deportations, slave labor, and the killings and death marches."

"These genocides not only involved the Holocaust and the killing of the Armenians, the best known of this century's genocides, but also the lesser known genocide of Gypsies by the Nazis and of Greeks by the Turks"

"However, the Treaty of Sevres was never ratified, As Kay Holloway wrote, the failure of the signatories to bring the treaty into force ‘resulted in the abandonment of thousands of defenceless peoples Armenians and Greeks — to the fury of their persecutors, by engendering subsequent holocausts in which the few survivors of the 1915 Armenian massacres perished.” The Treaty of Sevres was replaced by the Treaty of Lausanne of 24 July 1923 that included a ‘Declaration of Amnesty’ for all offences committed between 1 August 1914 and 20 November 1922."

"The genocidal quality of the murderous campaigns against Greeks and Assyrians is obvious. Historians who realize that the Young Turks’ population and extermination policies have to be analysed together and understood as an entity are therefore often tempted to speak of a “Christian genocide.” This approach, however, is insofar inadequate as it ignores the Young Turks’ massive violence against non-Christians."

"The Young Turks’ overall aim was a demographic reorganization of the Ottoman Empire. All deportations were planned and supervised by the “Directorate for the Settlement of Tribes and Immigrants” that belonged to the Ottoman Ministry of the Interior. A relatively small number of government administrators were thus chiefly involved in the coordination of the murder and expulsion of Armenians, Greeks, Assyrians and other minority groups.29 Therefore, the isolated study and emphasis of a single group’s victimhood during the collapse of the Ottoman Empire fails to really understand Young Turks’ motives and aims or its grand design."

""The forgotten genocide" is how many scholars, journalists, and filmmakers refer to the Armenian, Assyrian, and Greek genocides under the Ottoman Turks during and after World War I."

"Pontic Greeks, Genocide of. The Pontic (sometimes Pontian) Greek genocide is the term applied to the massacres and deportations perpetrated against ethnic Greeks living Ottoman Empire at the hands ot the Young Turk government between 1914 and 1923. The name of people derives from the Greek word pontus , meaning “sea coast,” refers to the Greek population that had lived on the south—eastern coast of the Black that is, in northern Turkey, for three millennia. In a campaign reminiscent of the Armenian genocide that was being perpetrated at roughly the same time, the Pontic Greeks endured inumerable cruelties at the hands of the Turks. An estimated three hundred fifty-three thousand Pontic Grccks died,, many on forced marches through Anatolia and the Desert just Like the Armenians. Those who survived were exiled from Turkey. The surviving Greek community. centered in the city of Sinyrna (lzmir). was literally thrown into the sea in 1922, with the city razed anand thousands killed by the advancing Nationalist army. The destruction of the Pontic Greeks, and the forcible deportation that followed, had but a single planned outcome: the removal of all Greeks from Turkey. a successful campaign in that it destroyed this ancient Greek community forever, creating a diaspora that is never likely to be reestablished in its ancestral homeland. In parallel with the Armenian situation, successive Turkish governments have denied the Pontic genocide ever occurred; the most frequent official explanations given are the Greeks died as casualties of war, by famine brought about by the Russian invasion of Turkey, or a a result of civil disturbances."

"The Ottoman and Kemalist Nationalist massacres of the Anatolian Armenians, Assyrians, Greeks, and Yezidis, as well as of the Mesopotamian Assyrians and Yezidis, constituted genocide under the initial definition and international criminal application of the term.384"

"Turning to the scale of the anti-Greek genocide, it may well have equaled or exceeded the genocide of the Armenians..."

"Hilmar Kaiser deepened this notion and demonstrated in purely historical yet extremely detailed research that the treatment of the Armenians and Syriacs, nothing short of genocide, and the deportation of Kurds and Greeks were integral parts of the CUP scheme of social engineering. Arguing that this scheme envisioned the cultural assimilation of Muslims and exclusion of non-Muslims, he drew a parallel with wartime Nazi policies in Eastern Europe by aptly characterizing the project as "Generalplan Ost 1915"."

"During these meetings, the weaknesses of the Ottoman Empire were equated with the presence of clusters of non-Turkish people in strategic areas, such as in the Aegean area with its hundreds of thousands of Ottoman Greeks, or in the eastern provinces with its hundreds of thousands of Ottoman Armenians and Kurds. CUP loyalists decided that these “internal tumours” had to be removed, once and for all.41 Party ideologue Ziyaˆ Go¨kalp wrote extensively about the necessity of “Turkifying” the empire by instilling Turkish nationalism into the Ottoman Muslims, who according to him were oblivious of their national identity."

"In 1914, most businesses on the Aegean littoral were owned by Ottoman Greeks. When persuasion didn’t cause the desired effect, the CUP took recourse to more violent methods of Turkification of the economy. It sent emissaries such as Special Organization agent Kara Kemal to assist Responsible Secretary Celal Bayar (1883–1986) in Turkifying the economy of Smyrna/I˙zmir.51 In the summer of 1914 this political and nationalist persecution gained momentum as boycotts and expropriations escalated into kidnappings and assassinations of Greek businessmen and community leaders, and even wholesale deportations of villages.52 The fact that after this terror campaign many Ottoman Greeks opted to emigrate to Chios or Greece, abandoning their territory to the benefit of Ottoman Muslims, was celebrated by the CUP as an administrative success. Turkification was beginning to yield its fruits at a time when the outbreak of the war foreshadowed bad times for the population of the eastern provinces."

"The Turks had used genocide against the Greeks and Armenians but did not have enough time to finish them off completely. The Kurds revolted in 1925, demanding independence or autonomy."

"First of all, the Ottoman Empire itself, now ruled by the nationalist Young Turks Committee, began to implement a deadly policy, which aimed at wiping out the non-Turkish elements in the Empire and culminated in the genocide of the Armenians and Greeks, particularly those living in the Pontos region"

"The Genocide Convention of 1948 and other United Nations Conventions strengthen the claims of genocide victims, including the Greeks, Assyrians and Armenians of Asia Minor."

"If there is a god, he will have to beg my forgiveness."

"The catastrophe which recently befell the Jewish people – the massacre of millions of Jews in Europe – was another clear demonstration of the urgency of solving the problem of its homelessness by re-establishing in Eretz-Israel the Jewish State, which would open the gates of the homeland wide to every Jew and confer upon the Jewish people the status of a fully privileged member of the comity of nations. Survivors of the Nazi holocaust in Europe, as well as Jews from other parts of the world, continued to migrate to Eretz-Israel, undaunted by difficulties, restrictions and dangers, and never ceased to assert their right to a life of dignity, freedom and honest toil in their national homeland."

"Like it or not, the [Holocaust] must and will dominate future events. Its centrality in the creative endeavors of our contemporaries remains undisputed. Philosophers and social scientists, psychologists and moralists, theologians and artists: all have termed it a watershed in the annals of mankind. What was comprehensible before Treblinka is comprehensible no longer. After Treblinka, man's ability to cope with his condition was shattered; he was pushed to his limits and beyond. Whatever has happened since must therefore be judged in the light of Treblinka. Forgetfulness is no solution."

"Hacker: That (French agricultural protectionism) certainly doesn't apply to the Germans."

"Sir Humphrey: No, no. They went in (the EEC) to cleanse themselves of genocide and apply for readmission to the human race."

"Complain, complain, that's all you've done ever since we lost, If it's not the crucifixion then it's the holocaust."

"They will never forgive us for the evil they've done us."

"The Nazi death machine worked economically, scientifically and euphemistically. In a word, it was very, very modern."

"[I]n spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart. I simply can’t build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery, and death. I see the world gradually being turned into a wilderness, I hear the ever approaching thunder, which will destroy us too, I can feel the sufferings of millions and yet, if I look up into the heavens, I think that it will all come right, that this cruelty too will end, and that peace and tranquility will return again."

"As for the Jews, well, I can tell you quite frankly that one way or another we have to put an end to them... In January, there is going to be an important meeting in Berlin to discuss this question...Whatever its outcome, a great Jewish emigration will commence. But what is going to happen to these Jews? Do you imagine there will be settlement villages for them in the Ostland? In Berlin we were told: Why are you making all this trouble for us? There is nothing we can do with them here in the Ostland or in the Reich Commissariat. Liquidate them yourselves!"

"If I were a Jew and were born in Germany and earned my livelihood there, I would claim Germany as my home even as the tallest gentile German may, and challenge him to shoot me or cast me in the dungeon; I would refuse to be expelled or to submit to discriminating treatment. And for doing this, I should not wait for the fellow Jews to join me in civil resistance but would have confidence that in the end the rest are bound to follow my example. If one Jew or all the Jews were to accept the prescription here offered, he or they cannot be worse off than now. And suffering voluntarily undergone will bring them an inner strength and joy which no number of resolutions of sympathy passed in the world outside Germany can. Indeed, even if Britain, France and America were to declare hostilities against Germany, they can bring no inner joy, no inner strength. The calculated violence of Hitler may even result in a general massacre of the Jews by way of his first answer to the declaration of such hostilities. But if the Jewish mind could be prepared for voluntary suffering, even the massacre I have imagined could be turned into a day of thanksgiving and joy that Jehovah had wrought deliverance of the race even at the hands of the tyrant. For to the godfearing, death has no terror. It is a joyful sleep to be followed by a waking that would be all the more refreshing for the long sleep."

"Endlösung der Judenfrage (Final Solution to the Jewish Question)"

"The road to Auschwitz was built by hate, but paved with indifference."

"Every movement that seeks to enslave a country, every dictatorship or potential dictatorship, needs some minority group as a scapegoat which it can blame for the nation's troubles and use as a justification of its own demands for dictatorial powers. In Soviet Russia, the scapegoat was the bourgeoisie; in Nazi Germany, it was the Jewish people."

"What is abnormal is that I am normal. That I survived the Holocaust and went on to love beautiful girls, to talk, to write, to have toast and tea and live my life — that is what is abnormal."

"The duty of the survivor is to bear testimony to what happened... You have to warn people that these things can happen, that evil can be unleashed. Race hatred, violence, idolatries—they still flourish."

"The ethnic and religious balance that could have contributed to the well being of all the inhabitants of northern Mesopotamia was terminated because their Islamic neighbours lost the will to co-exist with the Christian Assyrians. This development claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands of innocent people and ultimately contributed to driving the remaining Assyrians from the land of their ancestors."

"While the death toll in the trenches of Western Europe were close to 2 million by the summer of 1915, the extermination of innocent civilians in Turkey (the Armenians, but also Syrian and Assyrian Christians and large portions of the Greek population, especially the Greeks of Pontos, or Black Sea region) was reaching 1 million."

"[T]he East Syrians [Assyrians] were twice the victims of a general genocide - first in the late fourteenth century by Tamerlane, and then in 1915/1918 by the Turks and Kurds."

"A very rough estimate of the total of Ottoman Assyrian dead as a result of massacre before and after April–May 1915, and of wartime starvation and the conditions of flight, might be in the region of 20,000–30,000, to which should be added perhaps 7,000 Persian Assyrians."

"The full-scale Ottoman invasion of Persian Azerbeijan at the beginning of 1915 was accompanied by killings of both Armenians and Assyrians...."

"Continuing working on a book on Danish-Armenian relations of course during the Armenian Genocide, but also before and after that spanning from 1900 to 1940, and as I work in genocide I’m thinking of writing about other aspects of Young Turk policies like the destruction of the Ottoman Greeks and the Assyrians."

"The bloodstained annals of the East contain no record of massacres more unprovoked, more widespread or more terrible than those perpetrated by the Turkish Government upon the Christians of Anatolia and Armenia in 1915. It was the sufferings of the Armenians that chiefly drew the attention of Britain and America because they were the most numerous among the ecclesiastical bodies, and the slaughter was, therefore, on a larger scale. But the minor communities, such as the Nestorian and Assyro-Chaldean churches, were equally the victims of the plan for exterminating Christianity, root and branch,. although the Turks had never ventured to allege that these communities had given any ground of offense."

"It is believed that in Turkey between 1913 and 1922, under the successive regimes of the Young Turks and of Mustafa Kemal (Atatürk), more than 3.5 million Armenian, Assyrian and Greek Christians were massacred in a state-organized and state-sponsored campaign of destruction and genocide, aiming at wiping out from the emerging Turkish Republic its native Christian populations. This Christian Holocaust is viewed as the precursor to the Jewish Holocaust in WWII. To this day, the Turkish government ostensibly denies having committed this genocide."

"Turkish denialism of the genocide of 1.5 million Armenians is official, driven, constant, rampant and increasing each year since the events of 1915 to 1922. It is state-funded, with special departments and units in overseas missions whose sole"

"… Haydar Bey, the Governor of Mosul, came with Turkish units and cannons.... The Turks occupied our villages and burned them down. Now Assyrians live on the mountain peaks.... They are dying from hunger, because they have no food. We have no bullets, we are surrounded by the Turks, and we have no solution."

"The ghastly slope was crowned by thousands of half-nude and still bleeding corpses, lying in heaps, or interlaced in death’s final embrace. … Overcome by the hideous spectacle, and jumping our horses over the mountains of cadavers, which obstructed our passage, I entered Siirt with my men. There we found the police and the populace engaged in sacking the homes of the Christians. … I met various sub-Governors of the province … who had directed the massacre in person. From their talk I realized at once that the thing had been arranged the day before … Meanwhile I had taken up my lodging in a handsome house belonging to Nestorians, which had been sacked like all the rest. There was nothing left in the way of furniture except a few broken chairs. Walls and floors were stained with blood."

"WHEREAS the denial of genocide is widely recognized as the final stage of genocide, enshrining impunity for the perpetrators of genocide, and demonstrably paving the way for future genocides;"

":WHEREAS the Ottoman genocide against minority populations during and following the First World War is usually depicted as a genocide against Armenians alone, with little recognition of the qualitatively similar genocides against other Christian minorities of the Ottoman Empire;"

":BE IT RESOLVED that it is the conviction of the International Association of Genocide Scholars that the Ottoman campaign against Christian minorities of the Empire between 1914 and 1923 constituted a genocide against Armenians, Assyrians, and Pontian and Anatolian Greeks."

":BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED that the Association calls upon the government of Turkey to acknowledge the genocides against these populations, to issue a formal apology, and to take prompt and meaningful steps toward restitution."

"The Assyrian population throughout the empire was subjected to massacre, deportation, dismemberment, torture, and other atrocities. Whole cities were depopulated, and, when not killed outright, the inhabitants were send on the aforementioned death marches."

"Historians, perhaps concerned not to magnify these events by comparison with those of 1915-16, tend to avoid the term genocide to describe them. In my formulation, however, these events would"

"Unlike the Armenian case, in each of these other instances the scope, scale and intensity of the killings was limited, though this does not rule out comparison...The persistence of genocide or near-genocidal incidents from the 1890s through the 1990s, committed by Ottoman and successor Turkish and Iraqi states against Armenian, Kurdish, Assyrian, and Pontic Greek communities in Eastern Anatolia, is striking...."

"Many of our young men [in Seert] tried to escape the massacre by hiding themselves or disguising themselves as women. However, they were usually discovered. They were then dragged through the streets until they died, bound hand and foot, heads towards the ground. The women sought protection under the roof of houses and formed groups of 30 to 40 in order to be able to better protect themselves against trespasses. One day the Muslims began to gather all children between the ages of 6 and 15 and led them to the police commissioner’s office. From there these poor little children were brought to a mountainous area called Ras el-Hadjar and killed; their corpses were thrown into a mountain gorge."

"I myself stayed for six months in Seert serving the governor, whose predecessor had ordered the massacre. The Turks of the town attested to their joy that all the Christians in Seert had been annihilated and expelled."

"A large part of the deportees were killed in the villages, which were Shukri’s property, and the rest near the town bridge. The murderers took the victims’ belongings. Suchproceedings occurred several times, together with deportation marches from Diyarbakir.Many Chaldeans from our parish were among the victims. Meanwhile, the central government in Constantinople issued an amnesty for the Syrians and the Chaldeans. Only a small portion of them were still alive to benefit from it."

"The massacre of all the Diyarbakir Christians lasted four months."

"Finally, I should briefly mention the Young Turk slaughter of Armenians, Nestorians, and other Christians during their futile invasion of Caucasia and Northern Persia.... [T]hroughout the [Urmia] region they also exterminated most of the Nestorians, perhaps 47,000 of them."

"To this day, Turkey rejects the charge of intentional destruction of the Armenians, a stubborn refusal to acknowledge a historical truth that may ultimately cost it membership in the European UnionFN11."

"The genocidal quality of the murderous campaigns against Greeks and Assyrians is obvious. Historians who realize that the"

"The Young Turks’ overall aim was a demographic reorganization of the Ottoman Empire. All deportations were planned and supervised by the “Directorate for the Settlement of Tribes and Immigrants” that belonged to the Ottoman Ministry of the Interior. A relatively small number of government administrators were thus chiefly involved in the coordination of the murder and expulsion of Armenians, Greeks, Assyrians and other minority groups.29"

"The Chaldean diocese of Jazire, including its archbishops, priests and residents, has been completely exterminated. Only two priests, one from Peshkhabur [Fayshkhabour] and one from Guerke, managed to escape with 400 or 500 people and were the last to arrive in Mosul. His Holiness, the patriarch, has taken them under patriarchal protection."

"The Ottoman and Kemalist Nationalist massacres of the Anatolian Armenians, Assyrians, Greeks, and Yezidis, as well as of the Mesopotamian Assyrians and Yezidis, constituted genocide under the initial definition and international criminal application of the term."

"Hilmar Kaiser deepened this notion and demonstrated in pioneering research that the treatment of the Armenians and Syriacs [Assyrians], nothing short of genocidal destruction, and the deportation of Kurds and Greeks were integral parts of the CUP scheme of social engineering."

"2. At about the same time, the Nestorians in eastern Kurdistan were expelled from their homes by Turkish troops from Mosul after offering brave resistance, and they were partially destroyed. Their fields and homes were laid to waste. The survivors fled to the Russians and are now fighting in their ranks against Turkey. 3. Khalil Bey’s campaign to north Persia resulted in the massacre of his Armenian and Syrian (Assyrian) battalions and the expulsion of the Armenian, Syrian (Assyrian) and Persian populations from north Persia. They leave behind a great bitterness towards Turkey."

"Including refugees from Turkey and the Armenians, there were in Urmia, at the beginning of 1915, not far from 85,000 Christians. The Syrians or Nestorians include not only members of the old Nestorian Church but also Protestant members of the Russian Orthodox Church, and Roman Catholics or Chaldeans, as the last are generally called.... The Salamas Christians (except about 800), most of the Christians of Tabriz, and eight or ten thousand from Urmia fled with the retreating Russians. They left on the shortest notice, without preparation and in the heart of winter. Many perished by the way, mothers dying in childbirth, old men and women and little children falling by the wayside from exhaustion. This fleeing army ofrefugees, increased in numbers by several thousand from the regions in Turkey between Khoi and Van, passed over the Russian border and scattered in the villages and towns of Trans-Caucasia. Many of them died of disease due to the privations and exposures of flight and life as refugees"

"Do not worry over my death--it is God's will--I am going to protect the rights of the Assyrians at the hands of the biggest and greatest Judge. The books and the work I had started about our nation's education remain unfinished. I am afraid they will be destroyed in the very short time...."

"The Genocide Convention of 1948 and other United Nations Conventions strengthen the claims of genocide victims, including the Greeks, Assyrians and Armenians of Asia Minor."

"Our government has failed to denounce the suppression of democracy. Our government has failed to denounce atrocities. Our government has failed to take forceful measures to protect its citizens while at the same time bending over backwards to placate the West Pak[istan] dominated government and to lessen any deservedly negative international public relations impact against them. Our government has evidenced what many will consider moral bankruptcy,(...) But we have chosen not to intervene, even morally, on the grounds that the Awami conflict, in which unfortunately the overworked term genocide is applicable, is purely an internal matter of a sovereign state. Private Americans have expressed disgust. We, as professional civil servants, express our dissent with current policy and fervently hope that our true and lasting interests here can be defined and our policies redirected."

"It is a failure not only for the United Nations; it is a failure for the international community. And all of us are responsible for this failure ... it is a genocide which has been committed. More than 200,000 people have been killed and the international community is still discussing what ought to be done."

"Ah, but this time it was not so easy. This time it was not all one way. The Russian Armies and all the peoples of the Russian Republic have rallied to the defence of their hearths and homes. For the first time Nazi blood has flowed in a fearful flood. Certainly a million and a half, perhaps two millions of Nazi cannon-fodder, have bitten the dust of the endless plains of Russia. The tremendous battle rages along nearly two thousand miles of front. The Russians fight with magnificent devotion. Not only that, our generals who have visited the Russian front line report with admiration the efficiency of their military organization and the excellence of their equipment. The aggressor is surprised, startled, staggered. For the first time in his experience mass murder has become unprofitable. He retaliates by the most frightful cruelties. As his armies advance, whole districts are being exterminated. Scores of thousands, literally scores of thousands of executions in cold blood are being perpetrated by the German police troops upon the Russian patriots who defend their native soil. Since the Mongol invasions of Europe in the sixteenth century there has never been methodical, merciless butchery on such a scale or approaching such a scale. And this is but the beginning. Famine and pestilence have yet to follow in the bloody ruts of Hitler's tanks. We are in the presence of a crime without a name."

"How could so many reputable and responsible churchmen have lent their support, even if only passively, to the perpetration of such crimes as genocide? What fever seized so many millions of German Christians, both Evangelical [Lutheran] and Catholic, in those few short years of Nazi tyranny? ... The Church was unprepared and totally unsuited to cope with the situation."

"How could I deny the power of evil when I see what is occurring and what has occurred since I was born: The second world war, with over 40 million victims; Auschwitz and the death camps; the genocide in Cambodia; the bloody tyranny of the Ceauşescu regime; torture as a system of government in many places throughout the world. The list of horrors is endless. . . . So I believe that we are justified in calling such acts ‘diabolic,’ not that they are inspired by a Devil with horns and cloven feet but by a Devil that is the symbol of the spirit and power of evil operating in the world."

"Sometimes I have feared that, in some wild paroxysm of rage, the white race, forgetful of the claims of humanity and the precepts of the Christian religion, will proceed to slaughter..."

"Uzza heard their verdict, and he said: "O Lord of all the worlds! I know that my people deserve the punishment Thou has decreed, but may it please Thee to deal with them according to Thy attribute of mercy, and take pity upon the work of Thy hands, for Thy tender mercies are over all Thy works!" Almost the Lord had yielded to Uzza's entreaties, when Michael gave a sign to Gabriel that made him fly to Egypt swiftly and fetch thence a brick for which a Hebrew child had been used as a mortar. Holding this incriminating object in his had, Gabriel stepped into the presence of God, and said: "O Lord of the world! Wilt Thou have compassion with the accursed nation that has slaughtered Thy children so cruelly?" Then the Lord turned Himself away from His attribute of mercy, and seating Himself upon His throne of justice He resolved to drown the Egyptians in the sea."

"In 1973, CIA-psychological operatives in Chile scrawled graffiti on the sides of buildings that read "Jakarta se acerca" – "Jakarta is coming." This was a reference to the in Indonesia which overthrew Sukarno and made the country safe for US corporations like . The American and Indonesian governments have never acknowledged the truth of those events. But we must confront these sorts of dark truths if we are to move forward as a civilization."

"Genocide lies at the core of Western imperialism. It is not unique to Israel. It is not unique to the Nazis. It is the building block of Western domination. The humanitarian interventionists who insist we should bomb and occupy other nations because we embody goodness — although they promote military intervention only when it is perceived to be in our national interest — are useful idiots of the war machine and global imperialists. They live in an Alice-in-Wonderland fairytale where the rivers of blood we spawn make the world a happier and better place. They are the smiley faces of genocide. You can watch them on your screens. You can listen to them spout their pseudo-morality in the White House and in Congress. They are always wrong. And they never go away."

"We dominate the globe not because of our superior virtues, but because we are the most efficient killers on the planet. The millions of victims of racist imperial projects in countries such as Mexico, China, India, the Congo, Kenya and Vietnam are deaf to the fatuous claims by Jews that their victimhood is unique. So are Black, Brown and Native Americans. They also suffered holocausts, but these holocausts remain minimised or unacknowledged by their western perpetrators."

"Gaza is only the start. The new world order is one where the weak are obliterated by the strong, the rule of law does not exist, genocide is an instrument of control and barbarism is triumphant."

"Genocide can be hidden for a while with friendly visits, but one day it will be revealed."

"Can someone who has ignored a genocide at home truly feel empathy for suffering elsewhere?"

"It may well be that when Sapines encountered Neanderthals, the result was the first and most significant ethnic-cleansing campaign in history."

"We would be deceiving both ourselves and the people if we concealed from the masses the necessity of a desperate, bloody war of extermination, as the immediate task of the coming revolutionary action."

"Overt debates about genocide have been relatively slow in developing, in part because of the creation of a TRC, mandated with collecting the ‘truth’ about the IRS system while similarly engaging in ‘reconciliation’ (a contested term) with settler Canadians. While Canada's history wars may seem slow in getting off the ground, the TRC's more ‘balanced’ approach and wide-ranging engagement with non-Aboriginal societal actors may have a greater effect in stimulating national awareness than in the United States and Australia."

"Even before the and the annihilation of almost all the territory's infrastructure, the situation there was much worse. According to the World Bank, the water supply in Gaza has been at "crisis levels" since 2005. UNICEF reported that in 2020 only 10 percent of the population in Gaza had direct access to clean and safe drinking water. Palestinians in Gaza were prevented from drilling wells and importing materials such as cement and iron needed to repair water infrastructure. At the same time, the chronic electricity deficit also heavily impaired functional water management. These past years have shown that economic dependency can easily be transformed into a genocidal instrument. After October 2023, Israel cut off electricity to Gaza, making the of water dependent on fuel, which was also subjected to repeated blockades of one hundred days for longer. This catastrophic man-made drought has meant that thousands of children have died of thirst and suffered from diarrhea, scabies and polio."

"India’s 1971 armed intervention in East Pakistan—undertaken for a mixture of reasons—is widely and fairly regarded as one of the world’s most successful cases of humanitarian intervention against genocide. Indeed, India in effect applied what we would now call the ‘responsibility to protect’ (R2P) principle, and applied it well."

"What we’re seeing in Gaza now is much worse because the United States and the United Kingdom and some other Western powers have actually been complicit in the . That’s a separate crime under the , the crime of complicity. And that’s because the United States, as you know, during this genocide, has been actively providing economic, military intelligence, diplomatic support. It’s been using its veto at the Security Council to stop a ceasefire. And after each veto, we’ve seen thousands and thousands of more Palestinians lose their lives in the genocide."

"It is called a genocide. That's what it was... No other way to describe it and that's the way it needs to be described in the history books. And so I'm here to say the following: I'm sorry on behalf of the state of California... It's humbling for me, having believed I was educated, to have been so ignorant of our past, to have been so unaware of how ashamed I should be, as a Californian, 5th generation... I'm sorry that we've had generations of your kids and grandkids, your ancestors, that have had to suffer through indignities, lack of capacity, empathy and understanding..."

"Utopian ideologies invite genocide for two reasons. One is that they set up a pernicious utilitarian calculus. In a utopia, everyone is happy forever, so its moral value is infinite. Most of us agree that it is ethically permissible to divert a runaway trolley that threatens to kill five people onto a side track where it would kill only one. But suppose it were a hundred million lives one could save by diverting the trolley, or a billion, or - projecting into the indefinite future - infinitely many. How many people would it be permissible to sacrifice to attain that infinite good? A few million can seem like a pretty good bargain. Not only that, but consider the people who learn about the promise of a perfect world yet nonetheless oppose it. They are the only things standing in the way of a plan that could lead to infinite goodness. How evil are they? You do the math."

"We cannot forget Hitler's demonstration that genocide at home can become wider massacre abroad, that domestic genocide develops into the larger genocide that is predatory war."

"In the European century that began in the 1840s from Engels's article of 1849 down to the death of Hitler, everyone who advocated genocide called himself a socialist, and no exception has been found."

"The physical and cultural genocide of American Indian tribes is and was mostly about patriarchal fear of gynocracy. The particularly, but also the Catholic, Quaker, and other , like their secular counterparts, could not tolerate peoples who allowed women to occupy prominent positions and decision-making capacity at every level of society. Wives telling husbands and brothers whether to buy or sell an item, daughters telling fathers whom they could and could not murder, empresses attending parleys with colonizers and being treated with deference by male leaders did not sit well with the invaders. The colonizers saw (and rightly) that as long as women held unquestioned power of such magnitude, attempts at total conquest of the continents were bound to fail. In the centuries since the first attempts at colonization in the early 1500s, the invaders have exerted every effort to remove Indian women from every position of authority, to obliterate all records pertaining to gynocratic social systems, and to ensure that no American and few American Indians would remember that gynocracy was the primary social order of Indian America prior to 1800."

"The genocide practiced against the tribes is aimed systematically at the dissolution of ritual tradition. In the past this has included prohibition of ceremonial practices throughout North and Meso-America, Christianization, enforced loss of languages, reeducation of tribal peoples through government-supported and schools that Indian children have been forced to attend, renaming of the traditional ritual days as Christian feast days, missionization (incarceration) of tribal people, deprivation of language, severe disruption of cultures and economic and resource bases of those cultures, and the degradation of the status of women as central to the spiritual and ritual life of the tribes."

"Within one century after Columbus' arrival, the entire native American population of the Caribbean islands was exterminated, probably 8 million people. In continental Latin America, only 12 million people survived after a century of colonization - while the population in 1492 is estimated at up to 90 million. True, many died because of new diseases which the colonizers had involuntarily brought with them, and many died not by massacre but under the hardships of slavery (which also happened to many prisoners in the Nazi work camps), but the number of literally massacred people still amounted to millions. In North America too, the 2 million native inhabitants of Patagonia (southern Chile and Argentina) were gradually but systematically killed to the last, as were all the inhabitants of Tasmania in a single campaign, and most of the aboriginals of Australia: in these cases, the genocide was entirely intentional."

"Overt debates about genocide have been relatively slow in developing, in part because of the creation of a TRC, mandated with collecting the ‘truth’ about the IRS system while similarly engaging in ‘reconciliation’ (a contested term) with settler Canadians. While Canada's history wars may seem slow in getting off the ground, the TRC's more ‘balanced’ approach and wide-ranging engagement with non-Aboriginal societal actors may have a greater effect in stimulating national awareness than in the United States and Australia."

"It is called a genocide. That's what it was... No other way to describe it and that's the way it needs to be described in the history books. And so I'm here to say the following: I'm sorry on behalf of the state of California... It's humbling for me, having believed I was educated, to have been so ignorant of our past, to have been so unaware of how ashamed I should be, as a Californian, 5th generation... I'm sorry that we've had generations of your kids and grandkids, your ancestors, that have had to suffer through indignities, lack of capacity, empathy and understanding..."

"When Europeans reached the Americas, they recognized its enormous potential in gold and silver and tropical produce. But that potential could not be made a reality without adequate labor supplies. The indigenous Indian population could not withstand new European diseases such as smallpox, nor could they bear the organized toil of slave plantations and slave mines, having barely emerged from the hunting stage. That is why in islands like Cuba and , the local Indian population was virtually wiped out by the white invaders."

"And may I ask you, Europeans, what country you have ever raised to better conditions? Wherever you have found weaker races, you have exterminated them by the roots, as it were. You have settled on their lands, and they are gone for ever. What is the history of your America, your Australia, and New Zealand, your Pacific islands and South Africa? Where are those aboriginal races there today? They are all exterminated, you have killed them outright, as if they were wild beasts. It is only where you have not the power to do so, and there only, that other nations are still alive."

"If international finance Jewry inside and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, the result will not be the Bolshevization of the earth and thereby the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe!"

"A punitive expedition must come against the Jews in Russia. A punitive expedition which will provide the same fate for them that every murderer and criminal must expect. Death sentence and execution. The Jews in Russia must be killed. They must be exterminated root and branch."

"[If the British won the war] the German people, man, woman, and child would be exterminated [ausgerottet]. . . . The Jew would be wading in blood. Funeral pyres would be built on which the Jews would burn us... we want to prevent this. Hence it should be rather the Jews who fry, rather they who should burn, they who should starve, they who should be exterminated."

"Who should die, the Germans or the Jews? You know what your eternal enemy and opponent intends for you. There is only one instrument against his plans for annihilation."

"By unleashing this war, world Jewry completely misjudged the forces at its disposal. Now it is suffering a gradual process of annihilation that it had intended for us and that it would have unleashed against us without hesitation if it had had the power to do so. It is now perishing as a result of its own law: An eye for and eye, and a tooth for a tooth. In this historical dispute every Jew is our enemy, whether he vegetates in a Polish ghetto orscrapes out his parasitic existence in Berlin or Hamburg, or blows the trumpets of war in New York or Washington. Due to their birth and race, all Jews belong to an international conspiracy against National Socialist Germany. They wish for its defeat and annihilation and do everything in their power to help bring [them] about."

"Comrades, believe me. I’m not painting too grim a picture. It is bitter for me, bitterly serious. The Jew is the great danger to humanity. If we don’t succeed in exterminating him [ihn auszurotten], then we will lose the war. It’s not enough to bring him someplace [ihn irgend wohin zu bringen]. That would be as if one wanted to lock up a louse somewhere in a cage. (Laughter) They would find a way out and again they come out from under and make you itch again. (Laughter) You have to annihilate [vernichten] them you have to exterminate them [for what] they have done to humanity . . . (interrupted by ongoing applause)."

"If we lose the war, you [Germans] will be annihilated [vernichtet]. . . . This is not the Second World War. This a great race war. It’s about whether the German and Aryan will survive or if the Jew will rule the world, and that is why we are fighting abroad."

"[W]e had the moral right vis-à-vis our people to annihilate this people [the Jews] which wanted to annihilate us."

"These people called Inyenzis are now on their way to attack us.... I am telling you, and I am not lying, it is...they only want to exterminate us. They only want to exterminate us: they have no other aim... Are we really waiting till they come to exterminate us?"

"I think we are fast approaching what I would call dawn … dawn, because—for the young people who may not know— dawn is when the day breaks. Thus when day breaks, when that day comes, we will be heading for a brighter future, for the day when we will be able to say “There isn’t a single Inyenzi left in the country.” The term Inyenzi will then be forever forgotten, and disappear for good."

"The day of judgment will not come until Muslims fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jews will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say ‘O Muslims, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.'"

"[The Jews] suffer from a mental disorder, because they are thieves and aggressors.… They want to present themselves to the world as if they have rights, but in fact, they are foreign bacteria – a microbe unparalleled in the world. It’s not me who says this. The Koran itself says they have no parallel: “You shall find the strongest men in enmity to the believers to be the Jews.” May He [Allah] annihilate this filthy people who have neither religion nor conscience. I condemn whoever believes in normalizing relations with them, whoever supports sitting down with them, and whoever believes they are human beings. They are not human beings. They are not people. They have no religion, no conscience, and no moral values."

"Why did France, in 1253, expel and uproot the Jewish entity, which was represented by the ghetto? Why did they expel them? Because they sucked the blood of the French, because they shed the blood of the French, slaughtered them, stole their money, and conspired against them. At the end of the day, the French had no choice but to expel them in 1253. [Al-Zahar goes on to make the same assertion about the expulsion of Jews from other medieval European countries, from ancient Egypt, and from Germany under Hitler]... The series of expulsions continues to this day. Blood continues to be shed, martyrs continue to fall, our sons continue to hoist the banner high, and Allah willing, their expulsion from Palestine in its entirety is certain to come. We are no weaker or less honorable than the peoples that expelled and annihilated the Jews. The day we expel them is drawing near.... We have learned the lesson—there is no place for you among us, and you have no future among the nations of the world. You are headed to annihilation."

"The [Jews] are brought in droves to Palestine so that the Palestinians—and the Islamic nation behind them—will have the honor of annihilating the evil of this gang.... All the predators, all the birds of prey, all the dangerous reptiles and insects, and all the lethal bacteria are far less dangerous than the Jews.... In just a few years, all the Zionists and all the settlers will realize that their arrival in Palestine was for the purpose of the great massacre, by means of which Allah wants to relieve humanity of their evil."

"Child host (Rawan): “Tulin, why do you want to be a police officer? Like who?”"

"Girl (Tulin): “Like my uncle...”"

"Child host: “OK, so what does a policeman do?”"

"Nahul (adult in giant bee costume): “He catches thieves and people who make trouble.”"

"Child host: “And shoots Jews. Right?”"

"Girl: “Yes.”"

"Child host: “You want to be like him?”"

"[Girl nods]"

"Child host: “Allah willing, when you grow up.”"

"Girl: “So that I can shoot Jews.”"

"[Nahul the bee cheers]"

"Child host: “All of them? All of them?”"

"Child host: “Good.”"

"[G]o out and slaughter and kill Jews... [Palestinians] must attack every Jew who exists in the globe, slaughter and kill them."

"Upon conquering the region of Sinjar in Wilāyat Nīnawā, the Islamic State faced a population of Yazidis, a pagan minority existent for ages in regions of Iraq and Shām. Their continual existence to this day is a matter that Muslims should question as they will be asked about it on Judgement Day."

"Israel "must be wiped off the map""

"We know that the harming or killing of men and women is wrong, and we are reluctant consciously to do what we know to be wrong. But when particular men and women [and we must add, sadly, children] are thought of merely as representatives of a class, which has previously been defined as evil and personified in the shape of a devil, then the reluctance to hurt or murder disappears."

"It was impossible that hundreds of thousands of people should commit so many crimes unless they had been incited to do so .... He asked how, in those circumstances, the inciters and organizers of the crime should be allowed to escape punishment, when they were the ones really responsible for the atrocities committed. The peoples of the world would indeed be puzzled if the Committee, basing its decision on purely political arguments of doubtful validity, were to state that the instigators of genocide, those who incited others to commit the concrete acts of genocide, were to remain unpunished."

"Genocide is the foremost cause of preventable death and suffering in the last hundred years. Governmental incitement and use of hate language is a recognized predictor of genocide, and incitement to commit genocide is a crime in violation of the Genocide Convention. Indifference to incitement and inaction by the outside world are recognized predictors and risk factors forgenocide. Denial of previous genocides is another risk factor contributing to future genocides."

"[F]ree speech doctrine seeks to protect individuals against state repression, but incitement to genocide is speech in the service of the state, since genocide is a major organizational feat that so far has generally been carried out by state employees, albeit often aided by civilians."

"Speakers charged with international speech crimes have generally articulated the most extreme animus and conscious intent to harm, and gone beyond mere insult, libel and slander to incite others to commit mass atrocities. Moreover, their utterances usually occur in a context of an armed conflict, genocide and a widespread or systematic attack on a civilian population."

"The propagandists who lent themselves to this evil mission of instigation and incitement are more guilty than the credulous and callous minions who headed firing squads or operated the gas chambers."

"Hitler's "prophecy" of January 30, 1939, comprised the core of Nazism’s narrative of World War II. A historical subject called "international Jewry" had launched World War II with the intent of bringing about the "Bolshevization" of the world. It would fail. Instead, Nazi Germany would retaliate for this aggression and annihilate the Jews. It would wage a "war" against the Jews in response to the "war" the Jews had started. This reversed logic of self-righteous retaliation constituted the core of Nazi antisemitic propaganda between 1939 and 1945."

"The Nazis were explicit about the status of their victims. They were Untermenschen— subhumans— and as such were excluded from the system of moral rights and obligations that bind humankind together. It’s wrong to kill a person, but permissible to exterminate a rat… . Jews were the main victims of this genocidal project… . Jewish people posed a deadly threat to all that was noble in humanity. [These] putative enemies of civilization were represented as parasitic organisms— as leeches, lice, bacteria, or vectors of contagion… . Sometimes the Nazis thought of their enemies as vicious, bloodthirsty predators rather than parasites."

"It was Dietrich, the Poisoned Pen, who led the press propaganda phases of the program which incited hatred and conditioned public opinion for mass persecutions on political, racial, and religious grounds. Heretofore, Dietrich’s role has been ignored by historians, but actually he, more than anyone else, was responsible for presenting to the German people the justification for liquidating the Jews."

"It is thus clear that a well thought- out, oft- repeated, persistent campaign to arouse the hatred of the German people against Jews was fostered and directed by the press department and its press chief, Dietrich… . The only reason for this campaign was to blunt the sensibilities of the people regarding the campaign of persecution and murder which was being carried out…"

"The eighth commandment’s dictate, “Hutus should stop having mercy on Tutsis,” was explained in graphic terms by one of the authors of this poisonous creed, Leon Mugesera, a friend of [Rwandan President Juvénal] Habyarimana: “We the people are obliged to take responsibility to wipe out this scum"."

"The propaganda campaign achieved its goals with respect to both the Bosnian Serb and the [non-Serbs]. While influencing the Bosnian Serb population to perceive and treat the non-Serb inhabitants as enemies and preparing the Bosnian Serb population for the crimes that were committed later, it also instilled fear among the non-Serb population and created an atmosphere of terror, which contributed to the subsequent mass exodus of non-Serbs."

"I don't think there was any overall Reich policy to kill the Jews. If there was, they would have been killed and there would not be now so many millions of survivors. And believe me, I am glad for every survivor that there was."

"The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them. For quite six years the English admirers of Hitler contrived not to learn of the existence of Dachau and Buchenwald. And those who are loudest in denouncing the German concentration camps are often quite unaware, or only very dimly aware, that there are also concentration camps in Russia. Huge events like the Ukraine famine of 1933, involving the deaths of millions of people, have actually escaped the attention of the majority of English russophiles. Many English people have heard almost nothing about the extermination of German and Polish Jews during the present war. Their own antisemitism has caused this vast crime to bounce off their consciousness. In nationalist thought there are facts which are both true and untrue, known and unknown. A known fact may be so unbearable that it is habitually pushed aside and not allowed to enter into logical processes, or on the other hand it may enter into every calculation and yet never be admitted as a fact, even in one's own mind."

"The perpetrators of genocide dig up the mass graves, burn the bodies, try to cover up the evidence and intimidate the witnesses. They deny that they committed any crimes, and often blame what happened on the victims. They block investigations of the crimes, and continue to govern until driven from power by force, when they flee into exile. There they remain with impunity, like Pol Pot or Idi Amin, unless they are captured and a tribunal is established to try them."

"Following the physical destruction of a people and their material culture, memory is all that is left and is targeted as the last victim. Complete annihilation of a people requires the banishment of recollection and suffocation of remembrance. Falsification, deception and half-truths reduce what was to what might have been or perhaps what was not at all.""

"[In] the act of denying this historical truth [of the Holocaust], the deniers denigrate the Jewish people and memories of historical occurrences, suggest that those who accept the truth of the Holocaust lie, and relativize the suffering incurred. Thus, the act of Holocaust denial is not simply an expression of belief in what did or did not happen historically, given that the Holocaust has been historically verified. It is an act of vilification that denigrates and harms."

"Negationism means the denial of historical crimes against humanity. It is not a reinterpretation of known facts, but the denial of known facts. The term negationism has gained currency as the name of a movement to deny a specific crime against humanity, the Nazi genocide on the Jews in 1941–45, also known as the holocaust (Greek: complete burning) or the Shoah (Hebrew: disaster). Negationism is mostly identified with the effort at re-writing history in such a way that the fact of the Holocaust is omitted."

"To this day, the Turkish government refuses to acknowledge the Armenian genocide. This is strange, since the historical evidence of what happened is plentiful. Western observers like the US ambassador in Constantinople, Henry Morgenthau, wrote detailed reports about what was being done - including the telling statement of Mehmed Talaat Pasha, the Interior Minister, that all the Armenians had to perish because 'those who were innocent today might be guilty tomorrow'. Western missionaries too wrote harrowing accounts of what they witnessed. Their testimony formed an important part of the wartime report on 'The Treatment of the Armenians' compiled by Viscount Bryce, who had also investigated the German atrocities in Belgium in 1914. It might conceivably be argued that the citizens of Christian powers already - or later to be - hostile to the Turks had an interest in misrepresenting them. The Young Turks themselves insisted that they were merely retaliating against a pro-Russian fifth column. That was also the line taken by the Sultan in his reply to Pope Benedict XV's intercession on behalf of the Armenians. Yet agents of the Turks' own wartime allies gave the lie to these claims. Rafael de Nogales, a South American mercenary who served as Inspector General of the Turkish forces in Armenia, reported that the Governor-General of the province had ordered the local authorities in Adil Javus 'to exterminate all Armenian males of twelve years of age and over'. A German schoolteacher at Aleppo was appalled by what he saw of the 'extermination of the Armenian nation' and wrote urging his own government to 'put a stop to the brutality'."

"The discourse in the Muslim world about Jews is utterly shocking. Not only is there Holocaust denial—there’s Holocaust denial that then asserts that we will do it for real if given the chance. The only thing more obnoxious than denying the Holocaust is to say that it should have happened; it didn’t happen, but if we get the chance, we will accomplish it. There are children’s shows in the Palestinian territories and elsewhere that teach five-year-olds about the glories of martyrdom and about the necessity of killing Jews."

"My grandfather’s often-uttered phrase echoes in my ears: "There’s no question the Nazis were evil monsters, but I blame the bystanders." My grandfather felt profoundly betrayed by the people who had a voice and did not use it. He understood the existential evil of the Nazis, but felt most betrayed by the neighbors, the shop keepers and the friends who stood silent. He never accepted that humanity was unwilling to help."

"In China, the number of people still alive who survived the 1937 Nanjing Massacre at the hands of Japanese invaders has fallen to minuscule levels – some experts put the number around 80."

"Beneath the plane of political memory, the history of the war, of which the Nanjing Massacre is one small part, raises other questions that are pertinent to the present day. There is the issue of why the Japanese army behaved with such apparent barbarism in seizing places like Nanjing and thereafter defending its occupation against Nationalist and Communist insurgencies."

"The Japanese had in fact waged a kind of prototype blitzkrieg in China in the months after full-scale war broke out at the Marco Polo Bridge. But the fighting was harder and a good deal more costly in lives and treasure than Japan's leaders had anticipated. In December 1937, as Japanese troops neared Chiang Kai-shek's capital, Nanking, a decision appears to have been taken to make an example of it, in the hope of dealing a fatal blow to Chinese resistance and bringing the war to a swift conclusion. It is not entirely clear who took this decision. After the war, the blame was laid on General Matsui Iwane, Commander-in-Chief of the Japanese forces in central China. It seems more likely that the real culprit was the Emperor's uncle, Prince Asaka Yasuhiko, who took over command on December 2. It was under his seal that orders were issued three days later - marked 'Secret, to be destroyed' - to 'Kill all Captives'. As they fought their way along the road from Shanghai, two officers gave their men an indication of what was to come. They engaged in a killing competition, which was covered by the Japanese press like a sporting event."

"General Matsui entered Nanking on December 17, four days after his troops had begun their rampage. Though he subsequently claimed to be dismayed by what he witnessed, he did (or could do) little to stop it. The murderous orgy continued for a further five and a half weeks. It reached its peak in the week from January 28 to February 3,1938, after civilians had been ordered to return to their homes from the refugee camps outside the city whence they had fled. For days, thousands of unburied bodies littered the streets. The International Military Tribunal of the Far East later estimated that more than 260,000 non-combatants had died at the hands of Japanese soldiers at Nanking - more than four times the number of British civilians killed during the entire war. The Japanese did not content themselves with murder, however. There was also a systematic campaign of arson and other destruction."

"How is what became known as the Rape of Nanking to be understood? As a breakdown of military discipline, fuelled by alcohol and battle-fatigue? As a deliberate imperial policy? As the hideous offspring of what one writer called a 'militarist monster, forged in late Meiji from a mixture of late Edo [pre-Meiji] nativism and borrowed German racial theories'? Three impulses were consciously unleashed by those in command. The first was the contempt felt for those who surrendered. Japanese troops were trained to regard surrender as dishonourable. It was preferable to commit suicide rather than capitulate. Trainees were also encouraged to believe the corollary: that an enemy who did surrender was essentially worthless. This contempt went hand in hand with a culture of extreme physical brutality. If a Japanese colonel felt displeased with one of his majors, it was not unusual for him to strike the offending officer a blow across the face. The major chastised in this way would then lose no time in striking the first junior officer to incur his displeasure, and so it would continue on down the chain. Right at the bottom came enemy captives, so that any aggrieved Japanese NCO or private had one obvious and defenceless target on which to vent his frustrations."

"The second impulse was not peculiar to the Japanese army. As the Turks had treated the Armenians, as Stalin's henchmen were treating the kulaks, Poles and other 'enemies of the people', as the Nazis were soon to start treating Jews, Gypsies and the mentally ill, so the Japanese now thought of and treated the Chinese: as sub-humans. This capacity to treat other human beings as members of an inferior and indeed malignant species - as mere vermin - was one of the crucial reasons why twentieth-century conflict was so violent. Only make this mental leap, and warfare ceases to be a formalized encounter between uniformed armies. It becomes a war of annihilation, in which everyone on the other side - men, women, children, the elderly - can legitimately be killed."

"The third impulse, to rape, is the hardest to interpret. Is it possible for men simultaneously to despise people as vermin and yet to feel lust towards them? Were Japanese troops giving in to a primitive urge to impregnate the womenfolk of their enemy? Or was rape just bayoneting by other means? Perhaps the best answer is that all of these impulses were at work, reinforced by some element of peer-group pressure, since many of the assaults reported were gang rapes. As Hino Ashihei put it in his book War and Soldiers, "We would be friendly with Chinese individuals and indeed came to love them. But how could we help despising them as a nation? . . . To us soldiers, they were pitiful, spineless people." After the war, General Matsui told the International Military Tribunal, which would sentence him to hang for his role at Nanking: "The struggle between Japan and China was always a fight between brothers within the 'Asian family' . . . It has been my belief during all these years that we must regard this struggle as a method of making the Chinese undergo self-reflection. We do not do this because we hate them, but on the contrary because we love them too much." This seemed then and still seems preposterous. Yet it captures the vile ambivalence that lay behind the phenomenon of mass rape."

"How many thousands were mowed down by guns or bayoneted we shall probably never know. For in many cases oil was thrown over their bodies and then they were burned. Charred bodies tell the tales of some of these tragedies. The events of the following ten days are growing dim. But there are certain of them that lifetime will not erase from my memory and the memories of those who have been in Nanjing through this period."

"Anyone who tries to deny the massacre will not be allowed by history, the souls of the 300,000 deceased victims, 1.3 billion Chinese people and all people loving peace and justice in the world."

"At that time, my cousin was only eighteen-years-old. He was taken away by the Japanese troops and never returned. I personally watched as the Japanese troops massacred many people. We had a neighbor, elderly Ms. Zhen, who was about eighty-years-old. She thought that because she was old, she could remain at home and be fine. In actuality, she was brutally murdered by the Japanese, with her stomach slashed open. There was also a tea specialist, who couldn’t bear leaving his home. He was also murdered by the Japanese."

"Thus, the instant the Japanese soldiers opened fire on us all, I immediately fell toward the ground, faking my death. Struck by the flying bullets, my Chinese comrades all piled up on my body. Right up till it got dark and the Japanese soldiers had all left, I lay under the dead bodies, not daring to move. Only then did I climb out from under the pile of bodies. It was thus how I became a fortunate survivor of the Nanjing massacre."

"Nothing prepared me for these pictures - stark black-and-white images of decapitated heads, bellies ripped open and nude women forced by their rapist into various pornographic poses, their faces contorted into unforgettable expressions of agony and shame."

"If there is no name or ID number, the 300,000 figure could just be a summary of Chinese historical fiction. The history could be a folk tale if there are no supporting historical materials, which is a reflection of the lack of academic rigor in China."

"China in 2014 designated December 13 as a day of national mourning over the incident. It has held memorial services to boost patriotism among the Chinese people and highlight Japan’s role as a perpetrator."

"In Japan, the Nanjing Massacre harms feelings important to national identity – “pride, honor and shame.”"

"Even as southern states seceded and the country careened toward civil war, Congress once again emphatically endorsed and generously financed California’s killing machine. The new act appropriated up to $400,000 to pay the expenses of the nine California militia campaigns that had killed at least 766 California Indians from 1854 through 1859. The euphemistically titled “Act for the payment of expenses incurred in the suppression of Indian hostilities in the State of California” rejuvenated state militia Indian-hunting operations even as outrage against such campaigns became public at local, state, and federal levels. Genocide in California becoming a national issue, and the US government would soon become even more directly involved."

"Genocide of indigenous peoples occurred in California... and its perpetrators were primarily miners and settlers who had recently arrived from the East... The Native population [was] about 100,000 in 1849, during the Gold Rush, and [fell] to about 30,000 in 1870. It subsequently reached a nadir of 15,000 to 25,000 during the decade 1890-1900."

"I saw one of the squaws after she was dead; I think she died from a bullet; I think all the squaws were killed because they refused to go further. We took one boy into the valley [reservation], and the infants were put out of their misery, and a girl 10 years of age was killed for stubbornness."

"Leland Stanford himself passed legislation and recruited volunteers for US Army battalions that hunted and killed hundreds of Native Americans... The wealth and privilege we gain from attending Stanford were created by the sacrifices of previous generations, including the unpaid labor and genocide of California Indians."

"Serranus Hastings was expert in utilizing ‘externalities’ to shift to the State the substantial expenses of clearing his claimed lands and perpetuating a slave system predicated on terror, killings, rapes, and forced family separation which funneled into the slave camp known as the Nome Cult Farm, where one could eat only if one could work. That he was significantly responsible for genocidal atrocities against the native peoples of Round Valley is not in dispute."

"The extermination of the Yuki Indians of California’s Round Valley near Mendocino constitutes yet another story of the violent confrontation of settlers and native peoples. This relatively small tribe of 7,000 to 11,000 members on the eve of the settler inlux in the late 1850s was wiped out between 1856 and 1864. Genocidal killing and forced confinement to the reservation reduced the number of Yuki to 85 males and 215 women. The numbers continued to decline in the late nineteenth century as a result of starvation and sickness, as well as episodic fights with the settlers. The Round Valley Reservation still exists as the home of some 100 Yuki, plus a number of other California tribes. There are a handful of Yuki speakers still alive."

"On February 2, 1848, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was signed, ending the Mexican-American War and ceding California to the United States. Almost at the same time, on January 24, 1848, gold was discovered at Sutter’s Mill in Coloma, in the Sierra foothills. The gold rush that followed brought some 300,000 people to California, both from the East Coast of the United States and from abroad. While the prospectors fanned out into the foothills, many of the newcomers settled in the boomtown of San Francisco. The city required much more food and housing, and local ranchers and settlers looked for new lands to graze their animals. Round Valley served as a perfect destination for the herdsmen, causing immediate conflicts with the Yuki, Round Valley’s inhabitants. The settlers and their herds of cows and horses trampled the traditional products of Yuki foraging. Indians were attacked and beaten by the settlers, who thought of them as “savages” at best and little more than animals at worse. The Yuki began to retaliate by killing the settlers’ cattle for food and driving off their horses. California was admitted to the Union as a state in 1850, and its new government decided to set aside a reservation in 1856 for the Yuki in the northern part of the valley as a way to avoid confrontation between the settlers and the Indians. Some 3,000 Indians moved to the reservation, while others scattered around the valley and into the woods to the north and east, merging, in some cases, with other tribes that lived in the region. For their sustenance, the Indians would return to the valley to hunt game or gather roots and acorns, only to be driven off by the settlers, who were increasingly aggressive in shooting the Yuki and kidnapping their women for sexual exploitation. As the settlers claimed property and fenced off their ranches, they also set out in posses to punish the Yuki for rustling. In response, the Yuki sometimes killed whites, though in much smaller numbers than their own losses."

"The Round Valley Wars turned overtly genocidal in 1859, when the governor of California, John Weller, authorized the formation of the so- called Eel River Rangers, headed up by the settler and noted “Indian killer” William S. Jarboe. Jarboe and his band of vigilantes had already been responsible for the murder of some sixty- three Yuki men, women, and children. He was then authorized by the governor to deal with the problem. His way of doing it, as he told his rangers, was: “Kill all the bucks they could find, and take the women and children prisoners." For Jarboe and his men, the Indians were less than human; they were vermin, who stole and concealed, hid and ran, not at all worthy opponents of the settlers. Some three hundred Indians were killed in Jarboe’s campaign; another three hundred were sent to the reservation. For his work, Jarboe presented a bill to the state of California for $11,143.28 The state government’s investigation of the Mendocino wars revealed attitudes toward the Yuki that were shared by settlers and their representatives when faced by Yuki opposition to their encroachments. There were many who found the killings justiied as the only way to deal with the “thieving and murderous” Yuki. Even those who did not like the killings found it hard to consider the Yuki as equals. The Majority Report notes, for example, that one should not “dignify, by the term ‘war,’ the slaughter of beings, who at least possess the human form and who make no resistance and make no attacks, either on the person or the residence of the citizen.” “I do not consider them as hostile,” testified George W. Jeffress, who also maintained the innocence of the Yuki, “but rather as a cowardly thieving set of vagabonds: I do not consider that they are brave when two white men can drive twenty-five of them, and shoot them down while they are running.” The government investigation of the Mendocino war concluded: “History teaches us that the inevitable destiny of the red man is total extermination or isolation from the deadly and corrupting influences of civilization.” The majority of the committee clearly advocated that the Indians should be protected on the reservation and kept separate from the settlers. The problem was that they counted on the federal government to help them do this, but the Army was reluctant to intervene. The San Francisco Bulletin reported, for example: “The United States troops located in that region [Mendocino] are represented to be pursuing, during all these troubles, a ‘masterly course of inactivity.’ Some Army units were even stationed on the reservation. But they could not stop the incessant raiding against Indian villages, and did not have the ability to pursue the criminals outside the reservation borders. As a result, the periodic raids on the reservation continued as the Yuki died in large numbers from hunger and disease"

"In the early decades of California's statehood, the relationship between the State of California and California Native Americans was fraught with violence, exploitation, dispossession and the attempted destruction of tribal communities, as summed up by California's first Governor, Peter Burnett, in his 1851 address to the Legislature: "[t]hat a war of extermination will continue to be waged between the two races until the Indian race becomes extinct must be expected.""

"Our lands around were wanted by settlers, so in long lines, surrounded by soldiers, we were marched at gunpoint along what became known as the Trail of Death. They took us to a new place, far from our lakes and forests. But someone wanted that land too, so the bedrolls were packed again, thinner this time. In the span of a single generation my ancestors were "removed" three times—Wisconsin to Kansas, points in between, and then to Oklahoma. I wonder if they looked back for a last glimpse of the lakes, glimmering like a mirage. Did they touch the trees in remembrance as they became fewer and fewer, until there was only grass? So much was scattered and left along that trail. Graves of half the people. Language. Knowledge. Names. My great-grandmother Sha-note, "wind blowing through," was renamed Charlotte. Names the soldiers or the missionaries could not pronounce were not permitted."

"America was swelling rapidly in numbers as well as in area. Between 1790 and 1820 the population increased from four to nine and a half millions. Thereafter it almost doubled every I twenty years. Nothing like such a rate of growth had before been noted in the world, though it was closely paralleled in contemporary England. The settlement of great bodies of men in the West was eased by the removal of the Indian tribes from the regions east of the Mississippi. They had been defeated when they fought as allies of Britain in the war of 1812. Now it became Federal policy to eject them. The lands thus thrown open were made available in smaller units and at lower prices than in earlier years to the incoming colonists — for we might as well use this honourable word about them, unpopular though it may now be. Colonisation, in the true sense, was the task that engaged the Western pioneers. Farmers from stony New England were tilling the fertile empty territories to the south of the Great Lakes, while in the South the Black Belt of Alabama and Mississippi proved fruitful soil for the recent art of large-scale cotton cultivation."

"The federal government's Indian Removal policies wrenched many Native peoples from our homelands. It separated us from our traditional knowledge and lifeways, the bones of our ancestors, our sustaining plants—but even this did not extinguish identity. So the government tried a new tool, separating children from their families and cultures, sending them far away to school, long enough, they hoped, to make them forget who they were. [...] Children, language, lands: almost everything was stripped away, stolen when you weren't looking because you were trying to stay alive. In the face of such loss, one thing our people could not surrender was the meaning of land. In the settler mind, land was property, real estate, capital, or natural resources. But to our people, it was everything: identity, the connection to our ancestors, the home of our nonhuman kinfolk, our pharmacy, our library, the source of all that sustained us. Our lands were where our responsibility to the world was enacted, sacred ground. It belonged to itself; it was a gift, not a commodity, so it could never be bought or sold. These are the meanings people took with them when they were forced from their ancient homelands to new places. Whether it was their homeland or the new land forced upon them, land held in common gave people strength; it gave them something to fight for. And so—in the eyes of the federal government—that belief was a threat."

"Men, at that time, both in England and in America, looked upon the slave trade as the life of slavery. The abolition of the slave trade was supposed to be the certain death of slavery. Cut off the stream, and the pond will dry up, was the common notion at the time. Wilberforce and Clarkson, clear-sighted as they were, took this view; and the American statesmen, in providing for the abolition of the slave trade, thought they were providing for the abolition of the slavery. This view is quite consistent with the history of the times."

"For by aiming at the abolition of the slave-trade, they were laying the axe at the very root."

"Mr. Wesley, whose letter was read next, informed the committee of the great satisfaction which he also had experienced when he heard of their formation. He conceived that their design, while it would destroy the slave trade, would also strike at the root of the shocking abomination of slavery."

"The first step to be taken to put a stop to slavery in this country, is to leave off importing slaves. For this purpose let our assemblies unite in petitioning the king and parliament to dissolve the African company."

"God Almighty has set before me two great objects, the suppression of the slave trade and the reformation of manners."

"The early and more moderate American antislavery societies were called "abolition" societies, and the later and more militant groups were "antislavery" societies. British reformers, too, were by no means consistent in distinguishing the slave trade from slavery. In England, "the abolition" always referred to the end of the slave trade; but many "abolitionists" favored emancipation, and "emancipationists" were also known as "abolitionists." The term "anti-slavist," used by Jeremy Bentham, never gained wide currency. For both British and American reformers, "abolitionism" and "antislavery" were often interchangeable terms."

"Nothing is proved by the expectation of some Northerners that the clause would eventually put an end to slavery, for there was widespread confusion of "slavery" with the "slave trade." Both American and British abolitionists assumed that an end to slave imports would lead automatically to the amelioration and gradual abolition of slavery."

"Personally I believe the bicentenary offers us a chance not just to say how profoundly shameful the slave trade was – how we condemn its existence utterly and praise those who fought for its abolition, but also to express our deep sorrow that it ever happened, that it ever could have happened and to rejoice at the different and better times we live in today."

"The transatlantic slave trade is one of the biggest crimes in the history of humankind. And we continue to live in its shadow. We can only move forward by confronting the racist legacy of slavery together."

"The history of slavery is a history of suffering and barbarity that shows humanity at its worst. But it is also a history of awe-inspiring courage that shows human beings at their best – starting with enslaved people who rose up against impossible odds and extending to the abolitionists who spoke out against this atrocious crime. And yet, the legacy of the transatlantic slave trade haunts us to this day. We can draw a straight line from the centuries of colonial exploitation to the social and economic inequalities of today. And we can recognize the racist tropes popularized to rationalize the inhumanity of the slave trade in the white supremacist hate that is resurgent today."

"One can say that Europe allocated to Africa the role of supplier of human captives to be used as slaves in various parts of the world. When Europeans reached the Americas, they recognized its enormous potential in gold and silver and tropical produce. But that potential could not be made a reality without adequate labor supplies. The indigenous Indian population could not withstand new European diseases such as smallpox, nor could they bear the organized toil of slave plantations and slave mines, having barely emerged from the hunting stage. That is why in islands like Cuba and , the local Indian population was virtually wiped out by the white invaders. At the same time, Europe itself had a very small population and could not afford to release the labor required to tap the wealth of the Americas. Therefore, they turned to the nearest continent, Africa, which incidentally had a population accustomed to settled agriculture and disciplined labor in many spheres. Those were the objective conditions lying behind the start of the European slave trade, and those are the reasons why the capitalist class in Europe used their control of international trade to insure that Africa specialized in exporting captives."

"African rulers found European goods sufficiently desirable to hand over captives which they had taken in warfare. Soon, war began to be fought between one community and another for the sole purpose of getting prisoners for sale to Europeans, and even inside a given community a ruler might be tempted to exploit his own subjects and capture them for sale. A chain reaction was started by European demand for slaves (and only slaves) and by their offer of consumer goods—this process being connected with divisions within African society."

"The trade in human beings from Africa was a response to externa factors. At first, the labor was needed in Portugal, Spain, and in Atlantic islands such as , , and the Canaries; then came the period when the and the Spanish-American mainland needed replacements for the Indians who were victims of genocide; and then the demands of Caribbean and mainland plantation societies had to be met. The records show direct connections between levels of exports from Africa and European demand for slave labor in some part of the American . When the Dutch took in Brazil in 1634, the director of the Dutch West Indian Company immediately informed their agents on the Gold Coast that they were to take the necessary steps to pursue the trade in slaves on the adjacent coast east of the Volta—thus creating for that area the infamous name of the “Slave Coast.” When the British West Indian islands took to growing sugar cane, Gambia was one of the first places to respond. Examples of this kind of external control can be cited right up to the end of the trade, and this embraces also, since European markets in the islands became important in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and since demand in places like Brazil caused Mozambicans to be shipped around the ."

"John Hawkins made three trips to West Africa in the 1560s, and stole Africans whom he sold to the Spanish in America. On returning to England after the first trip, his profit was so handsome that Queen Elizabeth I became interested in directly participating in his next venture; and she provided for that purpose a ship named the Jesus. Hawkins left with the Jesus to steal some more Africans, and he returned to England with such dividends that Queen Elizabeth made him a knight. Hawkins chose as his coat of arms the representation of an African in chains."

"In speaking of the European slave trade, mention must be made of the U.S.A., not only because its dominant population was European but also because Europe transferred its capitalist institutions more completely to North America than to any other part of the globe, and established a powerful form of capitalism—after eliminating the indigenous inhabitants and exploiting the labor of millions of Africans."

"European planters and miners enslaved Africans for economic reasons, so that their labor power could be exploited. Indeed, it would have been impossible to open up the and to use it as a constant generator of wealth, had it not been for African labor. There were no other alternatives: the American (Indian) population was virtually wiped out and Europe’s population was too small for settlement overseas at that time. Then, having become utterly dependent on African labor, Europeans at home and abroad found it necessary to rationalize that exploitation in racist terms as well. Oppression follows logically from exploitation, so as to guarantee the latter. Oppression of African people on purely racial grounds accompanied, strengthened, and became indistinguishable from oppression for economic reasons."

"On the whole, the process by which captives were obtained on African soil was not trade at all. It was through warfare, trickery, banditry, and kidnaping. When one tries to measure the effect of European slave trading on the African continent, it is essential to realize that one is measuring the effect of social violence rather than trade in any normal sense of the word. Many things remain uncertain about the slave trade and its consequences for Africa, but the general picture of destructiveness is clear, and that destructiveness can be shown to be the logical consequence of the manner of recruitment of captives in Africa."

"By 1885, when European kings, princes and presidents sat in Berlin to slice up the African continent with their geometrical instruments, the African people had already been devastated by the ravages of the West Atlantic slave trade. In West and Central Africa, the indigenous civilisations lay in ruins, from the sophisticated Saharan trade routes with Timbuktu at their centre, to the empires of Angola. On the Eastern seaboard, the European invasion, led by the Portuguese, defeated and destroyed the city states of Swahili civilisation. All in all, some 40,000,000 souls are estimated to have perished in the triangular slave trade, which lasted for roughly four centuries, 1450–1850. The development of the European and North American industrial revolution and the global lead this gave to Europe and America was in no small measure built on the back of Africans. The colonial episode was thus the tail end of long and destructive contact between Europe and Africa. The slave trade tore apart the very social fabric of African societies, destroying their internal processes of change. It imposed on the continent a European worldview in which the peoples of Africa were at the lowest rung of the so-called civilised order. No other continent, including those that suffered formal European colonisation, had their social, cultural and moral order destroyed on this scale."

"Following the Hamas-led attack on 7 October 2023, Israel launched an intensive military campaign in the Gaza Strip... is still underway... Israel's onslaught on Gaza includes mass killing... in direct attacks and through creating catastrophic living conditions that... raise the massive death toll; serious bodily or mental harm to the entire population... large-scale destruction of infrastructure; destruction of the social fabric, including educational institutions and... cultural sites; mass arrests and abuse of detainees in Israeli prisons, which have... become torture camps for thousands of Palestinians held without trial; mass forced displacement, including attempts at and making the latter an official war goal; and an assault on Palestinian identity through the deliberate destruction of refugee camps and attempts to undermine the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (). The outcome... is severe, and at least in part, irreparable, harm to more than 2 million people..."

"...Israel's policy in the Gaza Strip and its horrific outcomes... with statements by senior... politicians and... commanders about the goals... leads to the... conclusion that Israel is taking... action to intentionally destroy Palestinian society in the Gaza Strip."

"Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip."

"Since the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide... genocide has... been recognized as one of the gravest crimes in international law, involving acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group."

"Both morally and legally, genocide cannot be justified... including as an act of self-defense."

"[G]enocidal acts are various actions intended to bring... destruction of a distinct group, as part of a deliberate, coordinated effort by a ruling authority."

"The current onslaught on the Palestinian people, including... Gaza... [is] in the context of... [>]seventy years in which Israel has imposed a violent and discriminatory regime on... Palestinians... its most extreme form... in the Gaza Strip."

"As part of broader... settler-colonialism... from the early stages of Zionist settlement, the Israeli regime works to ensure Jewish supremacy over Palestinians — economically, politically, socially, and culturally."

"[T]he apartheid and occupation regime has institutionalized mechanisms of violent control, demographic engineering, discrimination, and fragmentation of the Palestinian collective."

"These foundations... made it possible to launch a genocidal attack on the Palestinians... after the Hamas-led attack on 7 October 2023."

"The atrocious attack, aimed mostly at civilians, included many war crimes and likely... crimes against humanity."

"For Israelis, the... attack... generated a degree of anxiety and feeling of existential threat that led to profound social and political changes... These instigated a shift in... policy... from repression and control to destruction and annihilation."

"The Israeli genocide... in the Gaza Strip... [is] violence... implemented in its most extreme and lethal form. Yet the assault... cannot be separated from... escalating violence... inflicted... on Palestinians in the , including , and within Israel."

"[T]roops are operating... in the other areas, under the same commanders and political leadership. The practices... often reflect the... logic applied in Gaza: total disregard for human life, severe harm to innocents, widespread destruction of residential areas and living conditions, ... flouting... moral obligations and international law. ...[M]any senior military and political figures are threatening... the level of force... used in Gaza against Palestinians in other areas. In these areas..., lethal crimes are... committed... with no accountability... The violence and destruction... is intensifying... with no effective domestic or international mechanism acting to halt them. As a result... crimes are becoming normalized in the eyes of soldiers, commanders, politicians, media figures and Israelis..."

"Given the... escalation in... violence against Palestinians in all these areas — which... includes... grave crimes — we must call for an immediate end to the Israeli genocide against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, and warn of clear and imminent danger that... genocide will not remain confined to Gaza."

"means "in the image [of God]"... from... "So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him" (Genesis 1:27). It reflects the principle of the inherent value of all human life. This moral foundation has guided the organization's work..."

"Based on the information we collect and the resulting conclusions, we are committed to presenting unequivocal positions and demands regarding the state of human rights violations and the actions required to protect these rights."

"In 2021, joined many others, first and foremost Palestinian organizations and activists, who for decades... identified the Israeli regime as... apartheid... We wrote: ...the Israeli regime implements laws, practices and state violence designed to cement the supremacy of one group — Jews — over another — Palestinians. A key method... is engineering space differently for each group."

"[W]hen the State of Israel was established... [i]t... had a clear objective... to cement the supremacy of the Jewish group across... territory under Israeli control. The main tool... the establishment of an apartheid regime (one that, unlike... South Africa, has never been formally declared as such and... has been consistently denied...) This regime is designed to cement... supremacy... through demographic engineering, separation, shaping public discourse, indoctrination, militarism, and... use of force and violence."

"[T]he core objective... The... Israeli system — political, military, public, and legal — is structured to uphold Jewish supremacy, relying on a false pretense of... rule of law while... rights of... Palestinian subjects are... unprotected."

"As a human rights organization... our duty [is] to analyze human rights violations... in context, taking into account the regime... and its guiding political logic."

"[S]ince October 2023... we have gathered eyewitness testimonies and documented hundreds of incidents involving unprecedented and extreme violence... throughout the territory Israel controls, while key politicians and... commanders... openly declared the policies... Countless evidence... reflects the horrifying transformation of the... Israeli system in its treatment of Palestinians."

"At , Jewish-Israelis and Palestinians... work side by side, guided by... defending human rights... [as] a basic human and moral obligation. ...[A] discriminatory apartheid regime ...classifies some ...as privileged ...because we are Jewish, and others as undeserving of ...protection ...because we are Palestinian. Together, we fight for the right we all have to live... without discrimination, violent repression and annihilation."

"Israel is intensifying its brutal, merciless assault... [I]t is our duty to bear witness to... [what] we and many others have documented and investigated. It is our duty to name the reality... to recount it, and to stand with... victims."

"We call on the Israeli public and... the international community to... to put an immediate stop to Israel's assault on the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and across all areas under Israeli control, using every means available under international law."

"Genocide can rarely be carried out without consent, support, and legitimization from within the perpetrating group. Yet... societies that perpetrate genocide often do not recognize themselves as such."

"Usually, the genocidal campaign is perceived by its direct perpetrators, and understood by the broader public, as a legitimate act of self-defense in response to... existential threat."

"[R]ecognizing that genocide is taking place against part of a group or in a specific location is... a grave warning: it signals the potential expansion of similar patterns of violence to other segments of the group or... other areas."

"The 1948 United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (which came into force in 1951) defines... acts... considered genocidal if committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group: killing members... causing serious bodily or mental harm... deliberately inflicting conditions... calculated to bring about the group's... destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births... and forcibly transferring children... to another group. ...[I]nternational tribunals that adjudicated... Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia... included acts of widespread sexual and gender-based violence. Thus... the intentional destruction... may, and... tends to occur through multiple forms of action, with direct killing being only one..."

"[T]he centrality of intent to destroy... is often framed in terms of ' — the mental... intent to destroy the group in whole or in part — and ' — the physical acts... as... in the Convention. Genocide requires a specific intent (dolus specialis) to destroy the group in whole or in part..."

"There is an inherent gap between the legal and the historical analysis of genocide. The legal definition is narrow... shaped in large part by... interests of the states whose representatives drafted it. From a historical perspective, violent destruction of groups... has occurred... many of which do not align with the stringent legal definition. The high threshold... and... dominant interpretations... by international tribunals have led to... genocide... typically recognized only after a significant portion of the... group has... been destroyed and... suffered irreparable harm."

"[W]hile the legal debate over whether Israel is committing genocide in the Gaza Strip is... important and necessary, there is a critical gap between the amount of time it will take the formal legal institutions deliberating... chiefly the International Court of Justice, to issue binding decisions, and the reality of society in Gaza being destroyed before our eyes."

"[T]he international community either remains passive or actively supports Israel's crimes."

"This report relies on the legal definition of genocide as outlined in the UN Convention, but adopts a broader analytical framework, drawing on 's original conception as well as historical and sociological research..."

"...Israel has imposed unprecedented restrictions on access to Gaza by organizations and media outlets, deepening its isolation from the world. B'Tselem's field researchers in the Gaza Strip, who managed to escape... continued collecting testimonies from hundreds of residents... despite the ongoing challenge..."

"[D]ata... not directly investigated and verified by B'Tselem was drawn from... publications and reports by human rights organizations, humanitarian agencies, UN offices and bodies, investigations and reports by reputable media outlets committed to journalistic ethics and data verification standards, expert... internationally recognized professionals, and primary sources... as testimonies and verified documentation from the field. In addition, we drew on... scholarly literature that has examined... genocide... throughout history.., as well as... researchers who have documented widespread practices... in the... war in Gaza and published... in recognized academic journals."

"With regard to the number of Palestinians killed and injured in the Gaza Strip, this report relies on figures published by the Palestinian Ministry of Health in Gaza. These figures are widely considered reliable... Moreover, they are generally regarded as conservative..."

"[T]his section reflects only a partial picture of the scale of harm to... Palestinian life... under Israeli control. We estimate that years of documentation and research will be required to fully assess the scope of destruction that continues... and the long-term consequences... Palestinians... are expected to face in the future."

"Nearly two years of... onslaught has left most of the Gaza Strip in ruins. As of mid-July 2025, estimated... 58,026 fatalities, the overwhelming majority... civilians... not participating in... hostilities. The... wounded... approximately 138,520. All hospitals... destroyed or... partially functioning... the same is true of the vast majority of civilian infrastructure. ...Since ...early March 2025, hundreds ...have been killed or wounded every day: from airstrikes, shooting and shelling... malnutrition or a lethal combination of hunger, diseases.., contaminated water and a devastated healthcare system."

"This reality... cannot be justified or explained as an attempt to destroy the rule of Hamas or its military capabilities in Gaza."

"Statements by senior Israeli decision-makers... have expressed genocidal intent throughout."

"Genocidal intent was also expressed in numerous statements made by Israeli military officers... soldiers... military and security experts, and... Israeli media and cultural figures. These voices articulated a worldview... according to which... most... Gaza[ns] are... responsible for [October 7] crimes... or... support them."

"Accordingly, for many... the aspiration to destroy... Hamas and... to prevent future attacks... were translated into targeting the entire population of the Gaza Strip."

"The total dehumanization of Gaza's residents has led to a perception, still widely held among Jewish-Israelis, that their lives are of negligible value compared to Israel's national goals, if not worthless altogether."

"Israel's conduct... in the Gaza Strip... has included... massive, indiscriminate bombardment of population centers; starvation of more than two million... as a method of warfare; attempts at ethnic cleansing and formally including the ethnic cleansing... in the war aims; systematic destruction of hospitals and other medical facilities... entitled to... protection under international law... [and] the vast majority of civilian infrastructure... unprecedented killing of medical personnel, aid workers, persons in charge of... public order, and journalists. Israel's claim that Hamas fighters or members of... armed Palestinian groups were... in medical or civilian facilities, often... without... evidence, cannot justify or explain such widespread, systematic destruction."

"[T]his policy has been supported, legitimized and normalized by most of Jewish-Israeli and its institutions, including the Israeli legal system."

"The... intent... component in the definition of genocide, emerges unequivocally in... Israeli leadership's awareness of the... consequences of its open-fire and starvation policies; ...systematic destruction of civilian infrastructure..; the decision to continue, and... escalate, the assault despite... its impact on the civilian population..; and numerous statements by policymakers... indicating... Israel is targeting the entire population..."

"A... legal examination... appears in Amnesty International's December 2024... "You Feel Like You Are Subhuman: Israel's Genocide Against Palestinians in Gaza"; in the work of , currently being published; in the submissions by South Africa's legal team... filed with the International Court of Justice (ICJ); and in reports by United Nations experts."

"Israel's genocide against the Palestinians... in the Gaza Strip... cannot be separated from the sharp escalation of Israel's violence against Palestinians... in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and within Israel... [E]scalation of Israeli violence in Gaza is gradually extending to other areas... [A]... society that legitimizes genocide in Gaza — through participation, support, denial, or indifference—naturally legitimizes increasing violence against Palestinians as a whole."

"The sections below... focus on... killings, physical destruction, forcible displacement, and the destruction of political, cultural, and social life... address how Israel's genocide... targets Palestinian identity, particularly through attacks on refugees... [and] analyze key expressions of dehumanization and incitement against Palestinians..."

"[T]he Ministry of Health in Gaza.... [fatalities] breakdown released in July 2025 shows 15%... women, 29%... minors and 7% are elderly."

"A study... estimated that during the first 12 months of the Israeli assault, the life expectancy of men in Gaza dropped by 51.6%, to 40.5 years, a loss of 34.9 years compared to prewar... For women... 38.6%, to... 47.5 years, a loss of 29.9 years."

"Several studies... suggest... casualties... much higher. The duration... the... scale of infrastructure destruction, and... restriction of humanitarian and rescue organizations' access... are... some... factors..."

"Israel's... open-fire policy... systematically violates fundamental principles of international law, such as distinction and proportionality. Israel... policy... permits unprecedented levels of harm to uninvolved civilians when striking at what it considers military targets. ...These practices enable... increase... frequency of strikes and [to] reduce risk to soldiers at the expense of precautions... to reduce injury to innocents."

"[A]fter ordering residents to leave their homes, Israel repeatedly bombed... "safe corridors" that... s (IDPs) were to use to travel to "humanitarian zones"."

""[H]umanitarian zones"... meant to provide IDPs safety, offered unlivable conditions and were... systematically bombed."

"After breaking the ceasefire in March 2025, Israel resumed... aggressive... indiscriminate attacks... including... designated humanitarian zones and other areas densely populated by tens of thousands of destitute IDPs. As of 14 July 2025, the Ministry of Health in Gaza reported more than 7,450 people killed and over 26,000 wounded since the ceasefire was violated."

"The mass killing of civilians in Gaza has been carried out... through permissive... at times deliberate, live fire by Israeli soldiers... Soldiers' testimonies reveal that... Israeli forces in the Gaza Strip defined "kill zones"... with arbitrary boundaries, sometimes unclear even to the soldiers... where permission was given to open fire at anyone... within them."

"Soldiers and officers... reported... absence of... , or... rules... at the discretion of commanders... or based on arbitrary criteria. Isolated incidents such as the killing of 15 paramedics in April 2025, or the December 2023 shooting of three Israeli hostages who had escaped captivity and were waving a white flag, illustrate that the open-fire regulations were... discarded. These practices were reinforced by statements from commanders... and by... volunteer doctors... including visual evidence of deliberate sniper shootings of children."

"Until 14 July 2025... 138,520 people were injured... Approximately 25%... life-altering injuries that require... rehabilitative care, including limb amputations, spinal injuries, traumatic brain injuries, and severe burns. ...[R]ecords ...refer only to ...treatment at an official medical facility. ... As with the death toll, it appears... official figures... understate... the... number."

"According to data provided by the Ministry of Health in Gaza to (PHRI), more than 4,700... have undergone amputations since October 2023, including over 940 children and... 370 women. ...[W]here basic medications ...as s were unavailable, doctors were forced to amputate ...though under normal circumstances ... not ...necessary. ...Tens of thousands of wounded ...and amputees were left without adequate care."

"[T]he UN warned that people with disabilities... are "at higher risks of dying, becoming injured and acquiring further impairments" as a result of the ongoing Israeli offensive."

"[E]stimates range from thousands to tens of thousands of deaths, in addition to the direct fatalities caused by the Israeli assault. ...[R]esearchers broadly agree that... figures released by the Ministry of Health in Gaza significantly understate... victims."

"[C]auses of indirect deaths are injuries, infectious diseases, , maternal and neonatal mortality, and complications from untreated chronic illnesses. All... a... result of... destruction of living conditions... restrictions on the entry of , and... assault on the healthcare system that has rendered it unable to cope with... casualties. Experts warn... along with the starvation... indirect deaths will rise further."

"In... October 2024... 100 American medical professionals who had volunteered in the Gaza Strip published a letter stating that almost every person they encountered... was ... sick or wounded, and... nearly every child under... five was suffering from ing and . ...[M]any of the surgeries ...resulted in s due to ..., poor sanitary conditions, and ...lack of . They ...stated that malnutrition and ...shortage of clean ...led to widespread ...low and post-partum women unable to breastfeed, often resulting in the infants' deaths. ...[P]regnant women and fetuses ...had died as a result of the decimation of the healthcare system."

"Gaza's residents have endured countless traumatic events... with... psychological consequences... [W]ithin a reality of omnipresent death, relentless displacement, and ongoing hunger and disease, many are suffering psychological distress after witnessing horrific events, including the violent deaths of... loved ones."

"[I]ncidence of mental health problems has increased significantly, particularly trauma-related disorders, depression, and anxiety, in a population already exhibiting high rates of mental illness due to prolonged exposure to occupation, blockade, and recurring military violence."

"[N]early all of Gaza's 1.2 million children were in need of mental health and support due to symptoms of depression, anxiety, , and more."

"6% of children in Gaza felt... death was imminent, and nearly half expressed a desire to die as a result of... trauma..."

"[B]efore the... offensive... 64%... in the Gaza Strip were classified as food insecure, and... 80% relied on... humanitarian aid. Immediately after launching its assault... Israel declared a complete blockade... which quickly led to... shortages of food..."

"In September 2024, 15 aid organizations published an analysis showing that Israel had blocked 83% of food assistance to the Strip."

"Israel attacked convoys... distributing humanitarian aid, as well as the Palestinian police officers tasked... with securing them. The [food] shortage... led to sharp price hikes... further limiting access... for most of the population."

"[W]e have witnessed relentless human suffering and loss of life on a scale unimaginable..."

"Entire cities bombed and razed, with scarcely a house left standing; hundreds of thousands torn from their lives... with what little they could take on their backs, searching for temporary shelter; adults and children... in endless lines for... little food, risking life and limb... to feed their starving families; and... death looming everywhere."

"Genocide... is an assault on humanity... on the fundamental belief that every life is precious, and the core principle that every human being is entitled to basic rights affording protection from arbitrary violence. ...[A]ttempting to eradicate a group of human beings is a crime... that every person has the duty to oppose and act to stop immediately. This is a moral, legal, and human imperative: to acknowledge the facts... stand with the victims, and demand an end to destruction and extermination..."

"[S]ince October 2023, the Israeli regime has been responsible for carrying out genocide..."

"Killing tens of thousands... causing bodily or mental harm to hundreds of thousands more; destroying homes and civilian infrastructure on a massive scale; starvation, displacement, and denying humanitarian aid... perpetrated systematically... aimed at annihilating... life in the Gaza Strip."

"Israel's decision to continue.... despite countless warnings and... evidence of its deadly consequences... with repeated public clarifications by... policymakers that the target is the entire population of Gaza, demonstrate the intent of... leadership to... destroy Palestinian life in the Gaza Strip."

"[T]he Israeli regime is leading an assault on the Palestinian population in the West Bank and a policy of egregious rights violations against Palestinian citizens of Israel. The form and extent of these actions... are rooted in the... denial of Palestinian humanity. ...[T]he lives and dignity of Palestinians have come to be regarded as disposable... and violence against them normalized."

"The routine killing and destruction in the Gaza Strip and the forced displacement of tens of thousands in the would not have been possible without international inaction in the face of the unfathomable scale and severity of these crimes."

"[M]any state leaders, particularly in Europe and the United States, have not only refrained from effective action to stop the genocide but enabled it — through statements affirming Israel's "right to self-defense" or active support, including the shipment of weapons and ammunition."

"[A]fter the International Court of Justice ruled... plausible risk that Israel's actions amount to genocidal acts, and... the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Prime Minister Netanyahu and then-Defense Minister Gallant on suspicion of war crimes and crimes against humanity, the international community failed..."

"The genocidal nature of Israel's actions in the Gaza Strip and the international community's failure to prevent them will... likely to reshape norms of conduct in international relations and the protection of human rights around the world."

"Trampling fundamental principles... and blatantly disregarding the moral norms that shaped the post-WWII world order, may turn... indiscriminate lethal force and deliberate targeting of civilians into... conduct of future violent conflicts."

"Confronting the... destruction and moral disintegration requires... acknowledging the crimes... [and] commitment to action and... accountability... international and domestic."

"[R]ebuilding after such devastation will be... long and arduous... [and] require a fundamental shift in the foundations of the Israeli regime."

"[T]he Israeli regime... stripped [of] every moral value and obligation of meaning, is a danger to all people under its rule. ...[E]verything must be done to prevent it from claiming more victims."

"[R]ecognition that the Israeli regime is committing genocide in the Gaza Strip and the deep concern that it may expand to other areas... demand urgent... unequivocal action from both Israeli society and the international community."

"This is the time to save those who have not yet been lost forever, and use every means... under international law to stop Israel's genocide of the Palestinians."

"With the publication of these two reports, and become the first... Israeli organizations to state... based on meticulous documentation and research: Israel is committing genocide... This is another milestone in the human rights community’s efforts to hold Israeli authorities accountable for their crimes... Amid... efforts by the Israeli government to crack down on... human rights organizations, such publications demanded courage and unyielding commitment... Their findings must be heeded... and translated into action to... dismantle... apartheid against all Palestinians whose rights Israel controls. ...B’Tselem’s report builds on... work undertaken for decades to document Israel’s crimes... and demonstrate the cloak of that has sheltered Israeli authorities from accountability. The report’s findings... are... damning and illustrate the importance... to stop Israel’s genocide with... demands to end its unlawful occupation... and dismantle its system of apartheid. ...The publication... coincides with... the UN conference on Palestine in New York. Their... findings add to the... call for... states to recognize Israel’s action... for what it is: genocide. States... must take urgent and effective measures to end Israel’s impunity for its human rights violations against Palestinians and stop its genocide, apartheid and unlawful occupation. Palestinians have... suffered irreversible harm; the horrors... will require generations to recover... States must not miss yet another opportunity to change course, restore... faith in international law and enable Palestinians to begin their recovery..."

"Israel's military campaign in Gaza since October 2023... constitutes genocide under the 1948 Genocide Convention."

"The evidence shows a deliberate and systematic dismantling of Gaza's health and life-sustaining systems—through targeted attacks on hospitals, obstruction of medical aid and evacuations, and the killing and detention of healthcare personnel."

"...Israel's actions have destroyed Gaza's healthcare infrastructure in a manner that is both calculated and systematic."

"Gaza's health system has been systematically dismantled—its hospitals rendered non-functional, medical evacuations blocked, and essential services like trauma care, surgery, dialysis, and eliminated."

"[K]illing and detention of over 1,800 healthcare workers... has decimated Gaza's medical capacity and rendered recovery nearly impossible."

"Humanitarian relief has been deliberately restricted, forcing civilians to approach militarized distribution points that have often become sites of s."

"This... assault has produced a... failure of health and humanitarian infrastructure, compounded by policies leading to starvation, disease, and the breakdown of , housing, and education systems."

"As of mid-2025, over 57,000 Palestinians - primarily women and children - have been confirmed killed, with estimates nearing 100,000 when indirect deaths are included."

"Gaza residents... detained and held in Israeli facilities report systematic torture, medical neglect, and degrading treatment..."

"Children face... trauma, while women endure... miscarriages, s, and maternal mortality amid famine and lack of reproductive healthcare services."

"[T]hese acts... part of a deliberate policy targeting Palestinians... fulfill... core acts defined in Article II of the : (a) killing members of the group; (b) causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; and (c) deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its destruction in whole or in part."

"Despite international legal rulings, Israel has not complied... and global enforcement remains weak."

"PHRI urges international bodies and states to fulfill their duty under Article I of the to stop the Gaza genocide."

"[D]estruction of Gaza's health system is not only a legal violation but a humanitarian catastrophe demanding urgent global solidarity and response."

"Understanding... requires following key events at least since the 1948 war—the Palestinian Nakba ("Catastrophe"). Israel forcibly displaced over 80% of the indigenous Palestinian population through mass deportations, internment of civilians, massacres, and the systematic destruction of Palestinian infrastructure. More than 200,000 of the 751,000 Palestinians recorded as refugees fled to the Gaza Strip, tripling its prewar population."

"In 1967, Israel occupied the West Bank... and the Gaza Strip, displacing over 400,000..."

"Since 2007, Israel has imposed a comprehensive blockade on the Gaza Strip."

"Repeated Israeli military escalations between 2008 and 2021 severely damaged healthcare infrastructure and exhausted its emergency response capacity."

"Following Hamas' attack, Israel launched a sustained and far-reaching military offensive against the Gaza Strip."

"Today's rampant starvation and in the Gaza Strip carry critical long-term effects, particularly for children."

"The dismantling of long-term critical care, as well as preventative and diagnostic medicine, will have lasting consequences for the treatment of infectious, cardiac, oncological, and other diseases..."

"Mass displacement and the destruction of buildings... rendered the education system... inoperable, while also destroying family and community structures..."

"Collapsed water and systems have led to detrimental environmental effects."

"These issues are deeply interwoven with... categories... in the definition of genocide under Article II of the ..."

"[T]he destruction of healthcare infrastructure may constitute both the infliction of conditions of life (Article II(c)) and serious bodily or mental harm (Article II(b))."

"[A]cts of killing (Article II(a)) may also contribute to broader patterns of deprivation."

"The deliberate infliction of life-destroying conditions, where undertaken with the intent to eliminate a protected group, constitutes genocide under Article II(c) of the . The deprivation of basic necessities such as food, water, shelter, and medical care can thus fulfill the material element..."

"Through sustained military attacks, siege policies, and the obstruction of humanitarian access, including medical supplies, Israel has dismantled the institutions and services essential to health and survival."

"Hospitals, clinics, ambulances, and medical personnel have been systematically targeted, rendered non-functional, or killed. Diagnostic and treatment capacities have been eliminated, resulting in deaths due to acute and chronic life-threatening conditions, including infectious, cardiac, and oncologic diseases."

"The prolonged famine will have severe long-term effects, particularly on children. ...[[Psychological trauma|[M]ental effects]] of the atrocities will persist..."

"Very early into the war, all major hospitals in northern Gaza... were shelled, besieged, or forcibly evacuated."

"By late December 2023, only nine of the Gaza Strip's 36 hospitals remained partially functional - all located in the south."

"Repeated direct attacks on hospitals... obstruction of supply flows and aid, and the decimation of medical personnel through killings and detentions made recovery impossible."

"By early June, the health system had reached a state of near-total collapse. With only 14 out of 36 hospitals only partially functional, and most major facilities in Rafah and central Gaza either shuttered or overwhelmed, medical staff faced impossible conditions."

"From October 2024, Israel executed a military campaign aimed at physically and functionally erasing northern Gaza."

"[[w:Kamal Adwan Hospital sieges|[D]estruction of Kamal Adwan]] marked dealt a decisive blow to northern Gaza's healthcare system. With no remaining medical facilities, no operational ambulances, and no rescue infrastructure, northern Gaza's health system was erased."

"On March 2 [2025], Israel imposed a second total siege on the Gaza Strip—the longest yet... cutting off all humanitarian and medical access. The World Food Programme (WFP), WHO, and other UN agencies reported... bakeries ran out of flour and fuel, food stocks... depleted, and hospitals... unable to operate... In May alone, 5,000 children in Gaza were diagnosed with ..."

"On March 23, Israeli forces opened fire on marked ambulances and a fire-fighting vehicle, killing 15 Palestinian medics... attempting to assist wounded civilians after an airstrike. They were buried in an apparent attempt to eliminate evidence. The International Federation of the Red Cross called it "the most deadly attack on medical workers in a decade." (Jun 19, 2025)"

"As of May 23, over 90% of Gaza's 531 health service points were either entirely or partially out of service, with many of the last remaining sites located inside declared evacuation zones, inaccessible to civilians and medics alike."

"[A]ttacks on Gaza's hospitals... blocked medical evacuations, prevented patients from entering or leaving... and killed or detained... patients and medical staff. The raids caused significant damage... while denying... critical resources, including electricity, water, and medical supplies. These... endangered... lives... [and] severely undermined the hospitals' ability to function."

"Taking a health-focused approach to identify genocidal intent and policy, the report documents the systematic dismantling of Gaza’s health system, destruction of medical facilities, blocking of drugs, and killings and arrests of health workers. ...[T]hey implore health and humanitarian communities worldwide to confront the destruction of Gaza’s medical system, attacks on its infrastructure and environment, and deliberate targeting of the conditions needed for human survival in Gaza. ...[T]hird parties, PHRI argues, have a duty to terminate this genocidal campaign and protect the health, lives, and dignity of Palestinians."

"PHRI... ... documents.. a deliberate, cumulative dismantling of Gaza’s health system, and... its people’s ability to survive. This amounts to genocide. Israel’s bombing of hospitals, destruction of medical equipment, and depletion of medications have made medical care... impossible. ...Each day, dozens die of malnutrition. Ninety-two percent of infants aged six months to two years don’t get enough to eat. ...85 children have ...starved to death. Israel has displaced 9 in 10 Gazans, destroyed or damaged 92% of homes, and left... half a million children without schools or stability. It has wiped out essential health services... [A]ctions are critical—and must be taken immediately—to prevent further loss of life."