User talk:Altarbey: Difference between revisions

Genocide

I have deleted that page because you are violating our policies and guideline (both topic and etiquette). It doesn't matter if it was against Christians, Jews or Muslims, we're not going to put up with genocide denial on this site. I'm sorry if that displeases you but that is the way it is. The Armenian Genocide is a fact. --Sahabah (talk) 04:57, 4 March 2013 (PST)

Sadly, yes I seem to have violated "They are not there for debating the content of the article or for general attacks on the site or users of the site.". And I need not violate it further by adding "saying "genocide is a fact" a millon times does not make it a fact, without proof" or such.

Anyway, for the article, it has nothing related to islam or jihad. Armenian deportation is due to separatist armenians revolting by russians' support and order was given by the germans, not the ottomans. Ottomans were not even involved in the ww1 for jihad. either arabs or other muslims did not take ottoman's side in ww1. That article is nothing but a collection of non-related situations or stories, stitched together by some side details to make up a claim. Sadly this is also "a debate on article's content", so how one should inform about the incorrectness of the contents? Altarbey (talk) 07:16, 4 March 2013 (PST)

The Wikipedia article says the Armenian Genocide was "the Ottoman government's systematic extermination of its minority Armenian subjects". This is established history. What you are saying is not. What you are saying is akin to denying the Holocaust against Jews or the Srebrenica Genocide against Muslims. You can mock me all you want with the "saying "genocide is a fact" a millon times does not make it a fact" thing, but genocide denial is not even worthy of debating. And of course Islam played some part in it. I've heard the same thing said about some of the deadly riots against Christians and Hindus in Indonesia. People claiming it's an "ethnic" thing and so on. But that fails to explain why the murdering, raping rioters destroy churches and temples, yet leave houses with "I'm a Muslim" etc., untouched. Race, nationality, ethnicity, etc., is certainly a big factor in many of these situations, but, like in Sudan, it's religion that gives them justification and the assurance that what they are doing is right. If there is a genuine query about a mistake, we welcome them. That's mainly there because we get a lot of time wasters. In any case, that's a published book so we cant edit its content.

Indonesian "islamic" riots do have nothing in common with "deportation of minorities that were in alliances with enemy forces". Recently discovered Report of Brigadier General Bolhovitinov (11th december 1915)[Brigadier General Leonid Bolhovitinov's Report, 19 15, Russian Military History Archives (RGVIA) fond2100,listl,folder557,p.303-307] uncovers the details what armenian riots' and gangs have done. That's why Friedrich Bronsart von Schellendorf who was the chief of the General Staff of the Ottoman field army due to agreement on being allies with Germany in ww1, orders the deportation of the Armenians in (Huberta von Voss (Hrsg.): Porträt einer Hoffnung. Die Armenier. Lebensbilder aus aller Welt. Schiler, Berlin 2005, ISBN 3-89930-087-4, S. 101.) All the details aside, the main point is, this has nothing to do with Jihad or islam, for Ottomans were not the ones ordering the "deportation or else". "Systematic extermination" is just a dramatic naming of the 20-30 years up to 1916 in behalf of the Armenians.

I'm not in denial of anything, i just don't exaggerate the single sided sad stories and don't buy the pumped up numbers, since i've been hearing these stories for all my life. Let me give you an example, one of many similar others: Imam Atif of İskilip supported Greek and English forces who invaded almost everywhere in Anatolia right after ww1. He wrote fatwas against national forces, supporting enemies during Liberation War of Turkey. He was caught, hanged after trial for treason. Today, an islamist government occupies the state, and Atif suddenly became a poor victim of "godless" nationalists, who was nothing but a sweet man of faith. Sorry, being a Turk and Anatolian breed, I'm full of sad stories, i don't buy more without proof. All humans are the same. They want more. When they fail to have more, their failure becomes a sad story if told by sufficiently high number of mouths.

Aside all the details, my main argument is: "this has no relation with religion or jihad, the writer made up a claim from unrelated details" Altarbey (talk) 11:10, 5 March 2013 (PST)

Altarbey

About this [1], all the sources are present here [2]. You can look at all the sources over there. Would you say all of the sources are incorrect? Its well-documented.

Also that series of pages is attributed to an author, that's why so its like an essay. We have different policies for essays. You should separate yourself from this event in history as you're not responsible for it, so there is no reason to get national/patriotic about it. Many times the governments or authorities of the countries we live in do bad things and that doesn't have to be taken personally as it was not in our control.

The majority of our site focuses on Islam. Anyway, again the sources are all mentioned on Wikipedia, you can check each of them. --Axius (talk) 05:06, 4 March 2013 (PST)

If one should talk about Ottoman's genocidal behaviour, Turks should be the ones. Ottomans were nothing but a parasite feeding on Turks, almost wiping out Alawi Turks, totally wiped out Baktashis, messed up thousands of years of Anatolian culture pushing sunni islam into people's throats and guts, sentencing them to ages of darkness.

Yet I'm not taking any side on this issue. I'm informing that the content of the article has no proof whatsoever, just a popular topic for people love dramas, combined with side details to make up a claim. What made me fiery is, seing the "sceptical" people acting almost exactly the same as the religious ones, only the topic changes. "Everyone says so, there are many articles written by armenians or people fed by armenian loobysts so it must be true" is the same thing as "there are 1.5 billion muslims/ 2.0 billion christians etc, so god is real, my religion is real".

How much i don't like ottomans, yet they had one of the most detailed military records, which also continued with Turkey's army. Why not take a trip to Turkey's records, instead of "my grandma was sad because of bad turks" stories?

I've visited some of the online references from the wikipedia page, some ny times articles talking about blood baths, no pictures. some of them combining 1908-09 adana killings into 1915-16, some are just "yeah it happened" type of writings. some are the late liberal, romantic turkish writers feeding on sad stories, some sites dedicated to genocide, showing random pictures of miserable situations, yet no 1.5 millon, not even 15 people in them claiming that those are armenians or turks according to the situation.

Killings happen, rage happens, some knuckleheads might go berserk on some groups for some reason. But systemic, programmed genocide... Proof is all needed, nothing more, nothing less. And that is all i will say about this article.

Sad to see people being selectively sceptical on some issues depending on emotional reasons. What happened to scientific approach? Why accepting the whole story, without looking for proofs? Altarbey (talk) 07:16, 4 March 2013 (PST)

Most "skeptics" don't indulge in genocide denial. That's usually done by wing-nuts. I know Axius likes to discuss, but as I've said above, genocide denial shouldn't even be entertained here. --Sahabah (talk) 07:59, 4 March 2013 (PST)

Hi Altarbey, nothing you or I say about the genocide is relevant if it is contradicting historians. We are not subject-matter experts on this issue. Me and you are just an anonymous username on the internet. Therefore I'm not going to respond to your statements about the genocide and try to refute them. I'm not going to debate about them.

You can read this page on Wikipedia too: Armenian Genocide denial (wikipedia). There are sources mentioned for that as well.

One of the sources mentioned for the large number of deaths is this:

Frank Robert Chalk; Kurt Jonassohn; Institut montréalais des études sur le génocide (10 September 1990). The history and sociology of genocide: analyses and case studies. Yale University Press. pp. 270–. ISBN 978-0-300-04446-1. Retrieved 26 February 2012.

Here's another:

^ The German Foreign Ministry operative, Ernst Jackh, estimated that 200,000 Armenians were killed and a further 50,000 expelled from the provinces during the Hamidian unrest. French diplomats placed the figures to 250,000 killed. The German pastor Johannes Lepsius was more meticulous in his calculations, counting the deaths of 88,000 Armenians and the destruction of 2,500 villages, 645 churches and monasteries, and the plundering of hundreds of churches, of which 328 were converted into mosques.

Can you bring a source that refutes the above? Remember I don't want your opinion. I want facts (if you have them). Do you believe in things based on facts and references? I do. Like I said, you were not responsible for this event, so you should not be defensive about it.

There are countless other sources. So what if you cant find a lot of pictures? Pictures dont exist for a lot of things and that doesn't mean they didnt happen. 100s and 1000s of historians are not going to get together and falsely make up a large collection of facts. You should be able to think logically and acknowledge that when 80-100% of academic sources confirm a fact, you should accept that. Unless you can present a collection of reliable facts that contradicts and refutes those academic sources, you have nothing to claim. If you have a problem with the genocide, this is not the site to debate about it. You can try Wikipedia or internet forums.

Again, the majority of our website is about Islam and not about the Armenian genocide. Editors can disagree on certain issues and that doesn't mean they cannot work towards a common goal, which is to make this website better (where it matters, which is: the main topics of this site and these are the Core articles linked on the left such as Women, Miracles and so on). If you can, you should ignore this topic and continue with your task of translating the articles. If you cannot do that, that will be sad as you will not helping Turkish people learn about Islam, all because of one series of pages on a certain topic (where the consensus of academics and historians is clear and there are only minor disagreements, if any). We'll be deleting this page after the discussion is over. --Axius (talk) 14:50, 4 March 2013 (PST)

This will be a long read, so my argument is: "those stories has nothing related to islam or jihad, just a bunch of unrelated details. binding those stories to religion is also hiding the human greed from eyes, which does the same job as religion"

I don't need to bring any sources to refute the above, for it already refutes itself. 88K to 250K killed is the same as "i have 3 to 9 kids". When it comes to human casualties, a very wide range means "it's just a pumped up story". When it comes to numbers, this might be a good collection to show the real numbers of populations depending on the reports of foreign observers, then one can add or substract more accurately.

And this still has hothing to do with Jihad or islam, and even it has nothing to do with the so called genocide(1915-16 deportation) either. What you're talking about is Hamidian unrest, which is an act of Abdul"hamid"'s Hamidian Battalions built up of local Kurds to set a barrier between russia and ottoman empire, and stop the armenian terror, which sped up after Armenians's Independence project aired in Berlin Conference in 18th June 1878. The date of hamidian unrest is 1894-1896. 20 years before the deportation or the so called genocide. Also which is referred as a part of systematic extermination like all failed separatist ethnic riots that occupied years.

People seem to think that ww1 came out of the blue, everyone was sick of their borders, and thought "hey how about we have a world wide war? huh? i know, right?". Economical and industrial power hunger lead to war. Religion, like supporting the ethnic minorities for independence(armenians, kurds, rums, greeks etc.), was just another tool in the war. But unlike other tools, religion did almost no impact at all. Picture of wilhelm and abdulhamid shows that German emperor Wilhelm II as the protector and friend of muslims for the one after him is Abdulhamid II Ottoman emperor and the "khalifa of muslims". Against all propaganda for all those years, most "muslim arabs" fought against the ottomans in ww1.

Nobody suddenly goes berserk on others in numbers of hundreds of thousands in the name of religion. And no, there has never been a war in the name of religion. All were in the name of gaining the power of authority, painted religion. Muhammad cut all those heads, not because they did not accept his god, but because they did not accept muhammad's authority as him being the voice of that god.

What religion hides is the inhuman behavior of imperialism, and economic dominance. Relating everything to religion or Jihad is the same as saying "your hand hit me, your hand's bad". Religion is just a powerful bullshit that covers the underlying desires of humans. And i rest and end my case here. All the details aside, I really don't care of people crying over sad stories whether they are Turks or of the rest, none of those stories either has anything to do with religions or Jihads or never had. Relating up those stories to religions does not help in any way, since humans are the ones that made up religions so that they could mess up human life to gain more power easily. This had gone too far, taking up more and more time. And you most probably had many of these arguments. So no need to take it further. what i say is at the last two paragraphs, or in short "those stories has nothing related to islam or jihad, binding those stories to religion is also hiding the human greed from eyes".

I'll just be adding some translations to articles from time to time, to enrich the online resources in Turkish uncovering religion. Altarbey (talk) 11:10, 5 March 2013 (PST)

Ok. We can agree to disagree on that and a few other things, that is fine with me. Sorry about not responding to your points here but you can discuss the topic of this genocide and other issues with those who are willing to do so and you can reuse part of this discussion in those other debates (if you have them).

About the translations, I would really like a translation of 72 Virgins. There are numerous articles but this is a high traffic page and one of my favorites and an important topic. I hope you are translating word-for word. Let me know if there are any other issues.

Asides from that 72 V article, feel free to translate any other articles which you think are important and should be read by Turkish people. --Axius (talk) 16:46, 5 March 2013 (PST)

@Axius: I'm translating word-for-word. Some of the hadiths and ayats need more precise translations than word-for-word interpretation, so i need to copy them from external sources of well known and trusted Turkish interpretors. But the online resources where i find these translations are not under edu domains. How can/should i cite those resources? Altarbey (talk) 01:22, 6 March 2013 (PST)

Give me the links to those sources and I'll check them out. --Axius (talk) 04:50, 6 March 2013 (PST)

I'm using two sites for tafsirs and hadiths. Kuranmeali.org (Qur'an's tafsir) is the main site i use for tafsirs, for example: Ahzab 53 on İslamda Cinsel Ayrımcılık. Kuranmeali shows each ayat in it's own page, where well known scholars/interpretors's translations for that ayat are listed to provide more understanding which also helps the reader compare the tafsirs by accuracy. I mainly use Abdülbaki Gölpınarlı or Elmalılı Hamdi Yazır's tafsirs, since their tafsirs are much more accurate, and older than the others'. Newer tafsirs are mostly tailored according to scientific achievements to create an illusion of Kuran being ultimate source of information, containing all the scientific facts.

Ihya.org contains the direct copies of both kütub-u sitte and bukhari's sahih. For example [3] is exact translation of Sahih Bukhari 4:52:250