
World View: Europe’s Refugee Crisis Revives Ottoman Empire Fault Lines
Contents: EU votes to distribute 120,000 refugees among countries by quota; Hungary’s Viktor Orbán invokes memories of Ottoman Empire

Contents: EU votes to distribute 120,000 refugees among countries by quota; Hungary’s Viktor Orbán invokes memories of Ottoman Empire

Armenian families who fled Kobane, Syria, do not plan to return home even though the Kurdish army successfully defeated the Islamic State (ISIS/ISIL). “There were only eight families left before the ISIL attack [in October 2014],” explained Agop Tomasyon. “All of these families left Kobane after the attack.”

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Mustafa Karaaslan, an education official in Bursa, Turkey, has triggered national outrage after his Twitter account posted a picture of Turkey’s founding father Mustafa Kemal Atatürk in hell, presumably for being a secular leader, rather than an Islamist one.

On Tuesday, the Islamic State (ISIS/ISIL) destroyed the 200-year-old Maryam Khatoon Mosque in Mosul, Iraq, which the Ottoman Empire erected in 1821.

A statue of an Ottoman prince taking a selfie in the Turkish city of Amasya has become both a major tourist attraction and the victim of multiple vandalizations, as residents and tourists alike differ on whether the artwork is a fun homage to the city’s history or a vulgar commercialization of Turkish culture.

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On April 24, 1915 the Ottoman Turkish leaders ordered the arrest of hundreds of notable Armenians in Istanbul and launched the systematic annihilation of Armenian as well as Assyrian Christians within the empire’s borders and throughout the Middle East. This day would become known as “Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day,” and a century later is the center of a persistent geopolitical controversy.

LOS ANGELES, California — Friday will mark the centennial of the start of the Armenian genocide, in which nearly 1.5 million Armenians were massacred at the hands of the Turkish Ottoman Empire. A host of businesses will be closing in the area in observance of the anniversary. A march through Los Angeles has also been planned.

The Christian population of Turkey is evaporating rapidly. The nation, a NATO member since 1952, has experienced a reduction in its Christian population from 20% 100 years ago to only 0.2% today. The latest blow in the community occurred at the Hagia Sophia during Easter holy week.

The Armenian genocide is a very sensitive subject with Turkey, as it prefers to think of that horrendous century-old bloodbath as a military clash with the Ottoman Empire, which the Armenians lost very badly–badly enough to kill about 1.5 million of the 2 million Christian Armenians living in the Ottoman Empire at the time, to be specific.

The U.S. State Department wants a “full, frank” acknowledgement of the facts surrounding the mass killing of Armenians in World War I, but demurred when it came to labeling it “a genocide.”

The French UMP (Union for a Popular Movement) Party is facing controversy following the discovery that a large part of a bill presented to the French legislature in remembrance of the Armenian genocide was plagiarized from Wikipedia. Former French President Nicolas Sarkozy is a member of the UMP.

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Justice and Development Party (AKP) candidates in Turkey, from regional positions to the Turkish legislature, are donning medieval Ottoman garb in their advertising campaigns, in an attempt to harken back to the strength of the Islamist Ottoman Empire.

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As Armenians are gearing up to commemorate the centenary of the Armenian Genocide at the hands of the Ottoman Empire, the Turkish Foreign Ministry has “mistakenly” published a picture of the Armenian Genocide Monument amidst a collage of photos in a 2015 calendar.