Confusion And Deliberate Misrepresentation By Paula Yacoubian

Here.

Paula Yacoubian is a stylish television personality in Lebanon, a country that a century ago was 80% Christian, and thus a Christian refuge in a Muslim sea, a refuge that has become, through  the inexorable workings of Muslim over-breeding rates and of steady Muslim pressure, from within (as in the Lebanese civil war) and from without (as the malevolent, Saudi-imposed Treaty of Taif, that required the Christians — that is, the Maronites —  to formally recognize Lebanon as an “Arab state” when for long they had resisted the idea that, even if they used Arabic or had Arabic last names (but still managing to semaphore to the discerning, through such first names as “Pierre” and “Brigitte,” their non-Muslim and non-Arab identities), that they were Arabs. And now the Christians, who once had such self-assured and clearstatesman as Charles Malik, and religious leaders such as Archbishop Moubarac of Beirut, sense themselves to be, as they are, a threatened minority, as now they constitute less than 30% of the population of Lebanon.

Yacoubian owes her livelihood, and her life, to being accepted by that Muslim majority, that would be quick to discern any sentiment that they deemed harmful to Muslims. And those Armenians who, accurately, recognize that the Muslim Turks who took such fiendish pleasure in killing Armenian clerics and cutting open the stomachs of their pregnant wives, and who — by all the eyewitness accounts (see, for example, Harry Hartounian) — continually shouted “giavour” (Infidel)  when doing their killing, must be appalled by the attempt of this stylish miss, for her own purposes, to pretend it was not a Muslim war on Christian Armenians but something else.

Yet what something else? She admits, or claims, that “the Ottomans” (she means the Turks who did the killing) also killed other Christians — such as Greeks and Assyrians — and that had those Greeks or Assyrians accepted Islam, they would not have been killed. She says that “the Ottomans” are the ancesttors of the Islamic State, which consists of people who, at every step, rely on the Qur’an, Hadith, and Sira for their guidance an justification. She must know that it was not only Muslim Turks but Muslim Kurds who participated in the killing of .  on Lebanese Christians, that has helped to turn the Christians into a threatened minority of less than 30 and steady Muslim pressure on Christians, now a Muslim-dominated land. She owes her livelihood, and her continued existence, to not antagonizing Muslims.

She is speaking before a group, mainly Armenians (though I thought I spotted Geagea, that is Jahjah, in the mix) but wants them to refuse to see the massacres of Armenians  by Muslim Turks (and also, don’t forget,  by Muslim Kurds) as explicable as something other than a war of Muslims against Christians. But she never says what the motive could be. And she calls the Ottomans the predecessors of ISIS, which misreads Ottoman behavior, and at the same time constitutes an oblique recognition, despite herself,of the Islam common to both the Islamic and the Ottoman State.

A curious example of the confusion arises when a non-Muslim tries to exculpate Islam, out of fear that if the victims of Islam recognize the nature of the war being made on them, that will only encourage further faith-based hatred — as if Jihad did not exist, or the impulse to conduct it diluted, if only non-Muslims pretended it did not exist.