'Deliberate, state-engineered genocide aided by Muslim clerics and the Muslim-majority population'

'The Turks and their helpers murdered, straightforwardly or indirectly, through privation and disease, between 1.5 and 2.5 million Anatolian Christians between 1894 and 1924.'

And the Turks still deny that they did it.

Disinformation and ignorance continue to cloud this issue. Even though Kemal Ataturk subsequently proceeded to abolish the decrepit Ottoman Empire and proclaimed the foundation of the Turkish Republic in its place, he referred to himself as a 'mujahid,' that is, a jihadi who fought against the cross and Christianity.

Israeli historians Benny Morris and Dror Ze’evi have produced a work that shocks the conscience with their forensic study of the exterminatory violence committed during the final stage of the Ottoman Empire and the lead-up to the nascent phase of the Turkish Republic.

In contrast to scholarship that has largely focused on the World War I Ottoman extermination of Anatolia’s Armenian population, The Thirty-Year Genocide: Turkey’s Destruction of its Christian Minorities, 1894–1924 broadens that time frame to study other persecuted Christian minority groups, particularly Greeks and Assyrians.

An important lesson from this masterful history concerns the role that Islamic-animated genocide played in the destruction of the region’s Christians. Morris and Ze’evi marshal no shortage of evidence.

The book abounds with examples of Islamic ideology being combined with state directives to promote the extermination of Middle Eastern Christians. It is not a historical study for the faint of heart.

'The Turks and their helpers murdered, straightforwardly or indirectly, through privation and disease, between 1.5 and 2.5 million Anatolian Christians between 1894 and 1924.'

The authors conclude that what happened was deliberate, state-engineered genocide aided by Muslim clerics and the Muslim-majority population. They base their conclusion on “the massive documentation – American, British, French, German and Austro-Hungarian – that we have studied over the past decade.”

The Ottoman and Turkish Republic’s policy of elimination reduced Asia Minor’s Christian communities from 20% of the population at the end of the nineteenth century to 2% in 1924.