Former Turkish Prime Minister Mesut Yilmaz: „Turkish secret agents intentionally started forest fires around Christian monasteries of Greece“

Greek politicians reacted angrily on Monday following the admission by former Turkish Prime Minister Mesut Yilmaz that Turkish secret agents intentionally started forest fires in Greece in the 1990s as part of state-sponsored sabotage.
The claims are not new and were common knowledge on the islands of the eastern Aegean which were particularly hard hit by wildfires in the 1990s. But Yilmaz’s comments -- part of an interview published in the Turkish daily newspaper Birgun over the weekend -- are the first admission by an official source that Ankara was funding subversive activities in Greece.

According to Yilmaz, who served as premier three times in the 1990s, agents of the Turkish secret service set fire to Greek forests during the leadership of his archrival Tansu Ciller, from 1995 to 1998. During that period major forest fires caused huge damage on the islands of the eastern Aegean and in Macedonia.

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Gaddafi: "Turkey will be our Trojan horse"

He said it. "Gaddafi: God did not create a Europe for Europeans only,"

Tripoli - Firas Pressm:

Urged the Libyan leader Colonel Muammar Gaddafi of Muslims in the European Union to unite and join the People's Leadership of the Islamic World, which he chaired, to counter what he considered a threat to the Muslims there, pointing out that God - the Almighty - created the earth for all people and not for sex particular, in reference to the Europeans.

Gaddafi said at the meeting, on Thursday evening, in the Libyan capital Tripoli, the heads of delegations of leaders of the Social Popular Islamic Forum Muammar friendship and networking in the Balkans, and the Association of Gaddafi to young people of Bosnia and Herzegovina, who were visiting Libya, «You are a rarity in Europe, you get the large number of willing God in the day, you will have the upper hand and higher levels, you will be imams and Oarthyn of the European continent ».

He added: «If Turkey joined the European Union, and the presence of both states the Balkans in the European Union and Albania in the European Union, the meaning of this is that the European continent is no longer a crusade or a Christian as it was, but Islam has become a strong partner in the European continent to the ground and human beings and actually».

«We await the day when Turkey joins the European Union to serve as a Trojan horse, which tells the history».

And reduced-Qadhafi, who holds the rotating presidency of the Arab summit, of the importance of statistics that declare the number of Muslims in Europe, said it was not true, because it is tendentious statistics show that Muslims are a minority. However, he added: «Muslims more than the number declared by the official statistics».

He added, saying: «Fortunately, the Muslims started to multiply and multiply more than the rest of the other religions, maybe this is a sign of God. Thus the will of God, made Muslims multiply times higher than other breeds. Perhaps this is proof that God wants to be more Muslims than anyone else in the end »....
He said: «We must unite in Europe, and to be an Islamic state and one under the banner of the World Islamic People's Leadership», pointing out that God created the earth for all people....

The Armenian Genocide

(CBS)March 2010 Wars are fought over oil, land, water, but rarely over history, especially about something that happened nearly 100 years ago. But that's what Turkey and Armenia are still fighting over: what to label the mass deportation and subsequent massacre of more than a million Christian Armenians from Ottoman Turkey during World War I.

Armenians and an overwhelming number of historians say that Turkey's rulers committed genocide, that its actions were a model for what Hitler did to the Jews. The Turks, meanwhile, say their ancestors never carried out such crimes, and that they too were victims in a world war.

Ever since, this battle over history has not only ensnared the two nations but even the White House and Congress, where resolutions officially recognizing the genocide are currently moving through the House and Senate.

But our story begins where the lives of so many Armenians ended, far from Istanbul, in the desert.

"60 Minutes" and correspondent Bob Simon took a drive into what is now Syria, to the barren wilderness, to what amounts to the largest Armenian cemetery in the world.

"As many as 450,000 Armenians died here," author Peter Balakian told Simon.

Balakian is an Armenian American who has written extensively about what happened in this desolate place.

According to Balakian, 450,000 Armenians died in this spot in the desert. "In this region called Deir Zor, it is the greatest graveyard of the Armenian Genocide," he explained.

Deir Zor is to Armenians what Auschwitz is to Jews. The most ghoulish thing about the place is that 95 years later the evidence of the massacres is everywhere.

Just a short distance from the banks of Euphrates there's a dump. It's also the site of a mass grave. It has never been excavated. All we had to do was scratch the surface of the sand to collect evidence of what had happened here.

Under the surface was evidence of bones. "It's the hill full of bones," said Dr. Haroot Kahvejian, an Armenian dentist who showed Simon around.

"Nobody bothered to dig them up until now?" Simon asked.

It was extraordinary standing on a mound where perhaps thousands of people lie entombed. There is no record of who they were or where they could have come from.

"Look at that. There are kids who know exactly where they are. They are finding them by the dozen," Simon observed.

"Evidence comes in many forms. It comes in photographs, it comes in texts and telegrams," Balakian said. "And it also comes in bones."

So just how did all these bones end up here?

In 1915, the First World War was raging and the Ottoman Empire was crumbling. The Armenians were a Christian minority who were considered infidels by the ruling Muslims -- a fifth column who sided with the enemy in the war.

The fact that they were prosperous didn't help, says Balakian, whose great uncle survived the genocide and wrote about it in a memoir Armenian Golgotha.

"Like the Jews of Europe the Armenians of the Ottoman Empire had a dominant role in commerce and trade, they were highly educated, many of them," Balakian.

And he said they were highly resented.

Asked what happened next, Balakian said, "What happens from the spring of 1915 on through the summer is a well orchestrated project of government planned arrests and deportations."

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Because they hate Christians

The 2009 Western and Eastern Christmas season begun with the attempt of a Nigerian Muslim to blow up Northwest Airlines flight 253, with 300 passengers, just before it landed in Detroit on th 25th of December.

On this very day, Christians in Iraqi opted not to celebrate Christmas, since Ashura, a major Shi'ite day of mourning, falls on the same day. So out of "respect" for the local Shi'ites, Chaldean Catholic Bishop Imad Al Banna asked all Christians in cities like Basra not to engage in any public celebration of Christmas, and not even to entertain guests or show any joy in the day. A week earlier, Islamic jihadists attacked churches and Christian schools in Mosul, with forty people killed in bomb attacks and random Christians targeted for violence on the streets. "It is terrible," one Mosul Christian told the Times of London: "Most of the Christians are staying at home, or when they go out they watch their backs." A member of another religious minority, the Yazidis, who lives in a Christian village remarked: "You cannot live in Mosul. Every day you find Christians being killed. Very few are still going to church. The women have to wear hijabs. They send someone first in a car to check if there is someone outside the church."

The Christians in Turkey are facing a similarly somber Christmas. In an interview with the American CBS, the Ecumenical Patriarch of 300 million Orthodox Christians, his holiness Bartholomew I said, "We are treated," as citizens of second class. We don't feel that we enjoy our full rights as Turkish citizens." Yet "we prefer to stay here, even crucified sometimes."

And in Egypt, Christian Solidarity International and the Coptic Foundation for Human Rights released a new report detailing rampant abuse of Christian women by Muslims: Cases of abduction, forced conversion and marriage are usually accompanied by acts of violence which include rape, beatings, deprivation of food and other forms of physical and mental abuse. The US State Department's 2009 report on international religious freedom noted that the Egyptian government often turns a blind eye to crimes committed against Copts -- and government officials have on occasion even participated in those crimes.

In their quest of religious war to finish off the Christians in Egypt, Muslims yesterday sprayed automatic gunfire into a crowd of churchgoers in southern Egypt as they left a midnight Mass for Coptic Christmas, killing at least six Christians in a drive-by shooting.

And, these days, Christian churches are set on fire in Malaysia amid increasing religious discrimination against minorities.

Christian persecution continues on a daily basis, and the non-denominational American Christian group, Open Doors USA, which is dedicated to supporting persecuted Christians, brings out a list annually. This list is dominated year after year by Islamic states.

The top 10 persecutors for 2009 on the Open Doors list were:

1.North Korea
2.Iran
3.Saudi Arabia
4.Somalia
5.Maldives
6.Afghanistan
7.Yemen
8.Mauritania
9.Laos
10.Uzbekistan