Kurds Quotes
The Kurds are an ethnic people—Sunni Muslims by religion who like Armenians and Jews before Israel had no country of their own. There are large contingencies of Kurds in Iraq, Iran and Turkey where historically each of those countries saw the Kurds as part of their Nation. In Turkey, it could be said that almost half the population are Kurds. The Turkish government takes the position that all its citizens are Turks—there is no such thing as a Kurd. Turkey once banned the speaking of Kurdish and would not allow the language to be used in schools insisting that Turkish was the language of the country. Kurds outside of Turkey established terrorist cells and murdered many innocent Turkish people including Turkish Kurds. Turkey, Iraq and Iran have all tried to eliminate any semblance of a Kurdish state or province using force and military means. No country has really aided the Kurds but they have been able to avoid annihilation because of the mountains where they could hide and endure.
Objecting to the United States supporting the Kurdish Peshmerga forces attacking ISIS in Syria when they were affiliated with the PKK an organization that used terror tactics to gain independence for Kurds in Turkey.
His government had just used force to disarm the rebellion of religious Kurds.
The Iraqi Prime Minister was a Shiite autocrat who had a winner take all approach to government and other than putting token Sunnis and Kurds in the Cabinet ran a very discriminatory government and could muster no loyalty with Kurds and Shiites.
leaders of Turkey and Israel Both countries used to be highly secular states with extensive separation between church and state. As secular democracies they tended to view the world similarly. However, then the outlook was more religious—one Islamic and the other, Jewish. Their world views have become different.
A large proportion of Turks are of Kurdish extraction. A minority of the Turkish Kurds want to take part of Turkey, Iraq, and Iran and create a new state of their own—Kurdistan. The PKK has been a revolutionary terror organization within Turkey and other nations and at the time Turkey, unwisely many thought, restricted the use of the Kurdish language as there was a movement there similar to the English only movement in the U. S. at the turn of the millennium. The official position is that all were Turks and there were not separate peoples. Zana, a member of Parliament had Parliamentary Immunity, although she shocked and outraged the conservative, nationalist Turkish establishment. When she left Parliament she joined an illegal political party, was sentenced to jail for terrorism on the testimony of two people who had been tortured and in response to international protests was released in 2004. A number of American Congressmen nominated Zana for the Nobel Peace Prize.
He had been responsible for the violent deaths of thousands of people, mostly innocent civilians in his attempt to establish an independent nation of “Kurdistan.” His position is that with technology and the media, violence and terrorism are no longer necessary for a dissident political independence movement to succeed. However, he was found guilty for his past violence and was jailed for life. The PKK continued its terrorism. See {620143}.
The American troops were fighting and dying to protect Iraq freedom and this incident caused much soul searching in America. Political pressure was brought to bear on the Kurds and Talabany announced that Kamal Sayid Qadir would be pardoned and released from jail. However, he acknowledged that the laws themselves had to be reformed to make them more democratic. See {589503} for the law.
Turkey, following the French model, only allowed for one kind of citizen, and resisted the notion of different kinds of Turkish citizens. Some Turks of Kurdish extraction, however, wanted to maintain a separate identity, language, culture and sought political independence to join with the Kurds of Iraq and Iran to form their own nation. They used violence to attain their political ends. The Turkish response to this separatist threat was particularly heavy handed and the conflict escalated. The PKK lead by Ocalan killed thousands of Turks with bombings and other terrorist attacks, and the government troops also killed many trying to combat the terrorism. Finally, Ocalan was jailed, and the terrorism diminished.
She is a leading American Arab who is a Syrian expatriate. The examples she gives in the beginning of the quotations are relatively recent atrocities where Muslims have attacked and brutally murdered other Muslims. She articulates one of the theories to explain the Islamic propensity to brutality and violence that the religion itself, when taught literally which it so often is, actually produces an inclination and glorification of brutal violence and develops a tolerance and acceptance of Islamic violence.
The culture of Iraq and the Desert tribes made raiding and looting of other villages or travelers or caravans a way of life. The British occupiers were determined to put an end to it and Harris, a young officer, developed the retaliation of bombing the village of the raiders and their warlords. This appears to be the beginning of destroying of houses in the Middle East as a method of retaliation and punishment which would be adopted so well by the Israelis as a humane method and they often quoted Harris saying: “we put them to the maximum amount of inconvenience, without physical hurt, and they soon stopped their raiding and looting.”
The problem persisted into the 21st century. Iraqi Kurds have constantly tried to carve out parts of Iran and Turkey with ethnic Kurds and form them into a Kurdish nation, separate and distinct from Turkey, Iraq and Iran. Some of the Kurds became fanatic terrorists to that end killing many in all three countries as well as fomenting civil war with other Kurdish factions in Iraq.
A little over a decade later, it was the conservative President who was condemning Saddam Hussein for gassing his own people and justified the Iraq War in part over that. And in 2007 Saddam having been toppled from power, he was tried for this crimes against humanity with the major charge being his gassing of the Iraqi Kurds. He was hanged for the “liberal hate speech” which had turned into conservative hate speech, but was a correct accusation regardless of which political pole was making it. There were few issues where most Americans were as unanimous as Saddam’s guilt in the gassing of the Kurds with Limbaugh and Saddam’s relatives being about the only people who saw it as propaganda.
