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Yesterday on this blog we remembered the one hundredth anniversary of the start of the Armenian Genocide.  One day after that came another historic event of World War I, also happening to be associated with Turkey.

It was on April 25th, 1915, that Great Britain along with most of her Commonwealth nations (Australia, New Zealand, Newfoundland, and India) as well as France launched what is arguably one of the most ambitious operations of twentieth century warfare: the Gallipoli Campaign.

British infantry land on Lemnos during the Battle of Gallipoli

The Gallipoli offensive had as its goal the securing of the Dardanelles between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean, which would have given Russia a sea route to its allies.  But the British and French figured that they’d do better than that… by capturing the Ottoman capital of Istanbul.  The amphibious assault landed on two beaches of the ...

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They had been ridiculed and spat upon for hundreds of years.  The ultra-nationalists in power launched dehumanizing propaganda against them.  Their semblance of official protection had been stripped away and made them relegated to a class of life undeserving of life.  Their property was confiscated.  And in the end they were beaten and butchered and starved and raped and shot and crucified and whoever was left were herded onto railroad cars to be sent off to concentration camps stretching from border to border.

And it took place nearly thirty years before the Nazis implement their “final solution”.  But it was not a Germany frenzied by the mad ravings of a failed artist, or any other European nation.  It was instead the Ottoman Empire.  The time was World War I.  And the target for extermination was Armenian Christians as well as many other minorities that did not fit the criteria of ...

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Vladimir Putin may have come from the KGB.  But there arguably exists aspirations which are far away and removed from anything the Soviet Union set out to achieve.

Allow me to paint a picture…

Very soon, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine will commence.  Complete control of Ukraine is not Putin’s objective, but neither will it stop there.

There are even now reports of the Russian army stationed in Moldava beginning maneuvers.  It is altogether possible that Ukraine could be faced with invasion along two fronts.

Or not.

Ukraine is needed not to solidify Russia’s annexation of Crimea, but to establish an uncontested highway for troops and materiel to be transported to the south and west.  Poland?  Likely it has barely figured into Putin’s strategy.  Poland will not be a factor.  Putin is aiming for something far more than re-establishing the borders of Soviet domination during the Cold War.

The Russian army ...

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Television station STV in Turkey – an outfit apparently specializing in religious programming – recently produced a movie or series episode or something about a father and son and the father dies and goes to Hell and the son gets to watch him burn in tortured agony.

Yeah, I’d probably be screaming too if I were locked in a deep blue chromakey room being chained-up by guys covered head to toe in Hulk-green nude suits!

To STV’s credit, the first part of the clip does do a decent job of portraying Hell… or at least the Hell that we saw in Michael Jai White’s Spawn movie back in 1997. Looks like the graphics were drawn with a Sega Saturn. Anyhoo after the clergy dude shows up, the After Effects guy apparently fell asleep at the switch…




That’s either really bass-ackwards, or STV was counting on everyone to ignore the scene ...

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Let’s compare some fiction and fact…

– Jabba’s Palace was first built by the B’omarr Monks, who continued to live within it and practice their religion long after after Jabba the Hutt took over and made it his headquarters.

– The Hagia Sophia was a Christian basilica until 1453 when Ottoman Turks forced their way inside, slaughtering thousands of innocent people whose blood poured into the streets of Constantinople. From that time on Christians were forbidden from worshiping within their own building.

Got that? Good. Because it only makes the claim by a group of Turkish Austrians that LEGO’s new Jabba’s Palace set from its Star Wars line is “racist” and an affront to religion all the more ridiculous.

LEGO version of Jabba’s Palace (left) and Hagia Sophia in Istanbul (right)
One is a place that has known murder, slavery and intolerance toward others. The other is a children’s toy.
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A team of Italian archaeologists reported yesterday that the tomb of Philip the Apostle, one of the original Twelve Disciples that followed Jesus Christ, has been located in Turkey’s southwestern province of Denizli.

Philip is mentioned in all four Gospels as being among the disciples closest to Christ. He is often associated with that Philip who preached to the Ethiopian eunuch (recorded in Acts, chapter 8), however there is plenty of reason to suspect that there were two Philips who each played a prominent role in the history of the early church. Philip the Apostle is said by tradition to have been martyred at Hierapolis (located in the present-day Turkish province of Denizli). Philip is reported, like his friend and fellow apostle Peter, to have been crucified upside-down.

From the article at World Bulletin…

The tomb of St. Philip the Apostle, one of the original 12 disciples of

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From Turkey comes this awesome footage of a flour factory, built in 1928, being imploded. Or it was supposed to implode anyway. Instead the support on one side of the base was destroyed, causing the entire building to tumble over “like a toy house”.

Watch it below folks. This simply must be seen to be believed…

Look on the bright side: those wacky Turks have brought a whole new unprecedented scale to the old game of dominoes! 😛...

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In 1994 a Kurdish shepherd in eastern Turkey discovered something while tending his flock: the tops of a series of buried stones. News of his find reached museum curators several miles away and ultimately made the site at Gobekli Tepe (pronounced “Go-beckly Tepp-ay”) the subject of a full-blown archaeological survey.

Now, almost fifteen years later, Gobekli Tepe is being hailed as one of the greatest historical finds of the past half century, with some even calling it the “most important archaeological site in the world”. The stones unearthed thus far are intricately decorated with carvings of humans and animals. Evidence indicates that many more stones are waiting to be uncovered. And then there is the age of the buried structures: calculated to be around 12,000 years old. That’s approximately ten thousand years older than Stonehenge in Britain or the pyramids of Egypt. Little wonder then that more than a few ...

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The mayor of Batman, Turkey is suing Warner Brothers and Christopher Nolan over their Batman movie The Dark Knight, claiming that since the movie came out his town has been plagued by a high rate of unsolved murders and skyrocketing numbers of female suicides.

And in Russia, the parish priest of the village of Komarova notified law enforcement officials that he had been robbed. The item in question that has been stolen: the entire village church....

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