Robert Emmett Murphy, Jr.

  There was a long, protracted, battle to make Genocide a crime.   The word was coined by Raphael Lemkin, a Polish lawyer of Jewish descent, and he started agitating for the recognition of this crime was being, well, a crime, long before Hitler’s rise to power. His activism was on the stage of the World Community and his goal was to get them to accept a unified code that would made the mass murder of civilians a special crime against humanity. Lemkin was primarily motivated by the persecution of the Jews, though he was from Poland, the nation then-best known for ill-treatment oof that group, but by what we now call the Armenian Genocide, a campaign of exceptional savagery was committed by the Ottoman Turks in 1915. He was standing up for victims who were strangers to him.   The Armenian Genocide is both largely forgotten and a turning point in World History. Before it, similar savageries had been so typical they rarely even deserved mention in history books. A han...

  To try and explain some of the train-wreck of the Middle East…   To explain the train wreck of the Middle East you probably don't have to go back as far as the Crusades of that began e 11 th c. Muslim civilization was in its fullest flower then, Jerusalem was not really its center as Western media sometimes insists it was, so the great Arab and Muslim Empire of Saladin, from Egypt, was threatened, but never fully at-risk.   Stat looking later in the 19 th c. wherein the Middle East and Africa were dominated by outside Imperialist interests, both vicious and viciously-competing. It is important to remember that one of those interests was a Muslim, not a Christian, Empire, that of the Ottomans, based in Turkey. They were not Arab-ruled, and usually considered part of Europe, though more accurately called transcontinental, European and Asian.   It was during WWI that the Ottomans breathed their last gasp, caused by the Middle-Eastern, mostly Arab, Muslim...