Tonight we're going to look at the Turkish genocide of Armenian, Assyrian, and Greek Christians. 2015 marked the 100th anniversary of the launch of the systematic extermination of the Christian Armenians by the Ottoman Turks. That's 103 years ago. The jihad began On the 24th of April, 1519, with the rest of 250 Christian leaders in Constantinople, what is today called Istanbul. And then over 800 Christian leaders were arrested countrywide on that same day. In that year, one and a half million Armenian Christians were slaughtered by the Muslims in what is known as Turkey. Additionally, another 750,000 Assyrian Christians and 950,000 Greek Orthodox Christians were murdered in the Ottoman Turkish Empire between 1915 and 2022, just in seven years. Three and a half million Christians. victims of the Ottoman Turkish Empire and most Christians are not even aware of it and most journalists have not even bothered to give it any attention. Forget about the anniversaries, not at all. It's not even in the school textbooks of the average Christian school. 24th of April 1915, The leadership, the scholars, the intellectuals of the Armenian Christians were rounded up throughout the Ottoman Empire on the same day, and that's the beginning of what we now know as the Armenian Genocide. Names and numbers don't have much of an impact, so maybe some faces of some of the people who were the leaders of the Christians in Turkey help us to put a face to the crime. The word genocide was coined specifically this last century, 20th century, because of what happened to the Armenians. It's the deliberate extermination of a people or a nation. And that's what was done for the Christian Armenians by the Ottoman Turkish Empire. From the 15th century, the dominant Muslim power was the Ottoman Turkish Empire, which oppressed millions of Christians, including Armenians, Greeks, and many Slavs. Notice Armenia, right next to Anatolia, what used to be the Byzantine Empire, Asia Minor during the Bible years, where the seven churches revelation was, and the site of the thousand-year Christian empire, the Byzantine Empire, Constantinople is today renamed Istanbul, but Armenia was a great kingdom for many years. But they have been whittled down to the point where very few of them are even alive today. Some people know Arger Ashduni, one of the great scholars of our time. He's an Armenian. His parents, his grandparents were the only survivors of their family who fled from the Ottoman Turkish genocide. And in his family, for the last 1,400 years, there's always been at least one male member of their family involved in the ministry full-time. So he's got quite a history and a heritage. And his family fled to America, and his grandparents fled to America in 1915, and that's where he comes from. With the fall of the greatest city in the world at that time, Constantinople, in 1453, and the massacre of the entire city by the Muslim Turks, the Byzantine Empire, which had stood for 1,000 years, fell. They sacked Budapest in the heart of Europe, capital of Hungary, taking hundreds of thousands of Christians into Islamic slavery from the very heart of Europe. The Ottoman Empire declined into corruption and degeneracy from the very beginning. The Ottoman Turkish Empire basically took everything that used to be part of the Eastern Roman Empire, including most of North Africa, even as far as Algeria. They went as far into the heart of Europe that they were so close to the heart of Vienna itself, they almost took Vienna, capital of the Austria-Hungarian Empire. Of course, they went through decline, there were a lot of battles to liberate the whole of South-Eastern Europe, liberating progressively Austria, Hungary, all the way through Greece and Bulgaria and Romania. These were long battles. These countries endured centuries of Islamic persecution before winning their freedom. When Sultan Murad III died in 1595, his son, Muhammad, had his 19 brothers murdered to prevent them claiming his throne. Who can kill his own brothers? He had seven of his father's pregnant concubines sewn into sacks and thrown into the river to drown. Many of his nephews were incarcerated in the cage, and Sultan Ibrahim threw his grand-vizier into a cistern to drown. The Ottoman ruler at this time, Sultan Ibrahim I was emotionally unstable and believed to be mad. One morning after an orgy, Ibrahim had all 300 women in his harem put into sacks and thrown into the Bosphorus River to drown. Only one survived by being picked up by a ship bound for France. When Ibrahim was finally assassinated, the Ottoman Empire was torn apart by more corruption, nepotism, inefficiency, misrule, and power struggles. This is the whole story of the Ottoman Turkish Empire. There isn't a happy golden age. It was always corrupt from the very beginning. In the early 19th century, after the Ottoman Empire suffered defeats at the hands of Russia and Austria, and as the Greeks and Serbs mounted successful wars of national liberation, the Greek sacred band fighting the Turks in Romania, for example, Sultan Muhammad II decided to massacre all his Janissaries. Now, the Janissaries were soldiers forcibly recruited from Christian families. The Janissaries were the crack troops, but they were taken from the families from about age five or six. Never knew love. Only brutality and discipline made them the most fanatical and of course they were expendable because they were not real Muslims, they were just converts. And so the Janissaries were the shock troops of the Ottoman Turkish Empire for centuries. Well, at this point in the 19th century they decided to massacre their best soldiers because Well, they had Christian parents. That's the so-called blood levy. The reforms and westernization of state institutions was accompanied by escalating persecution of Christians. So throughout the 19th century, the Ottoman Turkish Empire kept modernizing, constitutionalizing, westernizing, all to appease the British in particular who wanted them to do this. But at the same time, they intensified the persecution of Christians within their boundaries. Despite adopting a Western-style constitution in 1839 to percolate the European powers, the last century of Ottoman Turkish rule witnessed the most thorough and complete destruction of Christian communities throughout the Middle East, Asia Minor, the Caucasus Mountains, and the Balkans. In 1822, the entire population of the island of Chios, tens of thousands of people were massacred or enslaved. In 1823, 8,750 Christians were slaughtered by the Turks at Mussolini. Thousands of Assyrian Christians were murdered in the province of Mosul in 1850. Notice the dates. Because that's all leading up to the Crimean War. Now we know quite a few things about the Crimean War. This is where Florence Nightingale modernized nursing and what a magnificent job she did. I mean one of the few good news to come out of the Crimean War. We know the Victorian cross came out of the Crimean War. It was made from Russian cannon melted down and of course there was the Charge of the Light Brigade. Just about everyone's heard of the Charge of the Light Brigade. It took place during the Crimean War. Alfred Lord Tennyson wrote the poem The Charge of the Light Brigade in 1854. Half a league, half a league, half a league onward, all in the valley of death, rode the 600. Forward, the light brigade, charge for the guns, he said, into the valley of death, rode the 600. Forward, the light brigade, was there a man dismayed? Not though the soldier knew someone had blundered. There's not to reply, there's not to reason why, There's but to do and die. Into the valley of death rode the 600. Cannon to the right of them, cannon to the left of them, cannon in front of them, volleyed and thundered, stormed at with shot and shell. Boldly they rode, and well, into the jaws of hell. Into the mouth of hell rode the 600. Flashed all his sabres bare-fleshed as they turned in air, sabring the gunners there, charging an army, while all the world wandered. plunged in a battle smoke right through the line they broke. Cossack and Russian reeled from the saber stroke, shattered and sundered. Then they rode back, but not the 600. Cannon to the right of them, cannon to the left of them, cannon behind them, volleyed and thundered, stormed at with shot and shell, while horse and hero fell. They that had fought so well came through the jaws of death, back from the mouth of hell, all that was left of them, left of 600. When can their glory fade? O, the wild charge they made! All the world wondered! Honour the charge they made! Honour the Light Brigade! Noble 600! Alfred Tennyson's poem was published 19th December 1854 in the Examiner. Inspired by the Psalm 23, the term Valley of the Shadow of Death, it highlights one of the most famous events of that long and costly Crimea war. The Light Brigade had been ordered into a nearly hopeless situation due to confusion of command and incompetence. Yet incredibly they did succeed in reaching the Russian artillery at the end of a valley lined with artillery on both sides and actually succeeded in fighting their way out of the Russian trap. An impossible task. Suicide mission. But most of the men actually made it back to their own lines, but very few were without serious wounds. And actually there were 666 men in the Light Brigade that day, but the 600 sounds better. There have been a number of films made on this, a very imaginative Charge of the Light Brigade with Errol Flynn and Olivier de Havilland, which took quite a lot of liberties with what actually happened, and the far more somber and skeptical, cynical, anti-war Chartered Life Brigade that came out in the 1970s. But the question is, why were we there? What were our people doing in Crimea and was it a good war? For centuries, Russian statesmen saw their manifest destiny to defend Orthodox Christianity against Islamic Jihad and also against Roman Catholicism. Systematically Russia had worked at freeing Christians from Ottoman Turkish control and remember Ukraine and the Crimea used to be part of Ottoman Empire. when people were complaining about Russia invading Crimea, I had to point out the Russians have had Crimea longer than America's had Hawaii. And the Russians liberated from the Ottoman Turks. The Crimea's always been Russian for generations and centuries. Russia couldn't invade Crimea because Crimea was always part of Russia. And yes, a Ukrainian dictator Khrushchev did, without any referendum or due process, make Crimea and a lot of other parts of Russia part of Ukraine, but he was a dictator, it was during the Communist Soviet Union, it couldn't have had legal force. The fact is Crimea is mostly ethnic Russian, it's always been Russian, it never was Ukrainian except in the 50s when Khrushchev just did this arbitrarily, and it had no legal force. At any rate, nobody today is complaining about the fact that Walfish Bay is part of Namibia even though it was politically part of South Africa for a very long time. And we have more claim to Walfish Bay than Ukraine has got to the Crimea. But that's another story. The fact is that Russia was forcing the Turks to respect religious freedom of their Christian subjects. And as Russia extended Christian civilization across the whole of North Asia to the Pacific Ocean, they were also pushing southward in their civilizing mission, seeking to liberate the holy places of Palestine, which were then controlled by the Muslim Ottoman Turkish Empire. So if it had not been for the untimely intervention of Great Britain and France, the Russians would have undoubtedly overrun the whole rotten, corrupt, crumbling edifice of the Turkish Empire and established Orthodox Christianity throughout the Middle East, which, from this perspective, looks like a much nicer and more satisfactory turn of events than what actually happened in the last century and a half. However, Britain dreaded the establishment of a Russian superpower stretching from the Arctic to the Indian Ocean. And so to prevent Christian Russia from gaining ice-free ports for their navy, Britain became the protector and guarantor of the Muslim Ottoman Turkish Empire, the greatest threat to Christian Europe in the history of the world. This just shows what often happens. You see it in our own private lives too, and the church, where Christians spend more time fighting fellow Christians and not realizing the damage they're doing for the cause of Christ in general, we often don't see the anti-Christian threat, and we're more busy fighting fellow brothers in Christ. This is, I think, what Europe's problem was for the last few centuries. Thousands of Assyrian Christians had been murdered in the province of Mosul in 1850, and it was such atrocities as these that led the Russians to demand the right to protect the holy places which were under Orthodox supervision in the Middle East. And it was at that moment that in 1852, with the accession to power of Napoleon III in France, that in order to enhance his prestige, I mean he had a great uncle to emulate in Napoleon Bonaparte, that Napoleon III sought to provoke an international crisis by demanding that the Turks place the Holy Place in the Middle East under the power of the Roman Catholic Church rather than to the Orthodox Church. who of course looked to Moscow as their main capital. As Napoleon III's new French regime was completely secular. This was a cynical and manipulative diplomatic political move designed to provoke war with Russia. There was no good reason here. This man was not a crusader. But Napoleon III's France now assumed the unlikely role of Catholic crusader, but not in aid of the cross, that's what crusaders meant to mean, in aid of the crescent, to support Islam. Effectively supporting the bloodstained, despotic, corrupt Turkish empire, this move led to the soaking of the continent in blood. Over 800,000 people died in the Crimean War, a worthless war. where we were actually involved in a cause of propping up anti-Christian persecutors in the Ottoman Turkish Empire, fighting against Christian Russians. I mean, what a worthless cause. The charge light brigade was brave, but sadly it was in a bad cause. Far more serious than the actual loss in lives in Lim was the British and French actions in the Crimean War extended the worthless existence of Turkish tyranny, who thereafter targeted the Christians who had previously been under the protection of Tsarist Russia with greatest ferocity. Because part of the requirement of the Allied win in the Crimean War was the Russian Navy in the Baltic Sea was basically destroyed and they weren't able to project their power to threaten Turkey as they had been before if Turkey massacred Christians. So in 1860, immediately after the Crimean War, 12,000 more Christians were slaughtered in Lebanon. In 1876, 14,700 Bulgarians were murdered by the Turks. At the town of Batau, over 7,000 inhabitants there, 5,000 of the Christians there were put to the sword. This is on the continent of Europe, in Bulgaria. In 1881, the Turks slaughtered the Christians in Alexandria, one of the greatest cities in the world. This is the city where Saint Mark, John Mark the Evangelist, died. This is the city which produced such great leaders of churches as Athanasius and Oregon. The reports of these and other routine atrocities by the Ottoman Turks were generally suppressed by the British government of Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli, who promoted an alliance with Muslim Turkey against Christian Russia. Gladstone, who was the opposition leader in Britain at the time, described British alliance with Turkey as the scandalous alliance. And here it is, where Britain should be shunning the bloodthirsty Turk, who's crucifying Christians and beheading Christians. And what are we doing in alliance with Turkey? You may recall during the Reformation era when King Francis I of France made an alliance with Ottoman Turkey, all of Christendom were coiled in horror. What kind of low base scum could fight fellow Christians in alliance with Islam in Turkey of all places, the greatest threat to Christianity in Europe in all of history. And yet here was Gladstone not that long ago referring to Disraeli doing this very thing. Prime Minister Disraeli had put Britain in alliance to prop up Turkey, the old man or the sick man of Europe. And Gladstone later opposed the Turkophile policies of Disraeli in these words. He's not such a Turk as I thought. What he hates is Christian liberty and reconstruction. What Gladstone observed 138 years ago can easily be applied to the foreign policies of many Western governments today. The Islamophilia in the West is not so much that they love Islam, it's just that they hate Christianity. The enemy of my enemy is my friend. It's that logic. And so when you see feminists and atheists and communists falling over themselves to support Islam, it's not that they support Islam. It's just that they know Islam is anti-Christian, and they hate Christianity. And you can see this. Do the gays think that the homosexuals are going to treat them better? They throw gays off buildings to their death. They decapitate and hang them. What they do to, not just feminists, but women, hang them, behead them, stone them, and yet feminists... Homosexual activists and communists are all fooling over themselves to promote Islam in the West, little realising what's going to happen at the end of the path if Islam gains control. But they so hate Christianity, they're blinded to the evils of their ally that they're now in love with, radical Islam. As Serge Trefokovic in Sword of the Prophet observes, and we've got his book on our shelves here, the great Western powers, the heirs of those who looted Constantinople in the Crusades, the Fourth Crusade, came through Constantinople and Constantinople fought their own way to fight the Turks. Once they were within the gates, they looted and destroyed and seized control of Constantinople itself, which was treacherous. They'd been put up to it by the Venice, the Viennese, the Venice powers wanted their biggest opponent or competitor in the market, Constantinople, to be knocked out. And so the treachery of that fourth crusade. And refused to help Constantinople when the Turks were breaking through the walls with a cannon built by a Hungarian Catholic. The West, who forced the last emperors of the Byzantine Empire to forswear their Orthodox faith at the Council of Florence as the price of the Western help which never came. The same Western powers, and of Great Britain in particular, actually supported the Turkish subjugation of Christian Europeans, like the Bulgarians, like the Turks, like the Armenians, like the Russians, on the grounds that the Mohammedan Empire was a stabilizing force and a counterweight against Austria and Russia. Were Austria and Russia so bad that one had to support Turkey in their massacring of Christians as a counterweight to your Christian cousins? The scandalous alliance with Turkey against Russia in the Crimean War reflected a pernicious frame of mind that has manifested itself more recently in overt, covert, or de facto support of certain Western powers, like NATO, for the Muslim side in Bosnia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Chechnya, Cyprus, Sudan, East Timor, and Kashmir. Reverend Bill Bathman, my father-in-law, previous chairman of the Board of Frontline Fellowship, who did a lot of work in Yugoslavia, he said he had never, ever, ever, ever support getting involved in a war in the Balkans. He said the wars in the Balkans go back centuries and the animosity and the blood hatred between the Bosnians and the Serbs and so on is so deep and it goes back so far and it's so complex that he wouldn't advise getting involved in any way. But he says if we had to choose, I'd choose to fight for the Serbs against the Bosnians because the Bosnians are Muslims allied with Al-Qaeda terrorists. Some of the most radical Muslim terrorists on the planet are supporting the Bosnian side. And the demonizing of the Christian Orthodox Serbs and the support of NATO and of the UN and the US for the Bosnian Muslims. This fits a pattern. It's exactly as this author points out. The Western powers have consistently, since Second World War, supported Islam against Christianity. Consistently. In fact, you can go back to the First World War. They consistently sided with the Muslims against the Christians, or the Communists against the Christians. They're always anti-Christian. And you can see it. They did nothing to help Christians Rwanda who were being slaughtered, but they did everything they could to help Muslims in Somalia or Muslims in Bosnia or Muslims anywhere. They don't care about Christians being slaughtered in Sudan, but Muslims in Darfur and Sudan, now that's something they can be concerned about. But Christians in Nuba Mountains, who cares? And the West has got an absolute anti-Christian bias and this brother from Eastern Europe is dead right. And this is where all our wars, you just think of how in the in the centuries of European bias for supporting Islam, going back to the Crimean War. So 160 years ago, Western European powers intervened in the policies of Russia, when Russia was standing up for Christians who were being massacred by Muslim Turks in the Holy Land, and we supported the Muslim persecutors. Invaded the Crimean, as a result, strengthened the hand of radical Islam. I mean, I was one of those also brought up in the charge of the Light Brigade and the Thin Red Line Balaklava, I mean, a lot of bravery, a lot of courage, you can't question the courage of the men there. But the policies of the low-life criminals like Disraeli, who sent them in there to support the enemies of Christianity. How short-sighted. Instead of supporting civilization and advancing freedom, which is what Russia was doing at that time, the Western powers' intervention in Crimea in the 1854 to 1856 Crimean War actually undermined freedom. It retarded civilization. It unintentionally led to even worse massacres of Christians and extended life granted to the worthless, tyrannical Turkish empire. The Turks slaughtered over 200,000 Armenian Christians in Bayezid in 1877, in Alshgard in 1879, in Sashen in 1894, in Constantinople in 1896, in Adana in 1909, in Armenia 1895 to 1896. Now bear in mind, none of these would have happened if Russia had been allowed to conquer Turkey in 1854. because of the massacring of Christians. And in 1915, the Turks massacred, martyred over one and a half million Armenian Christians in the most intensive extermination of Christians ever launched up to that point. Now here's a beautiful monastery, Varagavank Monastery, which in 1915, the Turkish army attacked, burned, destroyed, Here's the gutted, abandoned interior of an Armenian monastery north of Diyarbakir in Turkey, what is today called Turkey. Now, in April 1915, the Turks organized this quite cleverly. It was well-planned, this genocide. They called up Christian Armenians into the army. They didn't give them weapons though. They called up the army to get them out of the community so they couldn't protect their women and children. And then they were put into labor forces, and they were worked to death, and at a key point, then they were murdered. but they got the men out of the way, but then they did forced removals of the women and children from their communities, because the communities might protect them, or they might have access to things, weapons that could protect them. So they first moved them out of the area, and then they killed them in other areas where they had no friends and no resources. So the Armenians were first ordered to gather in the main square of the city to be deported, and they started it step by step. It was a Let's first call up the men, secondly deport the women and children, and thirdly they massacre them. Here the Armenian deportees in Malatya who were eventually massacred. Now bear in mind that Armenians were one of the first kingdoms to become Christian back in the 4th century. They date back a very long time. Armenia, by the way, is where the mountains of Ararat are. the Armenian people around the mountains where the Ark of Noah landed. Here's Fakao in flames during the massacre perpetrated by Turkish forces in June 1915. And here are a whole lot of the Turkish people being mobilized to kill their Armenian neighbors. Just one of many of the disturbing pictures. People being hung and the people murdering these Christians standing by and getting their photographs taken. Here are doctors, Armenian Christian doctors, hung at Aleppo Square in 1916. And the Turks are standing in front, proud of their actions. The most disturbing of all pictures, Christian women crucified by Turks in Armenia. Corpses of Armenian children. American Ambassador Henry Morgenthau, Sr. wrote to the State Department on 16 July 1915 describing the massacre as a campaign of race extermination and This letter was published in the newspapers. It was made known, but it didn't stop the Americans and the British from doing absolutely nothing to help. In fact, it was worse than that. Here you can see how at one stage the Turkish Empire stretched all the way up to Belgrade, Bosnia. By the way, the reason why there's so much hostility between the Bosnians and the Serbs. Bosnians are Serbs who converted to Islam. So they are racially the same, but they're religiously different. And they were the ones who did a lot of the atrocities. There's huge, there's a whole church made out of skulls of Christians murdered by the Bosnians. When they spoke about the Serbs committing genocide against the Bosnians, in fact, according to my contacts on the ground, and Bill Bathman took me to Yugoslavia and to these areas in Macedonia and Bosnia, and we spoke to people. The massacres were being done by the Bosnian Muslims against the Christians. And the media put it exactly the other way, the Christian Serbs are doing genocide against the Bosnians. And you might have recalled that the head of the Serbians was imprisoned for this very crime, and was tried in The Hague, in the International Court of Justice, and he died while under trial. And after his death, the verdict came out, there was no genocide, There was no war crimes committed by Milosevic. And he was on the newspapers and the front of Time magazine as the face of evil, guilty of genocide and so on, trialed by media. But after Hague, International Court of Justice had looked at it all, it was very small news items that the verdict came out in the end. There was no genocide neither. Milosevic nor any of his officers were guilty of it. In fact, the whole Serbian government had been falsely accused. And it was on that basis that Bill Clinton ordered the American Air Force to bomb the hell out of the Serbs. that they were committing genocide against the Bosnians. And all the information we have on the ground is the Bosnians were committing the genocide, the Serbs were the victims of the genocide, and the world got it exactly 180 degrees the wrong way around. Well, who's surprised about that? But the Ottoman Turkish Empire stretched as far as Algeria and Egypt and as far as Romania and Serbia and Bosnia, but they were down to this size during the First World War, and they lost most of the rest of the empire during the First World War, of course. But what we're talking about is in 1914, this was the Ottoman Empire, the Purple Era, and that's where the genocide took place. Armenia was a great kingdom, a very big kingdom, in fact bigger than what Turkey is today. And from the fourth century, it was a fine and strongly Christian kingdom. And they regularly were fighting against the Persians. They were a major military force. But over the years, they were really whittled down. And so here you can see, this is a 1914 map. And the blue areas show where the Armenians are. You can see they spread them. They've been colonized a lot by the Turks. There are Armenians on the Russian side. There is in fact a country called Armenia that was part of the Russian Empire. But they're only a small part of what used to be the Kingdom of Armenia. This is one of the earliest of the research done during the genocide. This is dating back already to 1915. And this shows by the larger the orange circles, the larger the amount of massacres are, the higher percentages. And you can see where the deportations are, the roots of the deportations, and then where the massacres took place. So it was a step-by-step, remove the men from the community, remove the women and children from their communities, and then massacre them where they are separated from everything that could provide them with protection. And this shows the development through 1915 to 1923, the death marches for the Turkish troops where the massacre sites were. And the Armenian Genocide Museum documents these things with more and greater precision. The map of the massacre locations, the deportation and extermination centers. Now, at some point, some Armenians realized what was happening and then took weapons and fought. And so there were a few cases, such as in the siege of Van, where some Armenian Christians made a brave, although ultimately futile, fight. But some did stand and fight when they realized what was happening. And these are some of the pictures you get in the Armenian Genocide Museum. And some of the excavations at massacre sites done later to prove what was happening. These burns of victims are in a Lebanon memorial chapel. Some of the victims of the leaders. These are some of the survivors that were discovered in salt and sent to Jerusalem in April 1918. And this is a picture of one girl who survived, others whole group marked in the middle. Passage to Ararat describes how along the road to Adana, Turkish women were given daggers to stab dying Armenians in order to gain the credit in the eyes of Allah of having killed a Christian. And many Muslims wanted this joy and this privilege of killing a Christian. Just as we've heard it today that Saudi Arabian businessmen, sheik, whatever they want to call themselves, they don't do any work there, will fly to Sudan in order to crucify a Christian in Nuba Mountains so that they can have the privilege and honor of having crucified a Christian. And it's sort of like canned lion hunting in South Africa where some A worthless individual comes from Japan or America and pays R25,000 to shoot some poor, retired circus lion from Boswell, Wilkie, who's out there, never lived in the wild before, and he's in the bush, and some big game hunter comes up and shoots him and thinks this makes him a great manhunter. And meanwhile, they're just actually worthless cowards, and same thing you could say about the people killing Christians in Turkey at that time. People propped up. This picture was taken by the Red Cross. They put these victims there, took the picture to document what was happening. Christians killed on the road of the extermination marches. There are some pictures that have survived of the victims of the Armenian massacre. This is essential that people have the documentation. 1915 to 1916, over 100,000 Maronite Christians in Lebanon and Syria were murdered. These are not the same as Armenians. It's a different denomination. There's a crevice where untold numbers of Armenians were tossed to their deaths near Kangas in Turkey in 1915. You see this crevice here. Turkey is taking advantage of the war in order to thoroughly liquidate its internal foes, that is the indigenous Christians, without being thereby disturbed by foreign intervention. This is what Talat Pasha said in defense of what they were doing. Mehmet Talat Pasha, Grand Vizier of the Ottoman Empire, the chief architect of the Armenian Genocide. and his loyal lieutenants who carried out most of the massacres, Ismail Enver and Hamid Dejmal. These are the three most responsible people for the massacres. It's no wonder that British Prime Minister Gladstone described the Muslim Turks as they were, upon the whole, from the Black Day when they first entered Europe, the one great anti-human specimen of humanity. Wherever they went, a broad line of blood marked the track behind them and as far as their dominion reached, civilization disappeared from view. They were represented everywhere, government by force as opposed to government by law. And these are some of the newspaper headlines at the time. Turks slaughter Greek Christians. Not satisfied with torture of Armenians, Turks extend cruelty to Greeks. Thousands of Greeks deported from the coast to the interior of Asia Minor. Why deported from the coast? Well, from the coast they could flee, from the coast they could get support from maybe the Greek Navy, but if they're in a hinterland, they're isolated. Massacres kept up. 20,000 Christians killed or missing in Persia. Turks and Kurd slayers. Thousands more in peril at Umairah and elsewhere. Bishop and four clergymen hanged. Assyrian men tied in groups of five put to death in a cemetery. Dr. Packard with American flag stops massacres. Jobar State Department seeking information. 40 Christians a day are dying, say refugees. Young Assyrians tell of terrors of Turkish uprising. Stop at gospel mission. Even as the Ottoman Turkish Empire crumbled and was replaced by the new Republic of Turkey under Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the ancient city of Smyrna, which is one of the seven churches in Revelation, the church which had the Apostle John ministering at towards the end of his life, with 300,000 Christian population, the city of Smyrna was destroyed. And this in 1922. I mean, that's in the lifetime of my father. The burning of Smyrna and the massacre of its Christian population marked the end of Greek civilization Asia Minor, which had stood in Asia Minor for millenniums, since, in fact, the time of Alexander the Great. On the eve of its destruction, Smyrna was a bustling port and a vibrant commercial center. This is the seafront promenade, so the waterfront, which is a popular tourist destination. And here's the quay of Smyrna full of people during the fire. The Christian population of Smyrna on the quay September 1922. Now the war is over. Here's Hellenic families praying for their relatives. The martyrdom of Chrysostomus on 9 September 1922. The Turkish mob organized and mobilized by the Turkish army under the command of Mustafa Kemal. He's one of the leaders of the Young Turks. he's the moderniser, attacked the Greek Orthodox Metropolitan, Chrysostomus. Metropolitan's sort of like an archbishop, majorly important in the Greek Orthodox Church. Archbishop Chrysostomus was lynched before the burning of Smyrna. The Muslim mob ripped his eyes out, dragged him by the beard, bleeding through the streets, beating and kicking him. Every now and then, when he had the strength of the dirt, he'd raise his right hand and bless his persecutors, repeating, Father, forgive them. One Turk became so infuriated he cut off the Metropolitan's hand with a sword. And Father Chrysostomus was hacked to pieces by the angry Muslim mob. This before they burned Smyrna. Another victim of the Turkish massacres in the Greek city of Smyrna. Another man buried alive. Here is the documentation of the destruction of Smyrna. Now, how were these pictures taken? by Western navies. The French, Italian, British and American navies were anchored offshore watching the destruction of Smyrna. The inhabitants were trapped between the flames on the one side and the Turkish bayonets on the other. On the 13th of September 1922, the Turks burned Smyrna, the last Christian city in Asia, burned it to the ground. Documented and watched by warships of four great Western powers. Incredibly, the British, American, Italian and French ships anchored in Smyrna's harbour were ordered to maintain neutrality. Some of the eyewitnesses described the scene as a pitiful throng, huddled together, sometimes screaming for help, but mostly waiting in a silent panic beyond hope, did not budge for days. Typhoid reduced the numbers, but there was no way to dispose of the dead. Occasionally a person would swim from the dock to one of the anchored ships and try to climb the ropes and chains only to be driven off. On American battleships the musicians on board were ordered to play as loudly as they could to drown out the screams of the pleading swimmers. The British poured boiling water down on the unfortunate to reach their vessels who were trying to climb up the chains. The harbour was so clogged with corpses that the officers of the foreign battleships were often late to the dinner appointments because bodies would get entangled in the propellers of their launchers. A cluster of women's heads bound together like coconuts by the long hair floated down the river towards the harbour. This is just one of the photos taken by the Red Cross representatives in Turkey, in Smyrna. Over a million Halins, that's Greeks, Christians living in Asia Minor, in what today is called Turkey, forced to ban their land and homes. Forcible, what do we call this? Land confiscation without compensation, basically. This is what's called the Greek genocide. of 1914 to 1923. This was the end of Christianity in Turkey. Today, the Turks, if you look at the Operation World Book or any unreached people group book, the Turks are the largest group of unreached people on the planet, the biggest unreached people group. And yet, Turkey used to be the site of the seven churches of the Book of Revelation, the site of the ministry of Paul and Timothy and Titus and Apostle John. As Turfakovic observes, at the very time that Europe achieved its military and geographical advantage, it had just beaten the Ottoman Empire. The moral and religious decline that culminated in the auto genocides of 1914-1939, the world wars, had become evident. Having found in the grass places that the crusader predecessors had only dreamed of reclaiming, here they've just conquered Jerusalem and Bethlehem and Antioch and Alexandria and Constantinople. Effete and demoralized European governments made no effort to re-Christianize these areas and within a few decades neatly abandoned them. If any of the Christians in these countries, imagine, a few Christians whose ancestors survived 14 centuries of Islamic persecution, and the British have come, they've beaten the Turks, we saved. They would have been just as disappointed as any Christians in Iraq or Afghanistan who thought when the American army arrived that they were saved. about to be betrayed, worse than ever before. The moral disarmament of contemporary post-Christian Europe is now nearly universal. Bear in mind, Europe was once Christendom. All the way from Portugal through Spain, through France and Germany, through Poland to Russia, Finland, Scandinavia, British Isles to Iceland, all the way down to Greece. The cross in different shapes and forms symbolizes the heart and the faith of their people. Europe was once overwhelmingly majority Christian. Before the First World War, 64% of the people in Europe were in church every Sunday. Before the Second World War, 42% of Europe were in church on Sunday. Since the Second World War, Europe averages 4% in the West in church on Sunday. You've got more Anglicans, you've got 14 times more Anglicans meeting in church every Sunday in Nigeria than you have in the whole of the British Isles of North America combined. You have 200 times more church attendance in the Congo than you have in Belgium. That used to rule the Congo. After World War I, with the installation of nominally pro-Western governments in many Muslim countries fashioned from the wreckage of the Ottoman Empire. Now remember the blues, the French took Syria. Syria and Iraq, the North and Lebanon were under French control. Jordan and Israel and Iraq, Kuwait, these were under British control. So a lot of what we've got in these countries today are thanks to these people who divided the borders as they did, gave the Kurds no freedom and Armenians even less. The West seemed to have convinced itself of the existence of benign Islam. And so the state of the world in one picture. The East is behind a burqa and the West has the blindfold. Some things just can't be covered by just a burqa. Why are they suddenly having burqas? I mean, East, I remember early on, Muslims would wear scarves but they didn't have the veils. Where's the veil from? Well, a veil can hide a lot more than just a face. And there are laws in the West against domestic abuse and violence against women. And that's why I think there's been this great increase in burqas. It's to conceal the broken noses and bloodshot eyes and the beaten up people. Civilization can go backwards. It takes centuries to build civilization. You can destroy civilization in less than a lifetime, less than a generation. You can see this. You can have some people whose fathers are chemical engineers, heart transplant specialists, and the kids can be some kind of beach bum high on drugs who's literally living on the mountain like a boogie. You can go to caveman in one generation. It doesn't take much time to go to caveman. It takes a long time to become advanced. This is now coming to Europe. The great European countries that civilized and evangelized the world are now being colonized by people who hate them and would like to behead them and kill them all and destroy everything. And the people who are welcoming this, they're welcoming their own destruction because they don't know the history and they don't seem to care about their faith. Islam is a peaceful religion and they'll kill anyone who says that they're not. Behead those who insult Islam. This is coming to a place where people don't want you to preach the gospel because it might offend someone. But it's okay for someone to talk about beheading people who make a comic or joke about Muhammad. Diversity means living with people who hate you and want to kill you. Islam is a religion of peace and love and we show it by writing. Entire Christian communities were obliterated in the Muslim Middle East. The Nestorians, the Chaldeans and other Christian communities were virtually wiped out. And as late as 1955, Istanbul's Christians suffered what one reporter called the worst race riot in Europe. I mentioned it last week under the false flags, because remember, they started after the false bombing. In seven hours, just in Constantinople, which has since been recalled in symbol, they looted and destroyed over 4,000 homes, 1,000 businesses, 73 churches, three monasteries, 23 schools, 110 hotels, and 27 pharmacies, causing over 100 million pounds of damage. That's 1955. pounds, 100 million British pounds worth of damage to properties belonging to Christians. The Turkish prime minister later admitted that the Turkish government had carried out the September 5, 1955 bombing of their own Turkish embassy in Thessaloniki in Greece, and also damaging the birthplace of the founder of modern Turkey, blaming it on Greece for the purpose of inciting and justifying this anti-Christian violence, which is what we focused on last week, the whole false flag operations. So this is in our lifetime, destroying even cemeteries. This, which went on from the night of the 6th into the morning of the 7th of September 1955, delivered a fatal blow to the Greek community and Hellenism of Constantinople in seven hours. Now, just bear in mind, this is what Islam did to chase Christianity out of Asia. And Constantinople was not even on the Asian side, it's in the Europe side. of Turkey. This is where we are potentially in danger facing in South Africa. We are in Cape Town, a toehold of Western Christian civilization on the outermost parts of Africa. And if we don't get prepared to protect our own, we could find ourselves chased from where our Christian civilization has been working hard and putting down roots and blessing the whole continent for the last three centuries and more. And we could be chased out in a matter of hours, just like they showed in Istanbul and Constantinople, if we're not ready and prepared and organized to fight and to defend and to protect. So it's just 53 years ago, the Greek minority in Istanbul was targeted in a crisis, fabricated by the Turkish security service they admitted was a false flag. Our government does false flags all the time. How easy is it for them to do a false flag and blame it on some white, racist, extremist, separatist, whatever? Destruction. It is no wonder that William Muir, one of the greatest orientalists of all time, concluded at the end of his long and distinguished career, the sword of Muhammad and the Quran are the most fatal enemies of civilization, liberty and truth which the world has yet known, an unmitigated cultural disaster. This picture, by the way, is of Muslim mobs murdering the Austrian ambassador and his wife, I think in Morocco. parading as God's will. An unmitigated cultural disaster parading as God's will. And here is the official pronouncement of Jihad against the Armenian and Greek and Assyrian Christians by Sheikh al-Islam of the Ottoman Empire in 1915. This was Turkey in Europe. Well, by God's grace, there's very little in Europe anymore, but even Constantinople on the European side of the Bosphorus has now been so Islamized. And so, three years ago, Assyrian Christians marked the 100th anniversary of the genocide of their people. The persecution of Christians by Muslims and the genocide by Turkey has become a forbidden subject in Western circles. How many history departments study this at UCT or Stelbosch? How many journalists marked this in the press? Did SATV or CNN or BBC mark these anniversaries? It's like a whole year, 1915, is just missing from the history of the Ottoman Empire. What happened in 1915? I can't remember. Just completely out. And so the Armenians are, this is the Armenian flag, colors, the blue, the red and the yellow. They're making a stand. Armenians have spread all over the world. It's a diaspora as far as California with people like Dr. Arjo Rastuni, one of the most famous Armenians in the world today. And we haven't even covered Nagorno-Karabakh. Armenia is one of the republics of the old Soviet Union, of the old Russian Empire, which today is an independent country. They are about the last toehold of what was once the great kingdom of Armenia. And they are bordering with Georgia, which is also Christian, and Azerbaijan, which is rabidly Muslim. And they've had some serious, serious, serious wars with Azerbaijan. They've been fighting for their life there. Back in 1993-94, when this was on the go, I very seriously considered going with a good friend of mine up to Nagorno-Karabakh and working in Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh under attack. This is the Nagorno-Karabakh army and their flag. When the Holocaust in Rwanda broke out and I went to Rwanda and then got the Macedonian call to Sudan, but I could have very easily ended up up there because I've got good friends who worked there and this was a very big concern of ours. Nagorno-Karabakh is an island of Christianity in a sea of Azerbaijan. The Azerbaijanis were trying to genocide the Nagorno-Karabakh isolated Armenians, but the Armenians have since managed to take these yellow areas, consolidate the area, and join in with Armenia. So Nagorno-Karabakh succeeded through military strength, and Russia later gave them aid, the Russian government under Yeltsin, and under Putin they have support too, so they can physically defend themselves from the Azerbaijan Muslims and the Turks who would love to genocide them. So this is basically Nagorno-Karabakh. I saw a lot of similarities between Nagorno-Karabakh and the Nuba Mountains, also an island of Christianity and a sea of Islam. It was so close, whether I went up to Armenia or whether I went to the Nuba Mountains in Sudan, and just the way it went, I was directed clearly to Sudan. But my heart was very much there, and I must say, what they went through there, and if you look at some of the old Frontline newsletters, 93, 94, 95, we had a lot about Nagorno-Karabakh and the Armenians fighting for their lives against the Azerbaijanis. and praise God they did win that war. So this is just to remind us of between Russia and Turkey and Iran there's Armenia, Georgia and Azerbaijan and Nagorno-Karabakh is this Christian enclave tucked away in Azerbaijan although they've now physically joined themselves to Armenia by very serious fighting and thankfully with Russia's support. So, marches to remind people of the genocide. Turkey is guilty of genocide. This is in Times Square, New York. Big and bold. Cyprus was the first country to recognize the genocide officially. Here's a monument to the Turkish genocide, to the Armenian victims in Cyprus. Cyprus itself is cut in half between Turkish-occupied north and Greek-occupied south. Here's the Armenian memorial in the French city of Marseille. Well, I wouldn't give much chance of this surviving because Marseille is heading towards an Islamic city which will destroy this monument very soon. This is where Armenia is today. They used to occupy this huge area and now they're down to a very small enclave. But they know they must fight for their survival. This is the memorial to the victims of the genocide. So the museum is here. This is in Armenia, what used to be part of the Russian Empire, but the Armenia that today is independent, Christian Republic, and a solemn, somber reminder of the victims of this genocide. And of course on the 24th of April every year there's a lot of people who go there for memorial services. And this is the Armenian language. Their script is quite different from ours. The eternal flame to commemorate the victims is a powerful image of remembrance. White flowers, white roses. In this case flags of the Armenian Republic and their forum against genocide. This is held on the 100th anniversary. And inside the museum, pictures commemorating artifacts, a picture of a mother and a child fleeing from the genocide, rising out of the ashes is the description of this monument. And again, 24th of April. These are countries that have officially recognized the genocide of Armenians by the Turks and these countries are resisting Turkey's inclusion in the European Union and demanding that Turkey acknowledge its part and Turkey continues to refuse to acknowledge that there was such a thing as a genocide. So in 2015 we were part of the international campaign to commemorate the 100th anniversary of this. The flag of Armenia and There are those who took billboards to wage war on the battle for the mind, the battle for the hearts. Information war recognized the crime of the century, the Armenian genocide. And there are committees and groups as far as Australia, all over the world, marching, demonstrating, protesting. And this Erdogan who organized another false flag coup just recently as an excuse to arrest thousands of teachers, judges and others in what was meant to be a coup which he organised himself. And you know, it didn't happen. That's why we get so angry when you mention it. So this is different, you can see the Constantinople skyline artwork being used in order to have people to understand some of what's been done. We need to use social media in order to remind people of things, of history in particular. Of course their books, there's one that quotes, they can live in the desert but nowhere else. That was during the expelling the forced expulsions the death march so there's one Armenian survivors memoir the young Turks and the boycott movement nationalism protest and working class in the formation of modern Turkey guilty with full charges for murdering over 2 million Assyrians and Armenians this isn't even looking at the Greeks though Armenians at the twilight of the Ottoman era Ambassador Morgenthau's test, which was ignored by the American government. And to think of all of these victims, it wouldn't have been necessary. if we hadn't propped up the Turkish Empire in the Crimean War back in the 1850s, and if after defeating the Turks hadn't just let them continue murdering people, or if the Allied navies at Smyrna had fired a few guns at the Turks who were coming there, that could have saved 300,000 lives. Just a bit of gunboat diplomacy. There's so many things that could have been done to save lives. So when we think of abortion, we can't just think of the abortionists. We've got to think of the people who are accessories to murder. They voted for the political parties that support abortion, the journalists who wouldn't print the other side of the story, the silence, the medical people who might have compromised. There's so many accessories to murder. And in genocide, there's a lot of accessories too. And you just think of all that was done by Western governments, or not done. that basically sealed their fate. May the 19th was selected by the Greek Parliament as a day to commemorate the Greeks of Pontia who were genocided by the Turks. And so basically, while we focused primarily on the Armenians, the Syrians have a story, the Greek Orthodox are also victims of the same general massacre. Three and a half million victims just in the space of seven years. But Armenia has survived as a nation. and some of the churches are being restored and returned. Fourteen centuries of religious discrimination and persecution causing the suffering, oppression, enslavement and murder of over 270 million people. have been buried under a thick whitewash of myths of Islamic tolerance. The most intolerant religion in history is the only one called peace intolerant these days. The deceit, the cowardice and the silence by all too many Western journalists and academics continues to facilitate religious discrimination and persecution by radical Islam to this day. They are accessories to murder. And the intellectual dishonesty of those Westerners who engage in academic gymnastics. To justify the invasion of other people's lands, the looting, pillaging, raping, murdering and enslaving of whole peoples, it needs to be exposed. It seems Islam can do nothing wrong and Christians can do nothing right according to the present politically correct narrative. The hypocrisy of those who justify the military expansion of Muslims but condemn those who inflict defeats upon Islamic invaders needs to be challenged. Why is it that the crusaders are always bad and the jihadists are always right? The fiction that jihad has never been an aggressive but only a defensive concept should be dismissed with the contempt that such deception deserves. What were Saudi Arabians defending in Spain? When Islam defines a refusal to submit to Sharia law under Islam as aggression, when they define peace as submission to Islam, then you must know we're not talking the same language. When they say Jihad's always defensive, how could it be defensive? You Saudi Arabians, what were you doing fighting in Spain? No, well, the Spaniards refused to submit to Islam. That's aggression? Yes, it is. We're talking totally different languages now. As one person described it, jihad seeks to conquer our souls. They seek the disappearance of our freedoms and our civilization. They seek to annihilate our way of living and dying, our way of praying or not praying, our way of eating and drinking, our way of dressing and entertaining and informing ourselves. We don't understand or don't want to understand that if we don't oppose them, if we don't defend ourselves, if we don't fight, that jihad will win. It will destroy the world that for better or worse we've managed to build. It'll destroy our culture, it'll destroy our art, our science, our morals, our values, our pleasures. That is why our Lord said, you will know the truth and the truth will set you free. This presentation is based on just one chapter of Slavery, Terrorism, Islam book. It's vital that we learn the lessons of history. Speak up, stand up for religious freedom, speak out for freedom of conscience, expose the enemies of liberty and fight the good fight of faith. But we also need to remember that the Lord is close to the brokenhearted and he saves those whose spirits have been crushed. The victims of these persecutions are some of the most vibrant Christians on the planet. We can learn a lot from them, not just help them, not just teach them, but learn from them. All the darkness cannot put out the smallest light. A candle is still more powerful than all the darkness. Remember the persecuted. like our friends in Egypt, who say they may destroy our churches, but they cannot destroy our faith. Remember the prisoners as if chained with them, those who are mistreated, since you yourselves are in the body also. As Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote, if we do not know our history, we will simply have to endure all the same mistakes, sacrifices, and absurdities all over again. Now these things became examples, we read in the scripture, to the intent that we should not lust after evil things as they also lusted. Now all these things happened to them as examples and they were written down for our admonition. So this is one of the articles we're putting up on a Henry Morton Stanley School of Christian Journalism website and Facebook page in order to put out investigative journalism, the articles that the world's media is refusing to print and focus on. It's part of a ReformationSA.org website. It's a part of our concern to be able to understand our history better, that we can work for biblical reformation today. But in addition to this, it's part of our goal of working for reformation in the future. So we have in Christian Action magazines some of these articles. IDOP Africa is a move to get people to observe the second Sunday of every November as an international day of prayer for the persecuted church. This is part of a campaign to get people to understand Islam and to evangelize Muslims. If we don't evangelize them, we will have to fight them. They either will be one to Christ and become our brothers, or they will be our enemies in some great battle in the future. But if we are just apathetic, we don't love our neighbor enough to share the gospel with them, one day we will suffer the consequences in many different ways. So this is just one of the battles, one of the chapters in Slavery, Terrorism, Islam, which is also now available as an e-book. and we've got these in audio visual we've got it in our mp3 powerpoints as part of our muslim evangelism programs and we should be praying for our mission teams that will be heading into sudan to serve the persecuted church and help people who are also behind the lines facing similar kinds of threats today that our friends in armenia in Assyria, even the Greek Christians and what used to be the Eastern Byzantine Empire are facing. So, any questions, any comments at all? This is here to remind me that last week we spoke about false flags, and one of the false flags is Khitan, so we have made some films that Each family or congregation might want to take and show, be advised that while it's restrained as much as it can be. It's a well-made Polish film. It is not the sort of thing you want children to be exposed to. It's a harsh film in some ways, even though it's well put. It's all in Polish with English subtitles, but I think it's brilliant, and it's a classic example of a false flag. So the Katyn film, thank you for sourcing it and putting it down on the phone. And so last week we handed out the noble lie about the Oklahoma City bombing, which was a false flag, and this is the Catan Forest Massacre, which we've dealt with just a few weeks ago. So, any questions? I'd like to say that I had passed to me, there must have been a news item, on the even more severe Christians And this was a terrible article. Would you like to comment on that? Well, I don't know exactly what's happening in Russia. I get mixed reports as well. I hear from many people, and I've got quite a large selection of both Russian and Ukrainian Christian friends, and my daughter's got Latvian Christian friends and others, so we hear a variety. First of all, we know that Vladimir Putin is a member of the Russian Orthodox Church, and the Russian Orthodox Church, which has over 80 million members, sorry, much more than 80 million members, they've got about 80% of the Russian population. That's much more than 100 million members. The Russian Orthodox Church is the official church of Russia, so they're no longer an atheist church country, they now are a Russian Orthodox country. The Russian Orthodox certainly have full religious freedom. Initially everyone had religious freedom in Russia. The Celts did very well at the beginning. Russia has gotten extremely hostile over the years to the Western variety of religion. Obviously there's Celts, there's name it and claim it and frame it charlatans, there's all kinds of religious extremists that the Russian government and people have decided to crack down on. I'm speaking to people, Salafi evangelical Christians, up in St. Petersburg and so on, saying, we have no restrictions on public sharing of gospel, open air preaching, everything's, you know, they say there's no religious crackdown at all. And then you also hear that some home church has been cracked down on, this person's been denied a visa, this person's been expelled. So there's certainly selective interference in some religious freedom in Russia. As far as I know, it is aimed and targeted at what they see as cults or sects or those that are disruptive of the Russian culture. Now, I'm a Protestant. I don't like government interference on any level of religion. Let us expose the cults through good teaching and preaching. I don't like that you have the government kicking out someone that they don't like, because next thing, that can be easily abused. They can kick out good preachers. I'd rather allow even the bad preachers to be ministering without any interference from the government. Unless they're committing a crime. I mean, if it's a crime that breaks any crime, it doesn't matter if he's religious, let due process be served. You know, if he's stealing or abusing or whatever it may be. Even false advertising. I mean, why not? Let the law have its course. But while I would totally oppose any government interfering in any religious freedom, and therefore, if the Russian government is clamping down religious freedom, we must be against that. But it's not as clear cut as some people are pointing. Some people are making out like Russia's persecuting Christians and there's no religious freedom. It's not that clear. What you've got is the Russian Orthodox Church is the preferred official religion and anything that's not Russian Orthodox is suspect and if they think this is some nonsense from the West, and let's face it, a lot of what comes from the West is nonsense, We should maybe just be a little restrained before making up our mind. I think the jury's out. I'm not totally sure what's going on in Russia, but I think it's an honest attempt to preserve religious freedom and clamp down on cults and abuses, and if they do that, I'm sure they're going to clamp down on people who shouldn't be clamped down on, and it's going to hurt good work as well. So I think it's the wrong thing to do, but I don't think it's... It's not a return to the KGB and the old days of Bible smuggling and religious persecution because the Russian government's printing Bibles, appointing chaplains. There's a lot of good going on there. But they don't think the same way as us. The Eastern Orthodox way of thinking is very different from us. We're very individualistic. The Orthodox is very much community. So I don't want to write off a whole branch of Christianity just because it's not the way we see it. If they're willing to die for Christ, I've got to accept they're genuine Christians, even if I disagree with what they're doing. So that's my answer. It's not totally clear to me, but I suspect what you're seeing is a Russian Orthodox nationalistic attempt to preserve Russian culture from what they perceive as a threat to the culture, and in doing so, they're trampling on some religious freedoms, which of course is dangerous. That's probably what's happening. Does anyone else know better what's going on in Russia? It's protecting the Orthodox Church. But they're not cracking down on everyone. I mean, there are Protestants going about their work without any interference, and then others are getting totally smacked. I don't know what the difference is between us. It's not totally clear-cut to me. Yeah, he's definitely doing that. He gets his support from the Russian Orthodox. And the Russian Orthodox Church loves him and he loves them. They've seen the soldiers, and the water. You know what I mean? There's no way that they're cracking down totally. It's pushing out all the other religions, and the Orthodox Church. But bear in mind, having settled this, bear in mind, what are they seeing from the West? homosexual priests, gay bishops, homosexual marriages, churches praying for God's blessing on abortion. I mean, it's like, they're looking at a lot of things in the West and maybe they're characterizing it all as, you know, the West is apostate. Well, of course, they're right. It is. But in doing so, they might have rejected a lot of the really good as well. almost certainly. And I mean you could just imagine when Obama was up there doing his nonsense and the Russians held this great family pro-life conference with a thousand representatives from over a hundred countries, hosted it at the Kremlin, and they were warning against Western decadence and Western godlessness. And I think that's the point, that they see themselves as, you know, we standing for the faith. The West's apostate. And so a minister or missionary who comes from the West, they suspect already. And so we should get out the idea of thinking they're atheists and we're Christians. They're Christians, but they're Orthodox Christians and they're highly suspect of anything else outside. And sadly, I think some of the people in the West have really muddied the waters and given them an excuse, whether they understand what they're doing or not, to overreact, which is sad. But having said that, we bump into Russian evangelical Christians and missionaries. I've bumped into Russian missionaries in Zululand and up in Pomelunga. They're all over the place. Met them in Zambia. So Russian Christians are sending out missionaries all over the world. Romanians as well. In fact, I've met an Egyptian Coptic Christian missionary from Egypt in Lusaka, running St. Mark's mission there in Lusaka. So there's a surprising amount of freedom now that you even have missionaries coming from these countries that used to be under serious persecution, or in the case of Egypt's law. Yes, I'm hesitant to come up with a categorical answer yet because some people, the way it was described to me is sometimes people are exaggerating the reports. We've got no more religious freedom in Russia and well maybe he's only seeing a small part of the whole story. It's just like you could get one report from Salafi and you'd get the impression that there's no life or freedom left in Salafi. And yet we know that there is. There's lots. In fact, to be honest, after coming back from Australia, I felt like I was coming back to a free country. Because compared to Australia, we have more freedom here. More freedom of religion, more freedom of speech, more freedom to protest, for example, outside an abortion clinic. In fact, I'd say that there's a lot of things that we've got better than Australia. And yet, of course, we're aware of what's wrong with our country, and we're aware of the dangers. But it's not so clear-cut, so one person can just portray South Africa as just in total free-fall evil. And that's part of the story in some parts of it, that's the government story. But there's dynamic Christian communities in South Africa and there's a lot of good going on here too. And we've got to realize that's so in Russia as well. In fact I get the impression sometimes that Russia's got more going for it right now than most of the Western countries. Which is weird. Any other questions? It's terrible how it's so easy to massacre so many people. I mean, you know, I praise it. And I think that's what a couple of the characters in this country think, you know. It's been so easy in the world, you know, just to kill a million people, you know, that they could do the same. Yes, well, of course, there's a big difference. And the big difference is that Armenians were disarmed. Yeah, but that's what I'm saying. They don't seem to connect the dots here. We need to be very careful. Super careful. On how things progress in the country. There are people who want to do it, we know that. Remember what our dear friend Julius Malema said a while ago, I'm not calling for the slaughtering of all white people at this stage. You should be grateful for that. You should have had a bigger jail sentence than Momberg, that's for sure. Momberg was a victim of a crime who reacted in a totally understandable way, even if it wasn't wise. And now they're trying to suggest that this person's got to go to jail for years. And you've got even Christians supporting it, which is totally insane. So we've got to use the social media platforms And these are just some of our Facebook pages and websites that we've got up for Bible studies and prayer meetings. And you may wonder why we have so many websites. Well, for one thing, Friends of mine have travelled to the Muslim Middle East for work, so they can't access the Frontline website. The Frontline Fellowship is apparently blocked in the United Arab Emirates or a place like that. So Livingston Fellowships, where we just put our sermons, Bible studies, nothing political and nothing about the Persky Church, just Bible studies and primaries. And the Digital Library, which has got links to all sorts of great things, from Jesus films to Arabic Bibles, you name it, in different languages. But we find it important to have Not all your eggs in one basket, because that can collapse, or be hacked, or be blocked. But different materials from Living Water's materials and my personal Facebook page. Animals Ministry. In fact, do you know that wonderful wildlife had over a million hits last year? It's quite extraordinary how many people you can reach with our animal rights movement things too. Vikings for Christ had a phenomenal reach. I think we reached just about a million people just in the last year. So these are just some of the different, this is Lenora's page, Victorious Christian Woman. On the Gospel Defence League, William Carey Bible Institute, we have a lot of resources here and links to digital libraries that people in Persky Church can access. If we just put these all on the front line, we'd be blocked. So that's why we've got many different sites. And these are resources that we can use. And of course, help yourself to what's on the table in the perspective stands in the hallway. Any other questions or comments? When Allies took the side of the Turks and fought against the Russians, did the pushback of the Russian military and obviously the morale of the Russians as well, did that give way to the rise of communism in Russia later? Do you think there's some kind of tie there? It could have contributed because Russia was a great power and they had civilized the whole of Northern Asia. And they were taking huge tracts of Muslim countries like Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan and Mongolia and Siberia and Christianizing it. And so they had done a tremendous civilizing mission. And they had a lot more to do than the Americans had. A huge area. their defeat effectively, although they didn't lose much territory, but they had a defeat in the Crimean War, and they were very disorganized, and just as the British discovered they were terribly disorganized, and the French discovered they were disorganized, and everyone discovered our medical services are pathetic, and as Florence Nightingale demonstrated, we're losing vastly more people to disease and infection than we are to wounds and battle, and in fact she brought the death toll down dramatically just with basic hygiene and good nursing. So everyone learnt a lot from it, but the prestige of the British government, the prestige of the Russian government suffered dramatically from it. And the Russians, having suffered a defeat, and having their navy basically destroyed and confiscated in the Black Sea, Russia declined in influence and prestige and morale. And that would have also sown the seeds because shortly after that you start to see the rise of anarchists and anarchists led to the communists. So yes, there are chain reactions and this definitely was one of the nails in the coffin of Christian czarist Russia, and a preparation for the rise of communism. So the fact that we should never waste our time fighting fellow Christians. There's many a Christian who stabbed me in the back and so on, and I've looked at it and everything in me wants to just unleash napalm-type warfare to wipe out this person or his ministry and so on, and you realize it's not worth it, what a waste of time. I remember my first pastor saying to me, Rev. Doc Watson said, when some very bad backstabbing was being done, he said, Peter, you fight God's battles, let him fight yours. And good advice. To fight for prestige, it's like if you slept in one side, turn your cheek to the other. It's not worth fighting over an insult. I mean, fight over something that's worth fighting for. I mean, fight for your survival. Look at this. Europe fought for nothing. Absolutely nothing in Crimea. They fought for no good reason in the First and Second World War. And yet, when they Lives are at stake when everything's at stake. They welcome the enemies in, they put them on welfare, and they lock up the people who point out this is actually treason and insanity. When we should fight we don't, and when we shouldn't afford we do. And that's not just our governments, it's many of our churches and ourselves too. We often spend more time fighting our friends and our relatives than fighting against those who really want to kill us. I do believe there's a lot of lessons in here. It's right down to the personal level too. Yes, the Crimean War would have definitely started a chain reaction that led to it was bringing down Russia and rising Soviet Union. Yes. I noticed one thing is reading the literature from different writers and preachers from uh from the old days from 14 15 1600 onwards they start warning again and again people falling away from the lord people are not with the lord anymore they're falling away they have nothing to do with this new thing what we have now Charles Pershing, he warns, and his servants, he warns everybody. Arthur W. Pink, even afterwards, he warns. L.R. Charlton, he warns, and he's much closer already to where we are now. People are falling away, they do not believe in God, they do not follow God, and that's where all this is coming from. All these diseases, all these wars, everything, those people do not respect. God and his laws. It was not a new thing. I mean, you think how many Salafi soldiers went off to fight in Europe, down Borewood, things like this. And we lost a lot of people fighting for absolutely nothing. It wasn't our war, we weren't attacked, it wasn't nothing to do with us, and what did it achieve? Our country was at stake. We had no other choice. When we had a good cause to fight, it was like, well, hmm, they would have an absolute fit over us having a casualty rate of 11 people. Operation Smoke Shop wiped out over 1,200 terrorists. We lost 11 people in the battle. But somehow or another, that was too much. couldn't take this, but thought we could throw thousands away in Delverwood for what? And this is the way Britain was willing to throw hundreds of thousands of men into the Somme, a piece of useless French countryside that gained four miles for the loss of hundreds of thousands of men over a four-month battle, and They're now not even willing to fight to defend their country against Muslim terrorism, and they make a Muslim terrorist sympathiser the Mayor of London. What are they thinking? There is an insanity, but what it is, is if the enemy can get you to spend all your energy fighting your cousins, and fellow Christians, and different denominations, and things like this, then after a while, when you've got the real fight, you've lost all energy and you're just absolutely in a mindset of giving up. It's insane. Just like right now, what's the real energy we should be putting all our energy into? Well, fulfilling the Great Commission, evangelizing, discipling, and yet many of the churches have decided to put most of their energy into sound shows. It's not even important. I noticed this with my family. My brother was here two years ago, flying Turkish airbases. I knew after he arrived, he was flying the Muslims. But there's nothing wrong with the Muslims. That's his point. On principle, I would love to find a Muslim in the world. They don't believe in it anymore. Even my dad, he said, just on Monday, it was 87th birthday. And I spoke to him. He said, oh, he doesn't know if he's going to make it another year. We shall see. I said, well, why don't you pray to God for us? Why don't you turn to the Lord? Leave me alone with the Roman Catholics." I said, I am against the Roman Catholics. You turn to the Lord. You take your Bible out and you study the Bible and live accordingly. The Lord will give me health. Why do you think he let you live that long and not another 10 years or 15 years or whatever? Speak to the Lord. Nah, nah, nah. Leave me alone with this. That's how they get influenced. And they don't even want to know you. Well, it's so important not to waste our time on things that are not important. Or fighting fellow Christians. I like the principles. You fight God's battles, let him fight yours. It's a good principle. Keep focused. Some things that really matter and there's some other things that the Lord will sort out in his own good time. Not for me to worry about. So, any other comments, questions? I missed the last brief, please. Turkey is a false flag? Without a shadow of a doubt. In fact, that's come from quite a lot of investigators, including Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists who have done investigative journalism. There's one journalist just saw recently. He's one of the most respected journalists who's exposed a lot of things in the past. He went to the actual place and said, there's just no doubt. This is a complete and utter token false flag. Turkey is behind it. and Turkey's part of NATO and Turkey was put up to use the sarin gas at this particular occasion with a full knowledge of the British and the Americans because they wanted an excuse to go back and embalm the North. This is power politics. And again the hatred for Russia and Russia could be our ally. Imagine if Russia and America worked together to fight against Islam. But no, they're spending more time fighting one another. Do you think Donald Trump's aware of this? No. I'm sure that while he was well aware of it when he was out of the White House, and you remember in his run-up for the elections he was speaking about these stupid wars and these useless wars and bombing Syria and no more of this, but now he's surrounded by the whole industrial military complex machine that's feeding him a distorted version of reality. He probably knows less about what's really happening now that is in the White House than he did when he was outside. I think that the man's instincts were dead right when he was campaigning for the presidency. He spoke about, bring all our soldiers home, no more useless wars. So when I went to America last year, I spoke to a person who'd been in the Reagan White House. I said, what's happening? He says, I know exactly what's happening. Because when Ronald Reagan came into the White House, he was an outsider, just like Trump. You know, about the only two outsiders since Calvin Coolidge, or Coolidge in the long time, that had an outsider, not part of this Council of Foreign Relations. And he said, Ronald Reagan was basically given the story straight by the people who really make decisions. Okay, we'll let you do this, this, and this, but these things you just don't touch. And he said, it would be the same with Trump. We will give you this and that, But don't touch our wars. The whole country is built on, like the Roman Empire, expansion, bombing, wars, things like this. And while his instinct was to say, bring all the troops home, end these stupid useless wars, let's defend our own borders, and what are we doing in Syria? That's what he said as a candidate. But now as the president, he's got a lot of people around him saying, can't do that, Mr. President. I do believe that he's right now controlled and managed well. He's still got some good instincts. I think he's being fed very, very distorted information. You just remember beforehand, he said, you know, we should be friends with Russia and he could see himself being friends with Putin. Remember how they bombarded him about this? Saying, Putin's a killer. And he says, what, do you think we're so innocent? There's lots of killers around. I mean, how many people do you think we've killed? And that was like, treason. I mean how could he say that? So they were outraged because they're so self-righteous and he was making a lot more sense to the candidates and of course as a president now he's definitely been... a lot of his key advisors you've noticed have kicked out one or the other of his top people and it's like Ronald Reagan, good man, but they surrounded him with other people to control him. For example he had Who was it? Jack Kemp was to be his running mate as his Vice President. And once he won the Presidential Candidacy of the Republican Party, I heard from someone on his staff, he said, they took him to one side and they said, OK, you can have the candidacy, but you can't have Kemp. You've got to have George H. Bush as your Vice President. And George H. Bush was insider, Council of Foreign Relations, ex-head of the CIA, things like this. He's a total, total insider. And Ronald Reagan was not, but Ronald Reagan was basically told, look, this is, we can give you the position, but you're going to have to earn this your own way. And then just a few months into the presidency, Ronald Reagan gets shot and he misses death by a couple of centimeters. I mean, that bullet went between his heart and his lungs so close, how he survived is a miracle. And I don't believe that's just an accidental, you know, single gunman murder. Same thing with Kennedy. Exactly, they're always lone gunmen, no agenda, no conspiracy, keep walking, nothing to see here. So, but the point is Ronald Reagan was dangerous and he did cause a lot of damage to the New World Order crowd, but they contained him. And we've got it in some of these books here, where there George H. Bush would send memos around to everyone in the White House, sanitize the President from all information to do with POW, Missing In Actions, MIAs. And he made sure that the President, because the President made a speech, we've got to get to the bottom of this, we've got to bring all the prisoners home, this, that, and the other. There was 2,500 American prisoners of war still in Vietnam after the war in Laos and Cambodia. And he was speaking about, we've got to bring them home, and they sanitized him and made sure nobody got through to him with anything of this sort. And George H. Bush was running the White House, a lot of it ensuring that what reached the President was limited. I think this is fairly normal. We've heard from Stephen Whitford Goodson what our country did, what our leaders behind the government did with Henrik Voigt when he was working to investigate the role of Anglo-American and De Beers in undermining the government and the role of the Reserve Bank. And as he's got the Hook Commission working on this next thing, he gets assassinated. And these things are not accidents. At any rate, I do believe that Donald Trump has good instincts, but I do believe right now he's being fed very, very false information. You know, we've got a choice of what we read outside, but the President probably has no choice. He's probably got to look at this and see this. I mean, he's got a whole group that's managing him. Very hard to be your own man in that situation.