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Turkish Hackers Target Vatican Website After Pope's Genocide Comment
An anonymous reader writes Turkish hackers have brought down the official Vatican City website, following Pope Francis' statement in which he referred to mass killings of Armenians by Turks as 'genocide'. According to reports, the website www.vatican.va was first taken offline on Monday evening with a Turkish hacker, named @THTHerakles, announcing that he would continue to target the website should an official apology not be issued from the Vatican City. The hacker said that the Pope's comments were "unacceptable" for a respected religious figurehead. "Taking sides and calling what happened with the Armenians genocide is not true ... We want Pope [Francis] to apologize for his words or we will make sure the website remains offline," he added.
Because killing over a million people of a certain way of life is not genocide...
It was a genocide. Genocide, genocide, genocide. The mass killings of the Armenians by the Turks 1925 was a genocide.
Now, vailant Turkish hax0rs, go ahead and take down the Internet.
Yeah, the best way to not get caught it to tell people you're going to continue hitting a specific target. No way you could get caught with that strategy.
Christianity has long ago admitted its past mistakes, and thrives in cultures whose secular liberals endlessly rake over the evils of the past. Not so with that other religion that dogs our headlines.
To bring in some News For Nerds relevance, the Vatican made up for its treatment of Galileo by setting up its own observatory, which in modern times has stayed on the front wave of astronomical technology:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V...
The irony is that to get this very facility built, Rome had to wage another crusade against the pitchfork-waving Greens.
The Inquisition. You mean the 2,000 - 10,000 (at the most) that were killed over a period of 300 years; with the overwhelming majority done over a few decades in Spain?
Compare that with Hitler 11,000,000 and Stalin 20,000,000+, and Mao 40,000,000+ and the Inquisition begins to pale in comparison.
If you're scared of your govt then you need to further restrict its powers
Vote 3rd Party in 2016 and beyond
Soon the Pope will be saying the US genocided the Native Americans.
That's a bit of a stretch. The aim of the US western expansion wasn't to kill all traces of Native American peoples and culture, it was to gain control of their land. While there certainly were numerous instances of massacres, they seemed to be more due to individual ignorance, prejudice, or misunderstanding than any systemic attempt to wipe out all Indians. Not even considering all the treaties and reservations set up (the quality-or lack thereof-of the land provided on the reservations can again I think be attributed mostly to apathy or ignorance as opposed to outright malice), the numerous attempts at integrating and Westernizing Native Americans shows a (misguided perhaps) desire to help them and make them become "Americans". In reality, the Western expansion was in effect a protracted, low-intensity guerrilla war, and there are plenty of cases of these types of conflicts to show that they very often lead to instances of overreactions of force, excessive non-combatant casualties, and mass killings.
Ahemm.. extermination of the American BIson... anybody? By the 1860s numerous US military figures advocated the extermination of the bison as a method to subjugate the American Aboriginals. General Philip Sheridan even stepped before Congress to plead for permissions to slaughter the bison herds to starve Native Americans into submission. There is probably about as much proof of methodical and premeditated extermination of the Native American by the US Government as there is for the genocide of the Armenians being part of some plot carefully and extensively planned and executed at government level in Turkey. It was a policy aimed at 'pacifying the native peoples', any mass deaths were probably regarded as a bonus. That having been said millions of people died as a result of the actions of a government against a certain ethnic group and we call that genocide whether it was acerbically planned like the Jewish Holocaust or a spontaneous disorganized series massacres like the Armenian Genocide or the near extermination of the Native Americans.
Some of the Crusades may have been, though the intent, from Rome's side was to save Eastern Christianity, and also probably to gain the upper hand over the Byzantine Emperors, who viewed themselves (with some justification) as supreme over the Bishop of Rome. To the European Princes, this was about grabbing one of the most valuable pieces of territory on Earth, and that's the first thing they did once they had driven back the Muslims; seize land that rightfully belonged to the Byzantine Empire and set up their crusader kingdoms.
Then there's the Fourth Crusade, which never reached the Holy Land, but rather stopped in Constantinople, looted the city, killed many of the residents (all of which, one should be reminded, were Christians), and set up a puppet state. Look up the Sack of Constantinople, one of the vilest acts of treachery in the history of Christendom, and an act that almost certainly undermined the Byzantine Empire, leading to the collapse of Christendom as a political force in Anatolia and the Levant.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Ahemm.. extermination of the American BIson... anybody? By the 1860s numerous US military figures advocated the extermination of the bison as a method to subjugate the American Aboriginals. General Philip Sheridan even stepped before Congress to plead for permissions to slaughter the bison herds to starve Native Americans into submission.
Was the blockade of the South during the Civil War an attempt at Genocide? How about blockading Germany during WWI/WWII? That's not an example of genocide, that's trying to defeat an enemy by targeting their ability to wage war (can't fight without food). As I said, it was more a low intensity guerrilla war than it was a genocide.
Was the population of the American South reduced by 75% as a result of the blockade? No? ...because the Native American population was systematically reduced by 75-80% first by the colonial authorities and then by the US government who really stepped up the speed of the eradication process. Entire tribes were wiped out in one way or another in the name of 'Manifest destiny'. Genocide is the systematic eradication of an ethnic group by a government or other organisation and if you manage to wipe out 75-80% of the Native American population then that is genocide in my book.