It is fairly telling of the usefulness of that great international institution, the United Nations, formed to use the weight of its considerable influence and moral power to reduce the chances of violent conflict on the Globe, and to press for human rights for all those resident on Earth, that it consistently singles out one tiny state dedicated to the enduring preservation of a single ethnic-social-religious group dating from obscure antiquity, to hold it accountable to a civilizational norm that no other country is subjected to.

Those nations whose human rights records and system of governance ensures security and equality for those living within their domains are a minority among all the nations of the Earth with an official presence within the United Nations. Yet even those minority Democratic countries do not, with rare exceptions, hesitate to criticize the State of Israel when perceived human rights violations are slanderously emphasized by the Jewish state's many nation-enemies within the Organization of Islamic Cooperation and the Non-Aligned nations.

Yet no other country in the world has ever faced violent disruptions to its presence on its heritage geography, as has Israel. Its neighbours set out time and again to destroy it, to exterminate the organized presence of a Jewish state, and when Israel defended itself and routed combined Arab military assaults, the assault of censure and condemnation and charges of illegitimacy surfaced with a vengeance. On its flanks it continues to guard against ongoing violence targeting its Jewish citizens, forced to assert its military might against ongoing threats.

Now that the terrorist Islamist group Hamas whose charter clearly states its function is to exterminate Israel from the map of the Middle East has once again organized a mass 'protest' with the purpose of destabilizing Israel with threats of conflict shielded by a network of human misery, a condition of life brought about solely by the intransigence of leaders of the Palestinian people, the response to yet another threat has been condemnation of disproportionality by those nations' heads and the UN -- who have never had to live under existential threat.

That Erdogan's Turkey, of all human-rights abusers, has charged Israel with war crimes and its president labelled a terrorist is beyond hypocrisy, but one that the sanctimonious leaders of the world community bar several are quick to pick up, solemnly pressing Israel to restrain its response. Where is the world censure of Erdogan's continued assaults against the Kurds, deprived of their rightful geographic heritage on which squats Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran? Turkey's illegal claims of ownership of Cyprus, its challenge to Greece? Its support of fanatical jihadis?

Sri Lanka's denial of Tamil independence? China's claims to areas in the South China sea? China's occupation of Tibet, its suppression of Uighur independence? Russia's Georgia and Ukraine incursions? Annexation of Crimea? The Syrian Regime's slaughter of its citizens? Pakistan's vicious mischief in India, the Kashmir dispute, Afghanistan? Spain's refusal to recognize a separate Catalonia?

Symbolism and social adherence to honour as they view it, is so critical to notions of order in tribal societies yet denial of the traditions and symbols that do honour to others is absent entirely from the minds of those tribal elements that seek to bring dishonour to and reduce the global legitimacy of those they view as rivalling their own.

The conjunction this year of two great religions' penultimate memorials to historical-religious events of paramount importance to each has brought Christianity's Easter and Judaism's Passover to once again sharing the calendar of primal events, each in their own way a story of salvation of humankind.

Just as Islamist Arab armies of conquest marauded several continents through antiquity to the present, on their way to achieving the glory their founder assured them was theirs to the exclusion of all others, so too does the tradition haunt and persecute into submission or exile ancient Christian sects enduring in the cradle of Christianity.

And just as those same Islamist Arab nations abhorring the presence of the predecessor religion and its worshippers attempted fruitlessly, time and again to wrench the heritage presence in Israel's return to Zion as usurpers of land 'consecrated' to Islam, once transgressing on Judaism's most sacred Yom Kippur tradition, so too do their more recent jihadist faithful once again profane the celebration of Judaic deliverance from injustice at Passover with yet another version of jihad.

The relentless ambition remains the same; to wrench geography violently and by manipulation of the responsive subconscious sanctimonious global condemnation from its historical to its current presence from those seeking security and peace, imperilled by the viciously hateful exhortation of a religion's sacred precepts promising deliverance to the faithful and death to the non-believers.

"Bey, where have all these human bones along this road come from?" Balkian asked the captain disingenuously.
"These are the bones of Armenians who were killed in August and September. The order had come from Constantinople. Even though the minister of the interior [i.e., Talat] had huge ditches dug for the corpses, the winter floods washed the dirt away, and now the bones are everywhere, as you see", Captain Shukri replied.
"Upon whose orders were the massacres of the Armenians committed?" Balakian probed.
"The orders came from the Ittihad [i.e. Unionist] Central Committee and the Interior Ministry in Constantinople", Captain Shukri explained. "This order was carried out most severely by Kemal . . . vice-governor of Yozgat. When Kemal, a native of Van, heard that the Armenians had massacred all his family members at the time of the Van revolt, he sought revenge and massacred the women and children, together with the men."
Balakian's questions did not upset the captain. He seemed to enjoy filling the long hours in conversation with the priest, inured to the evil he recounted: of the thousands of men hacked to death, of 6,400 Armenian women systematically robbed of their possessions and murdered along with their children, actions he consistently referred to as "cleansing"(paklamak in Turkish).
The mass-murdering Ottoman officer even seemed to develop an affection for the Armenian priest, offering to protect him from all harm if only he would convert to Islam.
Through conversations with Turkish officers, Balakian learned every aspect of the Armenian tragedy from the government's perspective. In his exchanges with survivors encountered along the way, the priest also deepened his knowledge of the Armenian experience of the genocide. He wove both perspectives together in his remarkable memoirs, first published in Armenian in 1922, thereby discharging his duty as a witness to what Balakian dubbed the "Armenian Golgotha".
Surviving the genocide was easier said than done. By preserving cordial relations with his captors and, in his own words, putting his trust in God, Balakian lived one day at a time, always at risk of sudden death. During the length of their forced march, the priest and his fellows confronted the magnitude of the horror that had befallen the Ottoman Armenian community: the bodies of the dead, the pleas of starving survivors, the shame of those who had converted to Islam to save their lives. He recorded the details in his diary as the caravan made its way across Anatolia to Cilicia towards the Syrian Desert. The accounts of other survivors of the Armenian genocide confirmed much of what he wrote.
Fear of violent death that might come at any moment without warning compounded the daily experience of brutality, exhaustion, and deprivation. Many Armenians chose to take their own lives rather than face the cruelty of strangers. Even Grigoria Balakian, who had vowed to survive, was driven to contemplate suicide. When accosted by an armed gang near the Halys River, Balakian and his comrades agreed to drive into the torrential waters in the event of "inescapable disaster", as many had done before them.
"Surely this deep grave of tens of thousands of Armenians would not refuse to take us too into its flowing turbid currents . . . and save us from harrowing and cruel deaths, at the hands of these Turkish criminals", he recalled. Only Balakian's presence of mind in negotiating the caravan's way past the gang spared them all on that occasion.
Manuel Kerkyasharian, who called himself M.K., was only a nine-year-old boy when he watched his mother dive from a bridge into the turbulent waters of the Euphrates. Natives of Adana, M.K.'s family had been deported to the Mesopotamian settlement of Ras al-Ayn (in modern Syria). An only child, M.K. saw his family robbed by armed gangs and beaten by the gendarmes sent to escort them. His mother's feet swelled painfully from the extensive marching, but she struggled to keep up with the caravan, knowing the fate of those who fell behind.
One night, when she knew she could walk no further, M.K.'s mother made a terrible request of her husband: "Lead me to the river's edge. I am going to throw myself into the water. If I stay, the Arabs will kill me with torture." Her husband refused, but a neighbour understood her fears and carried M.K.'s mother on his back to the banks of the swollen Euphrates. Her young son and a priest followed them to the river, but M.K. averted his eyes when she threw herself into the torrent. When he turned back, he saw his mother briefly before the current carried her away.
Within two days of his mother's death, M.K.'s father died in his sleep. The young boy was now an orphan with no one to care for him. He watched as soldiers killed a number of women and children who, like him, had been left behind by the caravan. He was robbed of his remaining clothes down to his underpants and abandoned by the roadside alone -- hungry, thirsty, and terrified.
The Armenian priest Grigoris Balakian encountered many such orphans along the way. At Islahiye, near where M.K. was orphaned, he encountered an eight-year-old boy begging with his eleven-year-old sister, both nearly naked and dying from hunger. The elder sister explained "in a schoolgirl's proper Armenian" how all the other members of their family of fourteen had died, leaving the  children to fend for themselves. "How I wish we hadn't survived". she sobbed.
Buffered by forces beyond his control, young Manuel Kerkyasharian did survive. He found himself among Arabs and Kurds, people whose languages he did not speak and whose actions he did not understand. Some gave him food and clothing; others stoned and robbed him. He witnessed acts of terrible brutality and crossed plains covered with Armenian corpses. He was rescued by four Kurdish women who found him wandering on the open road and took him back to their village as a domestic servant. He spent the remainder of the war years moving among the Kurdish villages on the Turkish-Syrian frontier, living off the kindness -- and fleeing the cruelty -- of strangers.
As he moved between the villages of south-eastern Anatolia, M.K. encountered a number of Armenian children and young women who, like him, had taken refuge among the Kurds. Many had been collected from the death marches and taken to work in the homes and farms of the Kurdish villagers. M.K. met several young Armenian women who had married into the families of their Kurdish protectors....

From: The Fall of the Ottomans -- The Great War in the Middle East, by Eugene Rogan

The Ultimate Appropriation and the Justness of War Against the Infidels

"[Islam] is the religion of Jihad in the way of Allah so that Allah's Word and religion reign supreme."
Osama bin Laden

"It is alleged in popular stories [and only God knows the truth] that Amina d.Wah, the mother of God's messenger, used to say when she was pregnant with God's messenger that a voice said to her, 'You are pregnant with the lord of this people and when he is born say, 'I put him in the care of the One from the evil of every envier; then call him Muhammad'. As she was pregnant with him she saw a light come forth from her by which she could see the castles of Busra in Syria."
Ibn Ishaq

"Why should you not fight in God's cause and for those oppressed men, women, and children who cry out, 'Lord, rescue us from this town whose people are oppressors! By your grace, give us a protector and helper!"?
Qur'an 4:75

"...what is the religion of Abraham, and how did he come to practice it? At 3:65-67, Jews and Christians listening to the Qur'an are challenged: 'Why do you argue about Abraham when the Torah and the Gospels were not revealed until after his time? . . . Abraham was neither a Jew nor a Christian. He was upright, in a condition of submission 'Hanifan musliman'.' That Abraham's submission is to God is indicated by what immediately follows: 'and he was not with the idolaters'. That the submission is not mediated by Jewish or Christian sources is important, as is the obvious fact that Abraham's religion is also not mediated by the Qur'an. All these texts come after Abraham's discovery of true faith, which provides the paradigmatic example of the religious potential of human reflection."

*****

War is a means to a political end, which is the establishment and governance of a political-territorial association governed by Islam.

We may take this further: the establishment of an Islamic state is itself a means by which the Muslim community can carry out its divinely mandated mission of calling humanity to the relationship with God signified by submission, al-islam. In this connection, war is a means to a political end [establishing an Islamic state], which is itself a means to an overarching religious goal [calling humanity to Islam]. This approach suggests that there is nothing particularly good or bad about war in itself. It is a means to an end, and should be viewed as such. Resort to war is thus a matter of estimating its probable effectiveness in attaining certain goals. Notions of just conduct in war are similarly suggested by the desire to gain particular objectives.

"Whenever God's Messenger sent forth an army or a detachment, he charged its commander personally to fear God, the Most High, and he enjoined the Muslims who were with him to do good.
He said: Fight in the name of God and in the path of God. Fight the mukaffirum [ingrates, unbelievers]. Do not cheat or commit treachery, and do not mutilate anyone or kill children. Whenever you meet the mushrikun [idolaters], invite them to accept Islam. If they do, accept it and let them alone You should then invite them to move from their territory to the territory of the emigres. If they do so, accept it and leave them alone. Otherwise, they should be informed that they will be in the same condition as the Muslim nomads in that they are subject to God's orders as Muslims, but will receive no share of the spoil of war. If they refuse, then call upon them to pay tribute. If they do, accept it and leave them alone. If you besiege the inhabitants of a fortress or a town and they try to get you to let them surrender on the basis of God's judgement, do not do so, since you do not know what God's judgement is, but make them surrender to your judgement and then decide their case according to your own views. But if the besieged inhabitants of a fortress or a town ask you to give them a pledge in God's name or in the name of God's Messenger, you should not do so, but give the pledge in your names or the names of your fathers. For if you should ever break it, it would be an easier matter if it were in the names of you or your fathers."
Shari'a reasoning on war

"I asked: If the Muslims besieged a city and its people positioned behind the walls shielded themselves with Muslim children, would it be permissible for the Muslim fighters to attack them with arrows and hurling machines?
He replied: Yes, but the warriors should aim at the inhabitants of the territory of war and not the Muslim children.
I asked: Would it be permissible for the Muslims to attack them with swords and lances if the children were not intentionally aimed at?
He replied: Yes.
I asked: If the Muslim warriors attack with hurling machines and arrows, flood cities with water or burn them with fire, thereby killing Muslim children or men, or enemy women, old men, blind, crippled, or lunatic persons, would the warriors be liable for blood money or acts of expiation?
He replied: They would be liable neither for blood money nor for acts of expiation."

Arguing the Just War in Islam . . . John Kelsay, Professor of Religion, Florida State University