Death in Izmir

According to the Daily Mail, two 54 year old Irish women on vacation in Izmir, Turkey were kidnapped and murdered by a 17 year old Turk after one of the women refused to let him marry her 15 year old daughter. Evidently the two women voluntarily got into the killer’s car, then he drove them to a secluded spot where he stabbed them to death.

The story says that Izmir is extremely popular with Irish and Britsh holiday goers, with an unbelievable 2.67 million Britons going to Izmir each year.

- end of initial entry -

Bill A. writes:

As a footnote to your post about the murders in Izmir, it may be worth mentioning that Izmir was formerly known as Smyrna.

The port city of Smyrna was a Greek city, and it had a population greater than Athens.

Turkish forces took the city on September 9, 1922, and put it to the torch in a fire that began on September 13, 1922. It burned for ten days—while British and American warships in the port did nothing. This was a deliberate massacre of the Greek and Armenian inhabitants. It was jihad.

You can read more about it here.

JC from Houston writes:

I have to disagree with Bill A. that the Turkish taking of the city of Smyrna in 1922 was jihad. The fire and battle for Smyrna took place in the context of the 1919-1922 Greco-Turkish War.

After the fall of the Ottoman Empire, the Allies led the Greeks (of the state of Greece) to believe that they would be supported in an attempt to reconquer and incorporate areas of Turkey into what Greek Nationalists envisioned as a “Greater Greece.” The Greek armies invaded and initially conquered large areas of Western Turkey. When the Greeks occupied Smyrna. according to the British Historian Arnold Toynbee, they engaged in massacres of the Muslim/Turkish inhabitants. Turkish forces, under the leadership of Mustafa Kemal (Ataturk) finally defeated the Greeks in 1922. The treaty of Lausanne, which ended the war, provided for the population transfer of Greeks in Turkey to Mainland Greece and Turkish Muslims living in Greece back to Turkey. Kemal was the founder of the modern secular state (or at least what was a secular state) of Turkey. He could hardly be considered a jihadist.

August 20

Elena G. writes:

Did you notice, reading the article, that this girl had been traveling to Turkey on “every school holiday” since meeting her Turkish boyfriend, which, since she is now fifteen, means that she had been going to Turkey, presumably to have a sexual relationship, since she was thirteen? The mind boggles at what her parents could possibly have been thinking! This article doesn’t answer any of the really major questions it raises.

LA replies:

I missed that!

LA continues:

However, clicking on the article, now I see why I missed it. The article has been much revised, with new photos and information. This is something about today’s online-based journalism that makes me crazy. When a paper gets new information on a story, instead of publishing a follow-up article, they simply change the original article, sometimes wiping out information that was in the original article. Not all papers do this, but many do. The Daily Mail is the worst offender.

This practice means that anything said about an article is likely to be rendered inoperative by subsequent revisions of the article.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at August 19, 2011 10:27 AM | Send