German recognition of Armentian genocide

[Bengalzona]

Quote:StLucieBengal
And yet they would have had no targets had the Muslims been peaceful.   

I don't debate whether the Christians were violent.   Ofc they were you can't defeat evil with happiness and sunshine.   Repeated attempts of Islam to push into christian territory kept this going.    Yes there were other things that branched off ... That's what happens in war.   But that does not change why the Byzantines needed help in the first place...   Because of Muslim aggression.  

Heck the Muslims even fought along side of Hitler.   These are not good people....   The problem is they haven't changed since before the crusades.   The rest of the world has moved forward except them.  And until they have a reformation they can't be trusted.    

Dude. You put two empires next to each other and they fight. That's the way history rolls. The whole term 'empire' defines a group of people that can't be satisfied with just their own borders and feel they have to continually invade other kingdoms.

You are aware that the interactions between the Byzantines and the Turks were more complex than "good guys, bad guys", right?

First off, and this may come as a shock, not all Turks... were Muslim. And the Seljuk Turks were quite different from the Ottoman Turks or the modern Turks. At one time, the Seljuk Empire stretched from Anatolia to China (1092). While most Seljuk Turks were Muslim, the expansion of their empire had nothing to do with seeing another religion and attacking them. It had everything to do with expanding the power of the empire itself as a political entity, in exactly the same manner that Alexander the Great expanded his empire beyond Macedonia. The truth is that most of the expansion of the Seljuk empire was through Muslim lands and 80% of the fighting they did was against Muslims.

Like most empires, the Seljuks had a wide range of ethnic groups and religions living within their empire (Kurds, Armenians, Georgians, Persians, Christians, Zoastrians, Hindus. Jews, etc.). And, as with most empires, they did not try to convert subjects. As long as the subject people obeyed their laws, they were okay with them living there and worshiping as they pleased. What they did import, however, was Persian culture. Life in the Seljuk Empire was quite different for Christians and other minorities than it was for folks in the Iberian Peninsula. A big part of that was because the Caliphate of Cordoba was led by Syrian Arabs, former rivals of the Seljuks (from the Umayyad Caliphate). The Syrian minority leadership in Cordoba were not nice people and believed wholeheartedly in their racial and religious superiority over others, even other Arabs and Muslims. Those types of exclusive attitudes prevent a group from ever creating an empire and was a reason why the Seljuks were able to successfully create an empire and the Syrians were not.

The Byzantine Empire also had a plethora of ethnic groups and religions, including Turks, Arabs, Muslims, etc. The Byzantines also hired Turks, Arabs, Muslims, Bulgarians, Russians, Vikings, English, etc. to fight for them at various times in their history. They really weren't too particular about who did the fighting for them.