In the years during and immediately after the First World War, over one and a half million Armenians were displaced, deported, tortured and killed at the hands of the “Young Turks” of the Muslim Ottoman Empire. Families, primarily Christian who had inhabited this sacred land since the time of Christ, were nearly all wiped from the face of the earth. Their homes destroyed, businesses burned, a generation of Armenians watched their men tortured, their women raped, their children crucified and the rest of their relatives taken away from their villages on a death march to be slaughtered in the wilderness.

When Adolf Hitler prepared to embark upon the horrible Holocaust against the Jews, he scoffed at the notion that the world would rebel in revulsion to his actions. His chilling response which is etched on a glass wall at the Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C. simply says, “Who remembers the Armenians?”

Recently my wife Debbie and I watch the movie, “The Promise” which depicts the atrocities of 1915. I recommend it to you. On April 24th each year Armenians around the world remember the first recorded genocide in modern history.  Humanity seemingly has not learned from history as is demonstrated by the continued demonic extermination of peoples in the killing fields of Cambodia, the ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, the tribal ravaging in Rwanda, the slavery and slaughter in the Sudan. ISIS’s aim to destroy all infidels to the Islamic faith, the human rights atrocities in North Korea and most recently the poison gassing of dissidents in Syria.

So today I ask, who remembers the Armenians and all the other martyrs whether Christian or otherwise?

Well today we do.

An Armenian pastor and partner in ministry,

Kyle Ermoian