Sticking to the Facts

Given this blog was been going for more than 11 years now, I’m pleasantly surprised - and relieved - that the need for me to decline comments has been a rare. At the same time, almost 10,800 comments have been published. There have been some clumsy attempts at spam from time to time, but the requirement for me to moderate comments on a post that is more than a few days old helps to ensure I can ditch the junk before it appears online. Lately I’ve deleted a few comments from people who have ignored my clear advice: Do not ask me to evaluate typewriters.

I’m also bemused to receive, thankfully only very occasionally, comments from people who have evidently not read the post in question. For example, a woman apparently representing the Australia-Gallipoli Friendship Society wanted to comment on my February 2017 post, “Allāhu akbar! Ice cream cart at the ready for jihadi attack in the Battle of Broken Hill”. She wrote, “according to some, this was a fake and organised so-called a small war ... They weren’t Turk they were poor Afgans ... after this so-called attack Australians hated Turks and enlisted to Army so fast to fight against to the Turks. SO the result was very succesfull on the side of Britania and Australia. However Turkey cant defend themself well then and still”.

If this person had bothered to actually read the post, before attempting to comment on it, she would have found:

a) The post makes it abundantly clear that the incident at Broken Hill on New Year’s Day 1915 involved “Two suicidal Afghan Muslims armed with Snider-Enfield and Martini-Henry rifles, a revolver, 30 rounds of ammunition, a homemade Turkish flag and bandoliers, and an ice cream cart.”  The pair were “self-declared soldiers of Allah”, former cameleers Badsha Mahomed Gül, 39, an Afridi ice-cream vendor, and Mullah Abdullah, 60, a Pathan who acted as an Islamic mullah and halal butcher. They left notes explaining their grievances were connected to the hostilities between the Ottoman and British empires and that they were responding to a call of holy war against “the mortal enemies of Islam”, issued by the Ottoman Sultan Mehmed V, caliph of all Muslims, on November 11, 1914.

 b) It is considered conceiviable by some military historians that the incident at Broken Hill may have helped with recruitment. But it had no impact whatsoever on ANZAC troops being sent to Gallipoli “to fight against the Turks”. That decision was made by Winston Churchill in London, not by anyone in Australia or New Zealand. Churchill had raised the idea of an attack on the Gallipoli Peninsula at a meeting of the British War Council in late November 1914, more than a month before the Broken Hill incident. The continuing stalemate on the Western Front, and developments in the Balkan region, led the council to back Churchill’s plan. In the Balkans, the Ottoman advance northwards into the Caucasus region led Russia to appeal for help to relieve the pressure. Until April 1915, most of the people living on the peninsula were Greek, not Turks. The Ottoman Fifth Army forcibly removed 22,000 Greek civilians from the area two weeks before the Gallipoli landings. The attack on the Dardanelles was approved on January 28, 1915.

As with the case on my post on Shere Hite and the Olivetti advert, I’d suggest to any potential commenter that they are best advised to stick to the facts, to what is known to be absolutely true and demonstrably so. Wild speculation about controversial matters has no place here, but thanks for reading anyway.