Edwin Pears

Pears spent 40 years in Istanbul before having to return to London, where he immediately became famous for his hatred of Turks. He must have done his job well; the job given to him by the British deep state, because when he returned to his country, he was knighted. Unsurprisingly, his article published in Daily News in 1876 on the alleged massacres in Bulgaria, caused wide anti-Turkish protests.

Pears was also made an honorary knight both in Greece and Bulgaria. In his book entitled Turkey and its People, Pears said of the Armenians, "They are an ancient people of the same Indo-European race as ourselves..." In his book, he went so far as to tell lies such as, "The penalty for speaking it [the Armenian language] was to have the tongue torn out." The truth is Armenians lived in the Ottoman Empire for more than 500 years in peaceful co-existence and spoke their own language freely. For instance, by 1897, the number of Armenian schools in the Empire had reached 922.

Edwin Pears' following remarks in his 1918 article for Daily News entitled 'Constantinople, Romance of the City', clearly showed the deep-seated hostility he harbored for Turks:

Well, it looks as if the Turk will be got rid of, and if it be so there will be a song of triumph which should go up from every Christian race in the World, a Te Deum in which all lovers of civilisation should take part. For centuries the Christians in the Ottoman Empire have been sustained by hope, holding to the faith that though life was long and weary, rest would come: the darksome night of persecution would pass and day would dawn.¹⁶⁴