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FOURTEEN CENTURIES OF WAR AGAINST EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION
By Fjordman
EuropeNews
http://europenews.dk/en/node/ 14593
September 30 2008
Denmark
The following essay is an amalgam of my previous online essays,
among them Who Are We, Who Are Our Enemies -- The Cost of Historical
Amnesia, Why We Should Oppose an Independent Kosovo, Refuting God's
Crucible and The Truth About Islam in Europe.
The Jihad, the Islamic so-called Holy War, has been a fact of life in
Europe, Asia, Africa and the Near and Middle East for more than 1300
years, but this is the first history of the Muslim wars in Europe
ever to be published. Hundreds of books, however, have appeared on
its Christian counterpart, the Crusades, to which the Jihad is often
compared, although they lasted less than two hundred years and unlike
the Jihad, which is universal, were largely but not completely confined
to the Holy Land.
Moreover, the Crusades have been over for more than 700 years, while
a Jihad is still going on in the world. The Jihad has been the most
unrecorded and disregarded major event of history. It has, in fact,
been largely ignored. For instance, the Encyclopaedia Britannica
gives the Crusades eighty times more space than the Jihad.
The above quote is from Paul Fregosi's book Jihad in the West from
1998. Mr. Fregosi found that his book about the history of Islamic
Holy War in Europe from the 7th to the 20th centuries was difficult
to get published in the mid-1990s, when publishers had the Salman
Rushdie case in fresh memory.
A few years later, perhaps the most comprehensive and scholarly book
on the subject to date, The Legacy of Jihad, was published by Andrew
G. Bostom. He has written about what he calls "America's First War
on Terror." Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, then serving as American
ambassadors to France and Britain, respectively, met in 1786 in London
with the Tripolitan Ambassador to Britain, Sidi Haji Abdul Rahman
Adja. These future American presidents were attempting to negotiate
a peace treaty which would spare the United States the ravages of
Jihad piracy -- murder and enslavement emanating from the so-called
Barbary States of North Africa, corresponding to modern Morocco,
Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya.
Bostom notes that "an aggressive jihad was already being waged
against the United States almost 200 years prior to America becoming a
dominant international power in the Middle East." Israel has nothing
to do with it. The Barbary Jihad piracy had been going on since the
earliest Arab-Islamic expansion in the 7th and 8th centuries. Francisco
Gabrieli states that:
According to present-day concepts of international relations, such
activities amounted to piracy, but they correspond perfectly to jihad,
an Islamic religious duty. The conquest of Crete, in the east, and a
good portion of the corsair warfare along the Provencal and Italian
coasts, in the West, are among the most conspicuous instances of
such "private initiative" which contributed to Arab domination in
the Mediterranean.
A proto-typical Muslim naval razzia occurred in 846 when a fleet of
Arab Jihadists arrived at the mouth of the Tiber, made their way to
Rome, sacked the city, and carried away from the basilica of St. Peter
all of the gold and silver it contained. The creation of the Vatican
as a walled "city within a city" was in response to the recurrent
threat of Islamic Jihad raids.
Bostom notes that "By June/July 1815 the ably commanded U.S. naval
forces had dealt their Barbary jihadist adversaries a quick series
of crushing defeats. This success ignited the imagination of the Old
World powers to rise up against the Barbary pirates."
Yet some Arabs seem to miss the good old days when they could extract
jizya payments from the West. Libyan terrorist-sponsoring leader
Muammar Gaddafi has stated that he thinks that European nations should
pay 10 billion euros ($12.7 billion dollars) a year to Africa to
help it stop migrants seeking a better life flooding northwards into
Europe. He added without elaborating: "Earth belongs to everybody. Why
they (young Africans) emigrated to Europe -- this should be answered
by Europeans." Apart from being a clear-cut example of how migration,
or rather population dumping, has become a tool for blackmail in
the 21st century, this is a throwback to the age when Tripoli could
extract payments from Europe.
Robert Davis, professor of history at Ohio State University, developed
new methodical enumeration in his book Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters
which indicates that perhaps one and one-quarter million white European
Christians were enslaved by Barbary Muslims just from 1530 through
1780 -- a far greater number than had been estimated before:
Enslavement was a very real possibility for anyone who traveled
in the Mediterranean, or who lived along the shores in places like
Italy, France, Spain and Portugal, and even as far north as England
and Iceland. Much of what has been written gives the impression that
there were not many slaves and minimizes the impact that slavery had
on Europe," Davis said. "Most accounts only look at slavery in one
place, or only for a short period of time. But when you take a broader,
longer view, the massive scope of this slavery and its powerful impact
become clear.
Corsairs from cities in North Africa -- Tunis, Algiers etc. -- would
raid ships in the Mediterranean and Atlantic, as well as seaside
villages to capture men, women and children. The impact was devastating
-- France, England, and Spain each lost thousands of ships, and long
stretches of the Spanish and Italian coasts were almost completely
abandoned by their inhabitants.
At its peak, the destruction and depopulation of some areas probably
exceeded what European slavers would later inflict on the African
interior. The lives of European slaves were often no better than
the victims of the transatlantic slave trade, which tapped into
the pre-established Islamic slave-trade in Africa. "As far as daily
living conditions, the Mediterranean slaves certainly didn't have
it better," Davis says. While African slaves did grueling labor on
sugar and cotton plantations in the Americas, European slaves were
often worked just as hard and as lethally -- in quarries, in heavy
construction, and above all rowing the corsair galleys.
Throughout most of the seventeenth century, the English alone lost
at least 400 sailors a year to the slavers. One American slave
reported that 130 American seamen had been enslaved by the Algerians
in the Mediterranean and Atlantic just between 1785 and 1793 (which
prompted the later military response from the Americans). In his
book White Gold, Giles Milton describes how regular Jihad razzias in
Europe extended as far north as Iceland. Even during the time of Queen
Elizabeth I, while William Shakespeare was writing his plays and poems,
young Englishmen risked being surprised by a fleet of Muslim pirates
showing up at their village, or being kidnapped while fishing at sea:
By the end of the dreadful summer of 1625, the mayor of Plymouth
reckoned that 1,000 skiffs had been destroyed, and a similar number of
villagers carried off into slavery." Such events took place across much
of Europe, also in Wales and southern Ireland: "In 1631...200 Islamic
soldiers...sailed to the village of Baltimore, storming ashore with
swords drawn and catching the villagers totally by surprise. (They)
carried off 237 men, women, and children and took them to Algiers...The
French padre Pierre Dan was in the city (Algiers) at the time...He
witnessed the sale of the captives in the slave auction. 'It was a
pitiful sight to see them exposed in the market...Women were separated
from their husbands and the children from their fathers...on one side
a husband was sold; on the other his wife; and her daughter was torn
from her arms without the hope that they'd ever see each other again'.
The Englishman Thomas Pellow was enslaved in Morocco for twenty-three
years after being captured by Barbary pirates as a cabin boy on
a small English vessel in 1716. He was tortured until he accepted
Islam. For weeks he was beaten and starved, and finally gave in after
his torturer resorted to "burning my flesh off my bones by fire, which
the tyrant did, by frequent repetitions, after a most cruel manner."
God's Crucible: Islam and the Making of Europe, 570-1215 was written
by David Levering Lewis, the American historian and two-time winner of
the prestigious Pulitzer Prize. He states that Muslims did not enslave
their co-religionists, only infidels. Yes, but why is that better?
As Robert Spencer writes in his book Religion of Peace?: "The Qur'an
says that the followers of Muhammad are 'ruthless to the unbelievers
but merciful to one another' (48:29), and that the unbelievers are the
'worst of created beings' (98:6). One may exercise the Golden Rule
in relation to a fellow Muslim, but according to the laws of Islam,
the same courtesy is not to be extended to unbelievers. That is one
principal reason why the primary source of slaves in the Islamic world
has been non-Muslims, whether Jews, Christians, Hindus, or pagans. Most
slaves were non-Muslims who had been captured during jihad warfare."
Slavery was taken for granted throughout Islamic history. When it was
finally abolished this was due to Western pressure, especially the
efforts of the British Empire. Spencer again: "Nor was there a Muslim
abolitionist movement, no Clarkson, Wilberforce, or Garrison. When
the slave trade ended, it was ended not through Muslim efforts but
through British military force. Even so, there is evidence that
slavery continues beneath the surface in some Muslim countries --
notably Saudi Arabia, which only abolished slavery in 1962; Yemen
and Oman, both of which ended legal slavery in 1970; and Niger, which
didn't abolish slavery until 2004. In Niger, the ban is widely ignored,
and as many as one million people remain in bondage. Slaves are bred,
often raped, and generally treated like animals. There are even slavery
cases involving Muslims in the United States. A Saudi named Homaidan
al-Turki was sentenced in September 2006 to twenty-seven years to life
in prison for keeping a woman as a slave in his Colorado home. For
his part, al-Turki claimed that he was a victim of anti-Muslim bias."
Jihad slavery was widespread in Africa and in many regions of
Asia. Indian historian K. S. Lal states that wherever Jihadists
conquered a territory, "there developed a system of slavery peculiar
to the clime, terrain, and populace of the place." When Muslim armies
invaded India, "its people began to be enslaved in droves to be sold
in foreign lands or employed in various capacities on menial and
not-so-menial jobs within the country."
Briefly summed up, God's Crucible laments the fact that Charles Martel,
"the Hammer," halted the advancing Islamic Jihad at the Battle of
Tours or, Battle of Poitiers, in 732:
Had 'Abd al-Rahman's men prevailed that October day, the post-Roman
Occident would probably have been incorporated into a cosmopolitan,
Muslim regnum unobstructed by borders, as they hypothesize -- one
devoid of a priestly caste, animated by the dogma of equality of the
faithful, and respectful of all religious faiths. Curiously, such
speculation has a French pedigree. Forty years ago, two historians,
Jean-Henri Roy and Jean Deviosse enumerated the benefits of a Muslim
triumph at Poitiers: astronomy; trigonometry; Arabic numerals;
the corpus of Greek philosophy. 'We [Europe] would have gained 267
years,' according to their calculations. 'We might have been spared
the wars of religion.' To press the logic of this disconcerting
analysis, the victory of Charles the Hammer must be seen as greatly
contributing to the creation of an economically retarded, balkanized,
fratricidal Europe that, in defining itself in opposition to Islam,
made virtues out of religious persecution, cultural particularism,
and hereditary aristocracy.
David Levering Lewis is clearly sympathetic towards this view, and
writes that the Carolingian order, established Charles Martel (Carolus
in Latin) and his grandson Charlemagne, was "religiously intolerant,
intellectually impoverished, socially calcified, and economically
primitive." Curiously, he mentions in passing that there was continuous
"out-migration to the Christian kingdoms" from al-Andalus. Why did
they move to the Christian lands, whose economy was "little better
than late Neolithic," if life was so sweet in al-Andalus? Lewis states
that: "At the end of the eighth century, Europe was militarily strong
enough to defend itself from Islam, thanks in part to Charlemagne
and his predecessors. The question was whether it was politically,
economically, and culturally better off for being able to do so."
God's Crucible was published during a time when Spain and Portugal
under Islamic occupation are being hailed as a model of coexistence
with Islam. The European Union recently announced its intentions of
expanding to include the Muslim Middle East and North Africa. There
is a concerted effort going on to present Islam as something
non-threatening, indeed benevolent. In May 2008, Germany's Der
Spiegel, Europe's largest weekly magazine, hailed al-Andalus as
a "Multicultural model" for Europe: "For nearly 800 years, the
inhabitants of al-Andalus, as the Arab dynasties called their empire
on the Iberian Peninsula, allowed Jews, Christians and Muslims to
coexist in a spirit of mutual respect -- a situation that benefited
all." Never mind that Richard Fletcher states in his book Moorish
Spain that "Moorish Spain was not a tolerant and enlightened society
even in its most cultivated epoch."
The European Union, the Council of Europe and numerous Islamic
organizations are working hard to rewrite European school textbooks
in order to promote Islam. In the European Parliament, the German
Christian Democrat Hans-Gert Pöttering has stated that textbooks
should be reviewed for intolerant depictions of Islam to ensure
that they don't propagate "prejudice." He suggested that the EU
should co-operate with the Organization of the Islamic Conference
to create a textbook review committee. The OIC desires to rewrite
textbooks around the world to remove anything critical of Islam,
silence mentioning of the victims of 1400 years of Islamic Jihad and
glorify the achievements of "Islamic civilization."
Robert Spencer writes in Religion of Peace?: Why Christianity Is
and Islam Isn't: "Islamic apologist Karen Armstrong enunciates the
common wisdom when she says that 'until 1492, Jews and Christians
lived peaceably and productively together in Muslim Spain --
a coexistence that was impossible elsewhere in Europe.' Even the
U.S. State Department has proclaimed that 'during the Islamic period
in Spain, Jews, Christians, and Muslims lived together in peace and
mutual respect, creating a diverse society in which vibrant exchanges
of ideas took place.'"
Those who want a second opinion can start with reading the online essay
Andalusian Myth, Eurabian Reality by Bat Ye'or and Andrew G. Bostom:
"There were rarely periods of peace in the Amirate of Cordova
(756-912), nor later. Al-Andalus represented the land of jihad par
excellence. Every year, sometimes twice a year, raiding expeditions
were sent to ravage the Christian Spanish kingdoms to the north,
the Basque regions, or France and the Rhone valley, bringing back
booty and slaves. Andalusian corsairs attacked and invaded along
the Sicilian and Italian coasts, even as far as the Aegean Islands,
looting and burning as they went. Thousands of people were deported
to slavery in Andalusia, where the caliph kept a militia of tens of
thousand of Christian slaves brought from all parts of Christian Europe
(the Saqaliba), and a harem filled with captured Christian women."
David Levering Lewis mentions "a small group of Andalusian
Christians" filled with "fanaticism" who engaged in "a senseless
spike in religious provocation" where individual Christian priests
and laypersons "publicly disrespected mosques, the Qur'an, and the
Prophet's name." Because of this, Cordoba's qadi (Islamic judge),
poor thing, had no choice. The ruler Muhammad I "approved his qadi's
death sentence in 851-52 for thirteen Christians for whom clemency
was impolitic if not impossible under Malikite Sharia."
Unfortunately, these "Christian militants," as Mr. Lewis calls them,
were still deaf to all pleas of behaving in a properly submissive
manner to Muslims, and more death sentences ensued:
Twenty or so 'Mozarab martyrs' were dispatched in 853 or the year
following, and a dozen more afterward. In another wave of Christian
blasphemy in 859, thirteen more were executed, along with two daughters
of a prominent Muslim family living in distant Huesca who defiantly
disclosed their secret Christian conversion.
Lewis believes that: "A poll taken of Andalusians of all faiths would
have shown an overwhelming disapproval of the 'Mozarab martyrs.' These
Christian extremists were an aberration not because they acted outside
history but because they were premature -- three centuries ahead of the
history whose intense cultural nationalism and religious intolerance
were inculcated in the decades after the Battle of Clavijo."
The "religious intolerance" he is referring to is not the Jihad
waged against Christians and Jews in Spain and Portugal; it is the
Reconquista, the Christian reconquest of the Iberian Peninsula. It is
traditionally seen to have begun with Pelayo in 718. Although initially
slow, it speeded up from the eleventh century onwards. The Portuguese
had been liberated in 1249 under King Afonso III. The concept "Holy
War" was originally alien to Christianity and was imported to Europe
only after Europeans had been confronted with centuries of Islamic
Jihad.
Lewis himself states (correctly) that people during this "golden
age of tolerance" were executed for criticizing Islam. Isn't that
disturbing, given that al-Andalus is now supposed to serve as the
blueprint for our coexistence with Islam, according to our authorities
and media? "Blasphemy" against Islam and Muhammad is punishable by
death in sharia law, which is why the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh
was murdered by a Muslim in Amsterdam in 2004.
Even for those non-Muslims who accept Islamic rule life is harsh,
with severe economic strains and the constant threat of violence in
the back of your mind. Scholar Bat Ye'or is an expert on dhimmitude,
the oppressive system for non-Muslims under Islamic rule, described
in the book Islam and Dhimmitude. She writes this about the Jihad
slave system:
When Amr conquered Tripoli (Libya) in 643, he forced the Jewish
and Christian Berbers to give their wives and children as slaves to
the Arab army as part of their jizya. From 652 until its conquest
in 1276, Nubia was forced to send an annual contingent of slaves
to Cairo. Treaties concluded with the towns of Transoxiana [Iranian
central Asia], Sijistan [eastern Iran], Armenia, and Fezzan (Maghreb)
under the Umayyads and Abbasids stipulated an annual dispatch of
slaves from both sexes. However, the main sources for the supply of
slaves remained the regular raids on villages within the dar-al-harb
[non-Islamic regions] and the military expeditions which swept more
deeply into the infidel lands, emptying towns and provinces of their
inhabitants.
According to Robert Spencer, "Although the strictness with which the
laws of dhimmitude (the subservient status of Jews and Christians)
were enforced varied, they were never abolished, and during times of
relaxation the subject populations always lived in fear that they would
be enforced with new stringency. Muslim rulers did not forget that the
Qur'an mandates that both Jews and Christians must 'feel themselves
subdued.' One notable instance is recounted by Arab historian Philip
Hitti: 'The caliph al-Mutawakkil in 850 and 854 decreed that Christians
and Jews should affix wooden images of devils to their houses, level
their graves even with the ground, wear outer garments of honey color,
i.e., yellow, put two honey-colored patches on the clothes of their
slaves... and ride only on mules and asses with wooden saddles marked
by two pomegranate-like balls on the cantle.'"
In 1888, a Tunisian Jew noted: "The Jew is prohibited in this country
to wear the same clothes as a Muslim and may not wear a red tarbush. He
can be seen to bow down with his whole body to a Muslim child and
permit him the traditional privilege of striking him in the face,
a gesture that can prove to be of the gravest consequence. Indeed,
the present writer has received such blows. In such matters the
offenders act with complete impunity, for this has been the custom
from time immemorial."
Maimonides, the renowned medieval Jewish philosopher and physician who
had to flee Islamic-ruled Spain due to an aggressive Jihad, stated
that "the Arabs have persecuted us severely, and passed baneful
and discriminatory legislation against us... Never did a nation
molest, degrade, debase, and hate us as much as they." Jews could
teach rabbinic law to Christians, but Muslims will interpret what
they are taught "according to their erroneous principles and they
will oppress us. [F]or this reason... they hate all [non-Muslims]
who live among them." Christians "admit that the text of the Torah,
such as we have it, is intact."
What about science and learning? Scholar Toby E. Huff, author of the
book The Rise of Early Modern Science: Islam, China and the West,
warns that if Islam had taken over Europe, later Western scientific
achievements would have been impossible:
If Spain had persisted as an Islamic land into the later centuries
-- say, until the time of Napoleon -- it would have retained
all the ideological, legal, and institutional defects of Islamic
civilization. A Spain dominated by Islamic law would have been
unable to found new universities based on the European model of
legally autonomous corporate governance, as corporations do not
exist in Islamic law. Furthermore, the Islamic model of education
rested on the absolute primacy of fiqh, of legal studies, and the
standard of preserving the great traditions of the past. This was
symbolically reflected in the ijaza, the personal authorization to
transmit knowledge from the past given by a learned man, a tradition
quite different from the West's group-administered certification
(through examination) of demonstrated learning. In the actual event,
the founding of Spanish universities in the thirteenth century, first
in Palencia (1208-9), Valladolid, Salamanca (1227-8), and so on,
occurred in long-established Christian areas, and the universities
were modeled after the constitutions of Paris and Bologna.
Greek learning was never integrated into the regular curriculum at
Islamic schools, as it was in European universities. The German-Syrian
writer Bassam Tibi points out that "science" in the Islamic madrasa
meant the study of the Koran, the hadith, Arab history etc.:
"Some Islamic historians wrongly translate the term madrasa as
university. This is plainly incorrect: If we understand a university as
universitas litterarum, or consider, without the bias of Eurocentrism,
the case of the universitas magistrorum of the thirteenth century
in Paris, we are bound to recognise that the university is a seat
for free and unrestrained enquiry based on reason, is a European
innovation in the history of mankind."
According to the leading scholar Edward Grant in Science and Religion,
400 B.C. to A.D. 1550: From Aristotle to Copernicus, Islam is a
theocracy in which religion and state form a single entity. There is
thus no secular state apparatus distinct from the Islamic religion:
[Islamic madrasas] had as their primary mission the teaching of the
Islamic religion, and paid little attention to the foreign sciences,
which, as we saw, were comprised of the science and natural philosophy
derived ultimately from the Greeks. The analytical subjects derived
from the Greeks certainly did not have equal status with religious and
theological subjects. Indeed, the foreign sciences played a rather
marginal role in the madrasas, which formed the core of Islamic
higher education. Only those subjects that illuminated the Qur'an or
the religious law were taught. One such subject was logic, which was
found useful not only in semantics but was also regarded as helpful
in avoiding simple errors of inference. The primary function of the
madrasas, however, was 'to preserve learning and defend orthodoxy'
(Mottahedeh 1985, 91). In Islam, most theologians did not regard
natural philosophy as a subject helpful to a better understanding
of religion.
On the contrary, it was usually viewed as a subject capable of
subverting the Islamic religion and, therefore, as potentially
dangerous to the faith. Natural philosophy always remained a peripheral
discipline in the lands of Islam and was never institutionalized
within the educational system, as it was in Latin Christendom.
Fear and uncertainty afflicted all too many Islamic natural
philosophers. As Grant states, "Without the separation of church
and state, and the developments that proceeded as a consequence, the
West would not have produced a deeply rooted natural philosophy that
was disseminated through Europe by virtue of an extensive network
of universities, which laid the foundation for the great scientific
advances made in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, advances
that have continued to the present day."
The Age of Exploration during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was
undertaken in order to get away from Muslims and re-establish contact
with the civilizations of Asia without hostile Muslim middlemen. Norman
Davies puts it this way in his monumental Europe: A History:
Islam's conquests turned Europe into Christianity's main base. At the
same time the great swathe of Muslim territory cut the Christians
off from virtually all direct contact with other religions and
civilizations. The barrier of militant Islam turned the [European]
Peninsula in on itself, severing or transforming many of the earlier
lines of commercial, intellectual and political intercourse.
Jihad piracy, slavery and attacks on European countries were a constant
menace from the Jihad in the seventh century until the so-called
Barbary States in North Africa in the nineteenth century. Some would
argue that it is resurfacing again now, for instance in the form of
kidnapping of Western tourists which is becoming increasingly common
as I write these words, encouraged by the ransom money often paid by
European authorities.
Jihad continues to this day in the Balkans, a region which was
for centuries under brutal Turkish rule. According to writer Ruth
King, "When Serbia became independent of Byzantine rule in the 12th
century, its economic, cultural, social and religious institutions
were among the most advanced in Europe. Serbia functioned as a
bridge between Greco-Byzantine civilization and the developing
Western Renaissance. The center of the Serbian Orthodox Church
was in Kosovo where churches, monasteries and monastic communities
were established. A form of census in 1330, the 'Decani Charter,'
detailed the list of chartered villages and households, of which
only two percent were Albanian. The Ottomans invaded Serbia in 1389
and consolidated their rule in 1459, propelling major parts of the
Balkan peninsula and adjacent southeast Europe into a Koran-dictated
Dark Ages."
Early in the twentieth century Serbian Christians comprised roughly
two-thirds of the population of Kosovo. After WW2, Communist dictator
Tito did not allow Serbs who fled from their homes to return and
did not enforce border controls as thousands of Albanians moved into
Kosovo. This later led to escalating violence against Christian Serbs.
As King says, "Initially, the media reported the situation in
Kosovo fairly. For example, in July 1982 The New York Times noted:
'Serbs have been harassed by Albanians and have packed up and left the
region. The Albanian nationalists have a two-point platform, first to
establish what they call an ethnically clean Albanian republic and then
to merge with Albania for a greater Albania. Some 57,000 Serbs have
left Kosovo in the last decade.' Five years later, in 1987, the Times
was still reporting the persecution of Serbs within Kosovo. 'Slavic
Orthodox churches have been attacked, wells poisoned, crops burned,
Slavic boys knifed. Young Albanians have been told to rape Serbian
girls... Officials in Belgrade view the ethnic Albanian challenge
as imperiling the foundations of the multinational experiment called
federal Yugoslavia... Ethnic Albanians already control almost every
phase of life in the autonomous province of Kosovo, including the
police, judiciary, civil service, schools, and factories.'"
It was this situation that led to the rise of Serb nationalist leader
Slobodan Milosevic. However, according to Ruth King, "While the
brutality of the Milosevic regime was indeed a complicating factor,
he is long gone, but the KLA [Kosovo Liberation Army] continues its
assault on Serbs, on their churches, priests, homes, even on civilians
sitting in cafes, this under the nose of the U.S. and UN troops."
Bosnia's wartime president Alija Izetbegovic died in 2003, hailed
as a moderate Muslim leader. Little was said in Western media
about his 1970 Islamic Declaration, where he advocated "a struggle
for creating a great Islamic federation from Morocco to Indonesia,
from the tropical Africa to the Central Asia," and that "The Islamic
movement should and must start taking over the power as soon as it
is morally and numerically strong enough to not only overthrow the
existing non-Islamic, but also to build up a new Islamic authority."
According to Hugh Fitzgerald, "One must keep in mind both the way in
which some atrocities ascribed to Serbs were exaggerated, while the
atrocities inflicted on them were minimized or ignored altogether. But
what was most disturbing was that there was no context to anything:
nothing about the centuries of Muslim rule. Had such a history been
discussed early on, Western governments might have understood and
attempted to assuage the deep fears evoked by the Bosnian Muslim
leader, Izetbegovic, when he wrote that he intended to create a
Muslim state in Bosnia and impose the Sharia not merely there, but
everywhere that Muslims had once ruled in the Balkans. Had the Western
world shown the slightest intelligent sympathy or understanding of
what that set off in the imagination of many Serbs (and elsewhere,
among the Christians in the Balkans and in Greece), there might never
have been such a violent Serbian reaction, and someone like Milosevic
might never have obtained power."
In 1809, after the battle on Cegar Hill, by order of Turkish pasha
Hurshid the skulls of the killed Serbian soldiers were built in a
tower, Skull Tower, on the way to Constantinople. 3 meters high,
Skull Tower was built out of 952 skulls as a warning to the Serbian
people not to oppose their Muslim rulers. Some years later, a chapel
was built over the skulls.
Similar Jihad massacres were committed not only against the Serbs,
but against the Greeks, the Bulgarians and other non-Muslims who
slowly rebelled against the Ottoman Empire throughout the 19th
century. Professor Vahakn Dadrian and others have clearly identified
Jihad as a critical factor in the Armenian genocide in the early
20th century.
As Efraim Karsh notes, "The Ottomans embarked on an orgy of
bloodletting in response to the nationalist aspirations of their
European subjects. The Greek war of independence of the 1820's, the
Danubian uprisings of 1848 and the attendant Crimean war, the Balkan
explosion of the 1870's, the Greco-Ottoman war of 1897--all were
painful reminders of the costs of resisting Islamic imperial rule."
In his book Onward Muslim Soldiers, Robert Spencer quotes a letter
from Bosnia, written in 1860 by the acting British Consul in Sarajevo,
James Zohrab:
The hatred of the Christians toward the Bosniak Mussulmans is
intense. During a period of nearly 300 years they were subjected to
much oppression and cruelty. For them no other law but the caprice
of their masters existed... Oppression cannot now be carried on as
openly as formerly, but it must not be supposed that, because the
Government employés do not generally appear as the oppressors,
the Christians are well treated and protected.
The Islamic world is now using the Balkans as a launching pad for Jihad
against the rest of Europe. "There are religious centres in Bulgaria
that belong to Islamic groups financed mostly by Saudi Arabian groups,"
the head of Bulgarian military intelligence has warned. According to
him, the centres were in southern and southeastern Bulgaria, where the
country's Muslims, mainly of Turkish origin, are concentrated, and "had
links with similar organisations in Kosovo, Bosnia and Macedonia. For
them Bulgaria seems to be a transit point to Western Europe." He said
the steps were taken to prevent terrorist groups gaining a foothold
in Bulgaria, which shares a border with Turkey. Bulgaria's Muslim
minority accounts for more than 10 percent of the country's population.
The Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia passed a law allowing ethnic
Albanians to display the Albanian national flag in areas where they
form the majority. The decision came as a result of seven months of
heavy fighting in 2001 involving Albanian separatists, and following
pressure from the European Union, always ready to please Muslims.
Ethnic Albanians make up about 25 per cent of Macedonia's
population. If the demographic trends are anything like in Kosovo,
where the predominantly Muslim Albanians have been out-breeding their
non-Muslim neighbors, Macedonians could be facing serious trouble in
the future. In Kosovo, dozens of churches and monasteries have been
destroyed or damaged following ethnic cleansing of Christian Serbs,
all under the auspices of NATO soldiers.
Martti Ahtisaari, former President of Finland and later Chief United
Nations negotiator for Kosovo, caused anger in Serbia when he stated
that "Serbs are guilty as a people," implying that they would have
to pay for it, possibly by losing the province of Kosovo. I disagree
with Mr. Ahtisaari. It is one thing to criticize the brutality of
the Milosevic regime. It is quite another thing to claim that "Serbs
are guilty as a people." If anybody in the Balkans can be called
guilty as a people, it is the Turks, not the Serbs. The Turks have
left a trail of blood across much of Europe and the Mediterranean for
centuries, culminating in the Armenian genocide in the 20th century,
which Turkey still refuses to acknowledge, let alone apologize for.
Dimitar Angelov elucidates the impact of the Ottoman Jihad on the
vanquished Balkan populations:
...the conquest of the Balkan Peninsula accomplished by the Turks
over the course of about two centuries caused the incalculable ruin
of material goods, countless massacres, the enslavement and exile of
a great part of the population -- in a word, a general and protracted
decline of productivity, as was the case with Asia Minor after it
was occupied by the same invaders. This decline in productivity is
all the more striking when one recalls that in the mid-fourteenth
century, as the Ottomans were gaining a foothold on the peninsula,
the States that existed there -- Byzantium, Bulgaria and Serbia --
had already reached a rather high level of economic and cultural
development....The campaigns of Mourad II (1421-1451) and especially
those of his successor, Mahomet II (1451-1481) in Serbia, Bosnia,
Albania and in the Byzantine princedom of the Peloponnesus, were of
a particularly devastating character.
This Ottoman Jihad tradition is still continued by "secular" Turkey
to this day. Michael J. Totten visited Varosha, the Ghost City of
Cyprus, in 2005. The city was deserted during the Turkish invasion
of Cyprus in 1974 and is now fenced off and patrolled by the Turkish
occupiers. The Turks carved up the island. Greek Cypriot citizens
in Varosha expected to return to their homes within days. Instead,
the Turks seized the empty city and wrapped it in fencing and wire.
In March 2006, Italian Luigi Geninazzi made a report from the same
area. 180,000 persons live in the northern part of the island, 100,000
of whom are colonists originally from mainland Turkey. According
to Geninazzi, the Islamization of the north of Cyprus has been
concretized in the destruction of all that was Christian. Yannis
Eliades, director of the Byzantine Museum of Nicosia, calculates
that 25,000 icons have disappeared from the churches in the zone
occupied by the Turks. Stupendous Byzantine and Romanesque churches,
imposing monasteries, mosaics and frescoes have been sacked,
violated, and destroyed. Many have been turned into restaurants,
bars, and nightclubs. Geninazzi confronted Huseyn Ozel, a government
spokesman for the self-proclaimed Turkish Republic of Northern
Cyprus, with this. Most of the mosques in Greek Cypriot territory
have been restored. So why are churches still today being turned
into mosques? The Turkish Cypriot functionary spreads his arms wide:
"It is an Ottoman custom..."
Yosef Bodansky, director of the Congressional Task Force on Terrorism
and Conventional Warfare in Washington in the USA, has stated that
the Balkans was a "springboard for Islamic extremism" in Europe,
with the Islamic Republic of Iran as the main driving force behind
it. Iran and Saudi Arabia supplied funding, weapons and men to the
Bosnians during the war in the 1990s, and terrorist organization
Al-Qaeda gained a foothold in the Balkans. Saudi Arabia has invested
more than $1 billion in the Sarajevo region alone, for projects that
include the construction of 158 mosques. Sarajevo has by now become
an almost entirely Muslim city.
Miroljub Jevtic, professor at the Belgrade University and author of
a number of books on the topic of Islam and politics, believes the
Western world is in favor of detaching Kosovo from Christian Serbia
by fiat and making it into an independent (Muslim) state. The main
argument of those supporting this scenario, notably in the United
States, is to improve their image in the eyes of the Islamic world and
"co-opt the influence of Islamic 'extremists.'"
Jevtic notes that "the fact that since the arrival of NATO to Kosovo
over 150 Christian churches have been destroyed and some 400 mosques
have been built, or are under construction, is for the Muslims a
proof that if there is a faith which is supported by true God --
it is Islam! Because, why would the Christian God, why would Jesus,
permit the destruction of churches, where He, Jesus, is glorified? Why
would He, at the same time, permit the construction of mosques, where
His existence as God is denied? Why would He permit it, moreover,
in the presence of men who bear arms and who claim to be Christians?"
Miroljub Jevtic warns that the European Union's support for Albanian
Muslim demands could backfire badly: "Granting the independence to
Kosovo will be taken as proof of Europe's own wish to cease to exist,
as it not only allows the expansion of Islam but is actively promoting
it by aiding those who are destroying churches, raping nuns, spitting
on crosses and daubing with excrement holy images of Christ."
In Kosovo, dozens of churches and monasteries have been destroyed
following ethnic cleansing of Christian Serbs by the predominantly
Muslim Albanians, all under the auspices of NATO soldiers, and Muslims
are not ungrateful. Kosovo Albanians plan to honor their "savior,"
former US President Bill Clinton, by erecting a statue of him. Yet
in 2007, four Albanians from Kosovo along with other Muslims were
arrested for conspiring to attack Fort Dix, a military base in New
Jersey, the USA, in order "to kill as many soldiers as possible."
Western governments are pushing for independence for a group of
Jihadist thugs who recently wanted to create the Osama bin Laden
mosque in Kosovo. This name was eventually changed for public
relations reasons since the Albanians knew they needed American
political support. In June 2007 the visiting US President George
W. Bush was hailed as a hero by a group of Albanians, who allegedly
also stole his watch. "Sooner rather than later you've got to say
'Enough's enough -- Kosovo is independent,'" Bush told cheering
Albanians. As German newspaper Suddeutsche Zeitung later commented,
"Why should the Albanians settle for autonomy when George W. Bush
had already promised them their own state?"
President Bush declared a "war on terror" after the Jihadist
attacks on the United States in 2001. Six years later, all he has
achieved is bleeding American tax payers financially and American
soldiers literally while overseeing the eradication of non-Muslim
communities in Iraq. Now his administration supports independence for
terrorist-sponsoring Muslims in the Balkans and in the Palestinian
territories. George W. Bush risks being remembered as one of the
worst presidents in American history.
In a commentary, "We bombed the wrong side?" former Canadian UNPROFOR
Commander Lewis MacKenzie wrote, "The Kosovo-Albanians have played us
like a Stradivarius. We have subsidized and indirectly supported their
violent campaign for an ethnically pure and independent Kosovo. We
have never blamed them for being the perpetrators of the violence
in the early '90s and we continue to portray them as the designated
victim today in spite of evidence to the contrary. When they achieve
independence with the help of our tax dollars combined with those of
bin Laden and al-Qaeda, just consider the message of encouragement
this sends to other terrorist-supported independence movements around
the world."
I once listened to a speech by Patrick Sookhdeo, a brave former
Muslim who has published books such as Global Jihad: The Future in
the Face of Militant Islam. Sookhdeo had done a lot of excellent --
and frightening -- research regarding the Islamization of Western
Europe, especially Britain. He recalled having a conversation with a
senior Western official regarding what would happen if Muslims in a
region of, say, Britain or the Netherlands, should declare that they
would no longer accept the laws of the central government and formed
a breakaway Islamic Republic. This official then replied that they
would probably have to quietly accept that. When witnessing Muslim
riots in France and elsewhere, which more and more resemble a civil
war, this question is no longer just hypothetical.
As writer Julia Gorin has warned, "An independent Kosovo will serve
as a nod to secessionists worldwide," and "history will show what no
one cares to understand: the current world war began officially in
Yugoslavia" in the 1990s.
Granting Jihadist Muslims independence in Kosovo after they conducted
ethnic cleansing of non-Muslims has established an extremely dangerous
precedent. Not only is it immoral to sacrifice the freedom or perhaps
existence of smaller nations, be that the Serbs or the Israelis,
in order to save your own skin. As the example of Czechoslovakia
demonstrated prior to WW2, it is also counterproductive. Supporting
independence for Muslim Albanians in Kosovo will not lead to
stabilization of the Balkans; it will rather lead to the Balkanization
of the West. The new thug state will serve as a launching pad for Jihad
activities against non-Muslims, just like an independent Palestinian
state would do in the Middle East. In the case of Kosovo, the Russians
are right and Western leaders, both in the European Union and the
United States, are wrong. The Serbs have suffered enough, and don't
need to be stabbed in the back by the West as well.
Janos (John) Hunyadi, Hungarian warrior and captain-general, is today
virtually unknown outside Hungary and the Balkans, but he probably
did more than any other individual in stemming the Turkish invasion
in the fifteenth century. His actions spanned all the countries of
south-eastern Europe, leading international armies, negotiating with
kings and popes. He died of plague after having destroyed an Ottoman
fleet outside Belgrade in1456. His work slowed the Muslim advance,
and may thus have saved Western Europe from falling to Islam. By
extension, he may have helped save Western civilization in North
America and Australia, too. Yet hardly anybody in West knows who he
is. Our children don't learn his name, they are only taught about
the evils of Western colonialism and the dangers of Islamophobia.
Western Europe today is a strange and very dangerous mix of arrogance
and self-loathing. Muslims are creating havoc and attacking their
non-Muslim neighbors from Thailand to India. It is extremely arrogant
to believe that the result will be any different in the Netherlands,
Britain or Italy, or for that matter in the United States or Canada,
than it has been everywhere else. It won't. If we had the humility
to listen to the advice of the Hindus of India or even our Christian
cousins in south-eastern Europe, we wouldn't be in as much trouble
as we are now.
On the other hand, if we didn't have such a culture of self-loathing,
where our own cultural traditions are ridiculed in favor of a
meaningless Multicultural cocktail, we probably wouldn't have
allowed massive Muslim immigration, either. There doesn't have to be
a contradiction between being proud of your own cultural heritage and
knowing that there may still be lessons you can learn from others. A
wise man can do both. Westerners of our age do neither.
Sun Tzu, a contemporary of the great Chinese thinker Confucius, wrote
The Art of War, the extremely influential book on military strategy,
2500 years ago. It is a book that deserves to be read in full, but one
of the most famous quotations is this one: "So it is said that if you
know your enemies and know yourself, you will not be imperiled in a
hundred battles; if you do not know your enemies but do know yourself,
you will win one and lose one; if you do not know your enemies nor
yourself, you will be imperiled in every single battle."
The West has forgotten who our enemies are, but worse, we have also
forgotten who we are. We are going to pay a heavy price for this
historical amnesia.
--Boundary_(ID_BWYYvQ/sHsL0T4jbj0zZ0A)--
By Fjordman
EuropeNews
http://europenews.dk/en/node/ 14593
September 30 2008
Denmark
The following essay is an amalgam of my previous online essays,
among them Who Are We, Who Are Our Enemies -- The Cost of Historical
Amnesia, Why We Should Oppose an Independent Kosovo, Refuting God's
Crucible and The Truth About Islam in Europe.
The Jihad, the Islamic so-called Holy War, has been a fact of life in
Europe, Asia, Africa and the Near and Middle East for more than 1300
years, but this is the first history of the Muslim wars in Europe
ever to be published. Hundreds of books, however, have appeared on
its Christian counterpart, the Crusades, to which the Jihad is often
compared, although they lasted less than two hundred years and unlike
the Jihad, which is universal, were largely but not completely confined
to the Holy Land.
Moreover, the Crusades have been over for more than 700 years, while
a Jihad is still going on in the world. The Jihad has been the most
unrecorded and disregarded major event of history. It has, in fact,
been largely ignored. For instance, the Encyclopaedia Britannica
gives the Crusades eighty times more space than the Jihad.
The above quote is from Paul Fregosi's book Jihad in the West from
1998. Mr. Fregosi found that his book about the history of Islamic
Holy War in Europe from the 7th to the 20th centuries was difficult
to get published in the mid-1990s, when publishers had the Salman
Rushdie case in fresh memory.
A few years later, perhaps the most comprehensive and scholarly book
on the subject to date, The Legacy of Jihad, was published by Andrew
G. Bostom. He has written about what he calls "America's First War
on Terror." Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, then serving as American
ambassadors to France and Britain, respectively, met in 1786 in London
with the Tripolitan Ambassador to Britain, Sidi Haji Abdul Rahman
Adja. These future American presidents were attempting to negotiate
a peace treaty which would spare the United States the ravages of
Jihad piracy -- murder and enslavement emanating from the so-called
Barbary States of North Africa, corresponding to modern Morocco,
Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya.
Bostom notes that "an aggressive jihad was already being waged
against the United States almost 200 years prior to America becoming a
dominant international power in the Middle East." Israel has nothing
to do with it. The Barbary Jihad piracy had been going on since the
earliest Arab-Islamic expansion in the 7th and 8th centuries. Francisco
Gabrieli states that:
According to present-day concepts of international relations, such
activities amounted to piracy, but they correspond perfectly to jihad,
an Islamic religious duty. The conquest of Crete, in the east, and a
good portion of the corsair warfare along the Provencal and Italian
coasts, in the West, are among the most conspicuous instances of
such "private initiative" which contributed to Arab domination in
the Mediterranean.
A proto-typical Muslim naval razzia occurred in 846 when a fleet of
Arab Jihadists arrived at the mouth of the Tiber, made their way to
Rome, sacked the city, and carried away from the basilica of St. Peter
all of the gold and silver it contained. The creation of the Vatican
as a walled "city within a city" was in response to the recurrent
threat of Islamic Jihad raids.
Bostom notes that "By June/July 1815 the ably commanded U.S. naval
forces had dealt their Barbary jihadist adversaries a quick series
of crushing defeats. This success ignited the imagination of the Old
World powers to rise up against the Barbary pirates."
Yet some Arabs seem to miss the good old days when they could extract
jizya payments from the West. Libyan terrorist-sponsoring leader
Muammar Gaddafi has stated that he thinks that European nations should
pay 10 billion euros ($12.7 billion dollars) a year to Africa to
help it stop migrants seeking a better life flooding northwards into
Europe. He added without elaborating: "Earth belongs to everybody. Why
they (young Africans) emigrated to Europe -- this should be answered
by Europeans." Apart from being a clear-cut example of how migration,
or rather population dumping, has become a tool for blackmail in
the 21st century, this is a throwback to the age when Tripoli could
extract payments from Europe.
Robert Davis, professor of history at Ohio State University, developed
new methodical enumeration in his book Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters
which indicates that perhaps one and one-quarter million white European
Christians were enslaved by Barbary Muslims just from 1530 through
1780 -- a far greater number than had been estimated before:
Enslavement was a very real possibility for anyone who traveled
in the Mediterranean, or who lived along the shores in places like
Italy, France, Spain and Portugal, and even as far north as England
and Iceland. Much of what has been written gives the impression that
there were not many slaves and minimizes the impact that slavery had
on Europe," Davis said. "Most accounts only look at slavery in one
place, or only for a short period of time. But when you take a broader,
longer view, the massive scope of this slavery and its powerful impact
become clear.
Corsairs from cities in North Africa -- Tunis, Algiers etc. -- would
raid ships in the Mediterranean and Atlantic, as well as seaside
villages to capture men, women and children. The impact was devastating
-- France, England, and Spain each lost thousands of ships, and long
stretches of the Spanish and Italian coasts were almost completely
abandoned by their inhabitants.
At its peak, the destruction and depopulation of some areas probably
exceeded what European slavers would later inflict on the African
interior. The lives of European slaves were often no better than
the victims of the transatlantic slave trade, which tapped into
the pre-established Islamic slave-trade in Africa. "As far as daily
living conditions, the Mediterranean slaves certainly didn't have
it better," Davis says. While African slaves did grueling labor on
sugar and cotton plantations in the Americas, European slaves were
often worked just as hard and as lethally -- in quarries, in heavy
construction, and above all rowing the corsair galleys.
Throughout most of the seventeenth century, the English alone lost
at least 400 sailors a year to the slavers. One American slave
reported that 130 American seamen had been enslaved by the Algerians
in the Mediterranean and Atlantic just between 1785 and 1793 (which
prompted the later military response from the Americans). In his
book White Gold, Giles Milton describes how regular Jihad razzias in
Europe extended as far north as Iceland. Even during the time of Queen
Elizabeth I, while William Shakespeare was writing his plays and poems,
young Englishmen risked being surprised by a fleet of Muslim pirates
showing up at their village, or being kidnapped while fishing at sea:
By the end of the dreadful summer of 1625, the mayor of Plymouth
reckoned that 1,000 skiffs had been destroyed, and a similar number of
villagers carried off into slavery." Such events took place across much
of Europe, also in Wales and southern Ireland: "In 1631...200 Islamic
soldiers...sailed to the village of Baltimore, storming ashore with
swords drawn and catching the villagers totally by surprise. (They)
carried off 237 men, women, and children and took them to Algiers...The
French padre Pierre Dan was in the city (Algiers) at the time...He
witnessed the sale of the captives in the slave auction. 'It was a
pitiful sight to see them exposed in the market...Women were separated
from their husbands and the children from their fathers...on one side
a husband was sold; on the other his wife; and her daughter was torn
from her arms without the hope that they'd ever see each other again'.
The Englishman Thomas Pellow was enslaved in Morocco for twenty-three
years after being captured by Barbary pirates as a cabin boy on
a small English vessel in 1716. He was tortured until he accepted
Islam. For weeks he was beaten and starved, and finally gave in after
his torturer resorted to "burning my flesh off my bones by fire, which
the tyrant did, by frequent repetitions, after a most cruel manner."
God's Crucible: Islam and the Making of Europe, 570-1215 was written
by David Levering Lewis, the American historian and two-time winner of
the prestigious Pulitzer Prize. He states that Muslims did not enslave
their co-religionists, only infidels. Yes, but why is that better?
As Robert Spencer writes in his book Religion of Peace?: "The Qur'an
says that the followers of Muhammad are 'ruthless to the unbelievers
but merciful to one another' (48:29), and that the unbelievers are the
'worst of created beings' (98:6). One may exercise the Golden Rule
in relation to a fellow Muslim, but according to the laws of Islam,
the same courtesy is not to be extended to unbelievers. That is one
principal reason why the primary source of slaves in the Islamic world
has been non-Muslims, whether Jews, Christians, Hindus, or pagans. Most
slaves were non-Muslims who had been captured during jihad warfare."
Slavery was taken for granted throughout Islamic history. When it was
finally abolished this was due to Western pressure, especially the
efforts of the British Empire. Spencer again: "Nor was there a Muslim
abolitionist movement, no Clarkson, Wilberforce, or Garrison. When
the slave trade ended, it was ended not through Muslim efforts but
through British military force. Even so, there is evidence that
slavery continues beneath the surface in some Muslim countries --
notably Saudi Arabia, which only abolished slavery in 1962; Yemen
and Oman, both of which ended legal slavery in 1970; and Niger, which
didn't abolish slavery until 2004. In Niger, the ban is widely ignored,
and as many as one million people remain in bondage. Slaves are bred,
often raped, and generally treated like animals. There are even slavery
cases involving Muslims in the United States. A Saudi named Homaidan
al-Turki was sentenced in September 2006 to twenty-seven years to life
in prison for keeping a woman as a slave in his Colorado home. For
his part, al-Turki claimed that he was a victim of anti-Muslim bias."
Jihad slavery was widespread in Africa and in many regions of
Asia. Indian historian K. S. Lal states that wherever Jihadists
conquered a territory, "there developed a system of slavery peculiar
to the clime, terrain, and populace of the place." When Muslim armies
invaded India, "its people began to be enslaved in droves to be sold
in foreign lands or employed in various capacities on menial and
not-so-menial jobs within the country."
Briefly summed up, God's Crucible laments the fact that Charles Martel,
"the Hammer," halted the advancing Islamic Jihad at the Battle of
Tours or, Battle of Poitiers, in 732:
Had 'Abd al-Rahman's men prevailed that October day, the post-Roman
Occident would probably have been incorporated into a cosmopolitan,
Muslim regnum unobstructed by borders, as they hypothesize -- one
devoid of a priestly caste, animated by the dogma of equality of the
faithful, and respectful of all religious faiths. Curiously, such
speculation has a French pedigree. Forty years ago, two historians,
Jean-Henri Roy and Jean Deviosse enumerated the benefits of a Muslim
triumph at Poitiers: astronomy; trigonometry; Arabic numerals;
the corpus of Greek philosophy. 'We [Europe] would have gained 267
years,' according to their calculations. 'We might have been spared
the wars of religion.' To press the logic of this disconcerting
analysis, the victory of Charles the Hammer must be seen as greatly
contributing to the creation of an economically retarded, balkanized,
fratricidal Europe that, in defining itself in opposition to Islam,
made virtues out of religious persecution, cultural particularism,
and hereditary aristocracy.
David Levering Lewis is clearly sympathetic towards this view, and
writes that the Carolingian order, established Charles Martel (Carolus
in Latin) and his grandson Charlemagne, was "religiously intolerant,
intellectually impoverished, socially calcified, and economically
primitive." Curiously, he mentions in passing that there was continuous
"out-migration to the Christian kingdoms" from al-Andalus. Why did
they move to the Christian lands, whose economy was "little better
than late Neolithic," if life was so sweet in al-Andalus? Lewis states
that: "At the end of the eighth century, Europe was militarily strong
enough to defend itself from Islam, thanks in part to Charlemagne
and his predecessors. The question was whether it was politically,
economically, and culturally better off for being able to do so."
God's Crucible was published during a time when Spain and Portugal
under Islamic occupation are being hailed as a model of coexistence
with Islam. The European Union recently announced its intentions of
expanding to include the Muslim Middle East and North Africa. There
is a concerted effort going on to present Islam as something
non-threatening, indeed benevolent. In May 2008, Germany's Der
Spiegel, Europe's largest weekly magazine, hailed al-Andalus as
a "Multicultural model" for Europe: "For nearly 800 years, the
inhabitants of al-Andalus, as the Arab dynasties called their empire
on the Iberian Peninsula, allowed Jews, Christians and Muslims to
coexist in a spirit of mutual respect -- a situation that benefited
all." Never mind that Richard Fletcher states in his book Moorish
Spain that "Moorish Spain was not a tolerant and enlightened society
even in its most cultivated epoch."
The European Union, the Council of Europe and numerous Islamic
organizations are working hard to rewrite European school textbooks
in order to promote Islam. In the European Parliament, the German
Christian Democrat Hans-Gert Pöttering has stated that textbooks
should be reviewed for intolerant depictions of Islam to ensure
that they don't propagate "prejudice." He suggested that the EU
should co-operate with the Organization of the Islamic Conference
to create a textbook review committee. The OIC desires to rewrite
textbooks around the world to remove anything critical of Islam,
silence mentioning of the victims of 1400 years of Islamic Jihad and
glorify the achievements of "Islamic civilization."
Robert Spencer writes in Religion of Peace?: Why Christianity Is
and Islam Isn't: "Islamic apologist Karen Armstrong enunciates the
common wisdom when she says that 'until 1492, Jews and Christians
lived peaceably and productively together in Muslim Spain --
a coexistence that was impossible elsewhere in Europe.' Even the
U.S. State Department has proclaimed that 'during the Islamic period
in Spain, Jews, Christians, and Muslims lived together in peace and
mutual respect, creating a diverse society in which vibrant exchanges
of ideas took place.'"
Those who want a second opinion can start with reading the online essay
Andalusian Myth, Eurabian Reality by Bat Ye'or and Andrew G. Bostom:
"There were rarely periods of peace in the Amirate of Cordova
(756-912), nor later. Al-Andalus represented the land of jihad par
excellence. Every year, sometimes twice a year, raiding expeditions
were sent to ravage the Christian Spanish kingdoms to the north,
the Basque regions, or France and the Rhone valley, bringing back
booty and slaves. Andalusian corsairs attacked and invaded along
the Sicilian and Italian coasts, even as far as the Aegean Islands,
looting and burning as they went. Thousands of people were deported
to slavery in Andalusia, where the caliph kept a militia of tens of
thousand of Christian slaves brought from all parts of Christian Europe
(the Saqaliba), and a harem filled with captured Christian women."
David Levering Lewis mentions "a small group of Andalusian
Christians" filled with "fanaticism" who engaged in "a senseless
spike in religious provocation" where individual Christian priests
and laypersons "publicly disrespected mosques, the Qur'an, and the
Prophet's name." Because of this, Cordoba's qadi (Islamic judge),
poor thing, had no choice. The ruler Muhammad I "approved his qadi's
death sentence in 851-52 for thirteen Christians for whom clemency
was impolitic if not impossible under Malikite Sharia."
Unfortunately, these "Christian militants," as Mr. Lewis calls them,
were still deaf to all pleas of behaving in a properly submissive
manner to Muslims, and more death sentences ensued:
Twenty or so 'Mozarab martyrs' were dispatched in 853 or the year
following, and a dozen more afterward. In another wave of Christian
blasphemy in 859, thirteen more were executed, along with two daughters
of a prominent Muslim family living in distant Huesca who defiantly
disclosed their secret Christian conversion.
Lewis believes that: "A poll taken of Andalusians of all faiths would
have shown an overwhelming disapproval of the 'Mozarab martyrs.' These
Christian extremists were an aberration not because they acted outside
history but because they were premature -- three centuries ahead of the
history whose intense cultural nationalism and religious intolerance
were inculcated in the decades after the Battle of Clavijo."
The "religious intolerance" he is referring to is not the Jihad
waged against Christians and Jews in Spain and Portugal; it is the
Reconquista, the Christian reconquest of the Iberian Peninsula. It is
traditionally seen to have begun with Pelayo in 718. Although initially
slow, it speeded up from the eleventh century onwards. The Portuguese
had been liberated in 1249 under King Afonso III. The concept "Holy
War" was originally alien to Christianity and was imported to Europe
only after Europeans had been confronted with centuries of Islamic
Jihad.
Lewis himself states (correctly) that people during this "golden
age of tolerance" were executed for criticizing Islam. Isn't that
disturbing, given that al-Andalus is now supposed to serve as the
blueprint for our coexistence with Islam, according to our authorities
and media? "Blasphemy" against Islam and Muhammad is punishable by
death in sharia law, which is why the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh
was murdered by a Muslim in Amsterdam in 2004.
Even for those non-Muslims who accept Islamic rule life is harsh,
with severe economic strains and the constant threat of violence in
the back of your mind. Scholar Bat Ye'or is an expert on dhimmitude,
the oppressive system for non-Muslims under Islamic rule, described
in the book Islam and Dhimmitude. She writes this about the Jihad
slave system:
When Amr conquered Tripoli (Libya) in 643, he forced the Jewish
and Christian Berbers to give their wives and children as slaves to
the Arab army as part of their jizya. From 652 until its conquest
in 1276, Nubia was forced to send an annual contingent of slaves
to Cairo. Treaties concluded with the towns of Transoxiana [Iranian
central Asia], Sijistan [eastern Iran], Armenia, and Fezzan (Maghreb)
under the Umayyads and Abbasids stipulated an annual dispatch of
slaves from both sexes. However, the main sources for the supply of
slaves remained the regular raids on villages within the dar-al-harb
[non-Islamic regions] and the military expeditions which swept more
deeply into the infidel lands, emptying towns and provinces of their
inhabitants.
According to Robert Spencer, "Although the strictness with which the
laws of dhimmitude (the subservient status of Jews and Christians)
were enforced varied, they were never abolished, and during times of
relaxation the subject populations always lived in fear that they would
be enforced with new stringency. Muslim rulers did not forget that the
Qur'an mandates that both Jews and Christians must 'feel themselves
subdued.' One notable instance is recounted by Arab historian Philip
Hitti: 'The caliph al-Mutawakkil in 850 and 854 decreed that Christians
and Jews should affix wooden images of devils to their houses, level
their graves even with the ground, wear outer garments of honey color,
i.e., yellow, put two honey-colored patches on the clothes of their
slaves... and ride only on mules and asses with wooden saddles marked
by two pomegranate-like balls on the cantle.'"
In 1888, a Tunisian Jew noted: "The Jew is prohibited in this country
to wear the same clothes as a Muslim and may not wear a red tarbush. He
can be seen to bow down with his whole body to a Muslim child and
permit him the traditional privilege of striking him in the face,
a gesture that can prove to be of the gravest consequence. Indeed,
the present writer has received such blows. In such matters the
offenders act with complete impunity, for this has been the custom
from time immemorial."
Maimonides, the renowned medieval Jewish philosopher and physician who
had to flee Islamic-ruled Spain due to an aggressive Jihad, stated
that "the Arabs have persecuted us severely, and passed baneful
and discriminatory legislation against us... Never did a nation
molest, degrade, debase, and hate us as much as they." Jews could
teach rabbinic law to Christians, but Muslims will interpret what
they are taught "according to their erroneous principles and they
will oppress us. [F]or this reason... they hate all [non-Muslims]
who live among them." Christians "admit that the text of the Torah,
such as we have it, is intact."
What about science and learning? Scholar Toby E. Huff, author of the
book The Rise of Early Modern Science: Islam, China and the West,
warns that if Islam had taken over Europe, later Western scientific
achievements would have been impossible:
If Spain had persisted as an Islamic land into the later centuries
-- say, until the time of Napoleon -- it would have retained
all the ideological, legal, and institutional defects of Islamic
civilization. A Spain dominated by Islamic law would have been
unable to found new universities based on the European model of
legally autonomous corporate governance, as corporations do not
exist in Islamic law. Furthermore, the Islamic model of education
rested on the absolute primacy of fiqh, of legal studies, and the
standard of preserving the great traditions of the past. This was
symbolically reflected in the ijaza, the personal authorization to
transmit knowledge from the past given by a learned man, a tradition
quite different from the West's group-administered certification
(through examination) of demonstrated learning. In the actual event,
the founding of Spanish universities in the thirteenth century, first
in Palencia (1208-9), Valladolid, Salamanca (1227-8), and so on,
occurred in long-established Christian areas, and the universities
were modeled after the constitutions of Paris and Bologna.
Greek learning was never integrated into the regular curriculum at
Islamic schools, as it was in European universities. The German-Syrian
writer Bassam Tibi points out that "science" in the Islamic madrasa
meant the study of the Koran, the hadith, Arab history etc.:
"Some Islamic historians wrongly translate the term madrasa as
university. This is plainly incorrect: If we understand a university as
universitas litterarum, or consider, without the bias of Eurocentrism,
the case of the universitas magistrorum of the thirteenth century
in Paris, we are bound to recognise that the university is a seat
for free and unrestrained enquiry based on reason, is a European
innovation in the history of mankind."
According to the leading scholar Edward Grant in Science and Religion,
400 B.C. to A.D. 1550: From Aristotle to Copernicus, Islam is a
theocracy in which religion and state form a single entity. There is
thus no secular state apparatus distinct from the Islamic religion:
[Islamic madrasas] had as their primary mission the teaching of the
Islamic religion, and paid little attention to the foreign sciences,
which, as we saw, were comprised of the science and natural philosophy
derived ultimately from the Greeks. The analytical subjects derived
from the Greeks certainly did not have equal status with religious and
theological subjects. Indeed, the foreign sciences played a rather
marginal role in the madrasas, which formed the core of Islamic
higher education. Only those subjects that illuminated the Qur'an or
the religious law were taught. One such subject was logic, which was
found useful not only in semantics but was also regarded as helpful
in avoiding simple errors of inference. The primary function of the
madrasas, however, was 'to preserve learning and defend orthodoxy'
(Mottahedeh 1985, 91). In Islam, most theologians did not regard
natural philosophy as a subject helpful to a better understanding
of religion.
On the contrary, it was usually viewed as a subject capable of
subverting the Islamic religion and, therefore, as potentially
dangerous to the faith. Natural philosophy always remained a peripheral
discipline in the lands of Islam and was never institutionalized
within the educational system, as it was in Latin Christendom.
Fear and uncertainty afflicted all too many Islamic natural
philosophers. As Grant states, "Without the separation of church
and state, and the developments that proceeded as a consequence, the
West would not have produced a deeply rooted natural philosophy that
was disseminated through Europe by virtue of an extensive network
of universities, which laid the foundation for the great scientific
advances made in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, advances
that have continued to the present day."
The Age of Exploration during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was
undertaken in order to get away from Muslims and re-establish contact
with the civilizations of Asia without hostile Muslim middlemen. Norman
Davies puts it this way in his monumental Europe: A History:
Islam's conquests turned Europe into Christianity's main base. At the
same time the great swathe of Muslim territory cut the Christians
off from virtually all direct contact with other religions and
civilizations. The barrier of militant Islam turned the [European]
Peninsula in on itself, severing or transforming many of the earlier
lines of commercial, intellectual and political intercourse.
Jihad piracy, slavery and attacks on European countries were a constant
menace from the Jihad in the seventh century until the so-called
Barbary States in North Africa in the nineteenth century. Some would
argue that it is resurfacing again now, for instance in the form of
kidnapping of Western tourists which is becoming increasingly common
as I write these words, encouraged by the ransom money often paid by
European authorities.
Jihad continues to this day in the Balkans, a region which was
for centuries under brutal Turkish rule. According to writer Ruth
King, "When Serbia became independent of Byzantine rule in the 12th
century, its economic, cultural, social and religious institutions
were among the most advanced in Europe. Serbia functioned as a
bridge between Greco-Byzantine civilization and the developing
Western Renaissance. The center of the Serbian Orthodox Church
was in Kosovo where churches, monasteries and monastic communities
were established. A form of census in 1330, the 'Decani Charter,'
detailed the list of chartered villages and households, of which
only two percent were Albanian. The Ottomans invaded Serbia in 1389
and consolidated their rule in 1459, propelling major parts of the
Balkan peninsula and adjacent southeast Europe into a Koran-dictated
Dark Ages."
Early in the twentieth century Serbian Christians comprised roughly
two-thirds of the population of Kosovo. After WW2, Communist dictator
Tito did not allow Serbs who fled from their homes to return and
did not enforce border controls as thousands of Albanians moved into
Kosovo. This later led to escalating violence against Christian Serbs.
As King says, "Initially, the media reported the situation in
Kosovo fairly. For example, in July 1982 The New York Times noted:
'Serbs have been harassed by Albanians and have packed up and left the
region. The Albanian nationalists have a two-point platform, first to
establish what they call an ethnically clean Albanian republic and then
to merge with Albania for a greater Albania. Some 57,000 Serbs have
left Kosovo in the last decade.' Five years later, in 1987, the Times
was still reporting the persecution of Serbs within Kosovo. 'Slavic
Orthodox churches have been attacked, wells poisoned, crops burned,
Slavic boys knifed. Young Albanians have been told to rape Serbian
girls... Officials in Belgrade view the ethnic Albanian challenge
as imperiling the foundations of the multinational experiment called
federal Yugoslavia... Ethnic Albanians already control almost every
phase of life in the autonomous province of Kosovo, including the
police, judiciary, civil service, schools, and factories.'"
It was this situation that led to the rise of Serb nationalist leader
Slobodan Milosevic. However, according to Ruth King, "While the
brutality of the Milosevic regime was indeed a complicating factor,
he is long gone, but the KLA [Kosovo Liberation Army] continues its
assault on Serbs, on their churches, priests, homes, even on civilians
sitting in cafes, this under the nose of the U.S. and UN troops."
Bosnia's wartime president Alija Izetbegovic died in 2003, hailed
as a moderate Muslim leader. Little was said in Western media
about his 1970 Islamic Declaration, where he advocated "a struggle
for creating a great Islamic federation from Morocco to Indonesia,
from the tropical Africa to the Central Asia," and that "The Islamic
movement should and must start taking over the power as soon as it
is morally and numerically strong enough to not only overthrow the
existing non-Islamic, but also to build up a new Islamic authority."
According to Hugh Fitzgerald, "One must keep in mind both the way in
which some atrocities ascribed to Serbs were exaggerated, while the
atrocities inflicted on them were minimized or ignored altogether. But
what was most disturbing was that there was no context to anything:
nothing about the centuries of Muslim rule. Had such a history been
discussed early on, Western governments might have understood and
attempted to assuage the deep fears evoked by the Bosnian Muslim
leader, Izetbegovic, when he wrote that he intended to create a
Muslim state in Bosnia and impose the Sharia not merely there, but
everywhere that Muslims had once ruled in the Balkans. Had the Western
world shown the slightest intelligent sympathy or understanding of
what that set off in the imagination of many Serbs (and elsewhere,
among the Christians in the Balkans and in Greece), there might never
have been such a violent Serbian reaction, and someone like Milosevic
might never have obtained power."
In 1809, after the battle on Cegar Hill, by order of Turkish pasha
Hurshid the skulls of the killed Serbian soldiers were built in a
tower, Skull Tower, on the way to Constantinople. 3 meters high,
Skull Tower was built out of 952 skulls as a warning to the Serbian
people not to oppose their Muslim rulers. Some years later, a chapel
was built over the skulls.
Similar Jihad massacres were committed not only against the Serbs,
but against the Greeks, the Bulgarians and other non-Muslims who
slowly rebelled against the Ottoman Empire throughout the 19th
century. Professor Vahakn Dadrian and others have clearly identified
Jihad as a critical factor in the Armenian genocide in the early
20th century.
As Efraim Karsh notes, "The Ottomans embarked on an orgy of
bloodletting in response to the nationalist aspirations of their
European subjects. The Greek war of independence of the 1820's, the
Danubian uprisings of 1848 and the attendant Crimean war, the Balkan
explosion of the 1870's, the Greco-Ottoman war of 1897--all were
painful reminders of the costs of resisting Islamic imperial rule."
In his book Onward Muslim Soldiers, Robert Spencer quotes a letter
from Bosnia, written in 1860 by the acting British Consul in Sarajevo,
James Zohrab:
The hatred of the Christians toward the Bosniak Mussulmans is
intense. During a period of nearly 300 years they were subjected to
much oppression and cruelty. For them no other law but the caprice
of their masters existed... Oppression cannot now be carried on as
openly as formerly, but it must not be supposed that, because the
Government employés do not generally appear as the oppressors,
the Christians are well treated and protected.
The Islamic world is now using the Balkans as a launching pad for Jihad
against the rest of Europe. "There are religious centres in Bulgaria
that belong to Islamic groups financed mostly by Saudi Arabian groups,"
the head of Bulgarian military intelligence has warned. According to
him, the centres were in southern and southeastern Bulgaria, where the
country's Muslims, mainly of Turkish origin, are concentrated, and "had
links with similar organisations in Kosovo, Bosnia and Macedonia. For
them Bulgaria seems to be a transit point to Western Europe." He said
the steps were taken to prevent terrorist groups gaining a foothold
in Bulgaria, which shares a border with Turkey. Bulgaria's Muslim
minority accounts for more than 10 percent of the country's population.
The Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia passed a law allowing ethnic
Albanians to display the Albanian national flag in areas where they
form the majority. The decision came as a result of seven months of
heavy fighting in 2001 involving Albanian separatists, and following
pressure from the European Union, always ready to please Muslims.
Ethnic Albanians make up about 25 per cent of Macedonia's
population. If the demographic trends are anything like in Kosovo,
where the predominantly Muslim Albanians have been out-breeding their
non-Muslim neighbors, Macedonians could be facing serious trouble in
the future. In Kosovo, dozens of churches and monasteries have been
destroyed or damaged following ethnic cleansing of Christian Serbs,
all under the auspices of NATO soldiers.
Martti Ahtisaari, former President of Finland and later Chief United
Nations negotiator for Kosovo, caused anger in Serbia when he stated
that "Serbs are guilty as a people," implying that they would have
to pay for it, possibly by losing the province of Kosovo. I disagree
with Mr. Ahtisaari. It is one thing to criticize the brutality of
the Milosevic regime. It is quite another thing to claim that "Serbs
are guilty as a people." If anybody in the Balkans can be called
guilty as a people, it is the Turks, not the Serbs. The Turks have
left a trail of blood across much of Europe and the Mediterranean for
centuries, culminating in the Armenian genocide in the 20th century,
which Turkey still refuses to acknowledge, let alone apologize for.
Dimitar Angelov elucidates the impact of the Ottoman Jihad on the
vanquished Balkan populations:
...the conquest of the Balkan Peninsula accomplished by the Turks
over the course of about two centuries caused the incalculable ruin
of material goods, countless massacres, the enslavement and exile of
a great part of the population -- in a word, a general and protracted
decline of productivity, as was the case with Asia Minor after it
was occupied by the same invaders. This decline in productivity is
all the more striking when one recalls that in the mid-fourteenth
century, as the Ottomans were gaining a foothold on the peninsula,
the States that existed there -- Byzantium, Bulgaria and Serbia --
had already reached a rather high level of economic and cultural
development....The campaigns of Mourad II (1421-1451) and especially
those of his successor, Mahomet II (1451-1481) in Serbia, Bosnia,
Albania and in the Byzantine princedom of the Peloponnesus, were of
a particularly devastating character.
This Ottoman Jihad tradition is still continued by "secular" Turkey
to this day. Michael J. Totten visited Varosha, the Ghost City of
Cyprus, in 2005. The city was deserted during the Turkish invasion
of Cyprus in 1974 and is now fenced off and patrolled by the Turkish
occupiers. The Turks carved up the island. Greek Cypriot citizens
in Varosha expected to return to their homes within days. Instead,
the Turks seized the empty city and wrapped it in fencing and wire.
In March 2006, Italian Luigi Geninazzi made a report from the same
area. 180,000 persons live in the northern part of the island, 100,000
of whom are colonists originally from mainland Turkey. According
to Geninazzi, the Islamization of the north of Cyprus has been
concretized in the destruction of all that was Christian. Yannis
Eliades, director of the Byzantine Museum of Nicosia, calculates
that 25,000 icons have disappeared from the churches in the zone
occupied by the Turks. Stupendous Byzantine and Romanesque churches,
imposing monasteries, mosaics and frescoes have been sacked,
violated, and destroyed. Many have been turned into restaurants,
bars, and nightclubs. Geninazzi confronted Huseyn Ozel, a government
spokesman for the self-proclaimed Turkish Republic of Northern
Cyprus, with this. Most of the mosques in Greek Cypriot territory
have been restored. So why are churches still today being turned
into mosques? The Turkish Cypriot functionary spreads his arms wide:
"It is an Ottoman custom..."
Yosef Bodansky, director of the Congressional Task Force on Terrorism
and Conventional Warfare in Washington in the USA, has stated that
the Balkans was a "springboard for Islamic extremism" in Europe,
with the Islamic Republic of Iran as the main driving force behind
it. Iran and Saudi Arabia supplied funding, weapons and men to the
Bosnians during the war in the 1990s, and terrorist organization
Al-Qaeda gained a foothold in the Balkans. Saudi Arabia has invested
more than $1 billion in the Sarajevo region alone, for projects that
include the construction of 158 mosques. Sarajevo has by now become
an almost entirely Muslim city.
Miroljub Jevtic, professor at the Belgrade University and author of
a number of books on the topic of Islam and politics, believes the
Western world is in favor of detaching Kosovo from Christian Serbia
by fiat and making it into an independent (Muslim) state. The main
argument of those supporting this scenario, notably in the United
States, is to improve their image in the eyes of the Islamic world and
"co-opt the influence of Islamic 'extremists.'"
Jevtic notes that "the fact that since the arrival of NATO to Kosovo
over 150 Christian churches have been destroyed and some 400 mosques
have been built, or are under construction, is for the Muslims a
proof that if there is a faith which is supported by true God --
it is Islam! Because, why would the Christian God, why would Jesus,
permit the destruction of churches, where He, Jesus, is glorified? Why
would He, at the same time, permit the construction of mosques, where
His existence as God is denied? Why would He permit it, moreover,
in the presence of men who bear arms and who claim to be Christians?"
Miroljub Jevtic warns that the European Union's support for Albanian
Muslim demands could backfire badly: "Granting the independence to
Kosovo will be taken as proof of Europe's own wish to cease to exist,
as it not only allows the expansion of Islam but is actively promoting
it by aiding those who are destroying churches, raping nuns, spitting
on crosses and daubing with excrement holy images of Christ."
In Kosovo, dozens of churches and monasteries have been destroyed
following ethnic cleansing of Christian Serbs by the predominantly
Muslim Albanians, all under the auspices of NATO soldiers, and Muslims
are not ungrateful. Kosovo Albanians plan to honor their "savior,"
former US President Bill Clinton, by erecting a statue of him. Yet
in 2007, four Albanians from Kosovo along with other Muslims were
arrested for conspiring to attack Fort Dix, a military base in New
Jersey, the USA, in order "to kill as many soldiers as possible."
Western governments are pushing for independence for a group of
Jihadist thugs who recently wanted to create the Osama bin Laden
mosque in Kosovo. This name was eventually changed for public
relations reasons since the Albanians knew they needed American
political support. In June 2007 the visiting US President George
W. Bush was hailed as a hero by a group of Albanians, who allegedly
also stole his watch. "Sooner rather than later you've got to say
'Enough's enough -- Kosovo is independent,'" Bush told cheering
Albanians. As German newspaper Suddeutsche Zeitung later commented,
"Why should the Albanians settle for autonomy when George W. Bush
had already promised them their own state?"
President Bush declared a "war on terror" after the Jihadist
attacks on the United States in 2001. Six years later, all he has
achieved is bleeding American tax payers financially and American
soldiers literally while overseeing the eradication of non-Muslim
communities in Iraq. Now his administration supports independence for
terrorist-sponsoring Muslims in the Balkans and in the Palestinian
territories. George W. Bush risks being remembered as one of the
worst presidents in American history.
In a commentary, "We bombed the wrong side?" former Canadian UNPROFOR
Commander Lewis MacKenzie wrote, "The Kosovo-Albanians have played us
like a Stradivarius. We have subsidized and indirectly supported their
violent campaign for an ethnically pure and independent Kosovo. We
have never blamed them for being the perpetrators of the violence
in the early '90s and we continue to portray them as the designated
victim today in spite of evidence to the contrary. When they achieve
independence with the help of our tax dollars combined with those of
bin Laden and al-Qaeda, just consider the message of encouragement
this sends to other terrorist-supported independence movements around
the world."
I once listened to a speech by Patrick Sookhdeo, a brave former
Muslim who has published books such as Global Jihad: The Future in
the Face of Militant Islam. Sookhdeo had done a lot of excellent --
and frightening -- research regarding the Islamization of Western
Europe, especially Britain. He recalled having a conversation with a
senior Western official regarding what would happen if Muslims in a
region of, say, Britain or the Netherlands, should declare that they
would no longer accept the laws of the central government and formed
a breakaway Islamic Republic. This official then replied that they
would probably have to quietly accept that. When witnessing Muslim
riots in France and elsewhere, which more and more resemble a civil
war, this question is no longer just hypothetical.
As writer Julia Gorin has warned, "An independent Kosovo will serve
as a nod to secessionists worldwide," and "history will show what no
one cares to understand: the current world war began officially in
Yugoslavia" in the 1990s.
Granting Jihadist Muslims independence in Kosovo after they conducted
ethnic cleansing of non-Muslims has established an extremely dangerous
precedent. Not only is it immoral to sacrifice the freedom or perhaps
existence of smaller nations, be that the Serbs or the Israelis,
in order to save your own skin. As the example of Czechoslovakia
demonstrated prior to WW2, it is also counterproductive. Supporting
independence for Muslim Albanians in Kosovo will not lead to
stabilization of the Balkans; it will rather lead to the Balkanization
of the West. The new thug state will serve as a launching pad for Jihad
activities against non-Muslims, just like an independent Palestinian
state would do in the Middle East. In the case of Kosovo, the Russians
are right and Western leaders, both in the European Union and the
United States, are wrong. The Serbs have suffered enough, and don't
need to be stabbed in the back by the West as well.
Janos (John) Hunyadi, Hungarian warrior and captain-general, is today
virtually unknown outside Hungary and the Balkans, but he probably
did more than any other individual in stemming the Turkish invasion
in the fifteenth century. His actions spanned all the countries of
south-eastern Europe, leading international armies, negotiating with
kings and popes. He died of plague after having destroyed an Ottoman
fleet outside Belgrade in1456. His work slowed the Muslim advance,
and may thus have saved Western Europe from falling to Islam. By
extension, he may have helped save Western civilization in North
America and Australia, too. Yet hardly anybody in West knows who he
is. Our children don't learn his name, they are only taught about
the evils of Western colonialism and the dangers of Islamophobia.
Western Europe today is a strange and very dangerous mix of arrogance
and self-loathing. Muslims are creating havoc and attacking their
non-Muslim neighbors from Thailand to India. It is extremely arrogant
to believe that the result will be any different in the Netherlands,
Britain or Italy, or for that matter in the United States or Canada,
than it has been everywhere else. It won't. If we had the humility
to listen to the advice of the Hindus of India or even our Christian
cousins in south-eastern Europe, we wouldn't be in as much trouble
as we are now.
On the other hand, if we didn't have such a culture of self-loathing,
where our own cultural traditions are ridiculed in favor of a
meaningless Multicultural cocktail, we probably wouldn't have
allowed massive Muslim immigration, either. There doesn't have to be
a contradiction between being proud of your own cultural heritage and
knowing that there may still be lessons you can learn from others. A
wise man can do both. Westerners of our age do neither.
Sun Tzu, a contemporary of the great Chinese thinker Confucius, wrote
The Art of War, the extremely influential book on military strategy,
2500 years ago. It is a book that deserves to be read in full, but one
of the most famous quotations is this one: "So it is said that if you
know your enemies and know yourself, you will not be imperiled in a
hundred battles; if you do not know your enemies but do know yourself,
you will win one and lose one; if you do not know your enemies nor
yourself, you will be imperiled in every single battle."
The West has forgotten who our enemies are, but worse, we have also
forgotten who we are. We are going to pay a heavy price for this
historical amnesia.
--Boundary_(ID_BWYYvQ/sHsL0T4jbj0zZ0A)--