— by Polydamas
In the aftermath of the massacre of cartoonists at the Paris headquarters of the Charlie Hebdo magazine that had dared to lampoon the Muslim Prophet Mohammed, there has been a concerted campaign to lull the European citizens to sleep by portraying the massacre as the bloody handiwork of isolated and deluded, militant, religious extremists and to assure them that their governments are doing all they can to preserve order. European politicians, intelligentsia, journalists, and academics practically fell all over themselves to avoid making any statements that could be construed even obliquely to be less than deferential to Islam. The prevailing narrative of the opinion makers is that the multitude of Muslims living in Europe are devoted mothers and fathers, sons and daughters, brothers and sisters, humble shopkeepers and artisans, apolitical people who mind their own business and are only trying to earn a modest living in trying times, and whose religion just happens to be Islam. The conventional and seemingly enlightened view is that the many peaceful Muslim citizens of Europe must not be made the scapegoats for a few homicidal maniacs who happened to be Muslims.
The fine homilies of the European politicians, intelligentsia, journalists, academics, and media personalities are riddled with either self-deception or outright lies that are intended to pacify the populace, all while hiding the deeper and more painful truth. In reality, the French Republic’s motto of “Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité” which stands for “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity” is no more. The French commitment to secular humanism and to the timeless ideals of Francois-Marie Arouet, better known as Voltaire, encapsulated in his famous aphorism “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it” no longer exists. In 21st century France, liberty means the freedom of all people to criticize and to lampoon every infidel religion other than Islam, the world’s one true religion. Similarly, equality means that all religions, creeds, cultures, philosophies, and ways of life are equal, except that Islam is more equal (read: superior) than all of them. Likewise, fraternity now means that all people are brothers who must all be subservient to Islam and obedient to its Sharia law, whether they are Muslim or not.
Western Europe is in basically the same boat as France. In all of the European capitals and in its major cities, there are entire enclaves in which Islam and Sharia law are the de facto law of the land and they are slowly and surely expanding their reach to the remaining parts. According to John Esposito’s “The Oxford History of Islam”, Islam is the fastest growing religion in the world. It is so because millions upon millions of Muslims immigrated over the past 50 years to Europe and quietly colonized it. Secular, humanistic Europe had been effectively reconquered by the forces of Islam, and now all that remains is to manage the orderly and inevitable handover of their countries to Islam and to Sharia law.
The quiet re-colonization of Europe has forced Europeans to bow their heads to Islam and to deferentially yet misleadingly proclaim that Islam is a peaceful religion. Nothing could be further from the truth because Islam is not — and has never been — a religion of peace like, say, Buddhism, Confucianism, Bahai or the Amish. Since its beginnings in the seventh century in Saudi Arabia, Islam consists of both the submission of Muslim individuals to the rule of Allah and the voluntary or involuntary submission of other people and nations to the rule of Allah. Islam is — and has always been — an aggressive conqueror religion whose aim is to forcibly bring all people and all nations under its green banner.
It is no wonder that this is so because the instrument that accomplished the phenomenal growth of Islam has ever been the sword. The other two monotheistic religions, Judaism and Christianity, have not sought religious converts through violence since Judea had been ruled by the Roman Empire twenty centuries ago and since the European Enlightenment four centuries ago, respectively. In contrast, for fourteen unrelenting centuries, Islam’s modus operandi has been to expand geographically, to war upon, and to uproot and replace any other religion or creed it encounters. Its historical success at spreading aggressively on every continent speaks for itself and is evidenced by religious cleansing, mass murder, and rivers of blood. Andrew Bostom’s book “The Legacy of Jihad: Islamic Holy War and the Fate of Non-Muslims” details the bloody history of the Jihad which contemporary historians have sanitized for reasons of overall political correctness and subservience to their countries’ Middle Eastern petroleum suppliers.
From the inception of Mohammed’s Jihad in Medina, his Muslim soldiers exterminated believers of other religions who had lived peacefully alongside them. This is but an early example of Jihad. There were a number of Jewish tribes, including the Banu Qurayzah, living peacefully in the city of Medina in what is now Saudi Arabia. Ibn Warraq’s book “Why I am Not a Musim” describes what happened next. The Jewish Banu Qurayzah tribe had unconditionally surrendered their weapons, lands, and properties to Mohammed’s forces in the hope of Mohammed sparing their lives. 900 disarmed Jewish men and post-pubescent boys were then led to the marketplace of the city of Medina where it took a whole day from morning until evening to behead all of them and bury them in the trenches. Mohammed selected for himself one of the newly-widowed women, Rihana, as a new wife. Several other Jewish women were handed over to Mohammed’s men as playthings. The remaining women and children were sold into slavery and the proceeds were used to buy horses and weapons in furtherance of the Jihad.
Fourteen centuries before silencing the French satirists of Charlie Hebdo, Mohammed established the precedent which has guided his followers throughout history to the present time by ordering the assassinations of writers and poets who were critical of him. As detailed in Ibn Warraq’s book, on Mohammed’s orders, a nighttime assassin plunged a sword into the chest of a sleeping female poet, Asma bint Marwan, who had criticized him, while she was sleeping with her young children and her youngest baby was suckling at her breast. (p. 121). Another poet, the elderly Abu Afak, was also cut down while he slept. A third poet Kab ibn al-Ashraf was lured into an ambush, decapitated, and his head was brought to Mohammed as a trophy (p. 122). History is clear that Islam’s homicidal enmity to criticism and to any non-Islamic art was very well established from its very beginning, and it amply refutes any specious defense by Islam’s apologists, including American President Barack Hussein Obama, that murdering artists and dissenters is un-Islamic when it is, in fact, a pillar of the religion.
Throughout Islam’s subsequent history, Muslim conquerors of new lands continued to faithfully execute the injunction in Sura 9:29 of the Qur’an’s to “Fight those who believe not in Allah nor the Last Day, nor hold that forbidden which hath been forbidden by Allah and His Messenger, nor acknowledge the religion of Truth, even if they are of the People of the Book, until they pay the Jizya with willing submission, and feel themselves subdued.” In other words, if Muslims encountered polytheistic people, the latter were offered the harsh alternative of conversion or death. However, if Muslims encountered the People of the Book, namely, Christians and Jews who were monotheistic people mentioned in the Book of the Qur’an, the latter were offered the additional alternative of living in Muslim lands as severely repressed second-class citizens who had to pay the per capita Jizya tax for the privilege of practicing a religion other than Islam. Not only was the Jizya tax a tribute that a conquered people pays to their conqueror and enriches the conqueror, the tribute was intended to be a harsh financial disincentive to practice a religion other than Islam and a powerful financial incentive to convert to Islam.
Paul Fregosi’s excellent 2000 book “Jihad in the West: Muslim Conquests From the 7th to the 21st Centuries” aptly states that “The Jihad is essentially a permanent state of hostility that Islam maintains against the rest of the world, with or without fighting, for more sovereignty over more territory”. (p. 14). Although the history books give scant attention to the Jihad in Europe, Fregosi describes convincingly:
The Muslims wanted to take and occupy Europe and, hopefully, to Islamize it. A large part of Europe was taken, occupied for centuries, sometimes devastated, and some of it was Islamized. Spain, Portugal, France, Italy, Sicily, Austria, Bosnia, Serbia, Croatia, Hungary, Rumania, Wallachia, Albania, Moldavia, Bulgaria, Greece, Armenia, Georgia, Poland, Ukraine, and eastern and southern Russia were all Jihad battlefields, where Islam conquered or was conquered. Many of these lands were occupied by the Muslims, in some cases by the Arabs and Moors, in others by the Ottoman Turks, usually for hundreds of years: Spain 800 years, Portugal 600 years, Greece 500 years, Sicily 300 years, Serbia 400 years, Bulgaria 500 years, Rumania 400 years, and Hungary 150 years. Hungary, particularly, was ruined, plundered, and ravaged and took 200 years to recover from Muslim occupation. By comparison, the European occupation of the Muslim countries of the Near and Middle East and of North Africa lasted less than a century and a half. In some countries of Europe, Spain, Sicily, Bosnia, Albania, Macedonia, the Crimea, and Crete, many, sometimes most of the people gave up Christianity for Islam; but in Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, Libya, Lebanon, Iran, and Iraq, few indeed were the adherents of the Muslim faith who gave up Islam for Christianity.
Muslims invaded and occupied a huge part of Europe, but sometimes Muslim raiders only came and went. The Turks besieged Vienna twice, in 1529 and 1683. Their cavalry raided central Europe, riding into Bavaria almost as far as Nuremberg. They fought in Poland and in the Ukraine, crushed Hungary, occupied Belgrade and Budapest for hundreds of years. The Moors and the Arabs took Spain and Portugal, invaded France through the Pyrenees, turned Sicily into an Islamic island, raided Rome, sacked St. Peter’s, and obliged the Pope to pay them tribute. From their base near St. Tropez on the French Riviera, they raided Switzerland as far as Lake Constance on the German border. The Pirates of the Barbary Coast raided England, Denmark, Ireland, and Iceland, and brought back thousands of slaves to be sold in the markets of Constantinople (after they conquered it and turned it into Istanbul) and North Africa. The Mongols threatened Moscow, occupied the Crimea, and became Tatars. The Persians marched into Georgia; so did the Turks who also occupied Armenia.
History has largely bypassed the Muslim attacks on and invasions of Europe that lasted from the seventh to the twentieth centuries, but has remained transfixed on the Christian Crusades to the Holy Land that lasted only from the eleventh to the thirteenth century. We could say the historical perspective here is gravely out of focus. (pp. 16-17).
Effete western European leaders, both political and financial, who may possess only a tenuous grasp of the history of Islam’s colonization of Europe during the middle ages, refuse to recognize the truth that Islam has succeeded in quietly re-colonizing Europe on their watch. They still fervently hope that a sizable ransom or bribe can be paid to appease their Muslim re-colonizers as Jizya and they plan to conceal their complicity in selling out their countries. Europe’s democratic socialist leaders figure that, since they already heavily bribe their own citizens with cradle-to-grave social and welfare services from monies looted from the public treasury, that a heavy additional Jizya tax paid to their Muslim settlers would not be considered a deal-breaker to their citizens. Their greatest fear is that their citizenry will discover that their countries no longer have sovereignty over the Muslim enclaves (read: colonies) in their midst and that they have been effectively re-conquered. European politicians and bankers do not want their citizens to realize that, over the past half a century, they had collaborated in the re-conquest of their countries by Islam and that, like the Judases that they are, they had received their proverbial 30 pieces of silver in Middle Eastern petrodollars that were deposited into their private Swiss bank accounts and invested in their nations’ economies.
In contrast, American President Barack Hussein Obama, the supposed leader of the free world, has completely different motivations for keeping Americans ignorant of this deeper truth and drawing a moral equivalence between the Muslim Jihad and the Christian Crusades. Reproduced below is Ralph Peters’ piece “Jihadis 14, Crusaders 2” in the February 6, 2015 National Review (http://tinyurl.com/qd7fa87) which posits that President Obama is merely ignorant of history. However, the opposite is true and as detailed at length in Dinesh D’Souza’s excellent books “The Roots of Obama’s Rage” and “Obama’s America: Unmaking the American Dream”, President Obama is, at heart, a third-world anti-colonialist who is completely immersed in the anti-colonial history, narrative, and ideology. It strongly appeals to Barack Obama’s sense of cosmic justice and karma that turnabout is fair play and that the former European colonial powers should be themselves re-conquered by their former Arab colonies (while conveniently ignoring that Europe had been colonized first by Islam). Correspondingly, Obama has parallel notions of turnabout is fair play that the United States should itself be re-conquered by Mexico and Latin America as a referendum on the Mexican-American War. thereby restoring to power the descendants of those who had been displaced by white Anglo Saxons over the past four centuries. This is the underlying reason that the Obama Administration has mendaciously pursued the disastrous “open borders” policy and granted amnesty from deportation to any who flagrantly flout America’s immigration laws together with reparations in the form of a host of economic benefits looted from the public treasury.
In 1980, Dr. Leonard Peikoff wrote an superb book titled “The Ominous Parallels” in which he fittingly described the very ominous parallels between contemporary western society and the liberal, democratic pre-World War II Weimar Germany of the the 1920s and the early 1930s. He stated compellingly:
The Nazis did not gain power against the country’s wishes. In this respect, there was no gulf between the intellectuals and the people. The Nazi party was elected to office by the freely cast ballots of millions of German voters, including men on every social, economic, and educational level. In the national election of July 1932, the Nazis obtained 37 percent of the vote and a plurality of seats in the Reichstag. On January 30, 1933, in full accordance with the country’s legal and constitutional principles, Hitler was appointed Chancellor. Five weeks later, in the last (and semi-free) election of the pre-totalitarian period, the Nazis obtained 17 million votes, 44 percent of the total.
The voters were aware of the Nazi ideology. Nazi literature, including statements of the Nazi plans for the future, papered the country during the last years of the Weimar Republic. Mein Kampf alone sold more than 200,000 copies between 1925 and 1932. The essence of the political system which Hitler intended to establish in Germany was clear.
In 1933, when Hitler did establish the system he promised, he did not find it necessary to forbid foreign travel. Until World War II, thse Germans who wishes to flee the country could do so. The overwhelming majority did not. They were satisfied to remain.
The system which Hitler established — the social reality which so many Germans were so eager to embrace or so willing to endure — the politics which began in a theory and ended in Auschwitz — was the “total state.” The term from which the adjective “totalitarian” derives, was coined by Hitler’s mentor Mussolini.
The state must have absolute power over every man and every sphere of human activity, the Nazis declared. “The authority of the Fuhrer is not limited by checks and controls, by special autonomous bodies or individual rights, but it is free and independent, all inclusive and unlimited,” said Ernst Huber, an official party spokesman, in 1933.
“The concept of individual liberties of the individual as opposed to the authority of the state had to disappear; it is not to be reconciled with the principle of the nationalistic Reich,” Huber said to a country that listened, and nodded. “There are no personal liberties which fall outside of the realm of the state and which must be respected by the state. The constitution of the nationalistic Reich is therefore not based upon a system of inborn and inalienable rights of the individual.” (p. 11).
The ominous parallels are very clear here to any student of history. The Nazis demanded that every person surrender all individual rights and submit to the absolute and unlimited power of the German state as personified by the Fuhrer Adolf Hitler. The Muslim re-colonizers of Europe demand that every person surrender all individual rights and submit to the absolute and unlimited will of Allah — which is precisely what the word “Islam” means — as established in the Qur’an and in Sharia law and as interpreted by a theocracy. The Nazis rose to power following a free election in a democratic country. Owing to their prodigious birth rates coupled with a decline in European birth rates, the Muslim re-colonizers of Europe will soon enough have sufficient political power at the ballot box to vote in democratic elections for a Muslim strongman who will proclaim himself caliph and institute the Qur’an and Sharia law as the highest law of Europe.
Is it, then, a wonder that the Jews of Europe, the canaries in Europe’s coal mine, are making haste to pack their bags and to leave behind the re-colonized Europe before history has the chance to repeat itself and to punish those who did not heed its bitter lessons?
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Jihadis 14, Crusaders 2
The President Perverts History (Again).
In his ignorant and bigoted remarks to religious leaders this week, President Obama parroted jihadi propaganda. Bored (when not annoyed) by facts, the president referred to the Crusades and the Inquisition as evidence of the horrors religion can wreak. That kind of talk emboldens the Islamist line that Christian bad behavior justifies the Middle East’s bad behavior even today.
The president knows as little about history as he does about warfare, and even less about religion. But he’s not alone. With the Left’s successful destruction of history instruction in our schools and universities, even “well-educated” creatures of Washington accept the Arab fantasy that the cultural incompetence, practical indolence, and spiritual decay of the entire Middle East stems from Richard Coeur de Lion’s twelfth-century swordplay.
Stop it! All of you! And try reading a book or two on the subject. Meanwhile, here’s a starter course in the vast tragedy jihad has posed for every civilization it’s touched for the past 14 centuries — while the Crusades mythologized by Islam’s apologists were a two-century blip whose only practical legacies are a few ruined castles.
Responding to the conquest of Christianity’s birthplace and jihad’s westward thrust, the Crusades were an effort not at imperial conquest but at reclamation. By dumb luck more than strategy, the First Crusade reached the Holy Land amid local Muslim squabbles. The Crusaders took Jerusalem and made a bloody mess of it, then held the city for less than a century. They never took nearby Damascus, but were confined to a narrow coastal strip and a fragile principality in Anatolia.
During their stay, the European knights and religious orders sometimes fought each other and sometimes allied with local Muslim lords to fight other Muslims. And when Christians and Muslims squared off, the Muslims increasingly won. The damage that venal Crusaders did to Constantinople, the last bulwark of Eastern Christianity, was far worse than any harm they wreaked in Muslim lands.
And then the Crusaders were gone — and the Arabs’ real problems began. The Mongols were the ones who leveled Baghdad and shattered Arab rule in the Levant. The destruction was horrific. Millions died. The next invaders were fellow Muslims, the Seljuk and then Ottoman Turks (who would rule the Arabs for over half a millennium).
But “historical” memory is selective. And those boorish European tourists (plus ça change!) who visited the Middle East’s coastal resorts in 1099 and briefly overstayed their welcome have become the all-purpose bogeymen excusing every failure, great and small, between Benghazi and Baghdad.
In fact, the Muslim conquest of Christianity’s Middle East heartlands and the occupation of much of Europe into the 20th century did the actual damage to civilization. Two hundred years of Crusades? How about 14 centuries of jihad?
To this day, Muslims occupy every city vital to the early formation of Christianity except Jerusalem. And the last traces of 2,000 years of Christian civilization are being exterminated as we watch.
Jihadis occupied most of Spain for half a millennium, and southern Spain for eight centuries.
The Islamic armies of the Ottoman Empire, whose troops went into battle shouting “Allahu akbar!” right to the end, occupied and savaged the Balkans and Greece for five centuries. Lord Byron died in the early 19th century during Greece’s struggle for freedom, and Crete escaped its Ottoman prison only at the end of that century.
As recently as 1683, Ottoman jihadis besieged Vienna, in the heart of Europe. The same century saw a continuation of Turkish invasions of Poland and Tartar sweeps through Ukraine, along with the kidnapping of countless Christians as slaves (through more than a millennium, Muslims took more Christian slaves than Europeans took Africans later on). Only at the end of the 17th century did the tide — slowly — begin to turn in the West’s favor. But the southeastern Balkans gained their freedom only on the eve of the First World War, after suffering atrocities worse than those perpetrated today by the Islamic State terrorists (do visit the tower made of Christian skulls the next time you’re in the Serbian city of Nis).
Even after the superficially secular Young Turks deposed the sultan, matters only got worse. In 1915, the Turks massacred at least a million and perhaps 2 million Armenian Christians in the seminal genocide of the 20th century.
With the unique exception of Andalusia and other bits of Spain, wherever jihadis ruled, civilization suffered. Islamic armies — which at one point reached central France — left behind fear, social dysfunction, poverty, and ignorance. A map of the Mediterranean world showing the territories occupied by Islam matches perfectly with the areas where the sequestration and oppression of women persisted for centuries; where family honor was defined by female chastity; and where blood feuds between illiterate clans passed for social discourse.
The Christians of Spain, Sicily, southern Italy, Greece, the Balkans, Hungary, Poland, and Ukraine should sue for reparations.
And the Inquisition? Much of it was inexcusable. But all the centuries of the notorious “Spanish Inquisition” put to death fewer human beings than jihadis killed last year. And the Inquisition elsewhere never remotely approximated the appetite for blood of the Islamic State’s cadres. The Church’s past has blemishes aplenty, such as the merciless suppression of the Albigensians and Hussites, but Christianity has made some progress since the Middle Ages.
Our president, of course, doesn’t want to hear it.
The greatest symbol of Christianity’s endless suffering at jihadi hands stands in Istanbul, a city I still prefer to call “Constantinople.” The greatest surviving monument of the first thousand years of Christianity is the Cathedral of Saint Sophia — Hagia Sophia — in the city’s compelling heart. Its magnificence is haunted and haunting even today, though profaned as a museum — after the humiliation of being used as a mosque for almost five centuries, until Ataturk secularized the building.
When the Ottoman conquerors finally stormed Constantinople in 1453, the Christian knights and their families made a last stand in their beloved cathedral. The Turks, of course, butchered them, putting to death a magnificent, if fading civilization.
Go there. In a lifetime of travels, I have stood in two literally haunted spots: the compact gas chambers of Auschwitz and the vastness of Hagia Sophia. Even the huge Islamic medallions scarring the latter — a church more important to my faith than St. Peter’s in Rome — cannot put down the ghosts of 14 centuries of slaughtered, enslaved, raped, and oppressed Christians who endured Islam’s endless jihad.
And our president blames the Crusades.