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  • Fourteen Centuries Of War Against European Civilization

    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)--
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