Wednesday, December 2, 2015

Story of a Credible Global Warming Denier

Source

It is safe to predict that when 20,000 world leaders, officials, green activists and hangers-on convene in Paris next week for the 21st United Nations climate conference, one person you will not see much quotedis Professor Judith Curry. This is a pity. Her record of peer-reviewed publication in the best climate-science journals is second to none, and in America she has become a public intellectual. But on this side of the Atlantic, apparently, she is too ‘challenging’. What is troubling about her pariah status is that her trenchant critique of the supposed consensus on global warming is not derived from warped ideology, let alone funding by fossil-fuel firms, but from solid data and analysis.

Some consider her a heretic. According to Professor Michael Mann of Pennsylvania State University, a vociferous advocate of extreme measures to prevent a climatic Armageddon, she is ‘anti-science’. Curry isn’t fazed by the slur.

‘It’s unfortunate, but he calls anyone who doesn’t agree with him a denier,’ she tells me. ‘Inside the climate community there are a lot of people who don’t like what I’m doing. On the other hand, there is also a large, silent group who do like it. But the debate has become hard — especially in the US, because it’s become so polarised.’ Warming alarmists are fond of proclaiming how 97 per cent of scientists agree that the world is getting hotter, and human beings are to blame. They like to reduce the uncertainties of climate science and climate projections to Manichean simplicity. They have managed to eliminate doubt from what should be a nuanced debate about what to do.

Professor Curry, based at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, does not dispute for a moment that human-generated carbon dioxide warms the planet. But, she says, the evidence suggests this may be happening more slowly than the alarmists fear.

In the run-up to the Paris conference, said Curry, much ink has been spilled over whether the individual emissions pledges made so far by more than 150 countries — their ‘intentional nationally determined contributions’, to borrow the jargon — will be enough to stop the planet from crossing the ‘dangerous’ threshold of becoming 2°C hotter than in pre-industrial times. Much of the conference will consist of attempts to make these targets legally binding. This debate will be conducted on the basis that there is a known, mechanistic relationship between the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and how world average temperatures will rise.

Unfortunately, as Curry has shown, there isn’t. Any such projection is meaningless, unless it accounts for natural variability and gives a value for ‘climate sensitivity’ —i.e., how much hotter the world will get if the level of CO2 doubles. Until 2007, the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) gave a ‘best estimate’ of 3°C. But in its latest, 2013 report, the IPCC abandoned this, because the uncertainties are so great. Its ‘likely’ range is now vast — 1.5°C to 4.5°C.

This isn’t all. According to Curry, the claims being made by policymakers suggest they are still making new policy from the old, now discarded assumptions. Recent research suggests the climate sensitivity is significantly less than 3˚C. ‘There’s growing evidence that climate sensitivity is at the lower end of the spectrum, yet this has been totally ignored in the policy debate,’ Curry told me. ‘Even if the sensitivity is 2.5˚C, not 3˚C, that makes a substantial difference as to how fast we might get to a world that’s 2˚C warmer. A sensitivity of 2.5˚C makes it much less likely we will see 2˚C warming during the 21st century. There are so many uncertainties, but the policy people say the target is fixed. And if you question this, you will be slagged off as a denier.’

Curry added that her own work, conducted with the British independent scientist Nic Lewis, suggests that the sensitivity value may still lower, in which case the date when the world would be 2˚C warmer would be even further into the future. On the other hand, the inherent uncertainties of climate projection mean that values of 4˚C cannot be ruled out — but if that turns out to be the case, then the measures discussed at Paris and all the previous 20 UN climate conferences would be futile. In any event, ‘the economists and policymakers seem unaware of the large uncertainties in climate sensitivity’, despite its enormous implications.

Meanwhile, the obsessive focus on CO2 as the driver of climate change means other research on natural climate variability is being neglected. For example, solar experts believe we could be heading towards a ‘grand solar minimum’ — a reduction in solar output (and, ergo, a period of global cooling) similar to that which once saw ice fairs on the Thames. ‘The work to establish the solar-climate connection is lagging.’

Curry’s independence has cost her dear. She began to be reviled after the 2009 ‘Climategate’ scandal, when leaked emails revealed that some scientists were fighting to suppress sceptical views. ‘I started saying that scientists should be more accountable, and I began to engage with sceptic bloggers. I thought that would calm the waters. Instead I was tossed out of the tribe. There’s no way I would have done this if I hadn’t been a tenured professor, fairly near the end of my career. If I were seeking a new job in the US academy, I’d be pretty much unemployable. I can still publish in the peer-reviewed journals. But there’s no way I could get a government research grant to do the research I want to do. Since then, I’ve stopped judging my career by these metrics. I’m doing what I do to stand up for science and to do the right thing.’

She remains optimistic that science will recover its equilibrium, and that the quasi-McCarthyite tide will recede: ‘I think that by 2030, temperatures will not have increased all that much. Maybe then there will be the funding to do the kind of research on natural variability that we need, to get the climate community motivated to look at things like the solar-climate connection.’ She even hopes that rational argument will find a place in the UN: ‘Maybe, too, there will be a closer interaction between the scientists, the economists and policymakers. Wouldn’t that be great?’

Tuesday, September 22, 2015

The crusades are quite possibly the most misunderstood event in European history. Most of what passes for public knowledge about it is either misleading or just plain wrong

By Prof. Thomas F. Madden

Misconceptions about the Crusades are all too common. The Crusades are generally portrayed as a series of holy wars against Islam led by power-mad popes and fought by religious fanatics. They are supposed to have been the epitome of self-righteousness and intolerance, a black stain on the history of the Catholic Church in particular and Western civilization in general. A breed of proto-imperialists, the Crusaders introduced Western aggression to the peaceful Middle East and then deformed the enlightened Muslim culture, leaving it in ruins. For variations on this theme, one need not look far. See, for example, Steven Runciman's famous three-volume epic, History of the Crusades, or the BBC/A&E documentary, The Crusades, hosted by Terry Jones. Both are terrible history yet wonderfully entertaining.

So what is the truth about the Crusades? Scholars are still working some of that out. But much can already be said with certainty. For starters, the Crusades to the East were in every way defensive wars. They were a direct response to Muslim aggression—an attempt to turn back or defend against Muslim conquests of Christian lands.

Christians in the eleventh century were not paranoid fanatics. Muslims really were gunning for them. While Muslims can be peaceful, Islam was born in war and grew the same way. From the time of Mohammed, the means of Muslim expansion was always the sword. Muslim thought divides the world into two spheres, the Abode of Islam and the Abode of War. Christianity—and for that matter any other non-Muslim religion—has no abode. Christians and Jews can be tolerated within a Muslim state under Muslim rule. But, in traditional Islam, Christian and Jewish states must be destroyed and their lands conquered. When Mohammed was waging war against Mecca in the seventh century, Christianity was the dominant religion of power and wealth. As the faith of the Roman Empire, it spanned the entire Mediterranean, including the Middle East, where it was born. The Christian world, therefore, was a prime target for the earliest caliphs, and it would remain so for Muslim leaders for the next thousand years.

With enormous energy, the warriors of Islam struck out against the Christians shortly after Mohammed's death. They were extremely successful. Palestine, Syria, and Egypt—once the most heavily Christian areas in the world—quickly succumbed. By the eighth century, Muslim armies had conquered all of Christian North Africa and Spain. In the eleventh century, the Seljuk Turks conquered Asia Minor (modern Turkey), which had been Christian since the time of St. Paul. The old Roman Empire, known to modern historians as the Byzantine Empire, was reduced to little more than Greece. In desperation, the emperor in Constantinople sent word to the Christians of western Europe asking them to aid their brothers and sisters in the East.

That is what gave birth to the Crusades. They were not the brainchild of an ambitious pope or rapacious knights but a response to more than four centuries of conquests in which Muslims had already captured two-thirds of the old Christian world. At some point, Christianity as a faith and a culture had to defend itself or be subsumed by Islam. The Crusades were that defense.

Pope Urban II called upon the knights of Christendom to push back the conquests of Islam at the Council of Clermont in 1095. The response was tremendous. Many thousands of warriors took the vow of the cross and prepared for war. Why did they do it? The answer to that question has been badly misunderstood. In the wake of the Enlightenment, it was usually asserted that Crusaders were merely lacklands and ne'er-do-wells who took advantage of an opportunity to rob and pillage in a faraway land. The Crusaders' expressed sentiments of piety, self-sacrifice, and love for God were obviously not to be taken seriously. They were only a front for darker designs.

During the past two decades, computer-assisted charter studies have demolished that contrivance. Scholars have discovered that crusading knights were generally wealthy men with plenty of their own land in Europe. Nevertheless, they willingly gave up everything to undertake the holy mission. Crusading was not cheap. Even wealthy lords could easily impoverish themselves and their families by joining a Crusade. They did so not because they expected material wealth (which many of them had already) but because they hoped to store up treasure where rust and moth could not corrupt. They were keenly aware of their sinfulness and eager to undertake the hardships of the Crusade as a penitential act of charity and love. Europe is littered with thousands of medieval charters attesting to these sentiments, charters in which these men still speak to us today if we will listen. Of course, they were not opposed to capturing booty if it could be had. But the truth is that the Crusades were notoriously bad for plunder. A few people got rich, but the vast majority returned with nothing.

Urban II gave the Crusaders two goals, both of which would remain central to the eastern Crusades for centuries. The first was to rescue the Christians of the East. As his successor, Pope Innocent III, later wrote:
How does a man love according to divine precept his neighbor as himself when, knowing that his Christian brothers in faith and in name are held by the perfidious Muslims in strict confinement and weighed down by the yoke of heaviest servitude, he does not devote himself to the task of freeing them? ...Is it by chance that you do not know that many thousands of Christians are bound in slavery and imprisoned by the Muslims, tortured with innumerable torments?
"Crusading," Professor Jonathan Riley-Smith has rightly argued, was understood as an "an act of love"—in this case, the love of one's neighbor. The Crusade was seen as an errand of mercy to right a terrible wrong. As Pope Innocent III wrote to the Knights Templar, "You carry out in deeds the words of the Gospel, 'Greater love than this hath no man, that he lay down his life for his friends.'"

The second goal was the liberation of Jerusalem and the other places made holy by the life of Christ. The word crusade is modern. Medieval Crusaders saw themselves as pilgrims, performing acts of righteousness on their way to the Holy Sepulcher. The Crusade indulgence they received was canonically related to the pilgrimage indulgence. This goal was frequently described in feudal terms. When calling the Fifth Crusade in 1215, Innocent III wrote:
Consider most dear sons, consider carefully that if any temporal king was thrown out of his domain and perhaps captured, would he not, when he was restored to his pristine liberty and the time had come for dispensing justice look on his vassals as unfaithful and traitors...unless they had committed not only their property but also their persons to the task of freeing him? ...And similarly will not Jesus Christ, the king of kings and lord of lords, whose servant you cannot deny being, who joined your soul to your body, who redeemed you with the Precious Blood...condemn you for the vice of ingratitude and the crime of infidelity if you neglect to help Him?
The reconquest of Jerusalem, therefore, was not colonialism but an act of restoration and an open declaration of one's love of God. Medieval men knew, of course, that God had the power to restore Jerusalem Himself—indeed, He had the power to restore the whole world to His rule. Yet as St. Bernard of Clairvaux preached, His refusal to do so was a blessing to His people:
Again I say, consider the Almighty's goodness and pay heed to His plans of mercy. He puts Himself under obligation to you, or rather feigns to do so, that He can help you to satisfy your obligations toward Himself.... I call blessed the generation that can seize an opportunity of such rich indulgence as this.
It is often assumed that the central goal of the Crusades was forced conversion of the Muslim world. Nothing could be further from the truth. From the perspective of medieval Christians, Muslims were the enemies of Christ and His Church. It was the Crusaders' task to defeat and defend against them. That was all. Muslims who lived in Crusader-won territories were generally allowed to retain their property and livelihood, and always their religion. Indeed, throughout the history of the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem, Muslim inhabitants far outnumbered the Catholics. It was not until the 13th century that the Franciscans began conversion efforts among Muslims. But these were mostly unsuccessful and finally abandoned. In any case, such efforts were by peaceful persuasion, not the threat of violence.

The Crusades were wars, so it would be a mistake to characterize them as nothing but piety and good intentions. Like all warfare, the violence was brutal (although not as brutal as modern wars). There were mishaps, blunders, and crimes. These are usually well-remembered today. During the early days of the First Crusade in 1095, a ragtag band of Crusaders led by Count Emicho of Leiningen made its way down the Rhine, robbing and murdering all the Jews they could find. Without success, the local bishops attempted to stop the carnage. In the eyes of these warriors, the Jews, like the Muslims, were the enemies of Christ. Plundering and killing them, then, was no vice. Indeed, they believed it was a righteous deed, since the Jews' money could be used to fund the Crusade to Jerusalem. But they were wrong, and the Church strongly condemned the anti-Jewish attacks.
Fifty years later, when the Second Crusade was gearing up, St. Bernard frequently preached that the Jews were not to be persecuted:
Ask anyone who knows the Sacred Scriptures what he finds foretold of the Jews in the Psalm. "Not for their destruction do I pray," it says. The Jews are for us the living words of Scripture, for they remind us always of what our Lord suffered.... Under Christian princes they endure a hard captivity, but "they only wait for the time of their deliverance."
Nevertheless, a fellow Cistercian monk named Radulf stirred up people against the Rhineland Jews, despite numerous letters from Bernard demanding that he stop. At last Bernard was forced to travel to Germany himself, where he caught up with Radulf, sent him back to his convent, and ended the massacres.

It is often said that the roots of the Holocaust can be seen in these medieval pogroms. That may be. But if so, those roots are far deeper and more widespread than the Crusades. Jews perished during the Crusades, but the purpose of the Crusades was not to kill Jews. Quite the contrary: Popes, bishops, and preachers made it clear that the Jews of Europe were to be left unmolested. In a modern war, we call tragic deaths like these "collateral damage." Even with smart technologies, the United States has killed far more innocents in our wars than the Crusaders ever could. But no one would seriously argue that the purpose of American wars is to kill women and children.

By any reckoning, the First Crusade was a long shot. There was no leader, no chain of command, no supply lines, no detailed strategy. It was simply thousands of warriors marching deep into enemy territory, committed to a common cause. Many of them died, either in battle or through disease or starvation. It was a rough campaign, one that seemed always on the brink of disaster. Yet it was miraculously successful. By 1098, the Crusaders had restored Nicaea and Antioch to Christian rule. In July 1099, they conquered Jerusalem and began to build a Christian state in Palestine. The joy in Europe was unbridled. It seemed that the tide of history, which had lifted the Muslims to such heights, was now turning.
But it was not. When we think about the Middle Ages, it is easy to view Europe in light of what it became rather than what it was. The colossus of the medieval world was Islam, not Christendom. The Crusades are interesting largely because they were an attempt to counter that trend. But in five centuries of crusading, it was only the First Crusade that significantly rolled back the military progress of Islam. It was downhill from there.

When the Crusader County of Edessa fell to the Turks and Kurds in 1144, there was an enormous groundswell of support for a new Crusade in Europe. It was led by two kings, Louis VII of France and Conrad III of Germany, and preached by St. Bernard himself. It failed miserably. Most of the Crusaders were killed along the way. Those who made it to Jerusalem only made things worse by attacking Muslim Damascus, which formerly had been a strong ally of the Christians. In the wake of such a disaster, Christians across Europe were forced to accept not only the continued growth of Muslim power but the certainty that God was punishing the West for its sins. Lay piety movements sprouted up throughout Europe, all rooted in the desire to purify Christian society so that it might be worthy of victory in the East.

Crusading in the late twelfth century, therefore, became a total war effort. Every person, no matter how weak or poor, was called to help. Warriors were asked to sacrifice their wealth and, if need be, their lives for the defense of the Christian East. On the home front, all Christians were called to support the Crusades through prayer, fasting, and alms. Yet still the Muslims grew in strength. Saladin, the great unifier, had forged the Muslim Near East into a single entity, all the while preaching jihad against the Christians. In 1187 at the Battle of Hattin, his forces wiped out the combined armies of the Christian Kingdom of Jerusalem and captured the precious relic of the True Cross. Defenseless, the Christian cities began surrendering one by one, culminating in the surrender of Jerusalem on October 2. Only a tiny handful of ports held out.The response was the Third Crusade. It was led by Emperor Frederick I Barbarossa of the German Empire, King Philip II Augustus of France, and King Richard I Lionheart of England. By any measure it was a grand affair, although not quite as grand as the Christians had hoped. The aged Frederick drowned while crossing a river on horseback, so his army returned home before reaching the Holy Land. Philip and Richard came by boat, but their incessant bickering only added to an already divisive situation on the ground in Palestine. After recapturing Acre, the king of France went home, where he busied himself carving up Richard's French holdings. The Crusade, therefore, fell into Richard's lap. A skilled warrior, gifted leader, and superb tactician, Richard led the Christian forces to victory after victory, eventually reconquering the entire coast. But Jerusalem was not on the coast, and after two abortive attempts to secure supply lines to the Holy City, Richard at last gave up. Promising to return one day, he struck a truce with Saladin that ensured peace in the region and free access to Jerusalem for unarmed pilgrims. But it was a bitter pill to swallow. The desire to restore Jerusalem to Christian rule and regain the True Cross remained intense throughout Europe.

The Crusades of the 13th century were larger, better funded, and better organized. But they too failed. The Fourth Crusade (1201-1204) ran aground when it was seduced into a web of Byzantine politics, which the Westerners never fully understood. They had made a detour to Constantinople to support an imperial claimant who promised great rewards and support for the Holy Land. Yet once he was on the throne of the Caesars, their benefactor found that he could not pay what he had promised. Thus betrayed by their Greek friends, in 1204 the Crusaders attacked, captured, and brutally sacked Constantinople, the greatest Christian city in the world. Pope Innocent III, who had previously excommunicated the entire Crusade, strongly denounced the Crusaders. But there was little else he could do. The tragic events of 1204 closed an iron door between Roman Catholic and Greek Orthodox, a door that even today Pope John Paul II has been unable to reopen. It is a terrible irony that the Crusades, which were a direct result of the Catholic desire to rescue the Orthodox people, drove the two further—and perhaps irrevocably—apart.

The remainder of the 13th century's Crusades did little better. The Fifth Crusade (1217-1221) managed briefly to capture Damietta in Egypt, but the Muslims eventually defeated the army and reoccupied the city. St. Louis IX of France led two Crusades in his life. The first also captured Damietta, but Louis was quickly outwitted by the Egyptians and forced to abandon the city. Although Louis was in the Holy Land for several years, spending freely on defensive works, he never achieved his fondest wish: to free Jerusalem. He was a much older man in 1270 when he led another Crusade to Tunis, where he died of a disease that ravaged the camp. After St. Louis's death, the ruthless Muslim leaders, Baybars andKalavun, waged a brutal jihad against the Christians in Palestine. By 1291, the Muslim forces had succeeded in killing or ejecting the last of the Crusaders, thus erasing the Crusader kingdom from the map. Despite numerous attempts and many more plans, Christian forces were never again able to gain a foothold in the region until the 19th century.

One might think that three centuries of Christian defeats would have soured Europeans on the idea of Crusade. Not at all. In one sense, they had little alternative. Muslim kingdoms were becoming more, not less, powerful in the 14th, 15th, and 16th centuries. The Ottoman Turks conquered not only their fellow Muslims, thus further unifying Islam, but also continued to press westward, capturing Constantinople and plunging deep into Europe itself. By the 15th century, the Crusades were no longer errands of mercy for a distant people but desperate attempts of one of the last remnants of Christendom to survive. Europeans began to ponder the real possibility that Islam would finally achieve its aim of conquering the entire Christian world. One of the great best-sellers of the time, Sebastian Brant's The Ship of Fools, gave voice to this sentiment in a chapter titled "Of the Decline of the Faith":
Our faith was strong in th' Orient,
It ruled in all of Asia,
In Moorish lands and Africa.
But now for us these lands are gone
'Twould even grieve the hardest stone....
Four sisters of our Church you find,
They're of the patriarchic kind:
Constantinople, Alexandria,
Jerusalem, Antiochia.
But they've been forfeited and sacked
And soon the head will be attacked.
Of course, that is not what happened. But it very nearly did. In 1480, Sultan Mehmed II captured Otranto as a beachhead for his invasion of Italy. Rome was evacuated. Yet the sultan died shortly thereafter, and his plan died with him. In 1529, Suleiman the Magnificent laid siege to Vienna. If not for a run of freak rainstorms that delayed his progress and forced him to leave behind much of his artillery, it is virtually certain that the Turks would have taken the city. Germany, then, would have been at their mercy. [At that point crusades were no longer waged to rescue Jerusalem, but Europe itself.]

Yet, even while these close shaves were taking place, something else was brewing in Europe—something unprecedented in human history. The Renaissance, born from a strange mixture of Roman values, medieval piety, and a unique respect for commerce and entrepreneurialism, had led to other movements like humanism, the Scientific Revolution, and the Age of Exploration. Even while fighting for its life, Europe was preparing to expand on a global scale. The Protestant Reformation, which rejected the papacy and the doctrine of indulgence, made Crusades unthinkable for many Europeans, thus leaving the fighting to the Catholics. In 1571, a Holy League, which was itself a Crusade, defeated the Ottoman fleet at Lepanto. Yet military victories like that remained rare. The Muslim threat was neutralized economically. As Europe grew in wealth and power, the once awesome and sophisticated Turks began to seem backward and pathetic—no longer worth a Crusade. The "Sick Man of Europe" limped along until the 20th century, when he finally expired, leaving behind the present mess of the modern Middle East.

From the safe distance of many centuries, it is easy enough to scowl in disgust at the Crusades. Religion, after all, is nothing to fight wars over. But we should be mindful that our medieval ancestors would have been equally disgusted by our infinitely more destructive wars fought in the name of political ideologies. And yet, both the medieval and the modern soldier fight ultimately for their own world and all that makes it up. Both are willing to suffer enormous sacrifice, provided that it is in the service of something they hold dear, something greater than themselves. Whether we admire the Crusaders or not, it is a fact that the world we know today would not exist without their efforts. The ancient faith of Christianity, with its respect for women and antipathy toward slavery, not only survived but flourished. Without the Crusades, it might well have followed Zoroastrianism, another of Islam's rivals, into extinction.

Thomas F. Madden is associate professor and chair of the Department of History at Saint Louis University. He is the author of numerous works, including The New Concise History of the Crusades, and co-author, with Donald Queller, of The Fourth Crusade: The Conquest of Constantinople. This special version for the ARMA was reprinted by permission of Crisis Magazine, www.crisismagazine.com.

End note: 

Regarding the modern day reference to the crusades as a supposed grievance by Islamic militants still upset over them, Madden notes: “If the Muslims won the crusades (and they did), why the anger now? Shouldn't they celebrate the crusades as a great victory? Until the nineteenth century that is precisely what they did. It was the West that taught the Middle East to hate the crusades. During the peak of European colonialism, historians began extolling the medieval crusades as Europe's first colonial venture. By the 20th century, when imperialism was discredited, so too were the crusades. They haven't been the same since.” He adds, “The truth is that the crusades had nothing to do with colonialism or unprovoked aggression. They were a desperate and largely unsuccessful attempt to defend against a powerful enemy.” “The entire history of the crusades is one of Western reaction to Muslim advances,” Madden observes.

Commenting on the recent scholarship of Oxford historian Christopher Tyerman in his recent, Fighting for Christendom: Holy War and the Crusades (Oxford, 2005), Professor Steven Ozment of Harvard writes how Tyerman: “maintains that the four centuries of holy war known as the Crusades are both the best recognized and most distorted part of the Christian Middle Ages. He faults scholars, pundits, and laymen on both sides of the East-West divide for allowing the memory of the Crusades to be ‘woven into intractable modern political problems,’ where it ‘blurs fantasy and scholarship’ and exacerbates present-day hatreds.” Ozment notes how Tyerman also views “the Crusades as neither an attempt at Western hegemony, nor a betrayal of Western Christian teaching and practice.” As Tyerman explains, the warriors who answered the pope’s call to aid Christendom in the Holy Land were known as crucesignati, “those signed with the cross.” Professor Tyerman considers the Crusades to have largely been “warfare decked out in moral and religious terms” and describes them as “the ultimate manifestation of conviction politics.” He points out the Crusades were indeed “butchery” with massacres of Jews Muslims and Jews, and that even among their contemporaries, crusaders had mixed reputations as “chivalric heroes and gilded thugs.” However, as Ozment observes, Tyerman adds that rather “than simple realpolitik and self-aggrandizement, the guiding ideology of crusading was that of religious self-sacrifice and revival, and directly modeled on the Sacrament of Penance.” See: Steven Ozment’s “Fighting the Infidel: the East-West holy wars are not just history” at: www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0RMQ/is_40_10/ai_n14791827.

Whereas as support for the crusades was far from universal within Christendom, in contrast Medieval Muslim expansion through the military conquest of jihad as dictated by the Koran was directly supported by Islamic scholars, who provided a spiritual imperative for violence. For example, Ibn Taymiyyah (d. 1328), who wrote: “Since lawful warfare is essentially jihad and since its aim is that the religion is God’s entirely and God’s word is uppermost, therefore according to all Muslims, those who stand in the way of this aim must be fought.” And by Ibn Khaldun (d. 1406), who declared, “In the Muslim community, the holy war is a religious duty, because of the universalism of the [Muslim] mission and [the obligation to] convert everybody to Islam either by persuasion or by force.” (See: Robert Conquest’s, Reflections on a RavagedCentury, reviewed at: http://victorhanson.com/articles/thornton100406.html).

Classical scholar, historian, and commentator, Victor David Hanson, reviewing Christopher Tyerman’s recent 1,000-page history of the Crusades, God’s War (Belknap Press 2006), notes how Tyerman is careful beforehand to declare the political neutrality of his work: “This study is intended as a history, not a polemic, an account not a judgment…not a confessional apologia or a witness statement in some cosmic law suit.” Tyerman’s history then points out, as Hanson then succinctly summarizes, that “it was not merely glory or money or excitement that drove Westerners of all classes and nationalities to risk their lives in a deadly journey to an inhospitable east, but rather a real belief in a living God and their own desire to please him through preserving and honoring the birth and death places of his son.” For the crusaders, religious “belief governed almost every aspect of their lives and decision-making. The Crusades arose when the Church, in the absence of strong secular governments, had the moral authority to ignite the religious sense of thousands of Europeans—and they ceased when at last it lost such stature.” Noting the widespread ignorance of the true history this subject among most modern Westerners, Hanson comments on how absent “is any historical reminder that an ascendant Islam of the Middle Ages was concurrently occupying the Iberian peninsula — only after failing at Poitiers in the eighth century to take France. Greek-speaking Byzantium was under constant Islamic assault that would culminate in the Muslim occupation of much of the European Balkans and later Islamic armies at the gates of Vienna. Few remember that the Eastern Mediterranean coastal lands had been originally Phoenician and Jewish, then Persian, then Macedonian, then Roman, then Byzantine—and not until the seventh-century Islamic. Instead, whether intentionally or not, post-Enlightenment Westerners have accepted [Osama] bin Laden’s frame of reference that religiously intolerant Crusaders had gratuitously started a war to take something that was not theirs.” (See: http://victorhanson.com/articles/hanson032107.html)

Though revisionist scholarship over the past few decades has taken a decidedly politically correct view of the these conflicts, trying to apply certain modern value systems onto the vastly different historical conditions and attitudes of the time, the goals of Crusaders from the 7th to 11th were to recover regions that had originally long been Christian kingdoms until being conquered during the first of many waves of Islamic Jihad. Failure to appreciate the physical and cultural environment of the people involved when examining this topic has become a common mistake. As historian Raymond Ibrahim writes when discussing modern views toward the Crusades: “Medieval man was not modern man. While all men throughout all time have been prone to hypocrisy, greed, violence, etc., Medieval Christians, as opposed to their 21st century (secularized) counterparts, were, by default, much more guided by faith (whether this faith was misplaced or not is hardly the point). ??’Secularism’ was never an option; Christians firmly believed in heaven and hell, God and the devil. And these were motives…One need not believe in God and religion; but one should still give them their due when discussing the Medieval world.” (“The History Channel’s Distortion of the Crusades”?by Raymond Ibrahim, June 6, 2009. See: http://victorhanson.com/articles/ibrahim060609.html)
 

Sunday, August 2, 2015

Muslim Student Challenges Jewish Professor, He Shuts Her Up On The Spot

CEO Raises Salaries to $70K for EVERY Employee, Now has to Rent Out his Own Home to Make Ends Meet

Back in April Dan Price, CEO of Gravity Payments, who said he would pay every single one of his employees $70,000 annually.
Every single one, from the lowest skilled workers on up.
Now, as expected, Price has fallen on hard times financially, even having to rent out his own home.
Employees who work for Gravity are now leaving the company, “spurred in part by their view that it was unfair to double the pay of some new hires while the longest-serving staff members got small or no raises.”
This was always going to be the outcome.
If everyone hits the jackpot, does anybody really win the lottery?
From BI:
When Dan Price, founder and CEO of the Seattle-based credit-card-payment processing firm Gravity Payments, announced he was raising the company’s minimum salary to $70,000 a year, he was met with overwhelming enthusiasm.
“Everyone start[ed] screaming and cheering and just going crazy,” Price told Business Insider shortly after he broke the news in April.
But in the weeks since then, it’s become clear that not everyone is equally pleased. Among the critics? Some of Price’s own employees.
Maisey McMaster — once a big supporter of the plan — is one of the employees that quit. McMaster, 26, joined the company five years ago, eventually working her way up to financial manager. She put in long hours that “left little time for her husband and extended family,” The Times says, but she loved the “special culture” of the place.
But while she was initially on board, helping to calculate whether the company could afford to raise salaries so drastically (the plan is a minimum of $70,000 over the course of three years), McMaster later began to have doubts.
“He gave raises to people who have the least skills and are the least equipped to do the job, and the ones who were taking on the most didn’t get much of a bump,” she told The Times. A fairer plan, she told the paper, would give newer employees smaller increases, along with the chance to earn a more substantial raise with more experience.
From Fox News:
Dan Price, 31, tells the New York Times that things have gotten so bad he’s been forced to rent out his house.
“I’m working as hard as I ever worked to make it work,” he told the Times in a video that shows him sitting on a plastic bucket in the garage of his house. “I’m renting out my house right now to try and make ends meet myself.”
The Times article said Price’s decision ended up costing him a few customers and two of his “most valued” employees, who quit after newer employees ended up with bigger salary hikes than older ones.
Grant Moran, 29, also quit, saying the new pay-scale was disconcerting
“Now the people who were just clocking in and out were making the same as me,” he told the paper. “It shackles high performers to less motivated team members.”
The Times said customers who left were dismayed at what Price did, viewing it as a political statement. Others left fearful Gravity would soon hike fees to pay for salary increases.
Brian Canlis, co-owner of a family restaurant, already worried about how to deal with Seattle’s new minimum wage, told Price the pay raise at Gravity “makes it harder for the rest of us.”
And to think, all of this came about within a few short months.
Liberal logic, for ya. One man with good intentions loses so much because he doesn’t understand how economics work.
Socialism: We all fail together!

Tuesday, April 14, 2015

Practice of Taqiyya, Deceptions, by Muslims in the West

Muslims in the West propagate day and night that Islam is the religion of peace. Recently, Muslims started saying that all religions teach peace and love. When they state all religions, they include Islam too. It is a way of covering up hatred and violence of Islam towards Infidels.

They describe unbelievers as Kafirs (degrading word for non-muslins) (Nejes) impure swines, monkeys, the fuel of hellfire, cruel, and friends of Satan, etc. But if a non-Muslim complains that they are using offensive language against non-Muslims, a Muslim will proudly state that he is speaking the Quranic terms and teachings. They insist that, in the West, they have every right to express their belief and the West has given them right to freedom of speech. In answer to all this, non-Muslims only can tell Muslims that if your Quran teaches you all this kinds of rubbish, then it teaches evil in fact.

Muslims claim that Islam teaches peace and love, most of the time they give references from the Quran. They quote two verses from the Quran mostly (Surah The Table Spread verse 32, i.e. 5:32) and (Surah The Cow verse 256, i.e. 2:256).

Quoting only half of the verse 5:32, Muslims in the West claim that teaching of the Quran is so noble that it equates killing just one human being to killing the whole of humanity. The reason for quoting only half of verse 5:32 is to deceive the Kafirs.

The full translation of verse 5:32 is as follows:

"For that cause We decreed for the children of Israel that whosoever killed a human being for other than manslaughter OR corruption on earth, It shall be as if he had killed all mankind, and whoso save the life of one, it shall be as if he has saved the life of all mankind, Our messengers came unto them of old with clear proofs but afterwards too many of them became prodigals in the earth."

This verse is the continuity of the previous verses talking about the story of Cain and Abel. In actual fact, Islam has nothing to do with this story. And although it is about the Abel and Cain story of the Old Testament or Torah, no such verse exists in the Old Testament.

Indeed, this verse is basically a quotation from the Talmud, which contain views and interpretation of the Old Testament verses by Jewish Rabbis. The Jews do not believe the Talmud to be revelation from God. But in the Quran, the statement of the Jewish Rabbi has been regarded as God’s revelation.

About this verse, Muslim scholar Ibn Katheer stated in his book, Tafseer Ibn Katheer, that he narrated from Saed Bin Sabeer, who narrated from Aisha, that any one who takes the life of any Muslim or even allowed to do so, he kills whole humanity and if anyone saves a Muslim, he saves the whole of humanity. It means that in this verse, non-Muslims are not included as humanity. Plus according to the Quran, Surah 9, verse 5 (9:5), it is lawful to kill Kafirs, unless they embrace Islam. Verse 9:5 reads as follows:

‘Then, when the sacred months have passed, slay the idolaters wherever ye find them and take them besiege them, and prepare for them each ambush but if they repent and establish worship and pay the poor-due (i.e. they become Muslim), then leave their way free, lo Allah is forgiving, merciful’.

‘Kill the infidels wherever you find them’.

Imam Jalal ul Deen Suyuti commented on this verse in his book, Al -itqan fi Ulum al Quran. He narrated from Imam Ibn-Al Arbi that this verse has abrogated 120 verses of the Quran, which includes 5:32, as well as verse 2:256, which says: ‘There is no compulsion in religion’. Imam Suyuti has claimed twenty-one instances of Naskh (abrogated verses) in the Quran. Suyuti writes that abrogation is something, which has only favoured the Muslims with. One can understand why Allah has given this favour to Muslims. Sometimes the revelation used to descend on the prophet during the night, and then he would forget it during the daytime (Asbab al Nuzul by Suyuti). Muslim scholars have collected lists of abrogating and abrogated verses from the Quran, which helps to explain away conflicting verses, and offers easy solution to contradictions of the Quranic verses.

Verse 9:5 is also famously called Verse of the Sword.

Some Muslim Scholars believe that the verse of the sword is the final revealed verse on the subject. They find no other verses in the Quran that may abrogated this verse.

Imam Jalal ul Deen Suyuti stated in his commentary on this verse that wherever it is stated in the Quran to have patience and not to hurry to harm the Kafirs, all those commandments have been abrogated by this verse.

Another famous Muslim Scholar Mulana Abul Ala Maududi stated in his commentary in his book, Tefheem-ul-Quran, that the last part of this verse has abrogated the first part of the verse. It’s mean,

That The Peace Treaty which was made for peace between Kafirs and Muslims signed by Muhammad has been nullified. Maududi states that it was the commandment of Allah to breach the peace treaty with kafirs. There is no need to compromise with kafirs any more. Allah has (SAQET) ceased the peace agreement between Muslims and Kafirs.

Quran the Kanzul Aman translated by Ahmad Raza Khan in Urdu and commentary by Maulana Mohammad Naeem ul Deen Murad Abadi has stated about verse 9:5 that Allah has revealed this to Muhammad with a sword, that there will be no more peace (to Kafirs) on Earth. After this verse was revealed, the Kafirs had only two options. First, to accept Islam; second, or you will be slain. He also states that the true meaning of this verse is that Allah wants to tell Muslims that they have to live with Kafirs only in peace until they are financially and militarily secure and strong, and once they become stable offer Islam to Kafirs, if they accept then leave them alone, but if they refuse, kill them.

This verse and like many other verses of the Quran signifies to force conversion. What you see going on in Muslims countries, how Muslims treat their religious minorities – they are all commanded in the Quran and hadith. A large number of verses of the quran teach hatred and violence against Kafirs (non-Muslims). Muslims are terrorists, because they read, believe, and act upon commandments of, the Quran – a manual of terrorism. We see many Europeans, some of them Atheist, after converting to Islam become terrorists. What makes them terrorists? What does the Quran do to make their mind and turn these normal persons into terrorists? In Britain, Muslims constitute only 2.2% of the population, but they are very active in terrorism.

Why is Britain spending millions of tax-payer's money to protect the public? Europe has given them equal human rights, but they are not satisfied and they demand greater privileges than their native inhabitants, because they believe they are superior in humanity than the Kafirs. Human rights do not exist in Islam. They care about human rights only in the West. And they have used and abused the ideas of human rights in favour of Islam, which is an anti-human rights ideology.

Muslim apologists in the West, whenever they quote verse 5:32 and 2:256, they act hypocritical and try to deceive the natives. Islamic apologists try their best to mask the ugly truth about Islam, but their own books of history testify against them. With the advent of the internet and freer spread of information and knowledge, the truth can no longer be concealed. Freedom of speech is the greatest enemy of Islam. Muslim countries, which have no freedom of expression, are trying to force Europe to limit it freedom of expression through United Nations resolutions.

Renowned Muslim scholars have clearly given true interpretations of the Quranic verses. If any Muslim apologist in the West, who does not agree to those interpretations by authoritative classical Muslim scholars, let him rebuke them. And he must first establish his own authority as an Islamic scholar before he denies the views of the classical Islamic scholars.

Blacks Calling Themselves Muslims Should Be Ashamed

by Reason

19 Dec, 2008

Slavery is one of the vilest institutions ever created by man. Islam institutionalized slavery. Allah, the Islamic God, created ETERNAL LAWS allowing Muslims to own and rape their slaves. Muslims can enslave kafirs and keep the female captives as sex-slaves.

If Islam succeeds in conquering the world, there will, most likely, arise again Islamic corporations for breeding, raising, and trading slaves in tens of millions as was done until the late 19th century. Kafir women will again likely become the sex-slaves of Muslim masters. This evil horrid treatment, which so characterized fate of tens of millions of kafirs at the hands of Muslims, may make a comeback on the world-stage.

Muhammad, the apostle of God, the Islamic prophet of peace, was a slaver. He owned 40 slaves some of them blacks. Muhammad had kept his female slaves as concubines, so did his comrades and pious companions.
Mahran, one of Muhammad’s black slave, was made him to carry the belongings of Muhammad and his companions while on a journey through the burning desert as Muhammad said: "Carry them, for you are a ship." Thereafter, he became known by that surname, Safina ('ship'). Relating this own story, Mahran said:

"The apostle of God and his companions went on a trip. (When) their belongings became too heavy for them to carry, Muhammad told me, 'Spread your garment.' They filled it with their belongings, then they put it on me. The apostle of God told me, 'Carry (it), for you are a ship.' Even if I was carrying the load of six or seven donkeys while we were on a journey, anyone who felt weak would throw his clothes or his shield or his sword on me so I would carry that, a heavy load. The prophet told me, 'You are a ship"' (refer to Ibn Qayyim, p. 115–116; al-Hulya, Vol. 1, p. 369, quoted from Ahmad 5:222).

Islamic 'Black Slave' Trade

Almost all Blacks living in U.S. today can trace their roots back to a slave ancestor.
The awful truth is that Arabs ravaged Africa for nearly a millennium engaging in enslavement of Africans on a grand scale before the Europeans began exporting black slaves. In fact, the Arabic word for 'black' ("abed") is also the same word for 'slave'. This is because, the black Africans became synonymous with slaves to Arabs. 

Over 120 million black Africans were killed by Muslim in one of the greatest holocausts in history. Some 75% of slaves perished on their way to markets thousands of miles. To ensure that black men could not have children Muslims castrated them; many died in this barbaric cruelty. This is the reason there are no Blacks in the Middle East.

Slavery is a divine institution in Islam, enshrined in the Koran and unchangeable for all time. To admit that slavery is a mistake is to admit the fallibility of the Koran and bring its divine origin into question.

Muhammad Owned and Sold Black Slaves
Muhammad owned several black slaves. Muslim scholar Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya relies heavily on the prophet's biographies written by great early Islamic scholars. He is regarded by Muslims as an authority, a primary source and a leader amongst Islamic scholars. He tells us in his book, "Zad al-Ma'ad" (part 1, pp. 114-116), the following:

"These are the names of Muhammad's male slaves: Yakan Abu Sharh, Aflah, 'Ubayd, Dhakwan, Tahman, Mirwan, Hunayn, Sanad, Fadala Yamamin, Anjasha al-Hadi, Mad'am, Karkara, Abu Rafi', Thawban, Ab Kabsha, Salih, Rabah, Yara Nubyan, Fadila, Waqid, Mabur, Abu Waqid, Kasam, Abu' Ayb, Abu Muwayhiba, Zayd Ibn Haritha, and also a black slave called Mahran."

Even today in Saudi Arabia, the heartland of Islam, the common word for "Black" is "Abd", also meaning "slave".

Mohammed's position on freeing slaves

In one instance, a man freed a slave that he kept as a sexual partner. When Mohammed heard what happened, he auctioned the boy and sold him for 800 dirhams to Na-eem Ebn Abdullah Al- Nahham. (Sahih Moslem vol. 7, page 83)


According to Mohammed, the punishment for committing adultery is different with a free-woman and a slave-woman. The man must be flogged one-hundred stripes and be exiled for one year. The free woman must be stoned to death. But the slave-woman (since she has a monetary value) will not be exiled or killed, she is to be flogged one-hundred stripes. If the violation is repeated, the slave-woman is to be sold. (Sahih Al Bukhari vol. 8:821 & 822)

There are many teachings in the Koran, in which Allah promotes the sexual and physical brutalization of human beings.

Quran 2:178:

"O you who believe! retaliation is prescribed for you in the matter of the slain, the free for the free, and the slave for the slave, and the female for the female, but if any remission is made to any one by his (aggrieved) brother, then prosecution (for the bloodwit) should be made according to usage, and payment should be made to him in a good manner; this is an alleviation from your Lord and a mercy; so whoever exceeds the limit after this he shall have a painful chastisement." 
Quran 4:3:

Marry women of your choice, Two or three or four; but if ye fear that ye shall not be able to deal justly (with them), then only one, or (a captive) that your right hands possess, that will be more suitable, to prevent you from doing injustice.

You can have sex with married women and female slaves obtained in war (with whom you may rape or do whatever you like). The divine institution of Islamic slavery, including the sex-slavery, is the vilest of institutions ever created in history.

Islam Looked Down on Blacks

Islam is an ideology, whose sacred Scriptures contain explicit denigrating remarks about black people.

Mohammed referred to Blacks as "raisin heads". (Sahih al-Bukhari vol. 1, no. 662 and vol. 9, no. 256).

In another Hadith, Mohammed is quoted as saying that Blacks are, "pug-nosed slaves". (Sahih Moslem vol. 9, p. 46-47).

A Slave Is Not Entitled to Property or Money

Ibn Hazm says in Vol. 6, Part 9,

"The slave is not permitted to write a will when he dies, nor can he bequeath (anything) because his entire possessions belong to his master."

The Testimony of Slaves is Not Admissible
In Vol. 35, p. 409 Ibn Timiyya remarks,

"The Shafi'i, Malik, and Abu Hanifa, who are the legists of Islam, assert that the testimony of the slave is not acceptable."

The "Ordinances of the Qur'an" by the Shafi'i (part II, p. 142), stipulates that,

"The witnesses must be from among our freeman, not from our slaves, but from freeman who belong to our religion!"

Black Slaves on Matters of Sex and Marriage


1. The Slave cannot choose for himself.
This was confirmed by all the Muslim scholars on the authority of Muhammad. In Vol. 6, Part 9, p. 467, Ibn Hazm said,

"If a slave gets married without the permission of his master, his marriage will be invalid and he must be whipped because he has committed adultery. He must be separated from his wife. She is also regarded as an adulteress because Muhammad said, 'Any slave who gets married without the approval of his master is a prostitute.'"

The same text is quoted by Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya (Part 5, p. 117 of "Zad al-Maad"), as well as Ibn Timiyya (Vol. 32, p. 201). Malik Ibn Anas relates (Vol. 2, Part 4) more than that. He says (pp. 199, 201, 206),

"The slave does not get married without the approval of his master. If he is a slave to two masters, he has to obtain the approval of both men." 
2. The male slave and the female slave are forced to get married.
Malik Ibn Anas says explicitly,

"The master has the right to force his male or female slave to marry without obtaining their approval" (Vol. 2, p. 155).

"The master does not have the right to force the female slave to wed to an ugly black slave if she is beautiful and agile unless in case of utmost necessity" (refer to Ibn Hazm, Vol. 6, Part 9, p. 469).

In matters of sex and marriage, Ibn Timiyya states:

"The one who owns the mother also owns her children. Being the master of the mother makes him the owner of her children whether they were born to a husband or they were illegitimate children. Therefore, the master has the right to have sexual intercourse with the daughters of his maid-slave because they are his property, provided he does not sleep with the mother at the same time" (Vol. 35, p. 54).

Price of Slaves

"If an owned slave assaults somebody and damages his property, his crime will be tied to his neck. It will be said to his master, `If you wish, you can pay the fine for the damages done by your slave or deliver him to be sentenced to death.' His master has to choose one of the two options - either the value of the slave and his price or the damage the slave has caused" (Vol. 32, p. 202, Ibn Timiyya).


Islam is a morally bankrupt, unethical ideology. Slavery, raping slave girls, owning slaves, murdering kafirs, killing Muslim apostates, selling boys and women as trophies of war, looting and pillaging the property of murdered kafirs, sharing the booty (including slaves) obtained in raids and wars with Allah Himself, the subjugation and beating of women, martyrdom for those who are killed for God's cause, a depraved Paradise filled with virgins—these are just some samples of utterly unethical and evil teachings of the Koran.

What will be one's conclusion about a man found to own slaves in a civilized country, let alone raping slaves? Prophet Muhammad, aided by Allah, created the institution of slavery: he enslaved in large numbers, owned dozens of slaves as the Prophet of Islam; he used the female captives as sex-slaves on top his dozen wives; he traded in slaves.

Such an evil incarnate is eulogized by world's 1.4 billion Muslims as the perfect human being, the greatest apostle of God, a man of peace. Tens of millions of Blacks—who were given the worst treatment by Muhammad, who suffered the most devastating treatment at the hands of Muslims—also eulogize this man, calls themselves proud Muslims. There cannot be anything more shameful than this.

The Tears Of Jihad - Part Two

The Tears of Jihad refers to the deaths of 270 million people over a 1400 year period. They were all killed for the same reason. They did not believe that Mohammed was the prophet of Allah.

After Mohammed died, Abu Bakr was elected caliph, Supreme Ruler of all Islam. This included both a spiritual guidance and a political guidance. So he was a combination of pope and king. Abu Bakr spent his three years in office making sure that Muslim Arabs did not leave Islam. The apostasy wars continued during his entire time in office. An apostate is one who wants to leave his religion and it is a killing offense in Islam.

Umar was the second caliph after Abu Bakr died. He picked up where Mohammed left off because Mohammed’s last efforts were all directed towards attacking the Christians north of Arabia. They were kafirs. They had not submitted to Islam.

At this time, the Middle East was not remotely what we think of now. It was basically a Greek culture. What had happened was the Greeks were sailors and businessmen and so the Greek culture spread all around the rim of the Mediterranean, including Syria, and Northern Egypt. North Africa was a Greek culture. And, of course, all of Anatolia (Turkey) was Greek. It was highly sophisticated culture but it had overwhelming problems and those problems were: Age, degeneracy and decay.

The Greeks had been at war with the Persians for a long time. This continual war left both the Persians weak and the Greeks weak, so the 900 year rule of Greek culture in the Mediterranean was coming to an end. The Greeks were also very divided along religious lines. Christianity had several variations and the Greeks in Constantinople had a different kind of Christianity than was held in Jerusalem, Syria and Egypt. These divisions were strong enough to cause ill will. So this was the world that Umar invaded and conquered.

The conquest went so fast that Umar was not really left able to govern what he had, but he now had enormous wealth because Syria fell, Persia fell, Iraq, Egypt and North Africa. In thirty years time all of the Greek culture except that that was in Anatolia was destroyed. An entire new world order came about.

At first the Christians were left pretty much to govern themselves and only send taxes to Medina. After the consolidation of the empire under Uthman, things began to change. Islam was no longer conquering more territory. Instead it was consolidating. The age of the dhimmi had arrived. Being a dhimmi involved paying heavy taxes, but it also began to involve being a second class citizen in your own home country. In Egypt, for instance, the Coptic culture was especially despised. Now the Copts, the descendants of the Egypt of the Pharaohs, had become Christians. The Coptic language was thousands of years old. If as a Christian you spoke the Coptic language in front of your new Arab masters, your tongue was cut out. That was the life of the dhimmi.

North Africa became Islamic. 600 years of Christianity disappeared. The culture of the Greeks, the Romans, the Europeans, was annihilated. Then the pressure started up against Greek Anatolia.

The Arab Muslims despised the Christians with a special fervor. You may say ‘But in the Koran it speaks well of the Christian.’ Religiously that may be true but that was written when Mohammed was in Arabia.

Now then everywhere the Muslims looked, they saw Christians who were wealthy, educated and very sophisticated. The Arabs were none of these things. They just wanted to crush the Christian kafirs. The 900 year old world of the Middle East completely changed. And notice something, it has not changed in the last 1400 years except to become even more Islamic.

The Christians had no idea what hit them. They never called the invaders Muslims, instead they called them Arabs or Saracens. Here are some of the words they left behind.

The sword of the Saracen, beastly and demonic savages. Evil God-hating Saracens destroyed crops, burned cities and drove the survivors before them.

This was the world that was created by Islam and would later cry out to the Christians in Europe “Help us!” Indeed the treatment of the Christians was a little better than slaves.

After the Middle East was conquered, Arabia looked towards Constantinople in Anatolia. This became a long term goal which took a few hundred years to accomplish. Their first step was to kill Armenians. In one town they brought together all of the Armenian leaders, took them down to the church and burned the church and it fell in on top of them.

In another town in Anatolia, when you came to pay your dhimmi tax, you got a special brand from a hot iron on your arm. If you were found and you did not have a brand, the first thing they did was to cut off the arm that should have held the brand. It didn’t hurt very long because the next thing they did was to cut off your head.

There was one Greek Bishop who offered to debate the Muslims with regards to Islam and Christianity. The Muslims listened to his debate for two hours then they cut off his head.

Another Bishop invited them to a debate so they too, debated for the afternoon. When the debate was over the Muslims took the bishop, cut out his tongue, hauled him out to the desert and left him to die.

Needless to say acts like this began to teach the Christians what their place was in this new order. It was a place of the dhimmi, a semi-slave. They could still have their church buildings, those that were left. Christianity could not be seen or spoken of beyond the church or the home. For a Christian to try to convert a Muslim was a death sentence.

Christians were actually forbidden to read the Koran. This element is important because it helps to ensure an ignorance of the Christian by his Islamic rulers. This has had a 1,400 year effect. Christians or other kafirs still do not study either the history or the doctrine of Islam. To not study the history or doctrine of Islam makes anyone including a Christian, a dhimmi.

Dhimmitude starts with ignorance. The cure for dhimmitude is knowledge. Once a dhimmi becomes aware of the doctrine of persecution and the history of persecution, the dhimmi’s eyes are opened and the dhimmi becomes a kafir.

The destruction in Anatolia took several hundred years. We have one accounting from a Muslim historian who gladly reports the figure of the destruction of 30,000 church buildings. Now some of the better church buildings had a special fate reserved for them. Those sites became mosques. When it conquers, Islam has built its mosques on top of where the best church building or temple was. It is ever thus because this is the way of Mohammed or Sunna.

Destroying religious art is also the way of Mohammed. As soon as Islam conquered any town, the churches were desecrated. The Christians could move back into them later if Islam decided to let them stand. Art, in particular religious art, is an affront to Islam. Mohammed’s first act on returning to Mecca, after he prayed, was to destroy all the religious art. We see this in Egypt for instance where the nose of the Sphinx has been knocked off. We see this along the silk route where all of the Buddhist murals in caves have had the eyes pecked out and the mouth taken out. It was Islam who invented the word deface.

There was an interesting side effect for those who had already been conquered as the conquest ebbed and flowed in Constantinople. If the Arabs lost a battle in Constantinople, back in Egypt, for example, there would be riots of anger that the Christians had beat the Muslims and the Christians would be killed.

This persecution was what set the stage for the Christians in the Middle East to cry out to their brothers in Europe, please help us, and the response of the Europeans in crusade was to try to help them. So the history of the crusades is one of the few times where Christians tried to help other Christians in the Middle East. The crusades should be a point of pride and should be studied to see what can be done to help Christians against Islam.

In the East, jihad was not just against the Christians, it was against everyone. The Persian Empire at this time had already been crushed. Zoroastrianism, the religion of the Persians was annihilated. It was annihilated to such a degree today historians are not really sure of the true nature of the Zorastrian religion because so many of their sacred texts, were destroyed.

Islam moved towards Hindustan. Due to jihad, what we think of as India today is about half of its original territory. But on the way to Hindustan, Islam stopped off in Afghanistan and destroyed the Buddhism that was there.

They then turned to the Hindus. The attack against the Hindus was similar to the ones against the Christians, Buddhists and Persians. When Islam started attacking the Persians, there was a parlay, a conference before the battle and the Persian general asked “who are you and why are you here?” because the Persians had never really fought the Arabs. And here, in a hadith, is what Islam told him. “Our prophet, the messenger of our Lord has ordered us to fight you until you worship Allah alone or pay the jizyah, the dhimmi tax, and our prophet has informed us that our Lord says whoever amongst us is killed shall go to paradise and lead a life of great luxury. Whoever amongst us remain alive will become your master.” This is the perfect statement of Jihad.

Now here is a statement by one of the conquering Muslim generals of India, Tamerlane. “My principle aim in coming to Hindustan has been to accomplish two aims. The first is to war with the kafirs, the enemies of Mohammed, and by this holy war, be able to claim a reward in paradise. The other was that the army of Islam may gain by plundering the wealth of the kafirs. Plunder in war is as lawful as a mother’s milk to a Muslim.”

You can see that the reason for invading Hindustan was exactly the same reason as invading Persia and it was the same reason for invading Anatolia and the Middle East. It’s important to realize this because many times people think that when the Muslims invaded maybe the people there got what was coming to them in some way. No, the only way you had to be, the only fault you had to have was to be a kafir and the Hindus were kafirs.

Just as the culture of the Middle East was crushed, the culture of the Hindu was crushed. You need to know that the Hindu that we see of today is not the Hindu as of before Islam. Islam changed the Hindu. Before Islam the Hindus had been a proud culture. They were a leader in intellectual theory, mathematics and philosophy. And they were very wealthy.

Hindustan had been an Empire for a thousand years and it had been relatively peaceful. In times of peace you accumulate a great treasure. That was one of the things that happened in Afghanistan with the Buddhists. They were very prosperous because they had given up war. It turns out that the Buddhist show what happens when you deal with Islam on the basis of we are peaceful people, we will do whatever you want. What happened to the peaceful Buddhist was that the pacifists were annihilated. Witness the fact that half of the Hindu culture still remains behind because it had a warrior caste. None of the Buddhist culture remains in Afghanistan.

Here is a typical story. 20,000 Jihadists and thousands of mercenaries laid siege to a city in Hindustan. A traitor in the city for money gave them a clue as to how they could place ladders up against one particular portion of the wall and penetrate the city. The Muslims poured into the city. For three days they did nothing but kill. They didn’t even rob the bodies. It’s very interesting. The General gave the job of killing the Hindus to only his most religious men and after three days they stopped the killing and then began to rob the bodies. While the killing was going on, the women, children, were raped, because rape always accompanies Jihad.

In the end the Hindus were crushed. Half their territory was gone. They were sold into slavery. There are some remnants of this in the geography books. There is in Afghanistan a mountain range called the Hindu Kush. Hindu Kush means the funeral pyre of the Hindu.

What we now call Pakistan was an original part of India. Of course the petition of Pakistan so that it would become purely Islamic and this happened under the British. It led to the destruction of about a million Hindus in the partition that led to the creation of the state of Pakistan.

It was Ghandi, the secular saint, whose pacifism and dhimmitude lead to the deaths of the million Hindus. It was Ghandi, who said that although all of the Hindus had to leave Pakistan, none of the Muslims in India had to leave. Today, those Muslims are devouring India from the inside. Ghandi was the great betrayer of Hindu culture.

Both Ghandi and the Buddhists of Afghanistan show how pacifism leads to total annihilation in the shortest time.

At the other end of India in Bangladesh the Islamization goes on today. In 1947 Bangladesh was still about a third Hindu. Today it is about 10% Hindu. And that reduction of the Hindu has come at a terrible cost. Women and men who are left in Bangladesh are persecuted on a daily basis, dreadfully, and the police turn a blind eye when some Muslim throws acid in a Hindu woman’s face. Why does he throw the acid? Her face isn’t veiled. The police will not investigate because the police are Muslim.

We do not have time in this brief accounting to tell the terrible story of the conversion of Anatolia to Turkey. Nor do we have time to tell the terrible persecution of the Orthodox Christians in Eastern Europe. Their persecution was dreadful but they fought on and on to their credit.

The first September 11th was in 1683 when the Europeans drove the Muslims from the gates of Vienna. Of course some years later we would have another September 11th. Now what is important about that is this. Islam never forgot that on September 11th they had been turned back from the gates of Vienna and the proud Turkish Army defeated. They never forgot.

Here’s what’s important. On September 11th in America we had no idea why that date was chosen. We were clueless and in that we see the nature of Islam and the kafir. The kafir never remembers the history that went with the expansion of Islam. Islam never forgets.

Since 9/11 nearly 58,000 people around the world died in 9,000 attacks. 87,000 have been injured in 39 countries. All of this suffering goes on around the world and you never hear about it because our press does not want to report the terror of what is happening politically around the world with Islam.

But we can’t blame our press because none of our schools teach this history, not even the Christian schools teach the dreadful history of the destruction of 60 million Christians. No schools teach the deaths of 10 million Buddhists, 80 million Hindus and 120 million Africans.

And since we don’t know the history we are doomed to repeat it. Islam continues to kill the kafir and the kafir just says “oh well, we’ll take care of that problem by pretending it is not there. And the reason we won’t turn our attention to it is complicated but part of it has to do with the shame of the history because the kafir has been defeated time and again by Islam. We absolutely refuse to admit that this is a culture that is devoted to the annihilation of kafir culture. Because now when you go to Iraq, you don’t find a Christian Iraq. When you go to Egypt, you don’t find a Christian Egypt. It is Islamic.

There’s only one way to stop this. The history of the Tears of Jihad must be taught in kafir schools. How can it be that the history of the expansion of the empire of Islam is treated as a glorious history and the history of suffering, the suffering of the dhimmi and the death of 270 million, is never reported. Until this changes we’re doomed to continual annihilation both here in America and abroad.

America, have you forgotten history?

Budget Hero

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