Friday, February 29, 2008

WHICH ISLAM IS HIJACKED?

Well, it can be said that Christianity has been hijacked by millions of apathetic backsliders, and it can be said that millions of fundy Christians upset our secular notions, and and it can also be said that neo-cons who wish to test a few new weapons usually go out hunting for rabbits, but every time the dusty-breathed Mohammedans sit up and take notice of the world, like the groundhog, only when corporeal power is once again in their camp, this is ALWAYS the result.

Nearly 1400 years of history attest to these facts. So what are we as a civilization to do. The Mohammedans are indeed on the march again thanks to billions of petrodollars in some circles and have a population explosion across most of their lands, so much so they export people as fast as they can export their vulgar religion with brand new mosques to train them in the "perfect" ways of Mohammed the plunderer.

Thanks to Eric the Kuffar who posted this on Jihad Watch:

1. Infidels are your sworn enemies (Sura 4:101).
2. Be ruthless to the infidels (Sura 48:29).
3. Make war on the infidels who dwell around you (Sura 9:123, 66:9).
4. Fight those who believe not in Allah nor the Last Day (Sura 9:29).
5. Strike off the heads of infidels in battle (Sura 47:4).
6. If someone stops believing in Allah, kill him (al-Bukhari 9:84:57).
7. Take neither the Jews nor the Christians for your friends (Sura 5:51, 60:13).
8. Never be a helper to the disbelievers (Sura 28:86).
9. Kill the disbelievers wherever we find them (Sura 2:191).
10. No Muslim should be killed for killing an infidel (al-Bukhari 1:3:111).
11. The only reward of those who make war upon Allah and His messenger will be that they will be killed or crucified, or have their hands and feet on alternate sides cut off, or will be expelled out of the land (Sura 5:33).
12. I shall terrorize the infidels. So wound their bodies and incapacitate them because they oppose Allah and His Apostle. (Qur'an:8:12)
13. Allah's Apostle said, 'I have been made victorious with terror.' (al Bukhari: 4:52:220)

End of Sermon on the Mount

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Thursday, February 28, 2008

RULES OF PROPAGANDA

If the ridiculous becomes the norm, and this continued appeasement of Islamic conspirators continues to find grounding in the West, just remember the Nazi ties to the Muslim Brotherhood.

Just remember that Adolph Hitler's Mein Kampf which means "my struggle" in German is eerily matched to what the word "Islam" (struggle) means in Arabic. Furthermore, it is the current and has been the longstanding top selling book in the Middle East. Just remember that political bent of the Socialist Left and this NWO contingent requires a "dirty hands" ally for optimum transgression, and has found its convenient ally in Islamofascism. Just remember the multicultural experiment contains its own recipe for failure, as does democracy as noted in the aphorism: Neither democracy, nor the US Constitution is a suicide pact. Just remember why all this feels so vaguely familiar.

Rules of Propaganda

1. The rule of simplification: reduce all data to simple confrontation between "good & bad", "friend & foe".
2. The rule of disfiguration: discrediting the opposition by crude smears & parodies.
3. The rule of transfusion: manipulating the consensus values of the target audience for one's own ends.
4. The rule of unanimity: presenting one's viewpoint as if it were the unanimous opinion of all right thinking people: drawing the doubting individual into agreement by the appeal of star-performers, by social pressure and by "psychological contagion"
5. The rule of orchestration: endlessly repeating the same messages in different variations and combinations.


--Joseph Goebbels

One of the more insidious forms of propaganda, however, is that situation where the true sources of information are hidden (or ignored) from the recipients and propagators alike. This stripe of so-called "covertly directed propaganda" conspires to mobilize a network of unsuspecting "agents of influence" who pass on the messages as if they were acting spontaneously, by feigning a coincidence of views with those of the target society it seeks to subvert.

By pandering to the proclivities of key individuals, it can procure by stealth clandestine means a dominant élite of opinion makers from which the operations can then prosper.

America, stand guard! The enemy is already among us. It entered into our nation, our cities, and our graces through the unchecked Trojan Horse of political correctness, runaway multiculturalism, as lofty as these ideals may seem to the hopelessly romantic, but when combined with the iron sword of petrodollar blackmail, it is a disaster waiting to happen.. This is not a drill. This is the real thing, and this cold war struggle will inevitably give way to the hot war for survival of our very souls. It is my opinion that this war will not long continue as the mere police action it is today, but as our enemies continue to whittle away at the basic way of liberty that is the American birthright, we will be forced to defend ourselves by any means necessary.

This is not my desire. But we are either still asleep at the wheel blinded by our own lethargy brought on by greed and irrational philosophies and behaviors, or else we have already in the full light of day chosen to our path, having sold our birthright for a gallon of gasoline, for a bowl of porridge, and the delightful sound phrases of false ideology, and as a consequence, we will required by nature to pay the price for our duplicitous behavior. Let us pray this terrible reckoning of the fevers which ail us never arrives. Let us pray we can turn back the tide of aggression facing us. We us pray, educate, and prepare ourselves and our families of this threat to our civil liberties and to life itself. The alternative won't be pretty.

Because here's what we face: politicians, businessmen, bureaucrats, pharmacists, police commander, TV journalist. These people of rank and stature were among Moroccan jihadists rounded up this week.

This simple fact leaves the liberal media (and there's no shortage of so-called right wing media, also) scratching its venerable collective head in puzzlement. I mean, doesn't everybody know that poverty causes terrorism, and only the desperate, uneducated and easily led join jihadist groups?

Of course, many have documented here for years that the opposite is the case, and just yesterday Saudi pseudoacademic shill John Esposito admitted it publically: "The radicals are better educated, have better jobs, and are more hopeful with regard to the future than mainstream Muslims."

Alas, this simple realization never seems to get through to the clueless, indifferent, PC-addled mainstream media.

In this week's Moroccan round-up, police conducted nationwide raids, the biggest crackdown in Morocco since suicide bombings killed 45 people, including the 12 bombers, in Casablanca five years ago. The alleged leader of the group was a well-off Moroccan immigrant in Belgium who is accused of financing his activity with multimillion-dollar hold-ups and committing assassinations in that European country dating back 20 years. Moroccan Interior Minister Chakib Benmoussa said in an interview that the group plotted to assassinate Cabinet ministers, military chiefs and Jewish leaders to destabilize this moderate Muslim nation.

"The leaders of this network had the opportunity to train in Afghanistan, to meet leaders of Al Qaeda, and to go to Algeria to train in [rural outposts] in 2005," Benmoussa said.

Some aspects of the case against the suspects perplex analysts. The three politicians arrested belong to small parties that mix Islamist and leftist ideologies. Their defenders say they are moderates. Their longtime ties to Shiite Muslim movements, including Hezbollah, may have been a factor in their arrests. Sunni Muslims are the majority here, but authorities worry about the danger of extremism among the small Shiite minority and sympathetic Sunni radicals.

Sunni and Western governments fear that the recent assassination of a Hezbollah military chief in Syria could foment Shiite-inspired violence around the world, says Abdellah Rami, an expert on Islam at the Moroccan Center for Social Studies. But Rami sees contradictions in the official version alleging that the Moroccan group of suspects was influenced by both Sunni-led Al Qaeda and Shiite Hezbollah.

We must face the inevitable. We have a lot of work ahead of us in securing our nation from the threats within and without its national borders. Wanna bet how many on the Left and the NWO Right will laugh at you for your passe "nationalist" concerns...

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Tuesday, February 26, 2008

ISLAM WILL LOSE, BUT WHAT OF THE WEST

In a recent article published online at Islam Watch by Mumin Salih, an Arabic-speaking Middle Eastern ex-Muslim, the case once again is made plain that the wretched claims of Islam are not to be trusted. Read and be warned.

Islam is currently passing through one of its most dynamic times since its rise fourteen hundreds years ago. This dynamic period started long before 9/11 as a fierce struggle, mainly against the west, but also against any nation or group that dares to stand in its way. Most Muslims take this resurgence phase very seriously and consider it as a decisive battle between Islam and the non-Islam, or the kufr, which Mohammed told them they would win. Even though the west, currently, is largely in denial about this makes no difference to the significance of this conflict to the whole world.

Islam will lose
Virtually unchallenged, Islam has survived and expanded during the last fourteen centuries. The only time Islam had ever faced any challenges was in the first few years, when Mohammed’s claims of being a prophet, were questioned by the Meccan Arabs and then by the Jews of Yathrib. During that period, which spanned over thirteen years, Mohammed failed to win any intellectual debate to prove his claims. That reflected on Mohammed’s failure to attract genuine followers. The few dozens who joined him were mainly friends and beneficiaries. Once Mohammed established his stronghold in Yathrib, which he renamed as Medina, intellectual debates, which had flourished until few years before his arrival, became meaningless and virtually non-existent. Since then, the only challenges Islam ever had were military ones; the opposing forces were more interested in military conquests than in exposing Islam’s ideology.

Knowing the Muslims’ mindset, we can safely say that Muslims may not even bother to consider any critical analysis of Islam that comes from non-Muslims, no matter how genuine and legitimate it may be. If Muslims ever mention such painstaking and authentic works, it is only to dismiss them as the works of the enemy of Islam. On the other hand, the critical analysis of Islam that comes from Muslims is often taken more seriously, although those Muslim critics of Islam will be branded as infidels.

Islam has guarded its ideology by employing a thorough indoctrination program and systematic and extensive brainwashing process of its adherents. The process is so incapacitating that it is incomprehensible to Muslims to contemplate their existence outside their religion.

Over the past fourteen centuries, Islam was never openly challenged or critiqued, because those who knew about its myths, also knew what it meant to disclose them. Those Muslims who did their own critical appraisal of their religion kept their results to themselves since they knew if they didn’t they risk loosing their heads by the authorities, or even by family members or friends who would be happy to do it for the sake of Allah.

Even during the last few centuries, when the whole world started to open up to a new age of enlightenment, Islamic authorities managed to seal the minds of Muslims towards any outside views bout Islam. The tight seal on the Muslims’ minds continues even during our time. Unwanted materials, whether printed or televised, is simply filtered out. For fourteen centuries, Muslims never had a chance to see their religion from any perspective other than their own. Islam survived because it always had a suitable environment of darkness and one-way coaching with no tolerance to different views.

Since the introduction of the Internet all that has changed. Thanks to the power of the Internet, the world is now open to almost everyone, and Muslims can have access to the alternative views about Islam, something considered impossible in the past. The Internet is the first true challenge to Islam because it breaks through all the Islamic security systems. The Internet doesn’t recognize Islam’s demands of submission and total surrender of the mind. Everything about Islam is now subjected to critical scrutiny, people now ask logical questions and demand logical answers. Everyday, the Internet sheds more light on the cult of darkness to expose its myths. This shakes the very foundation of the Islamic ideology. Muslims are slow to come out from the darkness, which is understandable, considering their programmed state of mind. They behave like the battery chickens that are so conditioned to the darkness that when they see the light they feel scared to come out. We are only in the beginning of the Internet age, the process may appear to be slow, but the ball started rolling and more Muslims will wake up to the light of truth and come out to the world of enlightenment and join the other ex Muslims in exposing the myths of Islam.

The West will lose, too
I sincerely hope that time will prove me wrong on this gloomy prediction, but the signs are that the west is already loosing. It did not take more than one generation for the western nations, which emerged victorious after WWII, to lose their momentum and give up any hope of staying in the lead. I write this part of the article with Britain in mind because it seems to be leading the way, but other countries are not far behind.

The decline of the west is mainly an endogenous problem that neither Islam nor any other external factors can be blamed for. But it is a disturbing observation that the west appears to be doomed with or without Islam, although Islam is taking advantage of the process and is working hard to speed it up. The Islamic predators look at the west as a helpless prey and are closing in waiting for the right moment to make a kill. They are hopeful to inherit the west without even having to fight for it, and they do not make a secret of it. A few years ago, colonel Ghaddafi said that Muslims couldn’t take Europe by force in the past, but now they will take it without force. If you don’t believe the Libyan leader’s remarks, you only need to visit a classroom in a British primary school to see how Britain will look like in the future.

Nations behave like individuals because they are made of individuals. An individual’s performance is at its best in times of stress like preparing for exams or entering competitions. Nations too perform best in times of stress like wars or other national struggles. During the last war, the western nations performance was at its peak. People took no chances; they went through some rough time, suffered of hardship, fought wars and lost lives to secure a good future for their children and grand children. Those children and grand children are today’s westerners who have reaped the fruits of their grandfathers’ hard work. Today’s westerners enjoy a freedom and democracy that they never earned and seem to be reluctant to defend.

The west had some very painful experiences because of Islam, like the attacks of 9/11 and the bombings in Madrid and London to mention only few. We all hate painful experiences, but it seems that pain is essential to the survival of individuals as well as nations. It is the uncomfortable sensation of pain that makes a man move away when he sits on a sharp object, otherwise he would bleed to death. It is the uncomfortable sensation of pain that alarms the sufferer to go and seek treatment for its cause. Pain is a warning system that alarms people about the more serious underlying problems that need attention. However, there are people who are careless enough, or stupid enough, not to take action other than swallowing painkillers until they succumb to their ailment.

The bombing of western targets all over the world during the last few decades should have been enough to motivate the west to take action about the roots of the problem, which we all know to be Islam. Instead, the west has opted to taking painkillers in the form of politically correct justifications prescribed to them by the politically correct groups. I am afraid that is a recipe for disaster.

The western societies seem to have an inherent serious problem that makes the westerners turn against their own history, heritage, culture and all their past achievements. They happily declare their cultural surrender as they see everything coming from the outside as genuine and honest, and look down at their own as false and corrupt. They are so consumed with post imperial guilt that they are blinded to their countries’ virtues.

The weakness in the west plays well in the hands of the Islamists and hinders our campaign to enlighten Muslims and defeat their cult. Western converts to Islam are used by the Islamists’ propaganda machine to boost the Muslims’ confidence in their religion. It is a common observation that when Muslims run out of answers to defend the Islamic myths, they produce the most bizarre reason for staying with Islam, they say: “but all those westerners wouldn’t convert unless Islam is right”.

The west has been a safe haven to the radical Islamic organizations that are banned in their own Islamic countries. The western social and political system facilitated some of the most notorious Islamic organizations, to survive, thrive and terrorize the innocents around the world. The remarks made by the head of the Anglican Church about introducing sharia law to Britain are just another reminder that the British problem is largely a self-inflicted one. The response of the British people to their problems is disappointing to say the least. Those who recognize the problem leave everything and emigrate, while the rest turn a blind eye and live in denial. I am afraid that when the nation’s feelings are so numbed, it is unlikely that it will sense any threat or react decisively to any danger.

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Thursday, February 14, 2008

BURNING LOVE FROM PAKISTAN



More love from the freaking religion of peace. This lovely image shows how much of a moral stupor these gesticulating Muslims who wallow about in daily outrage pretend to be. Of course they are on some mullah's payroll. Of course, they are dumb and dumber. But they execute the part they play with a strong mix of vigor and anguish, just like the thugs are really are. They're morally outraged at someone sending a card saying "I love you", but they never seem to imagine a problem with rigging a retarded person with explosives and detonating it in a crowded market.

I personally have never gone in for this day-glo commercialized Cupid's special day nonsense, but the madness that this so-called religion is fostering is not only worth noting, and fearing in the sense of how close it is coming into our own world, but it is to be strategically fought and eradicated.

These sad, mad actors and their understudies who fear love, oppress women, murder homosexuals, and everyone else in their path of narcissistic paranoia...

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Wednesday, February 13, 2008

TRAITORS IN THE MIST



An article posted almost three years ago by Hugh Fitzgerald of Jihad Watch bewars reposting in as many places and as many times as we can muster:

Karen Armstrong: The Coherence of Her Incoherence:

Karen Armstrong, long famous for her description of Muhammad as the consummate “peacemaker” who “brought together the warring tribes of Arabia,” has assumed the mantle, yet again, not of the Prophet, but of the Prophet’s defender. In an article in The Guardian she retells in her inimitable fashion the story of European Christendom’s relations with Islam and with Muslims. In her retelling, the Muslims are innocent victims, and more than innocent victims, likened again and again to the Jews. They are also the only people who provided, in that bright shining moment of European history known as Islamic Spain, the only real tolerance and humanity to be found anywhere in Europe before the modern era. It is a tough job, but Karen Armstrong proves equal to the task. And her real theme is not history, but that Europeans should feel ashamed themselves for showing any signs of wariness or suspicion about the millions of Muslims who now live in Europe, having come among the indigenous Infidels to settle, but not to settle down.

It is curious to see how often in this article Karen Armstrong makes references to examples of historic mistreatment of the Jews. For in her previous books she has exhibited a palpable distaste for Israel, and has attempted on every occasion to pretend that the claims of the “three abrahamic faiths” to Jerusalem are identical in the importance that each attaches to the city (but as a city Jerusalem is not holy in Islam, and never was), and she is fond, in her discussion of “fundamentalisms”—always presented in the plural – to make reference to the one or two examples of what she calls “Jewish terrorism.” She fails to consider whether or not the assassination of Rabin by a Jewish political opponent, or the mental collapse of Dr. Baruch Goldstein which led him, acting entirely alone and on impulse, to wreak his solitary revenge on those whose victims Goldstein treated every day as a doctor, until he could no longer stand it, really can be compared to the thousands of planned acts, many of them fortunately foiled, and others not, that are part of the world-wide Jihad against completely innocent Infidels, within Muslim lands, and without.

Here is how she begins:

“In 1492, the year that is often said to inaugurate the modern era, three very important events happened in Spain. In January, the Catholic monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella conquered the city of Granada, the last Muslim stronghold in Europe; later, Muslims were given the choice of conversion to Christianity or exile. In March, the Jews of Spain were also forced to choose between baptism and deportation. Finally, in August, Christopher Columbus, a Jewish convert to Catholicism and a protégé of Ferdinand and Isabella, crossed the Atlantic and discovered the West Indies. One of his objectives had been to find a new route to India, where Christians could establish a military base for another crusade against Islam As they sailed into the new world, western people carried a complex burden of prejudice that was central to their identity.”

This first paragraph is a scandal, consisting almost entirely of baseless assertions, incredible omissions, and complete fabrications. But it is not inexplicable. For Karen Armstrong history does not exist. It is putty in the hands of the person who writes about history. You use it to make a point, to do good as you see it. And whatever you need to twist or omit is justified by the purity of your intentions – and Karen Armstrong always has the purest of intentions. She knows that we in the “white Western world” (as some like to call it) fail to understand others. She knows of our deepneed to create “the Other” – a psychic need felt exclusively, and with great intensity, apparently, only by us, and never by anyone else. Though Western civilization, a product that was formed from the inheritance of both classical antiquity and and of Christianity (which itself has a strong Hebraic element, that it should be called Judeo-Christianity, a word about which some are still self-conscious), has far outstripped any rival in its achievements, collective and by individuals, in art and science, in political and economic thought, in social development, and has really never needed to create the “Other” (the entire business is a reason ideological fashion which is by this point getting long in the seminar and call-for-papers tooth). Indeed, it is Islam which, though Karen Armstrong does not see it, because she knows nothing about Islam (which doesn’t keep her from writing about it, endlessly), has the strongest claim to being based on the need of its Believers for “the Other.”

It is in Islam that emphasis is placed constantly on the only division that matters: that between Believer (to whom all loyalty is owed by other Believers, and for whom all transgressions may be forgiven, except that of disloyalty to Islam) and the Unbeliever, or Infidel (who must be opposed, and subjugated if such an Infidel refuses to accept Islam or stands in the way of its spread). That Armstrong fails to see this is extraordinary; it is everywhere in Qur’an, Hadith, and Sira. But she is on a mission: to make us feel guilty about our treatment of Muslims in the past (hence the harping on the Crusades, and the failure to offer the context of those Crusades, or the difference between the Crusades and Jihad). She wants to evoke a guilt that need not exist at all, so that we will, today, be inhibited from responding to Muslim atrocities and the attitudes that promote such atrocities – this she cannot abide.

“In 1492, the year that is often said to inaugurate the modern era…” Who says that the year 1492 inaugurated the modern era? And what does the phrase “the modern era” mean in any case? The year 1492 was chosen by this lover of symmetries and “three monotheisms” (now said to be studying Buddhism as the latest stop in her Spiritual Search) because in that year, in Spain, Jews and Christians and Muslims each acted, or was acted upon, in ways that Karen Armstrong finds useful to both misstate, and exploit. She will not mention what happened before 1492. She will not tell us about the Muslim invasion and conquest of Spain, or about the 500 years of the Reconquista, nor will she tell us when the Jews first came to Spain, long before the Muslim invasion, even before the Visigoths arrived. She will not point out that the Jews were inoffensive victims, and unlike the Muslims, never invaded, never conquered, never held the Christians of Spain in thrall, never posed a threat to the body politic.

In 1492 “the Catholic monarchs conquered Granada, the “last Muslim stronghold in Europe.” What then should we call all those lands in southern and eastern Europe that the Ottomans were at that very moment busy conquering and seizing, including Constantinople, the richest, most populous, most important city in all of Christendom for 800 years (taken by the Turks on a Tuesday – May 29, 1453), and the Balkans (including the then-vast Serbian lands), and what are modern-day Albania, Greece, Rumania, Bulgaria, and they continued to press northward and westward, later seizing much of Hungary and threatening Vienna twice. Were these not parts of Europe, and was not a good deal of Europe, including what had been its most important city for a millennium, Constantinople, firmly in Muslim hands before Granada fell – and after?

But it would not do to remind readers that while the Muslim invaders and conquerors of Spain lost their last “stronghold” in Granada, other Muslim invaders and conquerors were busy at the other end of Europe, seizing lands and subjugating the native populations to the devshirme (the forced levy of Christian children) as well as to the jizyah (the tax on non-Muslims) and all the other disabilities that, wherever Muslims conquered, were imposed, as part of a clearly elaborated system, and not merely the whim a ruler, on all non-Muslims.

Now having begun with that year 1492, Armstrong has a bit of a problem. It was that year that Jews were forced to be baptized or to leave. But though Granada had fallen, nothing then happened to the Muslims. In fact, they were treated with the same gentleness that all the Mudejares (Spanish Muslims) who had been defeated, in successive campaigns, were always treated by the Christian victors.

Henry Lea, the pioneering historian of the Inquisition, who was hardly looking for ways to exculpate Christianity, describes the generosity with which the defeated Muslims were treated in Granada, and after the prior victories:

“It was the Jews against whom was directed the growing intolerance of the fifteenth century and, in the massacres that occurred, there appears to have been no hostility manifested against the Mudéjares. When Alfonso de Borja, Archbishop of Valencia (afterwards Calixtus III), supported by Cardinal Juan de Torquemada, urged their [the Mudejars] expulsion on Juan II of Aragon, although he appointed a term for their exile, he reconsidered the matter and left them undisturbed. So when, in 1480, Isabella ordered the expulsion from Andalusia of all Jews who refused baptism and when, in 1486, Ferdinand did the same in Aragon, they both respected the old capitulations and left the Mudéjares alone. The time-honored policy was followed in the conquest of Granada, and nothing could be more liberal than the terms conceded to the cities and districts that surrendered.

The final capitulation of the city of Granada was a solemn agreement, signed November 25, 1491, in which Ferdinand and Isabella, for themselves, for their son the Infante Juan and for all their successors, received the Moors of all places that should come into the agreement as vassals and natural subjects under the royal protection, and as such to be honored and respected. Religion, property, freedom to trade, laws and customs were all guaranteed, and even renegades from Christianity among them were not to be maltreated, while Christian women marrying Moors were free to choose their religion.

For three years, those desiring expatriation were to be transported to Barbary at the royal expense, and refugees in Barbary were allowed to return. When, after the execution of this agreement, the Moors, with not unnatural distrust, wanted further guarantees, the sovereigns made a solemn declaration in which they swore by God that all Moors should have full liberty to work on their lands, or to go wherever they desired through the kingdoms, and to maintain their mosques and religious observances as heretofore, while those who desired to emigrate to Barbary could sell their property and depart."

It was not until 1502, after difficulties ensued between Spanish authorities, including the famous Cardinal Ximenes (he of the Complutensian Polyglot), and the Muslims (Mudejares) that they were given the choice of expulsion or conversion. And a great many of them pretended to convert, and remained in Spain – far more Muslims were capable of engaging in dissimulation of their faith than were the hapless Jews, who were expelled, in 1492, virtually overnight. It was much later, in 1570, under Philip II, that the Muslims (“Moors”) who remained were finally expelled, having in the meantime risen in revolt.

But Armstrong manages to smugglein that first, rather ineffective expulsion of 1502: “later [i.e. in a different year altogether] Muslims were given the choice of Christianity or exile.” .She does not add, and may not know, that Muslims in Spain after the fall of Granada were not under any danger of expulsion, and it was only when they showed signs of refusing to integrate as asked (and it was assumed that over time they would share the Christian faith, though at first nothing was done to demand such a sign). She may not know, either, that Muslims in a Spain now everywhere ruled by Christians asked members of the ulema in North Africa (in present-day Morocco) to determine whether they might continue to live under non-Muslim rule, and were told that it was not licit, and it was important for them not to be ruled by non-Muslims, and they must, therefore, return to the Muslim-ruled lands of North Africa. Such details provide a rather different slant on what Karen Armstrong offers – she takes the real tragedy, the overnight expulsion of the hapless and inoffensive Jews, and attempts to make the reader think that the Muslims were equally inoffensive, equally harmless, and treated with equal ferocity, as the Jews. But they were not equally inoffensive, not equally harmless, and not treated with equal ferocity..

First comes the fall of Granada. Then, second in time, and certainly in Karen Armstrong’s indignation, came the expulsion of the Jews “In March, the Jews of Spain were also forced to choose between conversion and exile.” Note how that “also” is dropped in, as if the real event, the main event, was the nonexistent (in 1492) expulsion of the Moors, which she had taken care to slip into her discussion of the Fall of Granada, so that she could diminish the significance of the expulsion of the Jews. That afterthoughtish “also.”

But the Muslims were invaders and conquerors, who had been resisted for 500 years of the Reconquista, and were expelled merely across the Straits of Gibraltar from whence they had come, to live again among fellow Muslims, under Muslim rule. Armstrong never says that. Nor does she point out, as she would if she were trying to compare the quite different treatments of Jews and Muslims, that the Jews of Spain never invaded, never conquered, never represented a threat to the political or social order. And when they were expelled they were not to find refuge, like the Muslims, in lands ruled by co-religionists, but again, to be scattered, to Ottoman domains and to Christian ones, Salonika or Amsterdam, to be treated indifferently, or kindly, or with contumely, or worse.

Under Muslim rule, despite their sometimes horrendous treatment, as recorded by Maimonides in his “Epistle to the Yemen” (Maimonides fled Islamic Spain), the Jews managed to make important cultural contributions as translators (along with Christians), as physicians, and as poets (the name Judah Halevi comes to mind). They were perfecdtly willing to live in Spain under Christian rule. They did nothing to deserve their expulsion. But Karen Armstrong has sympathy for the Jews only insofar as that sympathy can be transferred to the real objects of her pity, the Muslims, and she will do nothing to cause readers to see the difference in the two cases, one of clear mistreatment, the second a matter of prudence. It took a full decade for the Spanish rulers and clergy, or some of them, to realize that the Muslims, though conquered, were not about to eventually mold into one faith (that faith being Christianity), and their signs of remaining insubmissive and therefore potentially subversive or rebellions could only disturbIt had taken 500 years for the Reconquista. Why should the Spanish Christians, now that they were militarily victorious everywhere, take a chance that the Muslims would not rise in revolt?

And such revolts took place in the sixteenth century, and led, in 1570, under Philip the Second, to a second and more thorough expuslon of those Muslims who had remained in Spain, and feigned outwardly to have accepted Christianity, but had quietly waited to rise in revolt. That is why the real expulsion of the Muslims (Moors) took place not in 1502, but in 1570, nearly 80 years since the fall of Granada which Armstrong appears to believe led ineluctably to the expulsion of the Moors. It did not.

Both Jews and Moors were expelled from Spain, but however determined Armstrong may be to convince us (most unconvincingly) that these were identical historical events, both prompted by the demonization of “the Other” ( a phenomenon which apparently results from the peculiar psychic deficiency of Christian Europe) they were not identical/ The phrase “the expulsion of the Jews and the Moors” comes trippingly off the tongue, but without more, remains an offense to history and the truth.

The third great event, after the conquest of the “last stronghold” of Islam in Europe, and the two “identical” expulsions of identically unthreatening Muslims and Jews, in that fateful 1492 was the voyage of Columbus: “In August, Christopher Columbus, a Jewish convert to Catholicism and a protege of Ferdinand and Isabella, crossed the Atlantic and discovered the West Indies.”

Note how casually Armstrong drops in her astonishing remark: Columbus was a “a Jewish convert to Catholicism.” She treats it as a given, and finds no need to offer sources or evidence. But she must. For there is not a single authority on Columbus who has ever claimed this. Not Samuel Eliot Morison. Not Paolo Taviani. Not Salvador de Madariaga. Not all of the hundreds or thousands of scholars who have written about Columbus. What some have suggested or argued, is that Columbus came from a family of Genoese wool merchants, that Jews were prominent in that trade, that there is other evidence that his family originally had been Jewish but generations before had converted (and since, without conversions, and slaughter, the numbers of Jews in Europe would now be not a few million but 200 million, quite a few people must have converted over time). This was Salvador de Madariaga’s argument, and that of others. It convinced Indro Montanelli, the celebrated Italian journalist and popular historian, and he was by nature a skeptic. But that has nothing to do with Columbus himself.

Armstrong offers no authority for her statement. But why should she? Her purpose here is twofold. What better way to establish, in her vulgar, “some-my-best-friends-and-discoverers-of-the-New-World-are-Jewish” way, than to claim Columbus for the Jews (of course, assuming that people still honor Columbus for his deeds of derring-do, which would exclude the Ward Churchills of this world). At the same time, she can have this “Jewish” Columbus be depicted as part of a larger problem, for now he, that “Jewish convert to Catholicism,” has embraced the (non-existent) aggressive military plans of Ferdinand and Isabella. Columbus did not obtain royal support to find a new trading route to the east (now that the Muslim conquests in Byzantium have totally blocked the overland routes), or – as of course he would – along the way to spread the Gospel, but to find the best route to “India, where Christians could establish a military base for another crusade against Islam.”

Having been transformed into a “Jewish convert to Catholicism,” Columbus can more conveniently be depicted by Armstrong as a Pentagon Proto-Neo-Con, Jewish-but-also-Christian-fundamentalist, off on his voyage to “establish a military base” for “another crusade against Islam.” A regular Donald Rumsfeld, negotiating for American bases in Uzbekistan. And Kyrgyzstan.

“A military base for another crusade against Islam” – what can we say? Armstrong appears to believe that the Crusades, which were limited in space to the recapture of the Holy Land, and in time to 200 years (1090-1290, roughly) in fact were some kind of permanent impulse, just the way the unmentionable (in all of Armstrong’s copious published vaporings on Islam) Jihad remains a permant and central feature of Islamic teaching. But she is wrong. There was no ongoing effort in 1492 to embark on a new Crusade. Not a word about it, from Columbus, from Luis Santangel, from Los Reyes Catolicos themselves.

And had such a thought occurred to someone, what kind of sense would it have made, militarily, to try to attack from India? Europeans may not have known how far India was from Europe by sea, but they knew that it was very far from the Holy Land (in fact, Columbus thought it was much closer to Europe – that was his happy miscalculation). By 1492, the southeastern part of Europe itself had been for many decades under constant military assault by the powerful Ottoman armies.

A few decades before, the first city of Christendom had fallen to the Ottoman Turks, to the Mulsims. How, with such constant dangers, could anyone even think of launching a new Crusade from India? How would tens of thousands of men be transported there, stationed there, and then transported again to the Holy Land? How would they make their way safely through the vast Muslim-controlled lands of Persia, of Mesopotamia, of Syria, in order to reach the Holy Land and fight the Saracens?

Armstrong’s nonsense perhaps has to do with some rude and indigestible bits of history that she dimly recalls, about the story of Prester John, the mythical Christian king of a mythical Christian kingdom, placed first, in European imaginations, in India, and later transferred to Ethiopia – a fable, designed to hearten European Christians who were always fearful of Muslim assaults, the Arab raiding parties by sea, up and down European coasts, and the Turkish land armies of the mighty Ottoman Sultan.

Her every word adds to the absurdity. There is no evidence for Armstrong’s assertions about Columbus himself, or about what motivated him. History is putty in her hands, we said earlier. But the word putty does not do her infantile approach to history justice. History is for Karen Armstrong not so much putty as Playdoh.

She can roll it about, she can pull it apart, she can twist and turn it with the same delight exhibited by a two-year-old when too-too-solid block of Playdoh is finally softened up for use by grown-up hands. But the two-year-old is an innocent at play, and even if he leaves a momentary mess, he has done no real harm. Karen Armstrong is not innocent, and manages to do a great deal of harm, careless or premeditated harm, to history. Too many people read that she has written a few books, and assume, on the basis of nothing, that “she must know what she is talking about” – and some of the nonsense sticks. And perhaps an enraged professor or two bothers to dismiss her, but mostly – this is how the vast public, in debased democracies, learns its history today. It is hearsay as history – “Karen Armstrong says” or “John Esposito says.”

And that is only her first paragraph."


April 22, 2005

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EUROPEAN SPINE IS CELEBRATED

Teddy Bear
Newspapers across Europe Wednesday reprinted the controversial cartoon of the Islamic prophet Mohammed that sparked worldwide protests two years ago. These cartoons provoked widespread outrage in the Muslim world two years ago where many innocent lives were lost. The move came one day after Danish authorities arrested three people allegedly plotting a "terror-related assassination" of Kurt Westergaard, the cartoonist behind the drawing.

Berlingske Tidende, was one of the newspapers involved in the republication by newspapers in Denmark. It said: "We are doing this to document what is at stake in this case, and to unambiguously back and support the freedom of speech that we as a newspaper always will defend," in comments reported by The Associated Press.

Newspapers in Spain, Sweden and the Netherlands also republished the drawing Wednesday as part of their coverage of Tuesday's arrests. The image, by Morgenavisen Jullands-Posten cartoonist Westergaard, was one of 12 cartoons about the Islamic mountebank originally published in September 2005. Westergaard's cartoon depicted the seventh century Arab warlord wearing a bomb as a turban with a lit fuse.

The artist himself is quoted as recently saying, "I have turned fear into anger and resentment." Yes, perhaps. And in this case, that's a good thing, a very good thing.

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Saturday, February 09, 2008

NEIL YOUNG LOSES HOPE

Canadian folk rock legend Neil Young said he has lost all hope that music can change the world, as he presented a documentary about his 2006 anti-war concert tour at the Berlin film festival on Friday.

"I know that the time when music could change the world is past. I really doubt that a single song can make a difference. It is a reality," Young told reporters, adding, "I don't think the tour had any impact on voters."

But the silver-haired frontman of the sixties supergroup Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young nonetheless dealt US President George W. Bush a stinging, back-handed insult and said his own "naive" urge to make people think remains intact.

Read it all.

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Thursday, February 07, 2008

DECONSTRUCTING THE UNHOLY ALLIANCE

Holy War and Anti-War: An Axis against Nature
by Walid Phares

The oddest of all factional relationships is the open alliance between the Jihadists and the so-called "antiwar" neo-Left movement in the West. The jumble of causes thrown together is mind-bending: globalization hobnobs with the caliphate, class struggle with Wahabism, proletariat with infidels, and North Korea with Palestine.

While still shedding each others' blood, the Reds (neo-Left) and the Dark Greens (Islamists) are conducting a joint offensive against both democracy-pushing America and the democracy-craving Middle East. They are not letting old or new grudges get in their way.

  • The Wahabis fiercely fought the Soviet Communists in Afghanistan;
  • the Muslim Brotherhood and the Marxists have been at each other's throats for decades;
  • the Salafists butchered left-wing intellectuals in Algeria and assassinated progressive bureaucrats in central Asia after the Soviet collapse;
  • the Taliban killed socialists and shut down art institutions;
  • the Khumeinist regime in Iran decimated the Tudeh Communist Party in the 1980's.

    Despite all the mutual mayhem across the Mediterranean and throughout the Middle East, an unnatural alliance was established by elites of the two camps, even while blood was being shed in the 1990's. Setting ideologies and history aside, the Islamist tacticians and neo-Left pragmatists gradually converged on a two-lane path against liberal democracies and the specter of a free market and pluralist Middle East.

    The Jihadi concern with Western involvement in the region is logical: free societies in the Arab and Muslim world, joined finally to the international community, would shatter fundamentalism's control of the region's political cultures. To have Arab and Iranian youths, in addition to minorities, hooking up directly with the peaceful and prosperous societies of the West would leave the Islamists without a base to recruit from.

    Jihadism is joined with the antiwar movement even while promoting "holy war," which is the essence of their rissala (mission). The ideology of the Salafists and Khumeinists is to prepare for, mobilize for, incite, and engage in a constant war of jihad against the infidels, who are supposed to be all those who aren't Islamists, including moderate Muslims.

    Theoretically, the jihadi connection to the antiwar concept is impossible. But in the realm of reality, it does occur, mainly because of the mutating "pragmatism" of both of the antidemocratic movements. The radical Islamists, as I argued in "Future Jihad", have undergone a strategic mutation that has allowed them to coalesce tactically with ideological foes, among them Baathists, Neo-Marxists, and anarchists.

    The last group, under an international neo-Left umbrella in the West, created the anti-war movement, which is reminiscent of the old Cold War Communist-controlled "peace movement."

    Islamists found it easier to insert themselves as partners in an "antiwar" movement than a "peace" movement. Effectively, in the jihadi aqida (doctrine), seeking permanent peace with others is a non-issue, given that jihad is constant, regardless of its form. Jihadism cannot accommodate a peace movement in principle.

    However jurisprudence based on al Haja (necessity) would allow the jihadists to accept an interim cessation of war and work in more sophisticated ways to stop wars that they cannot win. Thus it is in the interest of the radical Islamists to stop a war that can't be won by them, at least until the balance of power is restored and a winnable war becomes possible again. They are against the West's war for tactical reasons. But they are not at all in favor of peace until they win.

    In the case of the War on Terror, the "political Islamists" joined the "no war" crowd in order to stop the military efforts of the United States and its allies against the terrorist forces of the jihadists. Hence Islamic militants marched in the demonstrations against the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq as a way to give respite to the Taliban and al Qaeda. The antiwar movement exposed its broken rationale when it marched against some but not all wars. It demonstrated against the military efforts to overthrow the Taliban and Saddam but ignored the wars waged by the Sudanese regime against the African peoples in the south and Darfur; it marched against the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, but ignored the Syrian occupation of Lebanon.

    Worse, in the eyes of millions of Middle Easterners, were the highly publicized "red buses" filled with antiwar militants who headed to Iraq to "support" dictator Saddam Hussein. They traveled from London, Berlin, and Rome through Eastern Europe without a word in remembrance of its struggle against the Soviet occupation, and crossed Syria without comforting the thousands of political prisoners tortured and assassinated by the Baathist regime.

    And for an apex of irony, the buses rolled through sinister Halabja, a Kurdish town gassed by Saddam in 1988, and past the Shiites' mass graves, stopping only to "shield" Saddam's castles, built from oil revenues that rented the buses and lodged their occupants in fancy hotels. This antiwar movement was convenient for the jihadists, as it was a form of war against the rise of democracies in the region. For the movement, mostly bourgeois in nature, never showed up in Darfur, among Berbers in Algeria or Lebanese under Syrian occupation, or to shield women under the Taliban.

    Hence it wasn't surprising for viewers around the world to see the Islamist militants in Europe taking to the streets alongside the "bourgeois Neo-Marxists" to protest the governments that supported the War on Terror. In Europe, the most revealing action of the Islamist militants was when—in the same year as the red buses—they marched in support of the French government against U.S. intervention in Iraq, and then burned shops and cars in 200 French cities and towns during a "French intifada."

    The jihadi manipulation of the bourgeois-Neo-Marxist "struggle" has played a central role in the so-called "mass demonstrations" in the West since 2002, and the demonstrations themselves are an important component of the "War of Ideas" against democracy. On campuses, both in North America and Western Europe, the jihadi-antiwar axis has planted deep roots, and thanks to the skills of university-based anarchist groups, the jihadists have found a cover they can hide under, instead of simply becoming members of the typical Wahabi-controlled Muslim Student Unions.

    But this "marriage of convenience" with the extreme left has not deterred jihadists from conducting another, simultaneous, wedding with the extreme right. But that's another story.

    Dr. Walid Phares is a senior fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies and a visiting scholar at the European Foundation for Democracy. He is the author of "War of Ideas", "Future Jihad", and other books.

    A quite-thorough biography is available—within his web site, here

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