Until the advent of materialism and 19th c. dogma, Western Civilisation was superior to anything Islam had developed. Islam has not aided in the development of the modern world; in fact civilisation has only been created in spite of Islam. Proof of this resides in the 'modern' world and the unending political-economic and spiritual poverty of Muslim states and regions. Squatting on richer civilisations is not 'progress'. Islam is pagan, totalitarian, and irrational.
Who speaks out against the current genocide or faithocide of Christians by Moslems? The Church ? The foolish Pope who believes he is evolved star dust ? The Marxist-Moslem President of the US? The pro-Jihad UN [Useless Nations] ? Europe ? Russia ? China ? The great unwashed in Gabon, Ecuador, Costa Rica ? No one. Not a single state, leader, or international confab organization speaks out against the Moslem slaughter of Christians. Not a one. The posturing egocentrics are too busy worrying about Islamophobia, buying Moslem votes, or parading the failed multi-culti model through Islamifying Western capitals.
Ibrahim on the Moslem faithocide of Christianity.
“In November, 1914, during WWI, the Ottoman caliphate issued a fatwa, or Islamic decree, proclaiming it a “sacred duty” for all Muslims to “massacre” infidels — specifically naming the “Christian men” of the Triple Entente, “the enemies of Islam” — with promises of great rewards in the afterlife.
The same Koran verses that the Islamic State and other jihadi outfits regularly quote permeated the Ottoman fatwa, including: “Slay the idolaters wherever you find them — seize them, besiege them, and be ready to ambush them” (9:5) and “O you who have believed! do not take the Jews and the Christians for friends; they are but friends of each other; and whoever among you takes them for a friend, then surely he is one of them” (5:51) — and several other verses that form the Islamic doctrine of Loyalty and Enmity.
...
As happens to this day under the new caliphate — the Islamic State — the Ottoman caliphate crucified, beheaded, tortured, mutilated, raped, enslaved, and otherwise massacred countless “infidel” Christians. The official number of Armenians killed in the genocide is 1.5 million; hundreds of thousands of Greeks and Assyrians each were also systematically slaughtered (see this document for statistics).
(Although people often speak of the “Armenian Genocide,” often forgotten is that Assyrians and Greeks were also targeted for cleansing by the Ottoman caliphate. The only thing that distinguished Armenian, Assyrian, and Greek subjects of the caliphate from Turkish subjects was that the three former were Christian. As one Armenian studies professor asks, “If it [the Armenian Genocide] was a feud between Turks and Armenians, what explains the genocide carried out by Turkey against the Christian Assyrians at the same time?”)
Henry Morgenthau, the U.S. ambassador to the Ottoman Empire and personal witness of the atrocities, attested that “I am confident that the whole history of the human race contains no such horrible episode as this.” He added that what the Turks were doing was “a carefully planned scheme to thoroughly extinguish the Armenian race.” In 1918, Morgenthau wrote in Red Cross Magazine:
Will the outrageous terrorizing, the cruel torturing, the driving of women into the harems, the debauchery of innocent girls, the sale of many of them at eighty cents each [today the Islamic State sells enslaved Christians and Yazidis for as little as $43], the murdering of hundreds of thousands and the deportation to, and starvation in, the deserts of other hundreds of thousands, the destruction of hundreds of villages and cities, will the willful execution of this whole devilish scheme to annihilate the Armenian, Greek and Syrian [or Assyrian] Christians of Turkey – will all this go unpunished?
..
War was — and, as shall be seen, still is — a pretext to sate jihadi barbarity. Winston Churchill, who described the genocide as an “administrative holocaust,” correctly observed that “the opportunity [of World War I] presented itself for clearing Turkish soil of a Christian race.” Talaat Pasha, one of the Ottoman Empire’s “dictatorial triumvirate” during WWI, pointed out that “Turkey is taking advantage of the war in order to thoroughly liquidate its internal foes, i.e., the indigenous Christians, without being thereby disturbed by foreign intervention.”
A century later, consider how Christian minorities today are still being systematically decapitated, crucified, tortured, raped, and enslaved — also under the pretext of war. In every Arab nation the U.S. has helped oust (secular) autocrats — Iraq, Libya, Syria — indigenous Christian minorities have been massacred by the jihadi elements that were once contained by Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gaddafi, and Bashar Assad (read here for details).
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Finally, to understand how the Ottoman Genocide of Christians is representative of the modern-day plight of Christians under Islam in general, the Islamic State in particular, one need only read the following words written in 1918 by President Theodore Roosevelt — but read “Armenian” as “Christian” and “Turkish” as “Islamic”:
The Armenian [Christian] massacre was the greatest crime of the war, and the failure to act against Turkey [the Islamic world] is to condone it… the failure to deal radically with the Turkish [Islamic] horror means that all talk of guaranteeing the future peace of the world is mischievous nonsense.
Indeed, if we “fail to deal radically” with the “horror” currently being visited upon millions of Christians around the Islamic world — which in some areas has reached genocidal proportions according to the United Nations — we “condone it” and had better cease talking “mischievous nonsense” of a utopian world of peace and tolerance.
Put differently, silence is always the ally of those who would commit genocide. In 1939, on the eve of World WWII, Hitler rationalized his genocidal plans against the Jews, when he reportedly asked: “Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?”
And who speaks today of the ongoing annihilation of Christians under Islam?” [bold mine]
No one speaks for Christians. Not even the Vatican, the cowardly Church hierarchy that is terrified of criticizing a moon cult fascism from Mecca. Thousands of Christians are slaughtered, raped, forcibly converted each year. Hundreds of churches and artifacts pulled down and destroyed in the past 10 years. But the world does not care. The Pope is worried about Mother Earth and Marxist redistribution. Yet, if a barber in Rome were to cut a Moslem's hair incorrectly and angered the poor dear compassionate 'religious' Moslem....well, that would be the cause of a court case, international investigation and accusations of Islamophobia.
So burns the world.
Hilaire Belloc, the great Irish-French historian and writer, wrote in his opus 'The Crusades' the following truisms, lost within the mendacious and immoral modern multi-cultural mantra and meme:
“It is remarkable that the Mongol hordes, from their first wave onward, had fitted in at once with the social structure and creed of Islam. Why and how this was so has never been explained. It has not even been described. Their own bloody or absurd superstitions, barbaric as they were, without substance or philosophy, or reason, yielded at once to the religious spirit of the society into which they came. They became not only Mohammedan, but fanatically Mohammedan, and through their military power what had already begun to be the decline of the Mohammedanism recovered.”
Belloc, is referring to both the Mongols descended from the great destroyer Chinghis Khan; and the Turks. Both branches of the barbarous Mongol converted to the cult of Muhammad – or Mohammedanism, as Belloc rightly calls Islam. The Mongol-Turkish savagery and conversion to Islam, saved the cult of Mohammed from decay and death. The pre-civilized Turk scorned the Arab as weak and effeminate. Jihad so plainly and obviously the root and core of Mohammedanism; appealed to the atavistic barbarism of the Turk. As Belloc so aptly reasons, the Turk's own lack of intelligence, civilization, and reflection, made them the perfect creatures to adopt Mohammedanism. Islam appeals to the barbarous, not the civilized. It attracts the savagely fanatical.
“...'Turk'...a fierce lust for cruelty and mere destruction, and the letting in of that spirit and all its armed agents was the great and almost mortal wound delivered indirectly by Islam to the civilization of Europe. They burnt and unroofed and massacred everywhere in their campaigns....Their function was the function of the Destroyer, and from the first of the great names among them, Attila, to the very last modern massacre of the remaining Christians in Asia Minor [the Armenian and Assyrian genocides], they have brought with them nothing constructive – only death.” [p. 17]
This is an apt summary of Islam. Nothing but death. Wipe out the Infidel. Massacre the Christian. Rape the dhimmi and subservient untermensch. The Golden Age of Islam is a gigantic myth, concocted by Protestants, Atheists and Church haters. It white washes the true Islam revealed by Belloc. Jihadic, violent, primitive, bloody, and crude. Any 'development' during the age of Jihad from 632 to 1683 AD; was in spite of, not because of the cult of Muhammad. Arabs and Moslems offered precious little, except the Arabicization of non Moslem names and individuals, or the appropriation of the merits and advancements of conquered, subjected people and societies.
Belloc knew that Islam has and always will be a failure. We also should know this because the Arab Moslem world today is as sordid a barbarous mess as it was in the 7th century with the Arab devastation of the civilized world; or the 11th, when the Turk converted and pronounced an endless Jihad against civilization. Nothing has changed within Islam in 1400 years. Nothing ever will. It is death and destruction. That is all.
Pope Frank is a creature of Vatican II. A Marxist, devoted apparently to the non science of Evolution [read grade 9 bio chemistry as to why genetic software code does not 'mutate' to form new species]; globaloneywarming and other vacuity, Pope Frank is also weak on Islam. He imbibed this from Vatican II.
Vatican II opened wide the doors of 'progressivism' or humanist-Atheism and Marxism [which is what the 'progressive' theology is all about]. An example of the weakening of the Church, and appeasing the dark forces of 'liberalism' [a euphemism for 'progressivism']; is the redacted affirmation of Islam, an anti-Christian cult, dedicated to the eradication of Christianity [read Mein Koran or link here for more details]. As scholar Atila Sinke Guimaraes summarizes:
“In 1965, Vatican Council II promulgated an official document – the Declaration Nostra Aetate, which contain these words about Islam: 'The Church also has a high regard for the Muslims. They worship God, who is one, living and subsistent, merciful and almighty.....Over the centuries many quarrels and dissensions have arisen between Christians and Muslims. The sacred Council now pleads with all to forget the past....” [The Return of the Moslem Threat, p.20]
What a pathetic ode to ignorance. 'The sacred Council now pleads' which when translated means, 'The scared council now begs Moslems to please like the Church'. Or not. It is your choice dear, kind, benevolent, always compassionate Moslems, as devotees of 'God'. Allah of course means the Lord, not God, and it references Baal of Mecca, the moon deity. Arabs pre-Muhammad, were celestial worshipers, venerating as most Near Eastern cults [and indeed MesoAmerican] did, Venus, the Moon, and the Sun. Islam or submission has nothing whatsoever in common with Christianity. Not a damn thing. Anyone who understands Mein Koran, Mein Muhammad, and Moslem history knows this.
Since 1965 there have been over 250.000 Catholics killed by Moslems. In Nigeria in 2014 alone, some 12.000 Christians were murdered. That is one country, in just one year. Sex trading of Christian girls runs into the tens of thousands since Vatican II. Forced conversions abound in the hundreds of thousands. Hundreds of Catholic churches, monasteries and sacred places have been demolished, pulled down or set to fire. The 'pleading' from Vatican II in 1965 did nothing but convince Moslems that the Church was weak, its leadership illiterate and effeminate, and Christianity – as described in the Koran – as corrupt, wayward and inferior. No wonder the Jihad is so strident, so ruthless and so utterly immoral. Not even the Church deigns to protect Christianity.
Horvat relates the untold story of a corrupt Visigothic Bishop, named Oppas, who allied with other diseased elements within the Romano-Gothic Church in Spain; allowed and supported the Moslem invasion and subjection of Spain from 710 to 712. The craven Gothic Church, riven with intrigue openly fought against its own people. It was left to the Christian knight Pelayo to organize a small band of 1000 Christians in the mountainous north which in 722, miraculously wiped out a force of between 30-60.000 Moslem Jihadists. Thus began the reconquista and the re-civilizing of Spain.
Horvat's unknown point is this: without Church betrayal the Moslem hordes would never have been able to launch their Jihad and reduce Spain to 7 centuries of apartheid, with Jews and Christians reduced to second-class Dhimmi slaves and the region including southern France, cleaved open for sex-slaving, pillaging, raiding and barbarity. Revisionist Marxists term this a golden age of Islamic enlightenment. As with all 'enlightenments' there was precious little which was either redolent or civilized. In any case the Church aided in its own self-immolation. A trend we see in full train post Vatican II with the endless pleadings from Rome that Islam has nothing to do with Jihad, terror, or fascism and indeed, if you oppose Islam in the words of the great John Paul II, you must be a xenophobe or a racist.
Horvat: “...the battle between the Moors and the Christians in July of 711....For two days the fighting went on and the Christians were winning...Archbishop of Seville Don Oppas, the commander of one third of the Catholic forces, turned his weapons against his own countrymen and joined the enemy, the Moors. From that moment, the day was lost to the Christians.”
The 'liberal' rot within the Church has always run deep. The Crusader states were lost to Islamic fascism at the battle of Hattin in 1187 when as the expert Regine Pernoud states, in her first rate book, 'The Templars', Gerard de Ridefort the Grand Master of the Templars, treacherously made a deal with Saladin and the Moslems and marched his army to the barren wasteland of Hattin where it was easily surrounded, denuded of water and cover, and annihilated.
“..the master of the Temple, Gerard of Ridefort, was responsible for what happened that day at Hattin, and still more inexplicably he was the only one who was spared...It seems beyond doubt that in his case at least an open betrayal on the part of the master of the Order.” [p. 135]
Much the same happened some 477 years previously with the Moslem invasion of Spain. Indeed the Church connived with Moslems before their invasion, guaranteeing them free use of the port of Ceuta in North Africa, and assuring them of an unopposed landing. The last Visigothic King, Rodrigo, had no idea of the depth and malice within his own court and Church, and the incredible evil that Oppas the Archbishop of Seville and many others were capable of. Fittingly Pelayo captured Oppas at the battle of Covadonga [deep cave], in 722. He was imprisoned for life, fed water and bread, and slowly withered and died.
A curious feature of the popular imagination is the ignorant belief that only whites traded and used Black slaves. Slaving and slavery is largely conceived as a white-only crime, a crime against nature-loving peaceniks and aboriginals, in the quest for gold and riches, or in the case of the USA the use of slaves to build an agro-economy. This sentiment that whites are responsible for slavery is of course a gigantic nonsense and a lie. The greatest slavers of all time have been the Blacks themselves, alongside the Arabs and Muslims. In both Black and Muslim states slave trading and ownership still goes on. Yet no one will discuss it. It does not fit in with the zeitgeist of hating Whitey.
You
hear it all the time from the left, and from misinformed citizens.
'Well the average Muslim is a pretty peaceful fellow, and Christians
can be as bad as Muslims.' The idea that somehow Islam can be equated
with Christianity, or that Christian 'extremists' are as active and
dangerous as Muslim 'extremists', is more than remarkably ignorant -
it is insane.
The two creeds have nothing, absolutely
nothing, in common. In fact Islam is the opposite in many ways of
what Christianity stands for. This is not to say that the average
Muslim is a terrorist or a fascist. That too is ridiculous. But it is
the ideology, not the individual which counts.
Russian
Communist grandmothers were hardly a threat to Western superiority,
nor was the individual dimwit marching Nazi goon. Castro's prison is
full of nice, ordinary but brainwashed personalities – none of whom
pose as individuals a threat to US interests. Iran is populated by a
large, intelligent, and hard-working population, and its citizens are
well known to be hospitable people – hardly a threat at the
individual level to a Jew in Tel Aviv. In these countries and others
it is the ideology – most of it state manufactured and created –
which is relevant.
Islam was conceived in the 7th
century as a political-military-state unifying ideology to compete
with and usurp Judaism and Christianity. It is based on a 3000 year old Arab
moon cult. Allah is al-ilah or the male moon deity of Mecca. The
Arab-Muslim calendar is still a lunar based calendar – one that was
used for thousands of years in Arabia. The crescent moon is an
obvious expression of Islam's roots, and the worship of the stone
idol or Kabbah in Mecca, another obvious example of Islam's pagan
past.
The entire theory demands submission by the
individual to the cult. This is the lethality of Islam. It is a vast
communal surge of feeling, supremacism, and universal will to power.
Islam demands that the 'umma' will dominate the globe. To someone
living in white-bread Kansas this might seem laughable. To a
Christian circa 1950 in Beirut, the one-world umma also seemed to be
a joke – until Islam conquered Lebanon in the 1990s.
Mohammed
and his followers were as much politicians as they were false
preachers and they created a pagan cult in which religious,
existential and moral ideals were fused with state power. It does not
have the golden rule; the ten commandments; the idea of private
property; concepts of individuality; injunctions about personal
responsibility and obligations; nor any of the ethics we find in the
parables; the psalms or in the book of Matthew – one of the seminal
books on philosophical meditation ever devised.
Even the
concept of God is different between the two 'faiths'. Muslim
activists in the West have been illegitimately claiming that they
worship the same God as Christians, in order to gain legitimacy and
media-cultural acceptance. This is of course a lie. Muslims will even
use 'God' in place of Allah in many translations of the Quran.
Al-ilah's antecedents have nothing in common with Jewish theology,
or the Old Testament monotheism, which the Jews developed in an area
of the world, including Arabia, which practicted pan-theism and were
sun, moon, or earth cults.
The Muslim idea that they
worship the same God as Christians comes from this Sura [29-46] in
which the political-military leader Mohammed stated, in the very
early stages of Islam's development when he was trying to win
Jewish-Christian support, 'We believe in What has been sent down to
us and sent down to you, our God is the same as your God.' This
statement was made before Islam became powerful. After Mohammed took
Mecca and united the Arab tribes, suddenly the Christian God was not
the same as Allah. Mohammed received a 'revelation' from Allah which
then tells him to "Fight those who believe not in God nor the
last day...Nor acknowledge the religion of truth (Islam), (even if
they are) of the people of the Book, until they pay Jizya (tribute
tax) with willing submission, and feel themselves subdued.' [Surah
9:29]
Suddenly once the Muslims had power, the
Christians and Jews were inferiors, targeted for taxation and private
property theft; and identified as believing in an inferior theology.
How consistent.
The idea of 'God' as well is radically
different in Islam. In Christianity God is largely anthropomorphic
with human qualities – especially in the Old Testament. He is a
personal God. In Islam no one knows what Allah is. It is certainly
not a personal, humanistic idol or 'God'. It is something impersonal,
unknowing – something you would expect from a moon cult. How can
one know the idol deity who represents a phase of the moon ?
In
fact this 'Allah' seemed pretty content to give Mohammed whatever
revelations or help Mohammed needed be it for sex, to steal someone's
wife, engage in war; receive booty; undertake the theft of property;
or simply to kill Jews, Christians and his Arab enemies. The only
personal aspect to Allah is his 'relationship' with the fascist
Mohammed, as Mohammed's favorite wife [he had about 13] Aisha, once
scornfully remarked, 'O Allah's Apostle, I do not see but that your
Lord hurries in pleasing you.' [Al-Bukhari Vol 7:48].
Allah
is not a personal God in the Christian sense – a god with human
qualities and a human understanding. Allah is an unknowable idol of
worship who only had a personal relationship with Mohammed. For the
average Muslim they must just submit to Allah – not try to
understand what it is. In fact Mohammed never explains what Allah is
and there is no description in the Qu'ran of what Allah might be. For
the Arabs there was no point in describing Allah – everyone knew
that it was the pagan idol of the moon's summer passing.
There
is very little between Islam and Christianity which is common – in
fact almost nothing. Islam is a universalist, supremacist and overtly
racist creed. Denigrations of Jews, Christians, and even 'desert
Arabs', or Arabs not from the family tribe of Mohammed or his core
followers are legion in the Quran. This is not to suggest that a
Muslim has any such personal beliefs. Most likely the average Muslim
is just the same as the average Christian, eco-cult member or
agnostic - or maybe not. We don't know. You can't generalise from the
individual to the mass.
The core of Islam's problem is
of course the creed as written in the Quran. It is the ideology, not
the individual which is important. Russian Communism like German
fascism had to be destroyed. It was not the individual who was the
problem though that certainly was the case for the misguided tens of
millions who supported the fascism. It was the ideology and its
demands which had to be destroyed. One reason why Russia for example,
has slid so easily back into a gang-run state was that the Cold War
victory never removed the Communist criminals and never wiped out the
cult's ruling class. Without the military destruction of the ideology
and its ruling caste, the vestiges and ill effects of its pernicious
intellectualisation; supremacism and will to power cannot be
erased.
Islam's ideology has almost no compatibility
with Western ideals. Since 9-11 there have been 26.000 plus Muslim
attacks killing and wounding over 1 million people. How many
Christian attacks has there been? Western armies have liberated 50
million in Iraq and Afghanistan from fascist Arab-Muslim regimes.
When has Islam liberated anyone ? Muslims have mosques in every major
Western city and openly demonstrate, worship and make societal
demands. The opposite cannot be said for Jews and Christians, even in
liberated Iraq. So which civilisation demonstrates the tolerance,
humility and self-denial which is witnessed in the Bible or is
supposedly such a central tenet of the Quran ?
Say what
you want about Christians but the creation of the modern world comes
from the reality-based doctrines of Christianity. Christians stopped
the slave trade and were instrumental in creating rights and laws for
non-white civilisations as European power expanded globally.
Christianity informed the creation of the modern world and gave
impetus to the creation of modern appliances and concepts in
everything from schools, to hospitals, to business. All of this has
benefited non-White, non-Christian peoples. Throughout the globe
Christian morality and the desire to do good is a prevalent force
whether the average agnostic, earth cult lover, or atheist believes
it to be true or not.
The West and Christianity are
quite imperfect, but their cultural ethos has nothing in common with
the Arab-Muslim pagan cult of a Meccan moon deity. We should keep
that in mind when we hear another ignoramus inform the world that
Christianity and Islam are the same and that Christian terrorism is
as historically prevalent as Islamic. These are absurd and ignorant
claims.
One of the greatest mistakes in modern history is not learning from the Meccans and their 'tolerance' of mad Muhammad's gibberish, now pronounced a 'religion'. Today some 50-65 million Moslems squat in Western lands, with at least 50% of those immigrants believing in Sharia Barbarism [it is not a Law], and fully aware [unlike most Westerners] that Islam is incompatible with Western ideals. The number of Moslems in Western states will reach 100 million in the next generation. Jihad, Sharia Barbarism, sex-slaving of young girls, necks smitten in city streets and another 9-11 are assured.
Witness the failure of the Meccans to kill Muhammad and do the world a favor.
Mimicking our own collective stupidity, one of the great mistakes in all of history, was the rather incomprehensible charity shown by the Meccans to the ruling tribe's mad poet, Muhammad. Sowing dissension, garbling Judaic-Christian scripture, insulting the Meccan pantheon, disrupting society, fomenting social discord should have earned the mad poet a parting of his head from his sloped shoulders. Instead, the Meccans threw the small cult of Muhammadans out of their city, and on to Medina, and eventual mastery of Arabia they went.
As the historian Gilchrist notes, the Hijra, or flight from Mecca to Medina, was part a preparation for Jihad. This was well understood during the time of Muhammad, and in the early centuries following his murder by fellow-Moslems. The Meccans would eventually see their city conquered by the mad poet at the head of 10.000 men, who smashed their idols, enshrined Arab paganism as divine, and ordered the Meccans to only follow Baal, the family deity of Muhammad, and the Lord or ilah of Mecca.
“In the old Arab law, the Hijra did not merely signify rupture with his native town, but was equivalent to a sort of declaration of war against it. (Lammens, Islam: Beliefs and Institutions, p. 27)
We have already seen how closely related the Hijrah was to the active policy of jihad which immediately followed it and it comes as no surprise to find the inevitable conquest being pursued two years after the truce [between Muhammad and Mecca]. A small provocation by the Banu Bakr, a tribe allied to the Quraysh, on the Banu Khaza'ah, allied to Muhammad, was all he needed to declare the treaty broken. Abu Sufyan, aware that the balances were now tilted well in Muhammad's favour, went to Medina to restore the treaty but Muhammad refused to accommodate him and he returned to Mecca empty-handed.”
Muhammad out of self-interest of course, spared the population and the city from Jihadic destruction. As Mehmed II would say of his annihilation of Constantinople, he needed a capital, not a corpse. Interestingly, mad Muhammad butchered the Koranic verse scribe writer, who was charged with recording the frequent and quite convenient revelations from Baal to Muhammad. Apparently the scribe knew a fraud when he saw one, and being so close to the mad poet, understood perfectly well the nonsense that was Muhammad's 'prophecy':
“[After Mecca was conquered] A dozen leading opponents were proscribed though only a few were eventually executed. Two were apostates from Islam, one was a poetess who had particularly irked Muhammad with her satires, and the last was one of two Meccans who had assaulted Muhammad's daughter Zaynab as she fled Mecca for Medina. The others escaped either by hiding themselves or by seeking pardon. One case is of particular interest.
One of these men was Abdullah ibn Abu al Sarh who once converted to Islam and wrote down the revelation for Muhammad, but who then apostatized, returned to Quraysh, and there spread tales about his falsification of the revelation. (Haykal, The Life of Muhammad, p. 410).”
If Muhammad was truly a 'messenger' why would his scribe apostasy and declaim against him?
In any event the madness of Western multi-culturalism, imitates that of the Mecan charity towards the nascent Islamic cult. Apparently that policy did not work out too well for the Meccans.
Modern history’s judgment on the Crusades has been severe and myopic, set as it is on portraying this glorious episode of Christian history as morally evil. When I praise the Middle Ages, I sometimes have young Catholics defiantly respond, “All right, all right. But how do you justify the Crusades?” Indoctrinated by revisionist history books and inter-religious study courses, they have accepted the false verdict that the Crusades were nothing more than a condemnable act of intolerance in the name of God.
Further, many of these youth have been adversely influenced by innumerable apologies for the Crusades from so many high-placed Catholic Prelates, religious, and educators of the post-Vatican II progressivist Church. Let me give only a few examples:
* During a visit to Syria this year (2001), Pope John Paul II himself visited a mosque and asked forgiveness of the Muslims “for Christian offenses and violence of the past” (1)
* On July 15, 1999, the 900th anniversary of the fall of Jerusalem to the Crusaders, a party of Christians, claiming to be acting in the name of Christ and as supposed descendents of Crusaders, paraded round the wall of the Old City to publicize a personal apology to Muslims for the Crusades (2).
This small incident says a lot: A new Catholic high school in San Juan Capistrano (CA) chose the team name Crusaders, only to have the name vetoed by the board because “it would be offensive to Muslims, who were targets of the bloody crusades of the Middle Ages “ (3).
To accept blame when one is at fault is, or course, good. But in the above cases, the apologizers and reconciliators only show that they have misinterpreted history.
First, they do not understand what motivated the West to a just war: The Crusades were waged to recover the Holy Sepulchre, which had become the target of constant profanation by the Muslims, for the defense of Christian pilgrims, and for the recovery of Christian territory. They constituted a defensive reaction against the Islamic threat.
Second, they do not understand the aggressive nature and fanaticism of Islam (founded by Mohammed, who lived from about 570 to 632 AD), which had been in conflict with Christianity since the Muslim conquests of the 7th century, and had as its goal the imposition of its religion and Mohammedan law on all Europe.
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The anger, frustration and fear roused in all Americans at the September 11 attack on the East Coast provide an opportunity to make the Crusades more comprehensible. There are surprising parallels between the two events. Both then and now, there were:
1. the peril of losing valuable religious principles, such as freedom of worship;
2. a perceived physical threat to fellow countrymen;
3. the injury experienced at losing a landmark site;
4. the sense that what is at stake is nothing less than the survival of Western civilization.
Those who rant and rave against the Crusades may soon find the ground shifting beneath them as they share in a new consensus, which, at base, is not so different from that which supported the medieval religious war they are condemning. Today’s call for a war on moral grounds is not so different from that of the Pope who called on Christians throughout Europe to come to the defense of Christendom “out of love of God and their neighbor” (4).
4. Jonathan Riley-Smith, What were the Crusades? (London, 1977), pp. 13-14.
A threat to fellow Christians
Since the third century, a favorite site of pilgrimage for Christians was the Holy Land. When Islam burst out of Arabia and took control of the Middle East in the seventh century, pilgrimages to the Holy Land became more difficult, but never ceased.
But the great age of pilgrimage began with the 10th century. In Palestine, the most beloved site of pilgrimage, the lot of the Christians was no longer so bad, and men and women of every class and age, sometimes travelling in parties numbering thousands, journeyed by sea or the land route to visit “the Sepulchre of the Lord which is in Jerusalem.” The Fatimid Arabs who were governing Palestine were lenient, trade was prospering, and pilgrims were welcomed for the wealth they brought to the province.
This period of relative peace came to an abrupt halt at the end of the 10th century. The Arabs were displaced as governors of the holy places by the Seljuk Turks, who reinvigorated the dwindling military spirit of Islam, and again made the call for jihad, or holy war. Their aim was the same as it has been since the inception of Islam, which does not mean “peace,” despite the strange and insistent claims of this seen in the newspapers today.
In fact, the word Islam means submission, and not just a passive submission to the book of Islam, the Koran. Submission for the followers of Mohammed means to carry out the will of Allah in history. The Muslim doctrine of the jihad, or holy war, stemmed from the ideas of the prophet himself—that is, that it was Allah’s will for a permanent war to reign until the rule of Islam extended over all the world. Hence Islam’s political domination could be, and was, spread by the sword. This is why Hillaire Belloc predicted almost a century ago that the West could again see a threat from Islam:
“It very nearly destroyed us. It kept up the battle against Christendom actively for a thousand years, and the story is by no means over; the power of Islam may at any moment re-arise” (5).
5. Hillaire Belloc, The Great Heresies, Chapter Four
Site link where this was published by Martin T. Horvat, Phd.
One has to be fearfully uneducated to believe propaganda without casting a rational doubting eye upon the claim and claimant. 'Enlightenment' philosophes pious in their Atheism or Protestant belief systems, looking upon 500 year old Cathedrals and pronouncing them 'Gothic', a pejorative for barbaric – are hardly the bien pensants that one should listen to or believe. Their ignorance is not 'science' or 'fact'. The great structures of worship which beguile and beckon tourists today can hardly be the outputs of a 'dark age', as mythical and as ridiculously inane as that term is. An age which invented everything imaginable from books to eye-glasses, and blast furnaces to massive grinding mills was not dark.
Witness bathing. The big brains say that the Medieval Christian, toothless, wearing sackcloth, with long shaggy hair, never knew a bath, and when they did, they ran from water as a cat runs from a dog. This is an oft-repeated Moslem lie, as if Islam has invented anything other than Jihad, sex slaving and death. Bathing was common in Roman Europe and that tradition was certainly embedded in the superior culture which followed the non-existent 'fall of Rome'. [Rome was dead long before 476 AD.] Bathing was known, common and at times, a community event in Medieval Europe [which brought its own problems of lack of privacy and even prostitution].
Bathing
and bouquets
Marian Horvat, Phd. "The next time you are washing
your hands and complain because the water temperature isn't just how
you like it, think about how things used to be. Here are some facts
about the 1500's:
Most people got married in June, because they
took their yearly bath in May and still smelled pretty good by June.
However, they were starting to smell, so brides carried a bouquet of
flowers to hide the body odor. Hence the custom today of carrying a
bouquet when getting married.
|
|
These are not facts, but
falsehoods.
Many people
married in May or June because they were Catholics and the Church
wisely proscribed marriages from being celebrated during the Lenten
season, a time of abstinence and penance. By the way, this pious law
continued to be followed by good Catholics until Vatican II swept out
so many of the good traditions that developed in the Age of
Faith.
As for the
yearly-bath myth, medievalists have long laid to rest the idea that
people rarely bathed in the Middle Ages. The Middle Ages was a period
of hygiene and cleanliness. The
first bit of evidence we have is the prevalence of soap,
a common product used for washing clothes and washing people. Next,
there are multiple references in literature and manuscripts to
bathing, treated matter-of-factly, as something common place.
Charlemagne, for example, used to bathe each morning in a large pool
or river, where he would meet with his ministers, who were also
invited to bathe.
Bathing was part of a ritual
before certain ceremonies, such as knighthood, and in the romances of
chivalry we see that the laws of hospitality required offering guests
a bath before they dined.
|
Scenes from 14th century thermal baths houses, popular at the time. The establishments were served by river currents |
The first
etiquette manuals (13th century), as well as the various monastic
Rules, specified washing the hands before eating, and keeping the
hair, fingernails and clothing clean. Clearly, washing was frequent –
there is evidence all over the place for people washing their hands,
faces and feet on a daily basis.
Monastic
rules usually had previsions that stipulated washing one’s hair and
bathing once each week, usually on a certain day. We can also see how
the medievals utilized running rivers or streams. The monks of Cluny
were the first to take advantage of the nearby running stream to use
as a type of indoor plumbing system. One can still find there
numerous lavatories close to the refectories.
A
saying in France from those days shows how cleanliness was considered
one of the pleasures of existence:
Venari, ludere, lavari, bibere; Hoc est vivere!
(To hunt, to play, to wash, to drink, - This is to live!)
One
thing I might add, care should be taken not to attribute to the 13th
century the revolting uncleanliness of the 16th and subsequent
centuries which, in France at least, has continued up to our own
time.
As
for the bridal bouquet, it was one of numerous beautiful symbolic
customs that developed around the Sacrament of Matrimony that we have
inherited. For the medieval mind, which saw in all nature a
reflection of the Creator, each flower had a symbolic value and
displayed a message.
Orange
blossom, popular for bridal bouquets, denoted chastity, purity and
loveliness. A sprig of ivy was included in bouquets as a symbol of
fidelity. Roses represented love, and the lily of the valley,
happiness, and so on. The flowers of the bridal bouquet had real
meaning; they were not meant to disguise foul odors from a supposedly
unwashed bride and groom."
ISIS is just following the 1500+ verses of Kufar-hate in Mein Koran. Dominate, tax, control, slaughter, rape....all is justified for Baal the iLah of Mecca, or the moon god of Muhammad. In Mein Koran of course Muhammad is often-times conflated with, and confused with, the iLah or Lord. But, as with other communal fascisms such as National Socialism, or Communism, the annihilation of the individual, of rights, freedoms, free-speech, and religion all leads to the same penury, destruction and eradication of civilization. ISIS territory looks more like 1980 Moscow than a 'liberated' Moslem state.
[lines for food, consumer items...]
Doesn't anyone wonder why the Moslem world is such a mess ? 50% of marriages are 2nd or first cousins. Inbreeding does not lead to genetic improvement. Over half of females are illiterate. Little in the way of innovation or advancement can be traced back to Islam current or past. The modern Islamic world is a mess, why would the medieval Moslem world be any better ? Culture is King, and when your culture is shaped by the fascistic barbarity of Mein Koran under the leadership of Mein Muhammad, it stands to reason that you will create nothing but an impoverished, illiterate mess.
“According to the document, Islamic State is enforcing the gruesome rules as it wants the population to fear God, in order for them to “enter into His mercy”. Earlier this year the UN reported that children are not exempt from IS’s torturous regime, but have been crucified or buried alive alongside adults when found guilty of crimes including refusal to convert to Islam. Young people with mental disabilities have been used as suicide bombers or as human shields during battle.” Link
Only the brain dead don't see Islam for what it really is.
From Maxwell to Einstein. There is no corollary within Islam of course, though I am sure Phds are being minted confirming that Maxwell received all of his input and inspiration from some non-existent Moslem science during the Golden Age. Indeed electro-magnetic theory was no doubt discovered in the mythical Cordoba of the 9th century....
In the modern pagan cults which dominate society – Islam is civilization, warming, the earth mother, atheism, fish-to-men, relativity, exploding everything from nothing – a serious appreciation for life, grace, beauty and existence is given short shrift. The so-called 'Enlightenment' disparaged a thousand years of European progress, belittling the Catholic society that somehow survived the Moslem Jihad, the Vikings, Magyars and Avars, various plagues, famines and 'climate change', not to mention creating modern science, math, medicine, architecture and universities. Books so beloved by the smug 'intellectual', were a medieval creation.
In the modern age we take nuclear power – for good and bad – as a given. Yet it was only developed in the West. It is rather easy for anyone with enough initiative to trace out the direct line from medieval science, the 13th century to the 19th century, and the Christian scientist Maxwell, who provided the key insight which led to our usage of safe nuclear power. I don't see a Moslem lineage or equivalent technological development.
In 1864 Maxwell gave a presentation to the Royal Society of London titled: 'A Dynamic Theory of the Electro-Magnetic Field'. He stated:
“We
have strong reason to conclude that light itself - including radiant
heat and other radiation, if any - is an electromagnetic disturbance
in the form of waves propagated through the electro-magnetic field
according to electro-magnetic laws.”
Historian of science one Professor R V Jones made the observation that: “This paper is the first pointer to the existence of radiation other than light and heat, and ranks as one of the greatest leaps ever achieved in human thought.”
Maxwell did not have a Phd. He was Christian. According to the cults of science today, this would mean that nothing he said or did would be 'scientific'. He would not be allowed an academic post in today's university system of cultish belief and group think.
By calculating the speed of electromagnetic waves, Maxwell postulated that light is a form of electromagnetic radiation exerting pressure and carrying momentum. This is a crucial insight and as Jones states, one of the most germane in the entire history of human thought. Maxwell's experiential data provided the basis for Einstein's work on relativity from which the relationship between energy, mass and velocity contributed to the theory underlying the development of atomic energy. Einstein was another scientist sans a Phd, a deist [though not a believer in the Christian ideal of God]; and today would not be qualified to teach in a university because he would not garner enough grant money. Such is the reduction of science in its purity and purpose.
And then he saw the light....Pierre Duhem (1861–1916) was a French physicist and historian of science. Before 1904 this famous scientists was quite certain that all of chemistry and physics, including mechanics, electricity, and magnetism, could be understood from thermodynamic first principles [law of matter and energy]. In this regard, saturated in the 'Enlightenment' and Atheist propaganda that no science was known before Voltaire, he regarded the Middle Ages as bereft of scientific advancement. Like many others who actually decided to study the subject he proved himself utterly wrong.
Duhem converted to the common-sense idea of what some call, 'continuity' and incremental change in scientific understanding. It was not dark for 1000 years, and then presto! the light shone and Galileo an earnest Catholic appeared. Copernicus and Newton both stated that they owed their achievements to the insights and labor of others. Some 500 medieval scientists in all manner of disciplines could be named.
It was Duhem who began to bring light and understanding to the subject of medieval science. In 1904, he found an unusual reference to a then-unknown medieval thinker, Jordanus de Nemore (d. 1260). From this small beginning Duhem invented the history of medieval science. Where Duhem's previous histories had been silent or negative about pre-1600 science in the Middle Ages, Les origines de la statique contained a number of chapters on the subject with one considering the impact of Jordanus de Nemore; another his followers; and a third argued about their influence on Leonardo de Vinci.
In his second volume of the same name, Duhem greatly extended his historical scope returning to the middle ages, spending four chapters on geostatics, including the work of Albert of Saxony in the fourteenth century. This investigation formed the basis of Duhem's best book on the subject of Middle Age science, Etudes sur Léonard de Vinci, and Le Système du monde, in which his thesis of the continuity of late medieval and early modern science is illustrated and quite proven.
From
1906 to 1913, Duhem studied the scientific notebooks of Leonardo de
Vinci and published a series of essays uncovering de Vinci's medieval
sources and their influences on the moderns. This was an important
link in the continuity thesis. Da Vinci and his 'Renaissance'
contemporaries were undoubtedly part of the Middle Ages and owed a
great deal to what preceded them. Common sense would confirm this.
In Etudes
sur Léonard de Vinci Duhem's
proposed the obvious and correct impression that Galileo's efforts
were all preceded by a medieval heritage:
When we see the science of Galileo triumph over the stubborn Peripatetic philosophy of somebody like Cremonini, we believe, since we are ill-informed about the history of human thought, that we are witness to the victory of modern, young science over medieval philosophy, so obstinate in its mechanical repetition. In truth, we are contemplating the well-paved triumph of the science born at Paris during the fourteenth century over the doctrines of Aristotle and Averroes, restored into repute by the Italian Renaissance. (1917, 162; 1996, 193.)
Duhem presented Galilean dynamics as a continuous development out of medieval dynamics. We know of course, that this is entirely true, yet in the early 20th century it was a heresy. He recovered the late medieval theory of impetus, tracing it from John Philoponus' criticism of Aristotle, to its maturity in the fourteenth century works of John Buridan and Nicole Oresme:
“The role that impetus played in Buridan's dynamics is exactly the one that Galileo attributed to impeto or momento, Descartes to ‘quantity of motion,’ and Leibniz finally to vis viva. So exact is this correspondence that, in order to exhibit Galileo's dynamics, Torricelli, in his Lezioni accademiche, often took up Buridan's reasons and almost his exact words” (1917, 163–62; 1996, 194).”
Duhem
then sketched the extension of impetus theory from terrestrial
dynamics to the motions of the heavens and earth. No one since the
Christian era began had ever believed in a flat earth, and many
Middle Age scientists were convinced that the earth was not the
center of the universe. Gravity was known long before Galileo:
“Nicole Oresme attributed to the earth a natural impetus similar to the one Buridan attributed to the celestial orbs. In order to account for the vertical fall of weights, he allowed that one must compose this impetus by which the mobile rotates around the earth with the impetus engendered by weight. The principle he distinctly formulated was only obscurely indicated by Copernicus and merely repeated by Giordano Bruno. Galileo used geometry to derive the consequences of that principle, but without correcting the incorrect form of the law of inertia implied in it. (1917, 166; 1996, 196.)”
Duhem went further and linked Albert of Saxony [from the 14th century] whose works were printed and reprinted during the sixteenth century, to Galileo. Duhem's key to understanding the transmission of medieval science was Galileo's use of the phrase Doctores Parisienses, which indicated the Parisian scholars Buridan and Oresme, amongst others. Duhem had rightly conjectured that Galileo had used George Lokert's biography of Albert of Saxony, along with the works of the Dominican Domingo de Soto (1906–13, III.582–83). Duhem's thesis, then original, has been confirmed through the studies of A. C. Crombie, Adriano Carugo, and William Wallace.
Duhem, when confronted with the evidence, apostasied, changed his mind and provided important proof that the Middle Ages certainly built and informed the era of modern science.
We are told that there was a 'revolution' in the 17th century in science. The implication is that science, or our modern understanding of it, just suddenly popped up, rising out of the mud and superstition of a 'dark age'. This sounds more like propaganda and claptrap than a real history of science. Most 'breakthroughs' are built on the careful accumulation of change and experimentation. Most 'revolutions' are firmly rooted in past events and precursors. Very little erupts at once, caused by a singular combination of events and energy. It stands to reason, as two of the more famous Christian scientists one could name out of 200 Newton and Copernicus admitted, that great insights stand on the shoulders of those who have laboured before.
Atheist-marxist-positivist histories of science either ignore or denigrate the achievements of medieval natural philosophers and scientists. These types studiously ignore the creation of algebra [Diophantus 2nd c AD], physics, calculation of the earth's sphericity, motion theorems, mean speed theorems, advanced geometry [see Descartes], objective experimentation [11th century], the University system [11th c or earlier], engineering [Gothic cathedrals], and the hundreds of inventions from optics [glasses, 13th c], to modern pants, to water milling wheels and the blast furnace. It seems rather odd that modern atheist academics wearing glasses, pants and reading books, would be so inclined to hate the medieval period.
A key objection that 'Enlightenment thinkers' had against the Christian Medieval period was its supposed faith in Aristotle. This is simply untrue [see here]. There were major groups within Christendom that either totally or partially rejected Aristotleian theorem in the natural sciences [Augustine, Siger et al]. Most of Aristotle is utterly wrong and medieval man knew this. His philosophical writings were in the main more compatible with the Christian view and since Aristotle represented the thought of the ancient world, it seems only fitting and rational that the Christian era would attempt to both understand and reconcile ancient Greek philosophy with medieval science. The supposedly rational 'Enlightenment' did not understand this, and such a fact only highlights its bigotry.
Apparently the 'Enlightenment' did not know that Aristotle's writings were condemned in 1277 as being contrary to scripture and observable evidence [Aristotle believed in many phenomena which were simply disproved by science]. The famed history of science philosopher Pierre Duhem, who in the early 20th century pioneered the investigation into medieval science, believed these condemnations of 1277 implied the rejection of the idea that the universe had to be the way Aristotle thought it had to, and the birth of the realisation that the workings of the universe had to be empirically determined. In other words they were a step forward for science. We see this evidenced in the neo-Platonism of Copernicus and Kepler – again in opposition to Aristotle - had developed in Italy through the late Middle Ages while the insistence on an intelligible and rational universe is found throughout scholastic natural philosophy, embedded within an independent University system.
Historian James Hannam, himself not that sympathetic to the Catholic Medieval viewpoint admits that science, in whatever method it arrived [a sudden leap, or a slow transformation], did present itself only in Christian Europe. Surely this must confound the modern Marxist and Atheist:
“Despite the huge volume of modern scholarship on the scientific revolution, there is no agreed answer to the question of why it happened in Western Europe in the seventeenth century and not elsewhere or earlier. Some theories include: sociologist Robert Merton’s suggestion of Puritanism provided the conditions for science, Thomas Kuhn’s system of normal science and revolution, Frances Yates claiming credit for hermetic magic, Duhem and Stanley Jaki for Catholic theology and Lynn White’s contention that the driving force was provided by technological change. No single theory has proved entirely satisfactory or convincing, as they tend to look either at internal or external causes rather than a combination. For the external environment, the medieval contribution might have come from the institution of the university, the reception of Greek and Arabic thought and the worldview of a rational creator God. Internal to medieval science, there is the work of developing, criticising and discarding hypotheses begun by scholastic natural philosophers and still ongoing.”
The only theory that makes sense when describing the rise of European science is cultural. Culture is king and only in Christian Europe did modern science, medicine and mathematics arise.
