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.
Not only did Christian Byzantium save Europe from the Mahometan Jihad, acting as the protective shield for the West, or the remaining rump of the former Roman empire, it also salvaged ancient Greek philosophy, science and literature. The Byzantine ‘Renaissance’ from the 9th to 11th centuries, was similar to the Carolingian in Francia during the 9th century, but deeper, broader and more extensively premised on ‘classical’ Greek history and sources. Universities were developed in Constantinople during the 6th century, predating ‘Western’ institutions by some 500 years. Byzantine scholars had long studied the ancient Greeks and reconciled if not incorporated many of their ideas into Christian theology.
The Christian Byzantines or ‘Eastern Romans’ fully embraced their Hellenistic past and culture. World history would be much different if they had not. Greek culture and the Koine Greek language suffused and enthused Byzantian society and its development, transmitting ancient Greek ideas and influences to the world. Copies of ancients were transcribed and stored in massive libraries and archives.
The largest library in ancient history sat in the Christian Greek city of Alexandria – burned down by the Mahometans in 641 A.D. Thousands of tonnes of priceless artefacts were destroyed by the Jihad. Who knows what wisdom, science and philosophy were annihilated in this book burning. Entirely new perspectives on Christian Byzantium and ancient Greek and Roman history were lost.
Byzantine literature represented a continuation of ancient Greek traditions, replicating the styles of Homer, Lucian and Herodotus. Byzantine monks collected, translated and copied Greek language texts and classical literature safeguarding them for posterity. These preserved works were the basis for the Western ‘Renaissance’ of the 15th century, an event fuelled by Greek refugees fleeing the Mahometan Jihad, who ended up in Italy with their treasures and libraries.
John of Damascus in the 8th century wrote the ‘Dialectica’, which commented on Aristotle’s ‘Prior Analytics’ and deductive reasoning. He used this format in the great ‘iconoclasm’ debate of the 8th century. If certain principles are known to be factual we can make deductions from that premise. In the 9th century Plotinus the Patriarach of Constantinople wrote ‘Amphilocia’ which included a commentary on Aristotle’s ‘Categories’ and concepts of substances and predication. The 11th century monk Psellos reintroduced Plato with analysis and commentary, aligning Platonic thought with Christian theology.
Medicine, much more advanced than the ancient Greek and the ideas of Galen, also flourished in Constantinople, eventually transferred to the West through merchants and the Crusades. Architecture and new engineering practices abounded during the 1000 years of Byzantine existence. The Haggia Sophia, built in the 6th century, was the largest dome ever built and was only imitated and surpassed in Europe in the 14th and 15th centuries.
Roman water works, aqueducts, baths, sewers and fountains providing fresh water dominated major Byzantine cities by 900 A.D. Such public works did not exist in the West until the 19th century. Justinian’s legal codex compiled in the 6th century, is the basis for Western canon and civil law and directly informs today legal corpus in Western states. Sundry inventions from the knife and fork, to gunpowder, military inventions, advance art, chemistry, advanced mathematics and governmental organisation, flowed from Byzantium to the West.
The cultural impact of Byzantium on European history was enormous. It is not an exaggeration to state that the West would not have existed without Christian Byzantium.
Raymond Ibrahim, Scholar on Islam and its perpetual Jihad against Christianity.
Armenia is one of the oldest nations in the world. Armenians founded Yereyan, their current capital, in 782 BC — exactly 2,700 years before Azerbaijan came into being in 1918. And yet, here is the president of Azerbaijan waging war because “Yerevan is our historical land and we Azerbaijanis must return to these historical lands.”
Armenia was also significantly bigger, encompassing even modern-day Azerbaijan within its borders, over two thousand years ago. Then the Turkic peoples came galloping in from the east, slaughtering, enslaving, terrorizing, and stealing the lands of Armenians and other Christians in the name of jihad.
Anyone who doubts this summation should consult the “Chronicle of Matthew of Edessa” (d.1144). According to this nearly thousand-year-old chronicle, which is near coterminous with the events it describes, it was only in 1019 that “the first appearance of the bloodthirsty beasts … the savage nation of infidels called Turks entered Armenia … and mercilessly slaughtered the Christian faithful with the sword.”
Three decades later the raids were virtually nonstop. In 1049, the founder of the Turkic Seljuk Empire himself, Sultan Tughril Bey (r. 1037–1063), reached the Armenian city of Arzden, west of Lake Van, and “put the whole town to the sword, causing severe slaughter, as many as one hundred and fifty thousand persons.”
Other contemporaries confirm the devastation visited upon Arzden. “Like famished dogs,” writes Aristakes (d.1080) an eyewitness, the Turks “hurled themselves on our city, surrounded it and pushed inside, massacring the men and mowing everything down like reapers in the fields, making the city a desert. Without mercy, they incinerated those who had hidden themselves in houses and churches.”
Eleven years later, in 1060, the Turks laid siege to Sebastia (which, though now a Turkish city, was originally Armenian). Six hundred churches were destroyed, “many and innumerable people were burned [to death],” and countless women and children “were led into captivity.”
Between 1064 and 1065, Tughril’s successor, Sultan Muhammad bin Dawud Chaghri — known to posterity as Alp Arslan, one of Turkey’s unsavory but national heroes — laid siege to Ani, then the capital of Armenia. The thunderous bombardment of Muhammad’s siege engines caused the entire city to quake, and Matthew describes countless terror-stricken families huddled together and weeping — not unlike those of modern-day Artsakh, as well captured by the following recent photo from yesterday, with the following caption:
As for their ancestors, once inside Ani, the Muslims “began to mercilessly slaughter the inhabitants of the entire city… and piling up their bodies one on top of the other… Innumerable and countless boys with bright faces and pretty girls were carried off together with their mothers.”
Not only do several Christian sources document the sack of Armenia’s capital — one contemporary succinctly notes that Sultan Muhammad “rendered Ani a desert by massacres and fire” — but also so do Muslim sources, often in apocalyptic terms: “I wanted to enter the city and see it with my own eyes,” one Arab later explained. “I tried to find a street without having to walk over the corpses. But that was impossible.”
Such “was the beginning of the misfortunes of Armenia,” Matthew of Edessa concludes his account: “So, lend an ear to this melancholy recital.” This has proven to be an ominous remark; for the aforementioned history of blood and tears was, indeed, just “the beginning of the misfortunes of Armenia,” whose “melancholy recital” continues to this day.
But what was the reason the Turks invaded and so ruthlessly attacked Armenia? What “grievance” did they have? Simple: Armenia was Christian, and the Turks were Muslim — and Islam makes all non-Muslim enemies to be put to the sword until and unless they submit to Islam.
Incidentally, Islam’s animus for Christianity was on display then no less than now. Thus, during the aforementioned sack of Ani, a Muslim fighter climbed atop the city’s main cathedral “and pulled down the very heavy cross which was on the dome, throwing it to the ground,” wrote Matthew.
Made of pure silver and the “size of a man” — and now symbolic of Islam’s might over Christianity — the broken crucifix was sent as a trophy to adorn a mosque in, ironically enough, modern-day Azerbaijan. Fast forward nearly a millennium to Azerbaijan’s war on Armenia in 2020, a Muslim fighter was videotaped triumphantly shouting “Allahu Akbar!” while standing atop an Armenian church chapel where the cross had been broken off.
Such is an idea of what the Turkic peoples did to Christian Armenians — not during the Armenian Genocide of a century ago when some 1.5 million Armenians were massacred and even more displaced — but one thousand years ago when the Islamic conquest of Armenia first began.
This unrelenting history of hate makes one thing perfectly clear: all modern-day pretexts and “territorial disputes” aside, true and permanent peace between Armenia and its Muslim neighbors will only be achieved when the Christian nation has either been conquered or ceded itself into nonexistence.
Nor would it be the first to do so. It is worth recalling that the heart of what is today called “the Muslim world” — the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) — was thoroughly Christian before the sword of Islam invaded. Bit by bit, century after century after the initial seventh-century Muslim conquests and occupations, it lost its Christian identity. Its peoples were lost in the morass of Islam so that few today even remember that Egypt, Iraq, Syria, etc., were among the first, oldest, and most populous Christian nations.
Armenia — the first nation in the world to adopt Christianity — is a holdout, a thorn in Islam’s side, and, as such, will never know lasting peace from the Muslims surrounding it — not least as the West has thrown it under the bus.
Note: Quotes from Matthew of Edessa and others were excerpted from and are documented in Ibrahim’s book, “Sword and Scimitar: Fourteen Centuries of War between Islam and the West.”
Armenians, who are indigenous to Artsakh, have inhabited the region for centuries; Armenian occupation and government has withstood in Artsakh since the 5th century B.C.E, regardless of countless attempts by neighbouring dynasties and powers to gain control over the land. The territorial conflict between Artsakh, also referred to as Nagorno-Karabakh, and Azerbaijan originated after the fall of the Russian Empire in 1917, during the establishment of the republics of Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia. At the time, Artsakh declared its independence and elected its own government. In response, Azerbaijan, with the help of Turkey, employed military action and carried out massacres which targeted Artsakh’s 95% Armenian population, killing 40,000 Armenians in the city of Shushi alone.
After the establishment of Soviet rule in the Caucasus, Stalin first declared Artsakh as part of Azerbaijan SSR, but Artsakh was later removed and attached to Armenia SSR. Shortly thereafter, a three-day pogrom was launched in the city of Sumgait, leading to the death of about 100 Armenians. As ethnic tensions rose between Armenians and Azeris in the region, the Armenian Supreme Soviet and Artsakh’s National Council proclaimed Armenia and Artsakh’s unification. After this proclamation, Azeri protesters in Baku committed massacres against the remaining Armenians in the region. Only after most of Baku’s Armenian population was killed, Gorbachev intervened and condemned the attempts of ethnic cleansing that had taken place.
After both Armenia and Azerbaijan declared their independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, the conflict surrounding Artsakh escalated. A war broke out from 1991 to 1994 and left behind 20,000 casualties and about 1,000,000 refugees. Through Russian negotiation, a ceasefire was established in 1994 and still continues to this day, despite countless violations from Azerbaijan’s forces.
The current war brewing along the border of Artsakh and Azerbaijan was not entirely unanticipated. After 11 Azeri soldiers died during an attempted border breach by Azerbaijan in July, thousands of Azeri protesters took to the streets of Baku and vigorously demanded a war with Armenia and Artsakh as they chanted “Death to the Armenian.”
Azerbaijan’s war efforts are also supported by its brother nation of Turkey. Turkish president Erdogan recently remarked, “We will continue to fulfil this mission which our grandfathers have carried out for centuries in the Caucasus region.” Erdogan’s genocidal rhetoric references the Armenian Genocide of 1915, during which 1.5 million Armenians were martyred and a majority of the Armenian mainland was conquered by the Ottoman Empire of Turkey. Evidently, Turkey and Azerbaijan’s dictators, Erdogan and Aliyev, are fixated on continuing the efforts of their ancestors. The pan-Turkic agenda put forward by Talaat Pasha, the main orchestrator of the Armenian Genocide, and other Turkish leaders during the past century or so, is the driving force behind Azerbaijan’s actions.
Although Aliyev has attempted to paint this conflict as purely geo-political, claiming that his mission is to rightfully repossess Artsakh as a city of Azerbaijan, he is not interested in governing Artsakh as it is now. Rather, he is interested in an Artsakh that is free of Armenians. Should Azerbaijan’s armed forces successfully conquer Artsakh, which would give them access to mainland Armenia, the governments and leaders of Azerbaijan and Turkey would put forward exceedingly ardent efforts to eradicate the Armenians of the Caucasus.
Over the course of their recent attempts to viciously attack the Armenians fighting for and inhabiting Artsakh, the Azeri government has committed countless war crimes and international human rights violations. In the past month, they bombed the Ghazanchetsots Cathedral of Shushi as well as the maternity hospital of Stepanakert.
Dozens of schools in Artsakh have been destroyed by Azeri shelling, while their use of widely-banned cluster munitions have been damaging residential areas. Their armed forces have targeted and killed countless Armenian civilians in both Artsakh and mainland Armenia, specifically in the regions of Martuni, Askeran, Stepanakert, and Syunik. In addition, Azerbaijan’s white phosphorus munitions have burned about 150 hectares of Artsakh’s forests.
Azeri soldiers are also guilty of torturing and killing their Armenian prisoners of war, then releasing video recordings of them doing so. The killers of one Armenian fighter even went as far as to post pictures of his beheaded body on social media, then call his brother to taunt him. It was recently brought to light that the Syrian mercenaries illegally bought by Azerbaijan were told that they would be rewarded $100 for every Armenian they beheaded. Of course, none of this is being reported by Azerbaijan or any journalist visiting Azerbaijan — the Azeri government has restricted all journalist entry into the military zone. This limitation is very much in line with Turkey and Azerbaijan’s lack of media freedom.
Azerbaijan’s allies, Turkey, Israel, and Ukraine have aided Azerbaijan in its military efforts through funding, provision of military personnel, and the blockage of humanitarian aid to Artsakh. Meanwhile, countries who have attempted to intervene to peacefully facilitate agreements between Artsakh and Azerbaijan have failed continuously. Azerbaijan has violated ceasefires called by France, Russia, and the United States. Although Aliyev’s regime has faced criticism, it has yet to experience any significant consequence from the international community. Furthermore, Artsakh has been placed on Genocide Watch, but there has been no extension of any humanitarian aid to the people of Artsakh.
Although Artsakh’s Armenians are unquestionably facing the worst impacts of Azerbaijan’s actions, anti-Armenian violence is not limited to the caucasus. Armenians in Russia, France, and the United States particularly have faced hate crimes by Turks and Azeris in support of Erdogan and Aliyev’s agenda. In addition to harassment and inappropriate content on social media, violence has also been incited at protests held by Armenians. Counter-protesters at pro-Armenia rallies have been seen wielding axes and firearms in an attempt to intimidate and potentially harm Armenian protesters. In late October, 3 Armenian demonstrators were stabbed during a protest in Fresno. Around the same time, a crowd of Turkish nationalists who are members of Turkey’s ultra-nationalist Grey Wolves group took to the streets of France looking for Armenians. The Grey Wolves are a militant wing of Turkey’s Nationalist Movement Party, which is strongly allied to Erdogan. The Grey Wolves have since been banned in France.
Moreover, Armenians also face harassment on social media. Not only have Turks and Azeris attempted to portray Armenians as the aggressors, but they also themselves have acted as offenders as they flood direct message inboxes with threats of assault, rape, death, and extermination. They have been vocal in their support of Aliyev as well as their desire to rid the Caucasus of Armenians and any historic Armenian landmarks or traces of culture.
Although the Armenians of the diaspora have banded together to garner attention toward the violence in Artsakh, it seems that there is not a single world power willing to sanction Erdogan or Aliyev, and oust their fascist, genocidal governments. Before, as descendants of Armenian Genocide survivors, we could only imagine the pain and fear of losing our people and homeland. Now, as Aliyev and Erdogan attempt to continue Taalat Pasha’s legacy, we face our very own threat of extinction as the world continues to ignore the Armenian struggle once again.
Artsakh is an Armenian Christian community sited in Mahometan Azerbaijan. It is the oldest Christian community in the world. The genocide started last December (2022). 150.000 Christians are being starved to death by Musulman Azeris. Christian churches, schools, rectories and abbeys are being systematically destroyed. No one cares. Imagine the outrage if Christians had built walls and wires around a Musulman region, sent in a Christian army to encircle and strangle said region, and cut off all food and supplies into the area.
12/16/2022 Artsakh (International Christian Concern)
On Monday December 12th, Azerbaijan started a blockade on the roads connecting Nagorno-Karabakh to all outside resources. This is the second time they have done this in the past month and is crippling for the Armenian people “the road, known as Lachin Corridor, is the only road connecting Karabakh to the outside world,” ..they also shut down the gas lines for roughly four days, causing schools to temporarily close, heat was shut off in homes, and long lines at gas stations. The blockade refused humanitarian groups from entering and the government also threatened to attack any aid that attempted to enter the territory by plane.
Genocide Watch, “The present blockade [of Artsakh] is designed to deliberately inflict conditions of life calculated to bring about the end of a national, ethnical, racial or religious group in whole or in part.” The Musulman Turks murdered 1.5 million Armenian Christians from 1915-1917, a holocaust that the ’NATO country’ still denies to this day. It destroyed 75% of the Christian population of Turkey, which at that time, comprised ¼ of the total population. Every vestige of Christianity from cemeteries to churches was destroyed. Christian genocide is now happening again in Azerbaijan.
Artsakh was given to the Azeris by the Soviets under Stalin in 1923. Artsakh became an oblast (an autonomous province with its own government) with Azerbaijan. During the past century Azerbaijan has taken the other autonomous Armenian province called Nakhichevan and literally wiped it clean of Armenian Christians, by making Christian life impossible. The Azeris also destroyed all the churches in Nakhichevan, a process they will repeat in Artsakh.
None of this is on your Fake mainstream news, nor debated in your fake ‘democratic’ assemblies. No one cares. Artsakh Christians and Christians in general, are not worth anything in the eyes of the ‘modern’ secular world, especially when they are being slaughtered by Muslims.
Historian Michael Haag has written an excellent 358 page account of one of Western Christendom's most virile, vital and interesting organizations. Haag's account is an informative and accessible layman's journey through the founding of the Templar's in 1119 at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre which marked the crucifixon, burial and resurrection of Christ; to its demise in 1307 at the hands of the bankrupted French King ironically named Phillip the 'Fair'. As Haag relates, over twenty thousand Templars died in battle or as prisoners of war fighting the Muslims. There is no recorded example of a Templar renouncing his faith or his Order's vows under torture, punishment or extended captivity. The romance, mystery, and demonstrated energy of this most unique of Western groups will always been of interest to any interested in the Western tradition.
There are seven parts. The first three cover the historical background of the Middle East including the origins of Solomon's Temple, the rise of Christianity and the 'rise' of Islam and the context for the pilgrimmages and the Crusades. Part four deals with the Templars proper, including their rise to power and their fall. Part five deals with the aftermath of the Templars destruction and the co-optation of some of their culture, by Freemasonry. The last two sections deal with the Templar castles and sites, as well as the role of the Knights in popular culture, including games, websites and books.
What makes this book so very good, is the realistic appraisal of Islam. This is the context of this first review. Islam is not portrayed by Haag as a religious faith. It is painted as it should be – a naked program of power and control. A true Muslim believes that the Koran supersedes the Bible, and that the military-political adventurer and fascist Mohammed, was the last and greatest of the Jewish-Christian prophets. Nothing further from reality could be true. Islam was and is, a Jihadic military poli-cracy, whose goal was and is world domination:
“Islam was the revealed and perfect faith, and as for the Christians, and also the Jews, as long as they submitted to Muslim rule and paid their taxes they were permitted to conduct their own affairs according to their own laws, customs and beliefs.”
As Haag states, the key to Islam is that it demands the submission of all people's to the Arab cult. Period. In the real world we call this imperialism. In PC-Cultural Marxist terms, the subjugation and tax-farming of second class knaves is termed 'inter-faith harmony'. This harmony is a resplendent orchestral composition in the 'minds' of the Muslim-lovers, as long as those playing are White Christians under the control of the masterful, educated, sophisticated and uber-intelligent Muslim class. Harmony, like so many words, is now re-equipped to denote the enslavement of Whites and Jews, under the caring tutelage of the 'minority victims', the Muslims. Islamic rule was vicious, predatory and arbitrary. In order to escape enslavement many non-Muslims just gave up and converted to the moon cult. So much for inter-faith harmony.
“Many Copts converted to Islam after the ferocious repression of 832; being unable to meet taxation demands, partly because the irrigation system was falling into further disrepair, they migrated into the towns, leaving large areas of land uncultivated. Even so, not until the eleventh century, four hundred years after the Arab occupation, did the majority of Egyptians finally adopt Islam.”
The poverty of Islam was so rife and its theological Fascism so obvious that revolts against Arab and Islamic cult rule were common. Islam was not spread by preaching and earnest debate. It was manufactured in, and expanded through, war and violence. As Haag so rightly elucidates, Arab and Muslim culture was barren, and far from producing anything that created the modern world, the Islamic states were in the main poor, backwards, and uneducated. Their only salvation came from squatting and plundering richer non Muslim locales and empires:
“With the triumph of an authoritarian and incurious religious dogma, with the failure to develop resources or technological advances, and with civil administrations replaced by local military autocrats, the empire of the Arabs fell into intellectual, political and economic decline.”
Even in Egypt as quoted above, it took 400 years for Islam to take root. The reason? The utter insipidity of the Muslim program militated against any social organization which could produce wealth, opportunity and rationality: In North Africa and elsewhere, the Muslims destroyed the existing and far superior Byzantine lands which had advanced systems of agriculture, irrigation, public works, sewage, and even public libraries. The complex system of social advancement was eradicated by the Muslims and Arabs. Libraries were destroyed, industries neutered and even large monuments defaced or pulled down.
“There were uprisings against the Arabs throughout their empire. In Egypt, where the population had been three million at the time of the Arab conquest, the mismanagement of the country's resources was so appalling that there were not maore than one and a half million Egyptians by 1000 AD.”
The decimation of Egypt's population was a singular event. Half of the population either died or left. This is a remarkable display of an anti-civilizational theology hard at work. In fact the mindless destruction visited upon Egypt by Islam, included rather remarkably, the loss of the wheel for 3 centuries. Pack animals replaced carts in North Africa as the wheel, and its necessary ancillary infrastructure of roads, hospices, and trade centers all disappeared. No wonder the political-economy of the once rich delta state simply collapsed.
It is worth noting that the Crusades, which saved Western Europe and which were a military response to 400 years of Muslim warring against Europe, including the killing and enslaving of millions of European Christians, not to mention the destruction of once Christian lands in Syria, the Levant, North Africa, Spain, Italy, and Turkey, are positively depicted by Haag. In fact Muslim savagery is given a fair hearing in Haag's work, with the destruction of Christian pilgrims by 'extremist' [a modern appellation] Muslims, for instance being well documented.
“An especially shocking attack too place at Easter 1119 when a large party of seven hundred unarmed pilgrims, both men and women, set out from Jerusalem for the river Jordan.....set upon by an Egyptian sortie from Ascalon. Three hundred pilgrims were killed and another sixty were captured to be sold as slaves.”
Even the 'sack' of Jerusalem in 1099, in which we are now told was a gigantic slaughter by Crusaders of defenseless Muslims and Jews, and which is a very large myth is told in more measured terms by Haag;
“What is more, contemporary letters written by Jews living in the Eastern Mediterranean make it clear that not all Jews and Muslims in the city were killed; and indeed the contemporary Arab writer Ibn al-Arabi estimated the number of Muslim dead at Jerusalem at only three thousand.”
The multi-cult usually attributes the 1099 retaking of Jerusalem, the ancient Jewish capital of David, and the home of Christendom's most sacred shrines and relics, as a barbaric slaughter in which the streets ran with blood. No more than 4.000 died and none were enslaved out of a population of 500.000. This hardly constitutes anything more than a minor episode in the long and bloody history of Near East warfare. The Muslims slaughtered far more in taking Jerusalem in 637 and in 1187 when Saladin who is much beloved by PC Fascists, retook the city from the Latins, he enslaved over 10.000 and only let the rest go for ransom. His usual policy was to slaughter all the inhabitants, a fact which he repeated on over 10 occasions in his ceaseless wars with the Christians and Sunni Muslim sects that he conquered to unite the Muslim Near East.
In expelling the last of the Knights from Acre in 1291, the Muslim Jihad under Baybars likewise killed some 10.000, destroyed the city, and sent any survivors into slavery. When the Muslim cult attacked the greatest of Christian cities,Constantinople, in 1453, 40.000 were butchered and 35.000 more cast in chains and sent off to the Muslim heartlands as sex slaves or workers. But none of these facts would make an impression on really clever PC relativists. For them Islam is a minority class and race, constituting a wonderful theology of improvement and love.
At least authors like Haag are detailed, realistic and intelligent enough to dispense with such claptrap.