Review 1: Diane Moczar, Islam at the Gates, How Christendom defeated the Ottoman Turks

This is an excellent summary of why and how Christendom defeated the Moslem Turks. Importantly it lays out the vast destruction that the Moslem Turks visited upon Europe. Millions of Europeans – whites – were enslaved and killed in the Turkish Jihad. In Hungary alone, some 3 million people were killed or enslaved in over 250 years of Moslem Jihad, out of a total population of 5 to 6 million. Not one single neo-Marxist supporter of the cult of multiculturalism even knows this, and if they did, they would not care. The would simply point to the African slave trade by 'whites' of some 10 million blacks. They might be surprised to know that 11-15 million 'blacks' were transshipped into Moslem states and empires, over 1000 years.

Moczar is a Catholic professor and historian who has written many works on Christian-medieval history. Her use of 'Christendom' in the title is purposeful. Christendom is indeed the key word. Without the bonds of Christianity, the similarity in culture and outlook, and without papal money and influence, it is highly likely that most of Europe would have been conquered by the Moslem. This indeed would have heralded a dark age, a term uselessly applied to the medieval civilization of European development. A set of states who had truly been mired in an era of 'darkness' would not suddenly have risen to 'rational-Enlightenment' glory in a span of a lifetime producing the vitality and industry needed to throw back the Oriental despotism of Turkish Islam. That much must be obvious.

One critical aspect of this book, is that the author lays bare the brutality and savagery of the Islamic project. A fact usually dismissed by the effeminzed, self-loathing elites and their acolytes in the West. For these clever people Islam is always peace, always sophisticated, and always genteel.

Slavery:

“It is estimated that about a fifth of the children of Eastern and Central Europe were taken by the Turks as tribute; collection seems to have varied according to the needs of their Turkish overlords in the beginning, and later became an annual practice in some places.” [p. 37]

and

“The large-scale bloodletting caused by taking so many boys from conquered Christian communities led to a decline in the Christian communities led to a decline in the Christian population to the benefit of the Muslims; it is estimated that between half a million and a million Christian boys, mostly from the Balkans, were victims of this brutal system from its inception until its abolition in 1848, and this does not include the numerous other slaves taken by the Turks.” [p. 40]

Moslem destruction:

“It appears, however, from a number of recent works, that the Arabs indeed brought misery, destruction, mass slavery, and other evils to the areas they took over....What was distinctive about the new Arab regimes was their treatment of conquered peoples after they had submitted or been subdued.. dhimmitude]” [p. 10, 13]

and

“Depending on their age, sex and circumstances, captives could be killed, enslaved, ransomed, or liberated. The Qur'an itself refers to an arrangement (...Sura 9) by which conquered Christians and Jews – known as dhimmi – would be subjected to a tax, so long as they recognized themselves as subdued.” [p. 15]

and

“Ottomans engaged in human sacrifice to honor the dead...Turkish warriors fallen in battle were buried with the enemies they had killed...if there weren't any dead enemies around, the Turks bought Christian slaves and made do with them...the extensive rights that Muslim law allowed slave owners over their infidel human property in fact facilitated them.” [p. 45]

Jihad – war – as the 6^th pillar of the cult of Muhammad:

“Each succeeding wave of converts, from Seljuqs to Mongols to Ottomans, took up the same war cry. Far from being a temporary feature of their early fervor, jihad became institutionalized as a permanent goal for all Muslim states as well as individual Muslims.” [p. 15]

and

“Thus Bernard Lewis writes in The Middle East, 'The classical jihad against Christendom was resumed by the Ottomans – of all major Muslim dynasties, the most fervently and consistently committed to the Muslim faith and the upholding and enforcement of the Holy Law...jihad forms a major theme in their political, military, and intellectual life alike, and it is clear that the Ottoman sultans, at least until the time of Suleyman the Magnificent, were sustained by a high sense of moral and religious purpose.” [p. 25]

and

“..The very term, ghazi, used by the Turkish warriors for themselves as fighters for Islam, seems to come from gaza, which means holy warfare – jihad, in fact, in Turkish.” [p. 25]

The butchery at Constantinople in 1453:

“Whether it was three days or one, the civilian population endured pillage, destruction and slaughter by the Ottoman troops that were nothing short of infernal. Turkish soldiers destroyed cultural treasures, tore up or sold off valuable books both sacred and secular, and burned holy images in fires to cook their food....Their unenviable fate – the harem, the beds of soldiers, or the slave market – was that of countless thousands of others in the course of the Turkish jihad.” [p. 71]

and

“The huge number of captives taken – the figures of fifty to sixty thousand are mentioned in the sources, most slated for deportation or slavery – must be understood to include primarily the fit, the useful, the attractive.” [p. 72]

Animus against Christianity:

“There are, for example, contemporary accounts of a large, unarmed group of German pilgrims who went to the Holy Land in 1064 and were attacked so violently by the Arabs that only 2,000 out of the original group of 7,000 returned home.” [p. 21]

and

“Numerous churches and synagogues were reduced to ruins throughout North Africa and the Middle East, even the Church of the Resurrection, in Jerusalem, and new construction was forbidden.” [p. 16]

Moslem demography:

“Combined with the usual mass deportations of Christians and the settlement of Turks and Muslim converts in their place, as well as the possibility for Muslim men of possessing four wives, any number of concubines, and therefore numerous children, the spiritual, demographic, and psychologically situation of the tattered Christian remnants of Byzantium was eroded..” [p. 75]

The Turkish Jihad was a Moslem project given impetus by Moslem theocratic totalitarianism, and a mission to colonize the world for the Al-Lah [the Lord] of Mecca [or Hub'Al the moon deity as he or it was known in 610 AD]. Millions of Christians in the Eastern, the Balkans, southern Russia, the Ukraine, and Central Europe – perhaps 10 million – were either killed, enslaved or forcibly converted to the Moslem cult. You won't hear a whisper of this at any University or within any media outlet.

One of the mainsprings for the Arab-Turkish assault on civilization was perversely the fragmented and varied nature of Christianity itself. Religious diversity within the Byzantine Empire was a source of strength since sects were forced into debate and rational discourse to defend their oftentimes abstruse theologies. But such sectionalism is also a point of weakness when various groups are confronted with Moslem totalitarianism and Jihad or total war, wrapped up in the guise of a supposed theology:

“...heresy of the Monophysites, who held that there was only one nature in Christ, the divine. They were rivals of the Nestorians, who claimed (correctly) that there were two natures in Christ, but added (erroneously) that there were also two persons....the existence of so many Christian sects prevented a unified resistance to the onslaughts of the new religion; each sect was so immersed in quarrels with the other sects and with Church authorities in Constantinople...that they all tended to ignore the truly serious danger until it was far too late. In many instances short-sighted heretics actually attempted to enlist Muslim support in their religious quarrels.” [p. 9]

Medieval Christianity was not of course, monolithic, united or 'total' in the sense of the church controlling the affairs of the secular. In reality it was usually the state trying to control the moral power and the riches, of the Church. In any event, the totality of the Moslem Jihad, and the underlying foundations of Moslem intolerance embedded in the 1562 or so verses of intolerance and Jihad in the Koran, the violent life of the political-military founder of the cult of Submission Muhammad, and the cultural assignation that all non-Moslems, and women, were the tools and slaves of Moslem men, all conspired to create in the Ottomans, a force for evil little equalled in the annals of human history. Thankfully 'Christendom' was able to save itself and civilization from this Oriental savagery.