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StudyToAnswer | By Timothy W. Dunkin

Islam: the Religion of Peace and the Crusades

We need to discuss the Crusades in some detail, for though they were not truly a Christian affair, they are an important series event, a knowledge of which is necessary for understanding the history of interaction between Islam and “Christendom”. The Crusades were a series of military expeditions by medieval Europeans into the Middle East, and have become an object of fixation in the mind of Islam. They are the lens through which Muslims have come to view practically all of their dealings with the West. The Crusades, unfortunately, have also become somewhat mythologized by Muslims, who reinvent history to fit their own propagandistic purposes. Muslims will try to point to the Crusades as an example of “Christian” evil, and as a justification for their own jihad, but as we have seen above, there was nothing scriptural about the Crusades – they did not occur because of devotion to biblical religion.

Now let us deal with the serious deficiencies in the Muslim understanding of the Crusades. Though it is now in vogue among Muslims to portray the Crusades as savage offensives against peace-loving Muslim people in the Middle East, this view is historically inaccurate. Indeed, until around the middle of the 19th century, the Ottoman Empire’s official position, taught to all Ottoman students in the schools, was that the Crusades were a great victory and triumph for Islam, which had defeated and expelled minor barbarian incursions from the west. The Muslims of the Middle East were hardly “peace-loving”. Indeed, lest we forget, the very reason why the Middle East was in the hands of the Muslims in the first place was because of a series of offensive religious wars waged by Muslims against the various Christian peoples of Asia Minor, Palestine, and North Africa.

It is necessary to understand that fact if we are to understand why the Crusades occurred in the first place. The Crusades, first and foremost, were defensive wars. They were not fought by an expansionistic, imperialistic Christendom, but rather by a Christendom that was at that time shrinking, being slowly but surely overwhelmed by the advancing Islamic empires. As Thomas Madden has written,

“Now put this down in your notebook, because it will be on the test: The crusades were in every way a defensive war. They were the West’s belated response to the Muslim conquest of fully two-thirds of the Christian world. While the Arabs were busy in the seventh through the tenth centuries winning an opulent and sophisticated empire, Europe was defending itself against outside invaders and then digging out from the mess they left behind. Only in the eleventh century were Europeans able to take much notice of the East. The event that led to the crusades was the Turkish conquest of most of Christian Asia Minor (modern Turkey). The Christian emperor in Constantinople, faced with the loss of half of his empire, appealed for help to the rude but energetic Europeans. He got it. More than he wanted, in fact.

Pope Urban II called the First Crusade in 1095. Despite modern laments about medieval colonialism, the crusade’s real purpose was to turn back Muslim conquests and restore formerly Christian lands to Christian control. The entire history of the crusades is one of Western reaction to Muslim advances. The crusades were no more offensive than was the American invasion of Normandy. As it happened, the First Crusade was amazingly, almost miraculously, successful. The crusaders marched hundreds of miles deep into enemy territory and recaptured not only the lost cities of Nicaea and Antioch, but in 1099 Jerusalem itself.” [T.F. Madden, "Crusade Propaganda", National Review Online, 2 November 2001]

The Crusades were a response to Muslim aggression. If the Muslims had not waged offensive war and continued in their plans to conquer the known world, the Crusades would never have happened. In a sense, blame for the Crusades lies at the feet of the Muslims themselves. It is doubtful, lacking the impetus provided by Emperor Alexius’ appeal and Pope Urban’s oration, that it would ever have occurred to the petty feudal nobles of Western Europe to even go adventuring thousands of miles away from home in the first place. And what of the Muslim contention that the Bible was somehow an impetus for the Crusaders to go pillaging across the Levant? Well, there is no real evidence that the Crusaders or those calling for crusade relied on the Bible as justification. For example, when we look at the actual text of Pope Urban II’s call for crusade at the Council of Clermont in 1095 [See Urban II: Speech at Council of Clermont, 1095], we see exactly three references to passages from the Bible: two of them from the Gospel of Matthew, one of them from the Gospel of Luke, and none of them in any way used in the actual call to crusade – all are used to reprove the “Christians” for being blind and careless. There is nothing which in any way suggests that Urban pointed to the Bible to justify or encourage the crusading. Instead, he lays out the political situation as it existed at that time, and warns that unless the Muslim aggression is stopped, more “Christians” will be conquered and enslaved.

Muslim apologists will point to the barbaric behavior of the Crusaders when they took Jerusalem in 1099. And well they ought, for these European warlords were most definitely barbaric. But, so were the Muslims. It is common for Muslims to assert that when the Muslim army reconquered the cities which the Crusaders had taken, that they did not harm the civilian population. This claim is most certainly not true. The Muslims were just as savage and brutal in the fighting during the Crusades as were the Crusaders. For instance, when the Muslims retook Antioch, they slaughtered 16,000 people in the streets and sold another 100,000 into slavery. Likewise, when the Crusader garrison at Caesaria, 2000 men, surrendered to the Muslims on the sworn promise that they would be spared, the Muslims broke their promise and instead executed them all. Indeed, one of the series of events that lead to the Crusades and likely made the westerners amenable to aiding Byzantium in the first place was the maltreatment and murder of European pilgrims to sites in the Holy Land in the 1070s. For these apologists to claim that the Muslims retook territory without harming anyone, and their apparent attempts to portray Islam as a spotless and pure victim in the tawdry affair of the Crusades, is astounding in its mendacity. Islam bears as much complicity in the violence of the Crusades as the Europeans do, both in terms of methodology and in root cause. Indeed, Islam’s march across the Middle East and North Africa in the centuries preceding the Crusades was drenched in the blood of thousands, possibly millions, of native peoples who were slaughtered and pillaged as the Arabs made their way from Egypt to Spain in the 8th century. Just as the Crusaders bear great reproach and responsibility for their conduct, so do the Muslims.

This point about the historic Muslim brutality and violence as they expanded out from the Levant in the 8th century and onward is important to remember. There is a good and strong argument to be made that the example of Islam’s behavior in war and expansion was what taught the medieval Europeans about holy war. In other words, Islam was the schoolmaster in religiously motivated violence, and the Europeans the pupils absorbing the lesson from the masters. Jacques Ellul, a scholar who has studied the theologies of both Christianity and Islam, has noted the impetus which Islamic “holy war” gave to the rise of this concept in medieval Europe. As part of a more general argument concerning the influence which Muslim theology and philosophy had on the Western statecraft and religion in the early medieval period, Ellul notes the following about the rise of the “holy war” concept in Christendom,

“In tandem with this great importance of the political power there is, of course, the importance and glorification of war as a means of spreading the faith. Such war is a duty for all Muslims. Islam has to become universal. The true faith, not the power, has to be taken to every people by every means, including by military force. This makes the political power important, for it is warlike by nature. The two things are closely related. The political head wages war on behalf of the faith. He is thus the religious head, and as the sole representative of God he must fight to extend Islam. This enormous importance of war has been totally obliterated today in intellectual circles that admire Islam and want to take it afresh as a model. War is inherent in Islam. It is inscribed in its teaching. It is a fact of its civilization and also a religious fact; the two cannot be separated. It is coherent with its conception of the Dhar al ahrb, that the whole world is destined to become Muslim by Arab conquests. The proof of all this is not just theological; it is historical: hardly has the Islamic faith been preached when an immediate military conquest begins. From 632 to 651, in the twenty years after the death of the prophet, we have a lightning war of conquest with the invasion of Egypt and Cyrenaica to the west, Arabia in the center, Armenia, Syria, and Persia to the east. In the following century all North Africa and Spain are taken over, along with India and Turkey to the east. The conquests are not achieved by sanctity, but by war.

For three centuries Christianity spread by preaching, kindliness, example, morality, and encouragement of the poor. When the empire became Christian, war was hardly tolerated by the Christians. Even when waged by a Christian emperor it was a dubious business and was assessed unfavorably. It was often condemned. Christians were accused of undermining the political force and military might of the empire from within. In practice Christians would remain critical of war until the flamboyant image of the holy war came on the scene. In other words, no matter what atrocities have been committed in wars waged by so-called Christian nations, war has always been in essential contradiction to the gospel. Christians have always been more or less aware of this. They have judged war and questioned it.

In Islam, on the contrary, war was always just and constituted a sacred duty. The war that was meant to convert infidels was just and legitimate, for, as Muslim thinking repeats, Islam is the only religion that conforms perfectly to nature. In a natural state we would all be Muslims. If we are not, it is because we have been led astray and diverted from the true faith. In making war to force people to become Muslims the faithful are bringing them back to their true nature. Q.E.D. Furthermore, a war of this kind is a jihad, a holy war. Let us make no mistake, the word jihad has two complementary senses. It may denote a spiritual war that is moral and inward. Muslims have to wage this war within themselves in the fight against demons and evil forces, in the effort to achieve better obedience to God’s will, in the struggle for perfect submission. But at the same time and in a wholly consistent way the jihad is also the war against external demons. To spread the faith, it is necessary to destroy false religions. This war, then, is always a religious war, a holy war.” [J. Ellul, The Subversion of Christianity, pp. 100-101]

Hence, he recognizes that the Gospel of Christ and war are not complementary, and Ellul rightly notes that true Christians have always been at least skeptical about war, even while recognizing that a legitimate need on the part of the state may exist for armed conflict. Conversely, he also observes that the teachings of Islam are wholly consistent with a perpetual war state. The concept of “holy war” in medieval Europe rose as a result of the influence of Islamic philosophical and theological ideas, and from the direct example of the Muslims themselves, whose dealings in North Africa and Spain were readily observable to the Christendom of the day.

None of this should be interpreted as seeking to justify the Crusaders in their warfare or their atrocities – indeed, the Crusaders indulged in many great evils when they conducted their wars in the Levant. The point still needs to be understood, however, that without the input of Muslim aggression, Muslim atrocities, and Muslim theological/philosophical ideas, the Crusades would not likely have occurred.

Another error in thinking which non-Christians often make and which needs to be addressed is this: There is not, nor has there ever been, such a thing as a “Christian nation”. No nation has ever been governed solely (or even principally) by the dictates of the Bible, nor has any nation ever been made up solely or even with a large majority of truly Bible-believing born-again Christians. Given the implications of what the Bible has to say as far as commanding Christians to be submissive to the laws of their respective earthly nations insomuch as they can do so without violating Scripture and conscience (see Romans 13:1-7, I Peter 2:11-17), and that Christians are to be “in the world, but not of the world” (see John 17:15-16), it must be understood that Christians cannot partake of forcing their authority, either political or religious, upon the unbelieving world beyond those realms (such as voting, in democratic nations) in which they are lawfully allowed a voice along with everyone else.

As such, since there is no such thing as a “Christian nation”, it is not a valid argument to try to blame Christianity for the behavior of Western nations such as the United States, Great Britain or other countries that many in the Third World usually refer to as “Christian”. Even a cursory glance at the laws and practices of Western nations, past and present, shows that these were not “Christian” in the sense of abiding by the strict dictates of the Bible, even if these nations did have large or influential Christian elements in their societies. Muslims err greatly in trying to apply their understanding of the ummah to the Western situation. In Muslim lands, Islam is supposed to form the complete sum total of all the community and society. Everything is to revolve around Islam, and Islam is to establish the sole deen, the way of living, in a nation ruled by the religion of Mohammed. Muslims apply this to the West, and therefore come to the erroneous conclusion that because the United States extirpated and quarantined the Native Americans, or because Britain sold smallpox-laden blankets to the Mohawks, or because the Dutch treated the natives in their Asian holding cruelly, that all of these crimes can be laid at the feet of Christianity, rather than just individual nations or people. This is an invalid argument because Christianity, as taught in the Bible, is a private and personal relationship between man and his Maker. There is no – can be no – Christian ummah to which a nation’s actions can be attributed. While that concept may be attributable even to apostate state religionism (which teaches its own version of ummah through its belief that all people in a region are submitted to the hierarchical religious authorities and belong to the “state church”), it cannot be attributed to people who are being faithful to the Bible, which is the very definition of a “Bible-believing Christian”.

In closing, when we contrast Islam and Christianity, we see that the former belief system promotes violence, while the latter does not. The difference lies in the holy books and other religious texts used by the two systems. The Qur’an and the ahadith provide ample and straightforward justification for violence against unbelievers. In contrast to this, the Bible brings a message of peace. Only those who try to take the Biblical message out of context and twist the scriptures will see in it a “justification” for violence against non-believers.

Related posts:

1. The Crusades and Islam
2. More Footage Proves ‘Peace’ Activists’ Violence
3. A Letter To Gaza

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Fri, July 09, 2010 | Rubinreports | By Barry Rubin

The Cooperation Council for the Arab States of the Gulf (CCASG)

Kings, Emirs and Shaykhs: the Survival of Traditional Regimes in the Persian Gulf

During the early 1980s I was asked to give a briefing for the head of the Toyota auto company and other enterprises. It was just after the assassination of Egyptian President Anwar al-Sadat and during the height of the Iran-Iraq war, so regional instability was much on the mind of everyone.

After I finished my talk, Mr. Toyota asked a question in Japanese which was quickly translated. “This is all very interesting,” he responded, “but what we really want to know is the date on which the Saudi monarchy will fall.”

Before I could answer, the head of the delegation said, “We know the date and are willing to tell you but first we would like to renegotiate our fees.” I think he was joking, though it was not the most tactful thing to say.

When I did answer, I explained that the Saudi monarchy was very strong and likely to survive for a long time to come. Almost 30 years later, I see no reason to change that assessment.

If you had told experts in the mid-1960s that a half-century later every king and emir then ruling in the Persian Gulf would still be there, most would have been astonished. After all, these regimes seemed representative of a bygone, even medieval, era. Surely, modernity would sweep them away. Certainly, militant Arab nationalists—backed up generally by the regimes in Egypt, Syria, and Iraq—were eager to do so. After 1979, the radical Islamists in Iran and their local sympathizers worked hard to foment revolution.

Yet all these regimes are still in power, in Bahrain and Kuwait, Oman and Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Indeed, in broad terms, these regimes are flourishing and none of them faces the threat of imminent overthrow. They have joined together in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) so it is possible to refer to these six countries collectively as the GCC states.

It would be easy to say, of course, that this political stability is due to wealth from petroleum and natural gas, a treasure even more precious when one compares the large amount of income to the relatively small population of these states. But that is misleading.

First, this very wealth has made these countries the target for blackmail, direct assault, and internal subversion. After all, they have weathered the Iranian revolution, the Iran-Iraq war, Iranian attacks on tanker traffic, Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, the U.S.-led overthrow of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, the challenge from al-Qaida, and much more. No region of the world has been through more upheavals than this one.

Second, wealth does not merely promote stability; it also undermines tradition and the status quo. This is especially true when vast amounts of money, material goods, as well as modern ideas and methods pour into these countries. Nothing could be more destabilizing to such conservative, religious, and traditionalist societies than an extremely intense dose of modernization, probably stronger and more intensive than that faced by any other countries in history.

Third, at times oil prices dipped far lower thus turning the GCC states’ surpluses into deficits when their high internal spending is taken into account. Not all has been rosy economically for them by any means.

Thus, these regimes deserve high marks for managing their situations well and, of course, these rulers know their societies far better than foreign observers who would advise them to do things differently. The price, certainly, has been an absence of democracy, a failure to expand rights, and the continuation of women’s status as second-class citizens generally. In exchange, the citizens of the GCC states have gained much higher living standards, though that doesn’t mean that poverty has been altogether banished, especially in Saudi Arabia.

In addition to all this, the GCC states have to handle a difficult diversity in their populations. This is of two types. On the one hand, each of these countries has a very large proportion of non-citizen foreigners living on their territory as “guest workers.” This sector is kept docile by rotation, sending out longer-term residents and bringing in new ones; of course by the rich financial rewards in comparison to what they’d be earning at home, and repression.

There has never been a single instance in which this large population has threatened the host country’s political stability. Perhaps the closest was when the large Palestinian minority in Kuwait was accused of collaborating with the Iraqi occupation army and was almost totally deported with little trouble. Palestinians have never been allowed into Saudi Arabia in very large numbers, presumably to forestall trouble from radicals among them.

On the other hand, and more problematic, has been the different groups among the local citizen population. Bahrain has a Sunni ruling group and a much larger Shia majority, which has led to friction in the past. Kuwait boasts both Sunni and Shia communities which have gotten along in relative peace.

The Saudis, whose Wahabi faith is austerely Sunni and explicitly hostile to Shiism, have a Shia minority of about 15 percent, concentrated in the strategic Eastern Province. There have been attempts to appeal to this group by Tehran-connected Islamist radicals, featuring the fact that Iran is a country where Shias rule.

While the other GCC states have seen only sporadic terrorism—Oman defeated a Marxist revolutionary war back in the 1970s—Saudi Arabia defeated a serious threat from al-Qaida. That group, it should be remembered, was created by Usama bin Ladin for the purpose of overthrowing the monarchy. At times, Saudi counterterrorist forces have evidenced considerable incompetence but overall they performed effectively and stamped out the attempted insurgency.

Since 2003, the GCC states have had to deal with a new set of problems. The overthrow of the Iraqi regime removed the old Iraqi threat but also augmented the Iranian one, made even worse by Iran’s drive for nuclear weapons. In addition, the sight of another Shia-led state next door worried the Sunni-dominated states lest revolt spread or Iraq would become an Iranian client.

How did the monarchies deal with this situation? Most immediately, they exported some of their own extremism to Iraq, encouraging young men to go there to fight against the Shias. This got rid of potentially troublesome Islamist-oriented youth while also undermining the Shia power which seemed to them to be so dangerous. Ironically, of course, this put the GCC states on the same side as Iran’s ally, Syria, providing funds and fighters to kill American soldiers in Iraq, not to mention Iraqi Shia civilians. From their own standpoint, however, it worked rather well.

Another way of exporting terrorism, albeit less deliberate, was the decision of Saudi terrorists to attack Western targets, most symbolically demonstrated by the fact that almost all the September 11, 2001, terrorists were Saudis. Al-Qaida, as mentioned above, was originally an organization designed to foment revolution within Saudi Arabia but which has directed almost all its energy elsewhere.

Finally, Saudi doctrine has encouraged the idea that terrorism against Muslims is bad but terrorism against non-Muslims is quite acceptable, almost recommended. These stratagems may have done a bit of damage to the kingdom’s international image but have not had any significant costs.

Regarding their own security, GCC states have pursued a balanced approach. Here, it is useful to recall the history of how the kingdoms have maintained their security. Gulf regional politics functioned as a triangle in which two powerful states—Iraq and Iran—confronted the half-dozen weak ones.

Before the Iranian revolution, when the Shah was in power and a radical Arab nationalist Iraq wanted to overthrow the Arab kingdoms, Iran was their protector. Once the Islamist revolution happened in Iran in 1979, Iraq became their protector against that country and doctrine, most obviously during the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq war. Increasingly, since the 1970s, the United States increasingly entered the picture as an external protector.

Once Saddam decided to attack Kuwait in 1990, it was clear that neither Tehran nor Baghdad could be counted on and the United States became even more important. True, there were negatives to dependence on a non-Muslim state whose policies often made it unpopular, but the GCC states did not hesitate when their survival was in question, as seen in the 1990-1991 Kuwait crisis.

In theory, during the post-Saddam era, the United States, with European help, should have been a satisfactory pillar whose power could balance off the continued Iranian threat. The GCC states also opposed Iranian ambitions to a degree which, given their usual caution, was relatively high. The willingness of Saudi Arabia to confront Iran’s ally Syria, over Lebanon, was notable. It might be noted that Syrian and Iranian backing for Hizballah was seen in Riyadh as another example of Shia expansionism.

The strategic problem for the GCC states, however, is that the United States has shown itself to be weak, both in general and in confronting Iranian-Syrian influence, especially under the administration of President Barack Obama. The president spent his first year seeking engagement with Tehran which, whatever its other implications signaled to the GCC states that they were partly on their own. They adjusted their strategy to include a larger measure of getting along with Iran and appeasing it. After all, Iran was much closer to America and much more willing to use violence. If Iran was going to emerge as the leading—and nuclear—power in the Persian Gulf they would have to adjust to that situation to ensure their own survival.

Thus, on one hand, the GCC states would be delighted to see the United States block Iran from getting nuclear weapons or even to see Israel attack and destroy such facilities, but they will keep a low profile publicly to avoid trouble. If Iran gets nuclear weapons, the Saudis might try to get some of their own though the likelihood of a serious Saudi effort to buy such weapons is often exaggerated.

Consequently, given all these problems, the question of how these regimes have survived with such apparent ease a modern world and regional atmosphere that is so hostile to them should be one of the most-studied issue in contemporary political analysis. The foundation of this success is their considerable traditional legitimacy and their massive financial assets. But that’s not all.

Internationally, as has been noted above, the use of a balance of power has been central. They have sought a protector against the most threatening force while also employing appeasement of the most dangerous local power in order to reduce the size of the threat. What is most notable about the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in this regard is that it came in the face of strenuous GCC, especially Kuwaiti but also Saudi Arabia, efforts to keep Baghdad happy. This factor made the attack all the more enraging for the GCC countries, and most of all the Saudis.

What is the secret of the kings and emirs in terms of domestic survival? The use of money to satisfy and co-opt people plus the calculated use of repression have been mentioned. In addition, however, a very important choice has been to slow rather than accelerate reform. A conventional analysis by Western observers would be to urge more rights, change, and democracy in the belief that these would be stabilizing forces.

But the contrary is true. To go too fast—to go even at a moderate speed—would antagonize the powerful conservative forces in these societies, most notably Islamic clerics who mostly support the regimes but who would switch to the revolutionary Islamist side if they thought their rulers to be impious.

Going too fast would have been the main domestic danger to these regimes and even though their rejection of reform entails more oppression, from a regime interests’ standpoint they have been clever to do so. (One might have an interesting discussion on whether they learned from the Iranian shah’s eagerness to bring social change to his country as a cause of the revolution there.)

Hand in hand with that approach was the continuation of the traditional foundation of the regimes’ power. Of course the Saudi and other royal families have often provided an example of corruption and dissolution that runs quite contrary to their desired image of piety and traditional tribal virtue, yet enough family members have behaved properly—or at least have kept their vices fairly secret—to avoid undermining their prestige irreparably.

It should also be emphasized that none of these are “one-man” dictatorships, in contrast to many nominally left-oriented dictatorships in the Third World. The royal families are large, members are distributed as watchdogs to many key posts (including in the military), and enough commoners are brought into the power elite (albeit in subordinate roles) to provide a lot of safeguards against a coup or revolution.

Some of these royals are very capable people and so while it certainly happens that incompetents are put in place due to their lineage, this problem is kept limited. Similarly, the family has some autonomy in choosing the monarch, allowing for the most feeble or incompetent to be discarded despite their seniority.

The regimes have also made good use of both repression and corruption. As Machiavelli taught, these tools can be well or badly used.

Repression, to be most effective, must focus on real threats rather than a generalized intimidation which increases social resentment to the point of revolt. (This is another mistake made by the shah.) Moreover, oppositionists must be given an escape valve that allows them to change sides, an action which is a most profitable one in the GCC states. At the same time, though, punishment must be severe enough to intimidate any but the most determined revolutionaries prepared to sacrifice their lives. The GCC states have been very effective in adjusting their blend of repressive and cooptive policies.

A similar point can be made regarding corruption. If corruption is used to the benefit of too narrow a group, it provokes tremendous resentment. But if it is spread widely, then it will be a positive force for stability, not only buying off key elements yet also giving many others the hope that if they support the regime and behave such riches could come to them also. It should also be noted that business is largely tied to the ruling family while intellectuals and professionals are largely tied to the state bureaucracy, limiting the growth of a completely independent class which sees its interest in conflict with that of the rulers.

The bottom line, then, has been that the GCC rulers have shown a strong sense of survival and

Maneuverability which has allowed them to survive well into the twenty-first century. There is no strong reason to believe that they will not continue to do so in decades to come.

Barry Rubin is director of the Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center and editor of the Middle East Review of International Affairs (MERIA) Journal. His latest books are The Israel-Arab Reader (seventh edition), The Long War for Freedom: The Arab Struggle for Democracy in the Middle East (Wiley), and The Truth About Syria (Palgrave-Macmillan). The website of the GLORIA Center is at Gloria Center and of his blog, Rubin Reports, at Rubinreports.

Related posts:

1. Saudi Arabia and the Rise of the Wahhabi Threat
2. The Obama Administration’s Middle East Disaster
3. Who will stop Iran’s Ahmadinejad?

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Mon, July 05, 2010 | Hurriyet Daily | By Soner Cagaptay

The AKP’s Hamas Policy: “Us vs. Them”

At home, the Justice and Development Party, or AKP, has promoted the Islamist mindset of “us Muslims” in conflict with “the bad others” through the media and also by spreading Hamas’ views throughout Turkey, whether through official Hamas visits to Turkey or through AKP-supported conferences and fundraisers.

Recent changes in media ownership in Turkey under the AKP are closely related to the spread of anti-Western sentiments in the country. Turkey is a country with free media. Media independence in Turkey, however, is increasingly under threat.

The Turkish media remains free (in that it is not illegal to produce journalism), but the AKP is trying to curb media freedoms by transforming media ownership through legal loopholes. Such was the case in December 2005 when the AKP took over the Sabah-ATV conglomerate, which represents around 20% of the Turkish media market, selling this conglomerate to a media company of which Turkish Prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s son-in-law Berat Albayrak is the CEO.

The AKP has also brought a $3.2 billion tax fine against Dogan Yayin, a conglomerate that owns around 50 percent of the Turkish media. This excessive fine exceeds Dogan’s total net worth—is political, because Dogan’s news outlets promote secular, liberal and nationalist views that often criticize of the AKP.

April 17, 2010, Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan receives an honorary PhD from the Hamas-controlled Islamic University in the Gaza Strip. The ceremony took place at the prime minister's home in Ankara. Present were Jamal al-Khudari, president of the university's board of trustees (who is also a Hamas activist and chairman of the Popular Committee to Lift the Siege of the Gaza Strip) and Kamalain Shaath, university president (Islamic University website).

The transformation of the Turkish media is not an esoteric issue, for it affects the future of Turkish democracy and also has a bearing on Turkish views of the world.

Where there is no independent media—as in Russia—there is simply no viable opposition to government. Whenever Turkey goes through a political spasm, analysts warn of the collapse of Turkey’s democracy. Despite this, Turkey has survived numerous crises in the past thanks to the balancing power of its fourth pillar.

As Turkish media becomes less free, there is a higher likelihood that it will become a tool for the government with which to shape an anti-Western public opinion. What is bad for secular liberal western Turks is bad for the West. Turkey’s free media needs to remain free because if it is all either state-owned or owned by pro-AKP businesses, anti-Western and anti-Israeli viewpoints will spread through the media, which we have been witnessing since 2002.

A recent show on Turkey’s publicly-funded Turkish Radio Television, or TRT, network is a perfect example. The debut of the series, entitled “Ayrilik” (Separation), came on the heels of Turkey’s cancellation of Israeli participation in the Anatolian Eagle exercises. TRT, whose head is appointed by the AKP, and which is entirely funded by Turkish taxpayer money, ran “Ayrilik,” a show with an anti-Israeli stance, including one which depicts an imagined situation in the Palestinian territories where a newborn baby is intentionally killed by Israeli soldiers.

What do 18-year-old Turks think of Israel now? They hate it, and they will do so because of images depicted in shows like “Ayrilik.” These are the images they have been seeing for the last seven years and this is what they’ll continue seeing. A Turk who has come of age under the AKP is now more likely than not to hate Israel and the West after seven years of such propaganda. Unlike Turks now in their forties or older who came of political age in a different Turkey, younger Turks in their twenties and thirties have more radical and negative views of the West as a result of what they see in government-controlled media as well as media owned by pro-government businesses.

Through Conferences

While government-controlled media promotes an evil image of the Israelis, international Hamas conferences in Turkey build legitimacy for Hamas and other extensions of the International Muslim Brotherhood movement. Before the AKP came to power, Turkey had never hosted a Hamas conference. Now, such conferences render the Hamas and Muslim Brotherhood agenda more accessible to Turks, making Hamas’ violent struggle against Israel a part of daily political debate in Turkey.

In the last three years alone, there have been seven Hamas conferences and fundraisers in Istanbul. The first one of these, held in July 2006 and attended by one of the spiritual leaders of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, Sheikh Yousef al-Qaradawi, was given the title “Muslims in Europe.” Qaradawi’s visit was funded by the British Foreign Office, and Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood came to talk about Muslims in Europe, exposing Turks and European Muslims to Hamas and its ideology.

The list continues: other Hamas and Muslim Brotherhood conferences in Turkey include a November, 2007 conference called “Jerusalem Day,” co-organized by nongovernmental organization the Association of Turkish Volunteer Organizations, or TGTV, close to the AKP and Islamic Association of Muslim World Nongovernmental Organizations, or IDSB. This conference, entitled “Jerusalem Day,” called for “liberating Jerusalem through jihad from the Zionists.”

Other conferences followed in February 2009, April 2009, May 2009, and July 2009. What is interesting is that the frequency of these conferences has been steadily increasing, with four such meetings alone held in 2009.

Moreover, these meetings have started to espouse a violent agenda. For instance, at the February 2009 conference, Hamas members called for a jihad centered on Gaza. The April 2009 meeting was a “Masjid al-Aqsa symposium” which called to “liberate Masjid al-Aqsa” and it was organized by the Istanbul Peace Platform, or IBP, which includes a number of NGOs close to the AKP. The symposium called on all Muslims to liberate al-Aqsa through violence, if necessary, and also claimed that Israel has plans to demolish it. The “Palestine Collaboration Conference” in May 2009 called for “continued resistance to liberate Palestine.” Conference participants included former Sudanese President Mushir Sivar Ez-Zeheb, President of the International Union of Muslim Scholars Yousef al-Qaradawi, and Hamas Representative and Spokesman in Lebanon Usame Hamdan. In his speech at this conference, AKP deputy Zeyd Aslan said that Israel “commits genocide in Palestine.”

On the other hand, the “Environment Conference” in July 2009 was organized by the Earth Centre of Dialogue Partners in cooperation with the Islamic Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, the city of Istanbul, and the Fatih University in Istanbul. The conference, attended by al-Qaradawi, concluded with the declaration of a seven-year-action plan on climate change. The conference also served as platform to bring Hamas and MB members to Istanbul.

These conferences are organized by NGOs close to the AKP government. Although they appear to be civil society initiatives, the meetings are held in city halls of Istanbul or convention centers under the control of the AKP city government, which in essence means that taxpayer funds help pay for these events.

Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center^[1]

Analysis

Since the beginning of 2009 Turkey has played host to intensive radical Islamic activity, different from what was familiar in the past, with the involvement of Hamas and activists affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood.

A conference held on February 14-15, 2009, was particularly prominent and attended by 200 activists and clerics from the Arab-Muslim world and Muslim communities in Western countries, many of them identifying with the radical Islamic ideology advocated by Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood. Ninety of them signed a jihadist document called “The Istanbul Declaration,” which called for every Muslim to fulfill his religious duty of jihad and “resistance” against Israel (“the Zionist Jewish occupiers”). The conference also called for supporting jihad and the “resistance” with money, weapons, clothing, food, medical equipment and other materials.

Walid al-Tabatibai waving a shoe in condemnation of Mahmoud Abbas. In the background are a picture of Sheikh Ahmed Yassin and the emblem of the Salafit.

The Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas’ parent movement, was well represented among the passengers aboard the Mavi Marmara. Its activists were prominent among both the Arab and Western delegations, for example from Arab countries such as Jordan and Egypt (where the Muslim Brotherhood is in the opposition) and Western countries such as Britain (where the Muslim Brotherhood spearheads the campaign to smear and delegitimize Israel). Two of the Mavi Marmara passengers were radical Islamic activists who also signed the Istanbul Declaration (Dr. Walid al-Tabatibai from Kuwait and Sheikh Muhammad bin Nasr al-Hazmi from Yemen, photographed on board the ship brandishing a dagger.) Another senior Hamas-Muslim Brotherhood activist, Mahmoud Sawalha, who lives in Britain and participated in planning the flotilla, did not join it (in our assessment, fearing he might fall into the hands of the Israeli security forces.)

On July 7, 2010, Hezbollah’s Al-Manar TV reported that Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan called Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah to express his condolences at the death of the movement’s spiritual leader Fadlallah. Nasrallah reportedly praised Erdogan for his stance.

[1] Terrorism-info.org.il.

Related posts:

1. Hamas continues its policy of terrorism against Israel
2. ‘Gaza Flotilla’ Organizer Bülent Yıldırım at Hamas Rally in Gaza 2009
3. Flotilla Activists Linked to Al-Qaeda, Hamas and Other Terror Organizations

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Fri, July 20, 2007 | Frontpagemag | By Robert Spencer

The Persistence of Islamic Slavery

The International Criminal Court recently [2007] issued warrants for the arrest of Ahmed Haroun, the minister for humanitarian affairs of Sudan, and Ali Kosheib, a leader of that country’s notorious janjaweed militia. The Sudanese government has refused to hand over the two for prosecution. Charges include murder, rape, torture and “imprisonment or severe deprivation of liberty.” Severe deprivation of liberty is a euphemism for slavery. Egypt’s Al-Ahram Weekly observed not long ago that in Sudan, “slavery, sanctioned by religious zealots, ravaged the southern parts of the country and much of the west as well.”

Muslim slavers in the Sudan primarily enslave non-Muslims, and chiefly Christians. According to the Coalition Against Slavery in Mauritania and Sudan (CASMAS), a human rights and abolitionist movement,

“The current Khartoum government wants to bring the non-Muslim black South in line with Sharia law, laid down and interpreted by conservative Muslim clergy. The black animist and Christian South has been ravaged for many years of slave raids by Arabs from the north and east and resists Muslim religious rule and the perceived economic, cultural, and religious expansion behind it.”

The BBC reported in March 2007 that slave raids

“were a common feature of Sudan’s 21-year north-south war, which ended in 2005….According to a study by the Kenya-based Rift Valley Institute, some 11,000 young boys and girls were seized and taken across the internal border — many to the states of South Darfur and West Kordofan….Most were forcibly converted to Islam, given Muslim names and told not to speak their mother tongue.”

One modern-day Sudanese Christian slave, James Pareng Alier, was kidnapped and enslaved when he was twelve years old. Religion was a major element of his ordeal:

“I was forced to learn the Koran and re-baptised “Ahmed.” They told me that Christianity was a bad religion. After a time we were given military training and they told us we would be sent to fight.”

Alier has no idea of his family’s whereabouts. But while non-Muslims slaves are often forcibly converted to Islam, their conversion does not lead to their freedom. Mauritanian anti-slavery campaigner Boubacar Messaoud explains:

“It’s like having sheep or goats. If a woman is a slave, her descendants are slaves.”

Anti-slavery crusaders like Messaoud have great difficulty working against this attitude because it is rooted in the Qur’an and Muhammad’s example. The Muslim prophet Muhammad owned slaves, and like the Bible, the Qur’an takes the existence of slavery for granted, even as it enjoins the freeing of slaves under certain circumstances, such as the breaking of an oath:

“Allah will not call you to account for what is futile in your oaths, but He will call you to account for your deliberate oaths: for expiation, feed ten indigent persons, on a scale of the average for the food of your families; or clothe them; or give a slave his freedom” (5:89).

But while the freeing of a slave or two here and there is encouraged, the institution itself is never questioned. The Qur’an even gives a man permission to have sexual relations with his slave girls as well as with his wives:

“The believers must (eventually) win through, those who humble themselves in their prayers; who avoid vain talk; who are active in deeds of charity; who abstain from sex, except with those joined to them in the marriage bond, or (the captives) whom their right hands possess, for (in their case) they are free from blame…” (23:1-6).

A Muslim is not to have sexual relations with a woman who is married to someone else – except a slave girl:

“And all married women (are forbidden unto you) save those (captives) whom your right hands possess. It is a decree of Allah for you” (4:24).

In the past, as today, most slaves in Islam were non-Muslims who had been captured during jihad warfare. The pioneering scholar of the treatment of non-Muslims in Islamic societies, Bat Ye’or, explains the system that developed out of jihad conquest:

The jihad slave system included contingents of both sexes delivered annually in conformity with the treaties of submission by sovereigns who were tributaries of the caliph. When Amr conquered Tripoli (Libya) in 643, he forced the Jewish and Christian Berbers to give their wives and children as slaves to the Arab army as part of their jizya [tax on non-Muslims]. From 652 until its conquest in 1276, Nubia was forced to send an annual contingent of slaves to Cairo. Treaties concluded with the towns of Transoxiana, Sijistan, Armenia, and Fezzan (Maghreb) under the Umayyads and Abbasids stipulated an annual dispatch of slaves from both sexes. However, the main sources for the supply of slaves remained the regular raids on villages within the dar-al-harb [House of War, i.e., non-Islamic regions] and the military expeditions which swept more deeply into the infidel lands, emptying towns and provinces of their inhabitants.^[1]

Historian Speros Vryonis observes that

“since the beginning of the Arab razzias [raids] into the land of Rum [the Byzantine Empire], human booty had come to constitute a very important portion of the spoils.”

As they steadily conquered more and more of Anatolia, the Turks reduced many of the Greeks and other non-Muslims there to slave status:

“They enslaved men, women, and children from all major urban centers and from the countryside where the populations were defenseless.”^[2]

The Indian historian K. S. Lal states that wherever jihadists conquered a territory,

“there developed a system of slavery peculiar to the clime, terrain and populace of the place.” When Muslim armies invaded India, “its people began to be enslaved in droves to be sold in foreign lands or employed in various capacities on menial and not-so-menial jobs within the country.”^[3]

Slaves faced pressure to convert to Islam. In an analysis of Islamic political theories, Patricia Crone notes that after a jihad battle was concluded,

“male captives might be killed or enslaved…Dispersed in Muslim households, slaves almost always converted, encouraged or pressurized [sic] by their masters, driven by a need to bond with others, or slowly, becoming accustomed to seeing things through Muslim eyes even if they tried to resist.”^[4]

Thomas Pellow, an Englishman who was enslaved in Morocco for twenty-three years after being captured as a cabin boy on a small English vessel in 1716, was tortured until he accepted Islam. For weeks he was beaten and starved, and finally gave in after his torturer resorted to

“burning my flesh off my bones by fire, which the tyrant did, by frequent repetitions, after a most cruel manner.”^[5]

Slavery was taken for granted throughout Islamic history, as it was, of course, in the West as well up until relatively recent times. Yet while the European and American slave trade get stern treatment attention from historians (as well as from reparations advocates and guilt-ridden politicians), the Islamic slave trade, which actually lasted longer and brought suffering to a larger number of people, is virtually ignored. (This fact magnifies the irony of Islam being presented to American blacks as the egalitarian alternative to the “white man’s slave religion” of Christianity.) While historians estimate that the transatlantic slave trade, which operated between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, involved around 10.5 million people, the Islamic slave trade in the Sahara, the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean areas began in the seventh century and lasted into the nineteenth, and involved 17 million people.^[6]

And when pressure came to end slavery, it moved from Christendom into Islam, not the other way around. There was no Muslim William Wilberforce or William Lloyd Garrison. In fact, when the British government in the nineteenth century adopted the view of Wilberforce and the other abolitionists and began to put pressure on pro-slavery regimes, the Sultan of Morocco was incredulous.

“The traffic in slaves,” he noted, “is a matter on which all sects and nations have agreed from the time of the sons of Adam…up to this day.” He said that he was “not aware of its being prohibited by the laws of any sect” and that the very idea that anyone would question its morality was absurd: “No one need ask this question, the same being manifest to both high and low and requires no more demonstration than the light of day.”^[7]

However, it was not the unanimity of human practice, but the words of the Qur’an and Muhammad that were decisive in stifling abolitionist movements within the Islamic world. Slavery was abolished only as a result of Western pressure; the Arab Muslim slave trade in Africa was ended by the force of British arms in the nineteenth century.

Besides being practiced more or less openly today in Sudan and Mauritania, there is evidence that slavery still continues beneath the surface in some majority-Muslim countries as well — notably Saudi Arabia, which only abolished slavery in 1962, Yemen and Oman, both of which ended legal slavery in 1970, and Niger, which didn’t abolish slavery until 2004. In Niger, the ban is widely ignored, and as many as one million people remain in bondage. Slaves are bred, often raped, and generally treated like animals.

A shadow cast by the strength and perdurability of Islamic slavery can be seen in instances where Muslims have managed to import this institution to the United States. A Saudi named Homaidan Al-Turki, for instance, was sentenced in September 2006 to 27 years to life in prison, for keeping a woman as a slave in his home in Colorado. For his part, Al-Turki claimed that he was a victim of anti-Muslim bias. He told the judge:

“Your honor, I am not here to apologize, for I cannot apologize for things I did not do and for crimes I did not commit. The state has criminalized these basic Muslim behaviors. Attacking traditional Muslim behaviors was the focal point of the prosecution.”

The following month, an Egyptian couple living in Southern California received a fine and prison terms, to be followed by deportation, after pleading guilty to holding a ten-year-old girl as a slave. And in January 2007, an attaché of the Kuwaiti embassy in Washington, Waleed Al Saleh, and his wife were charged with keeping three Christian domestic workers from India in slave-like conditions in al-Saleh’s Virginia home. One of the women remarked:

“I believed that I had no choice but to continue working for them even though they beat me and treated me worse than a slave.”

All this indicates that the problem of Islamic slavery is not restricted to recent events in the Sudan; it is much larger and more deeply rooted. The United Nations and human rights organizations have noted the phenomenon, but nevertheless little has been done to move decisively against those who still hold human beings in bondage, or aid or tolerate others doing so. The UN has tried to place peacekeeping forces in Darfur, over the objections of the Sudanese government, but its remonstrations against slavery in Sudan and elsewhere have likewise not resulted in significant government action against the practice. Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have also noted the problem, but as HRW observes,

“the government of Sudan has stonewalled on the issue of slavery, claiming it was a matter of rival tribes engaging in hostage taking, over which it had little control. That is simply untrue, as myriad reports coming out of southern Sudan have made abundantly clear.”

For Islamic slavery to disappear, a powerful state would have to move against it decisively, not with mere words, and accept no equivocation of half-measures. In today’s international geopolitical climate, nothing could be less likely.

[1] Bat Ye’or, The Decline of Eastern Christianity Under Islam: From Jihad to Dhimmitude, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1996, p. 108.

[2] Speros Vryonis, The Decline of Medieval Hellenism in Asia Minor and the Process of Islamization from the Eleventh through the Fifteenth Century, Berkeley, 1971. P. 174-5. Quoted in Bostom, Legacy of Jihad, p. 87.

[3] K. S. Lal, Muslim Slave System in Medieval India, Aditya Prakashan, 1994. P. 9.

[4] Patricia Crone, God’s Rule: Government and Islam, Columbia University Press, 2004. Pp. 371-372. Quoted in Bostom, Legacy of Jihad, p. 86.

[5] Giles Milton, White Gold: The Extraordinary Story of Thomas Pellow and Islam’s One Million White Slaves, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004. P. 84.

[6] Andrew Bostom, The Legacy of Jihad, Prometheus, 2005, pp. 89-90.

[7] Quoted in Bernard Lewis, Race and Slavery in the Middle East, Oxford University Press, 1994. Reprinted at Fordham.edu.

Related posts:

1. Praising Military Slavery
2. “Slavery Is A Part Of Islam”
3. The Philosopher of Islamic Terror – part 3

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Mon, July 05, 2010 | Arutz Sheva | By Hillel Fendel

Salah Uddin Shoaib Choudhury

Muslim Zionist Speaks Out in Bangladesh

Salah Uddin Shoaib Choudhury, a Muslim Zionist in Bangladesh, told IsraelNationalRadio’s Yishai Fleisher last week,

“Political Islam and hate speech are our biggest enemies.”

Choudhury is the editor of the Weekly Blitz, which he calls “the only anti-jihadist newspaper in the Muslim world.” He is also an author, lyricist, movie director and peace activist – and was held in solitary confinement for 17 months because he wanted to visit Israel.

“I started this newspaper in ’03,” Choudhury told Fleisher, “and at the time, the Hebrew Writers Association in Tel Aviv invited me to take part in a symposium. On my way to Israel, I was stopped and arrested at the international airport in Dhaka. They labeled me a Zionist and an Israeli spy, interrogated me and tortured me for ten days, and then imprisoned me for 17 months in solitary confinement, until 2005.”

Choudhury’s latest book, Inside Madrassa, published in October 2009, gives extensive information on education in Muslim schools known as madrassahs, including material on Jihadist orientation, hate speech and other aspects of radical Islam taught there. He opened a branch of the Israel-based International Forum for Literature and Culture of Peace in Bangladesh, and has authored articles critical of anti-Israeli and anti-Semitic attitudes in Muslim countries.

Asked how he came to sympathize with Jews, Choudhury said,

“My father used to tell me not to believe the weekly hate speeches against Christian and Jews that we would hear in the mosques. I tried to follow this advice, and later on I kept an open mind when I met Jews – and now I have thousands of Jewish friends.”

Among them he mentioned Dr. Richard Benkin,

“who did not give up and worked to have me freed from jail… Many of my relatives abandoned me, but Benkin did not, and he got me out of jail.”

Benkin is currently helping Bangladeshi Hindu refugees in West Bengal and elsewhere secure basic rights, especially protection from attempted genocide by Islamist radicals. He is a strong pro-Israel advocate who believes Jews and Hindus must unite to defeat radical Islam.

Choudhury described his newspaper as

“the only paper in the Muslim world in which you can find untwisted news about Israel… We have tremendous adversity, though we have 37,000 readers of the print version… I believe that Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East, and as a Muslim, I believe that the only problem is political Islam and the hate speech, and if these can stop, then all Muslims will be like me…”

“We have been able to get an Islamic anti-Semitism group banned in Bangladesh, and there’s another group that’s on its way to being banned as well. The problem is political Islam, which is present in all Islamic countries and is now growing in the West, too. In the U.S. there are 600 congregations preaching jihad. We must raise our voices against the misinterpretation of the Quran.”

On an optimistic note, Choudhury noted that

“changes have been made; there are voices now in favor of Israel in Bangladesh, which would have been impossible in 2003.”

Bangladesh, a non-Arab Muslim country, is the third largest Muslim nation in the world.

Related posts:

1. Mein Kampf: Best seller in Muslim Bangladesh
2. From Egyptian Muslim to Italian Christian and Zionist
3. Europe’s Long Road to the Mosque: Muslim Immigration

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Mon, Dec 17, 2007 | Family Security Matters | By Adrian Morgan

Exclusive: The Failure of Western Feminists to Address Islamist Abuse

Women Harmed By Muslim Men

In 2007, women have been killed in Basra, Iraq, by fanatical Islamists. Their bodies are subsequently dumped among refuse, with notes saying they were killed for “un-Islamic behavior“. Such “behavior” is actually the mere fact that these women did not wear the hijab or Muslim headscarf. One mother who did not wear a veil was murdered with her children, who were aged 6 to 11 years. In September 2007, the headless bodies of a woman and her six-year-old son were among those found. In fact, between July and September 2007, 42 women had been killed in this manner in Basra.

In Basra, Christian women who wear no head coverings have been warned by Shia militants that if they do not wear the hijab, they will be killed. December 2007, 41-year old Maison Marzouq, a Christian woman, was killed with her 31-year old brother. Their bodies were dumped in a Basra refuse tip. The killings have continued, bringing the number of “un-Islamic” Basran women murdered over the past six months [july-dec, 2007] to 48.

In June 2007, Hamas took control of Gaza by force. Sheikh Abu Saqer, who runs the Islamist group called Jihadia Salafiya, warned that Christian women living in Gaza should wear the hijab if they wished to live free from attack:

“All women, including non-Muslims, need to understand they must be covered at all times while in public.”

In Sudan in 2004, a Christian woman was given a sentence of 40 lashes and a fine, for the “crime” of standing near a garden at night, and not wearing a headscarf. She was beaten by police and denied the right to speak in her defense at her Sharia trial. The sentence of whipping was carried out immediately after her conviction.

The issue of Muslim men forcing women to wear the hijab continues. In September 2007 British dentist Omer Butt – brother of former radical Hassan Butt – faced a tribunal, accused of misconduct. He had told a woman patient that he would grant her free government-sponsored dental care only if she wore a headscarf. If she refused, she would have to seek dental treatment elsewhere. Butt was found guilty but received only an admonishment.

Last week [dec 2007], a 16-year old girl was murdered in Missauga, Toronto. Aqsa Parvez was strangled, and died on Monday, December 10 2007, after a brief struggle for life in hospital. Her father was arrested and on Tuesday, he was charged with her murder. Her 26-year old brother Waqas was charged with obstruction of justice.

Aqsa’s school friends claimed that she would leave home dressed in a hijab, but would change into Western clothes before arriving in class. At the time she was killed, she had left home and had apparently only returned to collect some possessions. Classmate Ebonie Mitchell said:

“She just wanted to dress like we do. Last year she wore like the Islamic stuff and everything, the hijab, and this year she’s all Western. She just wanted to look like everyone else. And I guess her dad had a problem with that.”

Her family, and her father in particular, had apparently forced her to wear the Muslim headscarf.

Muslim groups, such as CAIR naturally rushed to defend their religion, maintaining that:

“Teen rebellion is something that exists in all households in Canada and is not unique to any culture or background.”

The Islamic Social Services Association said that the death was a case of domestic violence, and was a problem across Canada’s society.

Such less-than-honest assessments do not take into consideration the cultural and religious factors behind the case. Not wearing Islamic dress is a motivation for other so-called honor-killings. In Pakistan, from which Aqsa’s family came, an estimated 1,500 women die as a result of honor-killings every year.

In Britain, numerous honor killings have taken place, particularly amongst Muslim immigrants of Pakistani and Kurdish backgrounds. On November 1, 2006, Pakistani immigrant Mohammed Riaz burned his wife and four daughters (aged 3 to 16) to death because they had become too “Westernized“. Before the murders, he had destroyed “Western clothes” belonging to the girls.

It is frequently argued that honor-killings, like female genital mutilation (FGM) have nothing to do with Islam. This does not explain why such abuses of women take place predominantly in Muslim societies. In today’s climate of cultural relativism where Westerners do not wish to find fault with abuses of women under Islam, the voices of famous so-called feminists are either quiet, or even refuse to acknowledge that such abuse has anything to do with them.

Where were the voices of Western feminists when several girls and young women died in a fire in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, on March 11, 2002? The girls were students, staying in a dormitory when the fire broke out. When they tried to flee the building, those who were not Islamically “covered” were beaten back into the flames by the muttawa or “religious policemen.”

Australian-born Germaine Greer was an icon of the feminist movement. Her seminal book “The Female Eunuch” was first published in America in 1970, a radical response to Betty Friedan’s 1963 book, The Feminine Mystique.

In 1999, Greer published The Whole Woman. Here, she attempted to compare FGM – which is forced upon young girls who have no rights of refusal – with breast enhancement, which is an adult woman’s choice. For Greer, an operation that robs a woman of the right to enjoy sex is justifiable as it is a part of “culture“.

In 2004, Greer wrote:

“I get a bit worried about certain heavily veiled ladies driving because they have no peripheral vision at all. You can understand why in some countries they are not allowed to drive.”

In Saudi Arabia where women are banned from driving, they are given no choice about wearing the veil. In the West, only a few women, such as the Floridian former child-batterer Sultaana Freeman demand the right to drive while wearing a face veil (niqab).

Greer has previously suggested that as a protest against the (Afghan) war, women should wear burkas – even though in Afghanistan the burka was forced upon women by men who would use sticks and electrical cable to beat those who did not comply. Most recently, Greer showed her self-centered contempt for the plight of abused Muslim women during a talk in Melbourne, dec 2007.

Pamela Bone asked Greer why Western feminists did not speak out against “honor killings”. Greer mentioned the subject of Darfur, Sudan, and its rape-victims (thousands of women and young girls have been raped during the conflict). Greer said:

“I can talk to rape victims here. Why should I go to Darfur to talk to rape victims?”

When Bone responded that the situation for such women in Darfur was worse than in the West, Greer tried to hedge the issue.

She said: “Who says it is?”

When Bone said that she had been to Darfur, Greer argued that changing another culture was hard.

“We haven’t got it right in our own courts. What good would it do for me to go over there and try to tell them what to do? I am just part of decadent Western culture and they think we’re all going to hell fast and maybe we are all going to hell fast.”

Greer said that she cared, and was wearing a white ribbon to show she cared.

Greer’s shamefully hollow sympathies are symptomatic of the malaise of Western feminism, whose modern luminaries bask in the limelight of publicity, live lives of middle class privilege yet ignore those who are denied such privileges. A hundred years ago, women in America and Britain had not been granted universal suffrage. The vote for all U.S. women only came in 1920, and it was not until 1928 that British women were allowed equal rights to men at the polling booth. Their struggles had begun decades earlier.

In Britain, suffragettes were imprisoned for their beliefs and their hunger strikes were addressed by force-feeding. On June 4, 1913, one British suffragette martyred herself at the annual Derby races. Emily Wilding Davison threw herself under the king’s horse, dying days later from a fractured skull.

Modern Western feminists have been brought up with the luxuries of higher education, something that has been denied to many women in the Muslim world. The Taliban refused to allow women to work, and denied girls the right to schooling. Even now, the Taliban continue to deny education to girls, killing those who do try to teach them. I should here mention one Western feminist who – shortly after the Taliban usurped power on September 27, 1996 – had been an outspoken critic of their oppression of women. Mavis Nicholson Leno – wife of talk show host Jay Leno – is on the board of the Feminist Majority Foundation, and from February 1997 was national chair of the group’s Campaign to Stop Gender Apartheid in Afghanistan.

Muslim students in Tehran 1970's

One of the problems associated with the issue of women’s rights in Muslim countries is the false notion that headscarves and face-veils have always been intrinsically a part of Islam. Look at the photograph above. It shows girl students in Tehran, Iran, in the 1970s, shortly before the Islamist revolution. These girls would have thought of themselves as modern, but still Muslim. When the revolution came, Ayatollah Khomeini enforced strict dress codes upon women. As well as introducing primitive and barbaric punishments of stoning for adultery, he lowered the age of adulthood of women – at which a girl could be executed for a crime – to nine years old.

Though the age of adulthood for a woman has been subsequently raised, modern day Iran still punishes women for not covering themselves in the headscarf or chador – the Iranian equivalent of the burka. Iranian women are still sentenced to be stoned to death for adultery – often on spurious grounds.

Muslim Feminism

Writing on the case of murdered schoolgirl Aqsa Parvez in Canada’s National Post, Tarek Fatah and Farzana Hassan argue that there is nothing in the Koran to justify wearing of a hijab. Both writers are members of the Canadian Muslim Congress, and claim that extremists have made the veil issue the “sixth pillar of Islam”. They cite one Montreal mosque which had carried a notice on its website stating:

“By removing your hijab, you have destroyed your faith. Islam means submission to Allah in all our actions.”

In October 2006 the door of Farzana Hassan’s home was pelted with eggs. She claimed that her comments about there being no Koranic justification for the hijab had prompted the attack.

Photograph of the Osama bin Laden family, taken by their father on a holiday in Falun, Sweden. Osama bin Laden is shown second from the right, aged 14. Note that not all the female are wearing a headscarf or hijab.

The most extreme Islamist known to us is Osama bin Laden. In the photograph above, he is shown second from the right, aged 14. The picture is of the entire bin Laden family, taken by their father on a holiday in Falun, Sweden. Though some of Osama’s sisters have headscarves, most are unafraid to show their hair to the world.

The veil has been known at least since the time of the Assyrians, whose empire flourished around northern Iraq from 2400 BC to 612 BC. In Assyria, a woman had to wear the veil outside the house, and prostitutes were forbidden to wear it. It has been argued that only as Islam expanded did the veil become incorporated into Muslim codes of dress. Around the 10th century AD, it became part of general Islamic tradition. In the 14th century, Arab traveler Ibn Battuta was shocked to find Turkish women in Anatolia who went about uncovered.

The last Caliphate was that of the Ottomans, and it was officially abolished by the newly-created Turkish government on March 3, 2004. The wife of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, founder of modern Turkey, was Latife Hanim Usaklgil (1898 to 1975). She led campaigns for women to throw away the headscarf and to become modern citizens.

After the demise of the Caliphate, the Muslim Brotherhood was founded by Hassan al-Banna in Egypt in March, 1928. This group would globally become influential among Islamists, including the ideologues of Al Qaeda, and since the 1980s has been predominantly responsible for the rise of the wearing of the hijab. One woman within the Muslim Brotherhood extolled the notion of feminism within Islam. Zainab al Ghazali was born in 1917. She joined the Egyptian Feminist Union in 1935, but initially refused to join the Brotherhood. She joined the Brotherhood only in 1948, at a time when the group was committing acts of terrorism and sending fighters against Israel. She would be imprisoned by President Nasser in 1965. She was tortured in prison, and was finally released in August 1971.

Ghazali declared that:

“Islam has provided everything for both men and women. It gave women everything–freedom, economic rights, political rights, social rights, public and private rights. Islam gave women rights in the family granted by no other society. Women may talk of liberation in Christian society, Jewish society, or pagan society, but in Islamic society it is a grave error to speak of the liberation of women. The Muslim woman must study Islam so she will know that it is Islam that has given her all her rights.”

Ghazali believed women could enter all areas of commerce and politics. She died in 2005, but despite her efforts, Mahdi Akef, the current leader of the Brotherhood, recently stated:

“It is the Muslim Brotherhood’s opinion that a woman cannot be president [of Egypt].”

So much for feminism and women’s equality within the Muslim Brotherhood.

There are aspects of Islam that always will be used by extremists to undermine Muslim women’s emancipation, such as the Sharia concept that legally, a woman’s testimony is worth half that of a man. Muslim “feminists” must fight against such entrenched positions if they really want full equality. There are no Muslim spiritual leaders who are women. Some women may teach, but few are imams.

Amina Wudud broke with traditions and led Islamic prayers in New York on March 18, 2005. The Islamic Friday prayers were held in an Episcopalian church under tight security. Three mosques had refused to let her lead prayers. She attended the first European conference on Islamic Feminism held at Barcelona, Spain, in October 2005. The conference ran smoothly, attended by 300 delegates from the Muslim world.

In Morocco, women are now allowed to act as Islamic “guides”, known as morchidat. In April 2006 the first batch of these female chaplains graduated. One of these “guides” said:

“The imamate in Islam is restricted solely to men who are apt at leading prayers, notably those on Friday. The Morchidat will be in charge of leading religious discussions, give courses in Islam, give moral support to people in difficulty and guide the faithful towards a tolerant Islam.”

There are many sincere and intelligent Muslim women who argue that the original Islam of the Koran is a source of women’s emancipation, such as Asma Barlas, and Mahsa Sherkarloo. In Malaysia, the daughter of a former president has campaigned for women’s rights. Marina Mahathir is still a Muslim, but has condemned Islamist legislation in her country.

Also in Malaysia, the women’s group Sisters in Islam argues that the Koran should be used for the emancipation of women. In neighboring Indonesia, Lily Zakiyah Munir similarly maintains that despite 1,400 years of patriarchal Islamic jurisprudence, Islam as described in the Koran promotes the rights of women. She argues that a genuine form of Sharia law should promote justice for women.

The efforts of these Muslim women who struggle to find a message of equality and liberation in the Koran should be applauded. If there is any hope for a genuine reformation in Islam, it may come from the arguments presented by scholars such as these. However, even these women must concede that Sura 4:34 of the Koran grants a man permission to beat his wife.

The existing schools of Islam are not going to give women equal legal and religious status in a hurry.Ghada Jamshir is a woman’s rights activist living in Bahrain. She is a Muslim, but refuses to let patriarchal clerics silence her criticisms of their methods. When Muslim woman doctor Taslima Nasreen wrote a newspaper article describing how in her native Bangladesh a Muslim cleric had organized the illegal stoning to death of a woman, reactions against her were swift and hostile. A death fatwa was put on her head, and she was forced to flee the country. 14 years later, she is still subject to persecution.

In Germany, Seyran Ates is a 44-year old lawyer who was born in Turkey. She has campaigned for two decades against forced marriages and so-called honor killings amongst Germany’s Muslim communities. For her pains, she was once shot at by the enraged husband of a client. In 2005 Ates was named “German Woman of the Year“, but in September 2006 she announced that she was to retire. She claimed that the constant death threats against her and her daughter were getting too much to bear. Later, she did gain some support, and returned to work under tighter security.

Seyran Ates sums up the problems created by well-meaning “liberals” who hide behind cultural relativism when gross abuses of Muslim women take place. She has said:

“I want to know, and many thousands of Muslim girls and women have a right to know, why understanding and infinite tolerance is practiced with particular cultural traditions that are clearly oppressive of women. Human rights are universal and unconditional. And that goes most certainly for religious objectives. It is only girls and women who are forced to wear head-scarves. And it’s also a majority of girls and women who are affected by forced marriage.“

If only Western-born feminists could be so forthright.

The Failures of Western Feminism

Britain’s first mainstream “feminist” magazine was called Spare Rib, founded in 1971. Some of its articles became mere rants against men, who were dubbed “phallocrats“. Such vitriol was not dissimilar to that promoted by American Valerie Solanas, author of the Scum Manifesto, where Scum stood for the “Society of Cutting Up Men“.

The term “feminist” is now viewed by 75% of working American women as an insult. The fault for this lies not in the drive for full economic, legislative, and social equality of women, but in the arrogant and vainglorious personalities of many of feminism’s leading icons. There have always been great and remarkable women who stood up for their rights as human beings in patriarchal environments, from Lysistrata and Sappho to Boudicca, Hildegard of Bingen, Elizabeth Fry, Mary Woollstonecraft, Sojourner Truth and Eleanor Roosevelt, but these women never saw themselves as “feminists“.

Gloria Steinem said in December 2005 of Hugh Hefner:

“He’s such a jerk. He’s so pathetic. … Now’s he’s going around with four young women in their 20s instead of just one. It’s sort of Moslem, actually.”

Her comments raised the temperature of CAIR, but did little to enhance the situation of Muslim women trapped in patriarchal societies. I can find little else by Steinem that actually criticizes Islamism, a palpable threat to women.

Andrea Dworkin and Catherine MacKinnon are known for their stance against pornography, but this crusade apparently masks a deeper grudge against sensuality in general. Gloria Steinem, who joined the pair in their legal attempts to gain damages against the makers of the notorious porn movie “Deep Throat”, has claimed that Dworkin is among the elite few who have helped the human race to evolve.

Dworkin, who died on April 9, 2005, had been sexually abused as a child, had engaged in prostitution and was a battered wife. Dworkin has stated:

“Marriage as an institution developed from rape as a practice,” and “Men are distinguished from women by their commitment to do violence rather than to be victimized by it.”

MacKinnon is a sharp lawyer from a comfortable Minnesota background. She now lectures in law at the University of Michigan. An important and commendable point in her career came in 1993, when she employed a little-known U.S. law, the Alien Tort Statute to seek redress for Muslim and Croatian women who had been raped by Serbs in Bosnia. This allows for jurisdiction to be maintained in the U.S. court for crimes committed abroad, but only if the defendant is personally handed the charges on U.S. soil. The target of the suit was Radovan Karadzic, who supervised campaigns of rape during the Bosnian war. When he appeared in New York in March 1993, he was served with a lawsuit. Karadzic has been named in other indictments, including one for the Srebrenica genocide of 8,000 Muslim males, but since 1995 his whereabouts are unknown [He was arrested in Belgrade on 21 July 2008 and brought before Belgrade’s War Crimes Court a few days later. He was extradited to the Netherlands, and is currently in The Hague, in the custody of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia].

MacKinnon’s failings, in my view, stem not from commission but from omission. To wish to see a mass murderer and supervisor of rapes charged is commendable. Yet I wonder what deeper motives prevent MacKinnon, who has loudly attacked pornography, from employing the Alien Tort Statute against visiting Islamists and religious officials who have committed atrocities against women in their own countries. In my research for this article, I have found no condemnation from MacKinnon or Dworkin against Islamist abuses of women in Muslim societies. I hope I am wrong, and wish that either individual has used her influence to voice disapproval.

There are certainly no shortages of horrific acts to condemn. On March 24, 2006 a 16-year old girl who had been raped in northern Bangladesh by two men was sentenced to 57 lashes. Her two rapists were given the same punishment by two clerics from a local madrassa. The rapists had fled after being given 27 lashes, but the girl received 51 lashes before she passed out.

From February 10, 1979 to November 17, 2006, Pakistan had legislation called the Hudood Ordinances. This had been introduced by Islamists during the rule of dictator Zia ul-Haq. Any woman who complained that she had been raped was obliged to provide four witnesses to the act. Failure to do so meant she would be charged with adultery, for which the maximum sentence was the death penalty and lashes. Though no woman was executed under the Hudood Laws, thousands of women were detained in prisons across Pakistan for contravening these laws.

In November 2006, a Saudi court sentenced a victim of gang rape to 90 lashes. The woman had been raped by five men but was given a severe punishment because, before the attack, she had been alone in a car with a man who was not a relative by blood or marriage. This is the Islamic crime of “khalwat’. The woman’s lawyer appealed, but last month a court in Qatif increased her sentence to 200 lashes, accompanied by six months’ imprisonment.

This barbaric judgment has been condemned by the U.S. State Department, and 35 German lawyers also wrote to condemn the action. To her credit, Hillary Clinton described the ruling as an “outrage“. Barack Obama and other Democrat nominees followed suit, with Obama saying the decision was “beyond unjust“. One thing surprised me. When CNN reported on the Saudi ruling on its website, many of the comments (since removed) by American women maintained that it was no one’s business but the Saudis.

If an injustice is committed, a moral person has a duty to condemn it – be it forcible abortions in China, rapes in Darfur or state-sponsored oppression carried out in Saudi Arabia. Wearing white ribbons is not enough, despite Germaine Greer’s protestations. It should be noted that according to Salman Rushdie, Greer refused to sign a petition condemning the 1989 fatwa by Ayatollah Khomeini, which was in effect a death sentence against the author. Greer’s form of feminism is the antithesis of that promoted by MacKinnon or the late Dworkin – in 1969 Greer co-founded Suck, Europe’s “first sex newspaper”, and had no qualms about opening her legs for the camera.

The amoral individuals who complain that Saudi punishments have nothing to do with them should think each time they fill their cars with gasoline about how they financially support such injustice. Some Western feminists have been well aware of the dangers of Islamism, both to women in Muslim countries and to the West at large. Camille Paglia is one such woman. Oriana Fallaci was an Italian journalist who had no problems confronting Islamism. Her forceful rhetoric extended to condemning Muslims for “breeding like rats“, comments which have undermined her reputation. When she died on September 15, 2006 aged 77, she was facing defamation charges for passages she had written against Islam.

Naomi Wolf is another famous feminist. She has condemned Islamist terrorism, but seems more concerned to promote her theories that America is becoming a fascist state than to champion the causes of women stuck in patriarchal Islamist societies. When the “celebrities” of feminism could use their fame to ignite discussions of such issues in a complacent media ridden with torpor and lassitude, but fail to do so, the true failings of Western feminism become self-evident.

In Britain, the feminist movement is now a sick joke. With an estimated 109 cases of honor killings committed on their own doorstep, and at least 250 young British Muslim girls annually sent off to be forced into arranged marriages against their wills, there are plenty of local causes to champion. Instead of decrying these abuses, British feminists have bought into the myth that women in veils and headscarfs who submit themselves to arranged marriages are actually “liberated“.

Such nonsense has been promoted by the ludicrous figure of Yvonne Ridley. A former Sunday school teacher, “feminist” and journalist for the Sunday Express newspaper, Ridley went to Afghanistan in late September 2001. She had entered the country in secret, and was wearing a burka. She was arrested by the Taliban, who thought she was a spy. She was imprisoned for 10 days, and was freed on the condition that she read the Koran and study Islam. She became a convert in 2004.

Upon her release by the Taliban, Ridley began to make bizarre claims that MI6 (Britain’s offshore intelligence agency) and the CIA had wanted her to be killed while in prison. She wrote of this in her book “In the Hands of the Taliban”, and claimed that the hotel in Pakistan where she went after her release had been searched. In London, the locks on her Soho apartment had, she asserted, been tampered with.

Shortly after her contract with the Sunday Express expired in February 2003, Ridley became employed by the Qatar-based Al Jazeera media group. She was fired on November 12, 2003. No reason was given at the time, but the station later claimed that her “overly-vocal and argumentative style” had led to her sacking. In 2004, she said of the Koran:

“I was absolutely blown away by what I was reading – not one dot or squiggle had been changed in 1,400 years. I have joined what I consider to be the biggest and best family in the world. When we stick together we are absolutely invincible.”

Her initial support after conversion came in a phone call from the notorious Abu Hamza al-Masri hook-handed preacher of Finsbury Park mosque. She said:

“I explained I hadn’t yet taken my final vows and he said, ‘Don’t be pressured or pushed, the whole community is there for you if you need any help, just call one of the sisters.’ I thought, I can’t believe it, this is the fire and brimstone cleric from Finsbury Park mosque and he is quite sweet really. I was just about to hang up when he said, ‘But there is just one thing I want you to remember. Tomorrow, if you have an accident and die, you will go straight to hellfire’.”

Hamza was jailed on February 7, 2006 for inciting murder and racial hatred. Ridley became a member of the Stop the War coalition, a grouping of leftists and Islamists. In 2005, she stood as a prospective parliamentary candidate for George Galloway’s Respect party in Leicester. Though Muslim leaders from around the world supported her, with one claiming her win “would be an honor for Islam,” she failed to be elected.

After the 7/7 bombings killed 52 innocent people in London, Ridley appeared on the BBC wearing a black robe, headscarf and face-veil, claiming that Islam was a religion of peace, even though the four bombers were perhaps better versed in Islamic Hadiths than herself. She claims the hijab and niqab are liberating, and that wearing such items means a woman is “judged on your character and intelligence“. She said:

“How liberating is it to be judged for your mind and not the size of your bust or length of your legs.”

I may be a Philistine, but I treat a woman who dresses like a tent as a woman dressed like a tent. As such a costume is a political statement of “separateness” from Western values, I do not want to know any more about her.

Ridley worked on the Islam Channel, a cable TV show, but her show was suspended in 2007. In June 2006 Ridley urged Muslims living in London not to cooperate with the police. In January 2007, she had few good words to say about her fellow political Muslims, writing on her website:

“I feel very low at the moment … in total despair at the appeasing stance being adopted by some of our self-important Muslim leaders. Instead of standing up to the Establishment they are scuttling around like Uriah Heep characters without dignity or self respect.”

Ridley has also called Israel “a vile little state,” and has said that any Zionists in the Respect party would be “hunted down“.

Ridley, a former Western “feminist” is the public voice of British Islamic feminism – even though her views are attention-seeking, contradictory and inflammatory, a far cry from those of authentic Muslim women who go unnoticed. When the Stop the War coalition had one rally in 2005 one of the Leftist organizers urged the non-Muslim women to cover their heads to “show respect” to the Muslim women attending.

In Britain, and in an increasing number in North America, there are Muslim women who live in fear of their families. A friend of mine, who is now an apostate from Islam, was once thrown out of a moving car by her husband for not wearing her “hijab“. She still fears her own family’s reprisals. I personally have known Muslim women who live in dread of their families, because they have had relationships with Hindus or Sikhs.

Even though some women proudly proclaim themselves as feminists, where are the feminist voices to stand up for the rights of these women who live in fear?

With feminists like this, who needs enemies?

Adrian Morgan is a British based writer and artist who has written for Western Resistance since its inception. He also writes for Spero News. He has previously contributed to various publications, including the Guardian and New Scientist and is a former Fellow of the Royal Anthropological Society.

Related posts:

1. Cracks In The Islamist Curtain
2. Eight Casualties On Board the Mavi Marmara Were members of Turkish Islamist organizations
3. The Western Left: Non-Violent Terrorist Sympathizers

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Sat, June 19, 2010 | Vincent Carroll | Thomas F. Madden | Crethi Plethi

De Waarheid over de Kruistochten en de Islamitische Jihad

Sinds de aanslagen van 11 september 2001 op het World Trade Center en de Pentagon in de Verenigde Staten horen we regelmatig zogenaamde “deskundigen” uitleggen dat met name de middeleeuwse Kruistochten en het Westerse imperialisme de oorzaak zijn voor de diepgewortelde haat van islamisten en jihadisten tegenover het vrije Westen.

Gezien de historische expansiedrift en de gewelddadige geschiedenis van de islam sinds de oorsprong in de 7e eeuw (571-632 n. Chr.), is deze stelling met enig gezond verstand nauwelijks te verdedigen.

Sommigen gaan zelfs zover om te beweren dat “de Kruistochten één van de directe oorzaken zijn die geleidt hebben tot het Midden Oosten conflict van vandaag.” [Karen Armstrong] Door dit te beweren wordt er niet alleen onrecht gedaan aan de historische feiten, maar wordt de islam ook nog eens verheerlijkt en geromantiseerd als een vredelievende godsdienst die geen enkel kwaads in zin had, maar slachtoffer is geworden van een christelijk complot. Waarmee tegelijkertijd de directe bewijzen vanuit de Koran en invloeden uit de Islamitische traditie wat betreft de haat tegenover niet-gelovigen (Joden en Christenen) en het verspreiden van de islam door middel van de jihad gemarginaliseerd worden door deze zogenaamde “deskundigen.”

Een U.S. News & World Report artikel neemt het als een vanzelfsprekende waarheid aan dat “de Kruistochten een diepe wrok tegen het Westen hebben achtergelaten bij moslims welke tot op de dag van vandaag nog doorwerkt.” Hoewel Amerika nog een onontdekt werelddeel was tijdens de Kruistochten in het Midden Oosten (1095-1291 n. Chr.), zien de islamisten Amerika nog steeds als de Grote Satan en kan dit alles verklaard worden als een direct gevolg van de middeleeuwse Kruistochten. Het bewuste artikel werd geschreven door Andrew Curry^[1] en voor het eerst gepubliceerd op 31 maart 2002 (The first Holy War – During the Crusades, east and west first met on the battlefield) en daarna, bewerkt, opnieuw gepubliceerd op 7 april 2008 (The first Holy War – the truth about the epic clash between east and west).

De toonzetting is duidelijk: de Kruistochten waren een barbaarse onderneming uitgevoerd door wrede “christenen” en bedacht door een corrupte paus. Terwijl Saladin en zijn Arabische legers vooral bestonden uit edelmoedige en nobele krijgers die niets anders deden dan het verdedigen van “hun land.” De historische feiten vertellen het verhaal geheel anders. De Kruisvaarders waren niet wreder (of minder wreed) dan hun arabische tegenhangers en Saladin was ook niet de geromantiseerde persoonlijkheid uit films als “Kingdom of Heaven.”

Ook in Nederland worden de kinderen op scholen met dezelfde leugenachtige argumenten geïndoctrineerd. Dat hiermee de historische waarheid geweld wordt aangedaan, schijnt de leerkrachten niet te deren. Op de website van SchoolTV kan je bijvoorbeeld een uitzending bekijken over de Kruistochten [hier en hier]. De begeleidende teksten laten duidelijk zien vanuit welke hoek er gedacht moet worden:

Clip 1:

“De paus riep in een vergadering alle christenen op om op kruistocht te gaan. Een tocht naar Jeruzalem om daar de moslims te verdrijven en de heilige plaatsen te redden… De keizer in Byzantium was bang dat de moslims zijn Byzantijnse rijk zouden veroveren. Hij stuurde daarom een brief naar de paus in Rome waarin hij hem om hulp vroeg. De paus was de leider van de Christenen in Europa en een machtig man. Hij zag een kans om zijn macht te vergroten en besloot de keizer van Byzantium te hulp te komen. Hij verzon een manier om de mensen enthousiast te krijgen voor een kruistocht tegen de moslims.”

“Op een grote vergadering zij hij:

“Moslims hebben de heilige stad Jeruzalem veroverd. Er worden Christenen gemarteld en gedood; mannen, vrouwen, kinderen, ja zelfs babies.”

Dat was niet waar, maar de paus sprak het woord van God. De paus beloofde ook dat iedereen die aan de kruistochten meedeed, een plekje in de hemel zou krijgen. Zijn oproep ging als een lopend vuurtje door heel Europa. En iedereen die het hoorde, wilde meedoen met de kruistocht en de mensen riepen: God wil het! God wil het!”

Clip 2:

“Op 15 juni 1099 viel het kruisleger aan. Na een heftige strijd wisten ze Jeruzalem binnen te dringen. De kruisvaarders waren door het dolle heen. Ze doden alle inwoners van de stad, 30.000 mensen. Mannen, vrouwen, kinderen, ja zelfs babies. Jeruzalem was veroverd.”

“Een ridder schreef:

“De moslims hebben hun verdiende loon gehad. Er is bloed gevloeid, maar gelukkig alleen moslimbloed. De heilige plekken die zo lang moesten lijden onder de moslims, zijn weer bevrijd”.”

Dit begeleidend stukje van SchoolTV is een beschamende en eenzijdige voorstelling van de werkelijkheid. De moslims worden voorgesteld als slachtoffers, immers zij worden verdreven en afgeslacht. Het zijn de Kruisvaarders die wreed zijn en over de wreedheden van moslims wordt niets gezegd. Maar het was juist de islam die in de honderden jaren voorafgaand aan de Kruistochten systematisch alle vroeg-christelijke gemeenschappen en steden onder de voet gelopen en vernietigd hadden. Deze christelijke gemeenschappen bestonden al voor het ontstaan van de islam, zoals bijvoorbeeld Antiochië en christelijke gemeenschappen in Israel, Turkije en Egypte.

Het feit dat er pelgrims, op reis naar de christelijke Heilige Plaatsen door moslims werden vermoord, wordt een leugen genoemd. Hoewel dit toch een gedocumenteerd historisch feit is. Ook wordt er een oorlogszuchtig religieus fanatisme aan de eerste Kruisvaarders toegeschreven die in de vroeg-christelijke kerk juist totaal afwezig was. De jihad gedachte en het martelaarschap voor God is een typisch islamitische traditie en het christendom is hierdoor uiteindelijk weliswaar beïnvloedt, maar dit soort religieus fanatisme had met de eerste Kruistocht minder te maken dan de “deskundigen” ons willen doen geloven en het aanwezige fanatisme stond volledig in de schaduw van de islamitische jihad gedachte. In feite was de eerste Kruistocht zelfs een knullig en onprofessioneel georganiseerde expeditie die wonderwel toch slaagde. Maar het had niets te maken met professioneel georganiseerde ridder legers die het martelaarschap voor God en de religieuze jihad voor ogen hadden, zoals die wel binnen de islam bekend waren. De moderne politiek correcte, maar historisch gezien onjuiste, weergave van feiten beïnvloeden een hele nieuwe generatie met eenzijdige halve waarheden, waardoor het moeilijker wordt om de feitelijke waarheid te blijven onderscheiden.

Om een juist en goed begrip van de historische achtergronden van de Kruistochten te verkrijgen is het dus nodig om de historische feiten te laten spreken. We hebben hier immers te maken met “deskundigen” die de opinie proberen te bewerken door het verspreiden van ongefundeerde artikelen en de bewering dat de Kruistochten verantwoordelijk zijn voor de islamitische jihad tegen het westen.

In een interessante column van Vincent Carroll, staflid van de [inmiddels gefuseerde] Rocky Mountain News in Denver, wordt dieper ingegaan op de gewelddadige geschiedenis van de Islam voorafgaand aan de Kruistochten.

Hij schrijft dat als je het U.S. News & World Report artikel over de Kruistochten leest, je toch haast aan een grap moet denken.

“Zij kunnen niet serieus verkondigen dat de Kruistochten “de eerste grote slag was tussen de Islam en het Westerse Christendom” en het in hoofdletters “de eerste Heilige Oorlog” noemen.”

Geen enkele nuchtere journalist of historicus kan beweren dat “tijdens de Kruistochten, het Oosten en het Westen elkaar voor het eerst tegenkwamen op het slagveld” en tegelijkertijd verwachten dat een lezer, die zelfs maar een gemiddelde kennis van de wereldgeschiedenis heeft, niet geschokt uit zijn stoel zou springen.

Vincent Carroll noemt het een grap dat het U.S. News & World Report artikel, Akbar Salahuddin Ahmed citeert, de Ibn Kaldun chair of Islamic studies [American University in Washington D.C.] en U.S. Navy Academy [Annapolis], die plechtig volhoudt dat

“de impact van de Kruistochten een historische herinnering creëerde die ons tot op de dag van vandaag is bijgebleven – de herinnering aan een lange Europese moordpartij.”

Carroll geeft terecht aan dat

“geen enkele serieus opinieblad een dergelijke verklaring zou publiceren zonder enige vermelding van wat er gebeurd is vóór 1099 en de plundering van Jeruzalem door de metgezellen van Tancred van Galilea en Godfried van Bouillon.”

Iedereen die onderzoek doet naar het islamitisch-christelijk conflict vanaf het ontstaan van de islam ontdekt dat er al vele grote veldslagen plaats hadden gevonden tijdens de 500 jaar die voorafging aan de val van Jeruzalem in 1099 door de Kruisvaarders. En dat al deze veldslagen het gevolg waren van de islamitische “Blitzkrieg” vanuit Arabië die, hoewel het Midden Oosten en Noord-Afrika het hart van de christelijke nederzettingen waren, de gehele wereld trachtte te onderwerpen aan de islam, zowel naar het noorden, oosten en westen.

Volgens Carroll zullen sommigen tegenwerpen dat ze niet beweren dat de Kruistochten de eerste slag was tussen moslims en christenen. Maar wel dat het de eerste slag was tussen de islam en het “Westerse Christendom.” Daarmee zeggende dat Arabisch islamitisch imperialisme in het Midden Oosten en Noord Afrika niet meetelt. Zo kan een “expert” mooi om de hete brij heen praten, ‘we laten de gewelddadige en agressieve expansiedrift van de islam buiten beschouwing en focussen ons alleen op de gebeurtenissen tijdens de Kruistochten’ (500 jaar na het ontstaan van de Islam) als resultaat van Westers Christendom.

Maar laten we het eens van de andere kant bekijken. Als er in die eerste 500 jaar na het ontstaan van de islam een constante dreiging is uitgegaan van deze nieuwe religie en gaandeweg alle christelijke, joodse en traditionele gemeenschappen van het Midden Oosten, Arabië en Noord Afrika door middel van islamitische jihad veroverd is, waarom is het dan niet waard om deze islamitische veroveringsdrang een “historische herinnering” te noemen voor zowel christenen als joden? Net zoals de impact van de Kruistochten voor de islamieten een “historische herinnering” is geworden. En waarom worden de Kruistochten de “eerste Heilige Oorlog” genoemd, terwijl de islamieten “de jihad tegen de ongelovigen” vanaf het allereerste begin van hun expansiedrift benadrukt hebben.

Als we kijken naar de feiten dan blijkt dat de Kruistochten niet de eerste grote slag was tussen de islam en het Christendom, zelfs niet tussen de islam en het, als zodanig gedefinieerde, Westerse Christendom wat toen als het niet-orthodoxe Europa gezien zou moeten worden. Sterker nog, er waren vele grote veldslagen tussen de islam en het Christendom voorafgaand aan de Kruistochten, waarbij de islam de agressieve, gewelddadige en expansionistische religie is. En overal waar de islam kwam werd de bevolking gedwongen zich te bekeren tot de islam of als dhimmi [niet-moslims] te leven onder de moslims met alle discriminerende regels die hen werden opgelegd.

Rise of Islam. Within a century an unified Islamic zone was created from India to the Atlantic Ocean

Samenvatting van de geschiedenis van de islamitische jihad tot aan de eerste Kruistocht

• Voorafgaand aan de expansie van de islam over het Midden Oosten, heeft Mohammed al vele veldslagen moeten leveren om de islam te vestigen in Arabië tegen Arabische animistische, christelijke en joodse stammen. Mohammed was in het begin niet sterk genoeg om militair staande te blijven en sloot daarom ook vele verdragen om ze later, eenmaal op volle oorlogssterkte, met evenveel gemak te verbreken. Mohammed heeft in die periode de joodse gemeenschappen één voor één uitgemoord, vooral omdat de joden niet wilden erkennen dat Mohammed de profeet van God en de islam een verbeterde versie van het judaïsme zou zijn. Zo zijn de joodse stammen van Medina (624) en Khaybar (628-641) uitgemoord door de islamitische legers van Mohammed.
• De Taboek expeditie. In 630 n. chr (om precies te zijn van oktober tot en met december) lanceerde Mohammed zijn eerste islamitische expeditie tegen christenen in Arabië. Dit was na de verovering van Mekka in januari 630. Volgens islamitische bronnen had Mohammed de beschikking over 30.000 strijders en 10.000 ruiters, allen bereid te vechten voor de islam. Het gerucht was dat er een groot byzantijns leger optrok richting Arabië, maar dit was slechts een gerucht en is nooit daadwerkelijk gebeurd. Onderweg naar Taboek, liet Mohammed regelingen treffen met andere christelijke arabische stammen in het noorden van Arabië en verplichtte hen om een belasting te betalen, de Jizya belasting, waardoor ze gevrijwaard bleven van een islamitische aanval met als gevolg dood en vernietiging. Eenmaal aangekomen bij Taboek bleek er helemaal geen Byzantijns leger te zijn en moest Mohammed onverrichter zake terugkeren naar Mekka. Het was Mohammed zelf die de eerste moslimgeneraties inspireerde tot verovering, expansie en geweld.
• In 633 veroveren de moslims de regionale hoofdstad Al-Hira in Perzisch Mesopotamië (tegenwoordig Irak). De moslims werden geleid door Khālid ibn al-Walīd. Hij was een vroege metgezel van Mohammed en één van de meest succesvolle (en wrede) militaire leiders van de geschiedenis. Onder zijn militaire leiding verbreidde de islam zich over Arabië, Mesopotamië en Syrië in een korte tijd van 632 tot 636.
• In 633 n. chr. veroverden de moslims de christelijke stad Antiochië (nu Turkije).
• Moslimlegers veroveren Damascus in 635 en maken het de hoofdstad van het islamitisch Kalifaat. Tevens veroveren ze Gaza in 635.
• In augustus 636 versloegen de moslimlegers een groot Byzantijns leger tijdens de slag bij Jarmoek. Het Byzantijnse leger was gestuurd door Keizer Heraclius om verloren christelijke gebieden te heroveren. De moslimlegers werden geleidt door Khālid ibn al-Walīd. Deze overwinning was een belangrijke stap in de expansiedrift van de islam en legde de weg open voor de verovering van grote delen van de toenmalige christelijke wereld in Anatolië (nu Turkije) en de oostelijke landen aan de Middellandse Zee. Uit deze tijd stamt waarschijnlijk de islamitische filosofie van de dood: “Wij hebben de dood meer lief dan het leven. Zij hebben het leven meer lief dan de dood.” Het credo van de jihadist.
• In november 636 versloegen de moslimlegers definitief de Perzische legers in de slag bij al-Qādisiyyah, wat de feitelijke verovering betekende van grote delen van Iraq en de weg open legde voor de verovering van het Perzische Rijk (Iraq, Iran en Afghanistan) tot en met Pakistan.
• In 637 gaf patriarch Sophronius Jeruzalem, die toen in handen was van de Byzantijnen, over aan de Arabieren onder leiding van kalief Umar ibn al-Khattab.
• In 639 valt caesarea (in Israël) in handen van de moslimlegers.
• Moslimlegers vallen delen van Armenië binnen in 639 en komt uiteindelijk geheel in Arabische handen in 694. Ze verkrijgen autonomie onder Arabisch bestuur als het Emiraat van Armenië.
• Van 639-642 veroveren de moslimlegers Egypte op de Byzantijnen.
• In 641 veroveren moslimlegers onder leiding van generaal Amr ibn al-As Alexandria (Egypte) en vernietigen ze de wereldberoemde Bibliotheek van Alexandria, hoewel dit betwist wordt.
• Het Perzische Sassanid Rijk wordt in 5 jaar tijd definitief verslagen. In 642 wordt de slag bij Nahavand gewonnen door de moslimlegers en volgelingen van Zoroaster worden vervolgd en vermoord. Tegen 650 na chr. is het gehele Perzische Rijk tot aan de Kaspische Zee islamitisch bezit.
• De moslimlegers wenden zich nu ook richting Noord Afrika waar, sinds het ontstaan van het Christendom, enkele van de oudste christelijke gemeenschappen bestaan. De bekende kerkelijke leider en bisschop Augustinus van Hippo wordt hier geboren (in de West-Romeinse provincie Africa, tegenwoordig noord-oost Algerije en noord-Tunesië). Tripoli (nu hoofdstad van Libië) wordt door moslimlegers veroverd in 643.
• Van 640-720 wordt de Shari’a (islamitische Wetgeving) ingesteld in Iran, Afghanistan en delen van Pakistan
• Vanaf 649-650 heeft het Byzantijnse Cyprus 300 jaar lang te lijden onder voortdurende aanvallen van islamitische legers en wordt het afwisselend bestuurd door Arabische of Byzantijnse heersers. Geen enkele oud-byzantijnse kerk overleeft deze periode, vele steden worden met de grond gelijk gemaakt.
• Tussen 643 en 707 veroveren de moslimlegers geheel Noord Afrika. Hierbij worden de oude christelijke gemeenschappen geplunderd, vermoord, schatplichtig gemaakt of verdreven. Het oude Carthago (de stad Tunis in Tunesië is gebouwd met stenen van de ruïnes van Carthago) wordt in 697 totaal verwoest.
• De moslimlegers belegeren de hoofdstad van het christelijke Byzantijnse Rijk, Constantinopel (nu Istanboel), voor de eerste keer van 674 tot 678. Ook de tweede belegering van 717 tot 718 heeft geen succes en loopt zelfs op een grote nederlaag uit voor de moslimlegers, zowel op het land als op zee. Uiteindelijk valt het verzwakte Constantinopel in 1453 in handen van de islamitische Ottomanen.
• In 674 na chr. staan de moslimlegers al aan de oevers van de Indus Rivier in Pakistan.
• Tussen 688-692 wordt de Rotskoepel gebouwd in Jeruzalem.
• Vanaf 650 vallen moslimlegers Algerije binnen. In 700 wordt Algiers (hoofdstad van Algerije) veroverd door de moslimlegers en is het christendom verdwenen in Noord Afrika. De moslimlegers bestrijken nu ook het Europese vasteland.
• De moslimlegers veroveren in 710-713 de gehele indusvallei (nu gelegen in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Kashmir en west- en midden-India). Het hindoeïsme en Boeddhisme worden verder teruggedrongen.
• In 711 stak de Moorse en islamitische Generaal Tarik ibn Ziyad met 7000 jihadisten de Straat van Gibraltar over en versloeg Koning Roderik in een beslissende slag wat vrijwel geheel Spanje onder islamitisch bestuur bracht. De Moorse overheersing van Spanje wordt in het Westen vaak geroemd als een voorbeeld van gematigd islamitisch bestuur. Hoewel het zeker waar is dat de Moren een rijke cultuur ontwikkelden in Spanje samen met de joden en christenen, was de realiteit niet zo sprookjesachtig. Onder de Moren waren de joden en christenen ook tweederangsburgers en waren er allerlei discriminerende wetten van kracht. Daarnaast waren er geregeld opruiingen en aanvallen op christenen en joden, waardoor ze hun leven nooit helemaal zeker waren en nam de islamisering van de bevolking hand over hand toe. Toch verloren de islamitische legers vanaf 722 gaandeweg meer terrein en namen christelijke koninkrijken langzamerhand weer bezit van Spanje. Het zou nog tot 1492 duren vooraleer de laatste islamitische weerstand gebroken was.
• In 714-716 veroveren de moslimlegers Lissabon. Na even kort heroverd te zijn door Alfons II van Asturië (798) viel het al weer snel in handen van de moslims.
• Vanaf 710 vielen islamitische bendes Sardinië binnen en zorgden ervoor dat de kuststreken ontvolkten en de bewoners de binnenlanden invluchten. In 846 kwam het eiland in bezit van de moslims, deze bezetting duurde ongeveer 150 jaar. Tegen het jaar 1000 n. chr. was Sardinië weer in bezit van het Rooms-Katholieke Rijk.
• In 719 wordt Cordoba de zetel van de islamitische gouverneur van het gebied Cordoba. In 756 wordt de stad de hoofdstad van het “Emiraat van Cordoba” en in 929 het nog machtigere “Kalifaat van Cordoba“, wat feitelijk over heel “al-Andalus” [Spanje] regeert.
• Narbonne wordt door Al-Samh ibn Malik al-Khawlani, gouverneur van Al-Andalus, in 719 of 720 ingenomen. De stad werd hernoemd tot Arbunah en veranderd in een militaire basis voor toekomstige campagnes.
• Na al enkele malen Frankrijk binnen getrokken te zijn, worden de moslimlegers in 721 verslagen door Odo van Aquitanië tijdens de slag bij Toulouse.
• In 725 hadden de moslimlegers meer succes onder leiding van Anbassa ibn Suhaym al-Kalbi en veroveren ze opnieuw Narbonne, Carcassonne, Nîmes en komen tot Autun in Bourgondië. Tevens komen de Kopten (Egyptische christenen) in opstand tegen de moslim overheersers in Egypte vanwege de hoge belastingen die alleen zij moeten betalen aan het moslimbewind.
• In 732 trok Emir Abd el Rahman [gouverneur van Spanje] Frankrijk binnen en veroverde Bordeaux op Odo van Aquitanië en trok verder noordwaarts helemaal tot aan de Loire.
• De moslimlegers onder aanvoering van Emir abd el Rahman werden in 732 door Karel Martel verslagen in de slag bij Poitiers (Tours). De uitkomst van deze veldslag bracht de noordwaartse expansie van de islam uit Spanje tot staan en wordt traditioneel beschouwd als een keerpunt in de opmars van de islam in Europa. In de daaropvolgende jaren heroverd Martel Zuid-Frankrijk op de moslims.
• In 739 versloeg de Byzantijnse keizer Leo III the Isaurian de moslimlegers van Hisham ibn Abd al-Malik, geleidt door zijn broer Sulayman tijdens de slag van Akroinon. Met deze overwinning verdreef hij de moslimlegers uit Klein-Azië. Leo III was ook de keizer die Constantinopel behoedde tijdens de 2^e belegering van de stad in 717. Dankzij zijn overwinningen heroverde het Byzantijnse Rijk verloren gegaan gebied na een periode van opeenvolgende veroveringen door de moslimlegers in Klein-Azië.
• In 777 vragen Moorse heersers van Barcelona, Zaragoza en Gerona Karel de Grote om hulp tegen de Emir van Cordoba. Karel de Grote verovert Pamplona, maar besluit zijn veldtocht te staken als het niet lukt om Zaragoza te veroveren. Op de terugtocht wordt zijn achterhoede overvallen door Basken bij Roncesvalles en afgeslacht. In 792 werd er door Hisham I, de Emir van Córdoba, opgeroepen tot een jihad tegen de Franken. Opnieuw vallen moslimlegers Zuid-Frankrijk binnen, maar worden daar bij Orange verslagen door legeraanvoerder Willem van Gelonne.
• In 813 worden veel christenen in Israel door moslimbendes overvallen en gedood. De meeste christenen vluchten het land uit.
• Moslimlegers veroveren Kreta in 826, plunderen de Griekse eilanden in 827 en vielen Sicilië aan en veroverden Sardinië in 827. In 831 veroveren de moslimlegers Palermo. Tijdens de slag om het Byzantijnse Sicilië ontmoeten de moslimlegers veel tegenstand waardoor het meer dan 100 jaar duurde voordat de moslims het hele eiland in hun bezit kregen in 965 en het transformeerden tot het Emiraat van Sicilië.
• Gedurende de 7^e en de 8^e eeuw heeft Marseille veel te lijden gehad van islamitische zeerovers en in 838 wordt Marseille uiteindelijk veroverd door de moslims. Nice heeft aanvallen te verduren in 813, 859, 880 en 942. In 888 hebben de moslimlegers een basis ingericht in Fraxinet vlakbij Frejus in de franse Provence. Tijdens deze periode heeft ook Corsica te lijden onder de islamitische aanvallen.
• In 855 komen christenen uit de voormalig Byzantijnse stad Hims (Syrië) in opstand vanwege nieuwe dhimmi belastingen opgelegd door het islamitisch kalifaat. Deze opstand heeft geen schijn van kans en wordt hardhandig neergeslagen door de christelijke leiders te doden, de christenen te verbannen uit de stad, en alle kerken te verwoesten.
• Vanaf 838 vielen moslimlegers Zuid-Italië binnen. In 840 veroverden ze Taranto en Bari. En in 841 viel Brindisi in moslimhanden, Capua werd met de grond gelijk gemaakt, en werd Benevento van 840 tot 847 en van 851-852 bezet. Rome, de hoofdstad van het Roomse Rijk, werd driemaal belegerd (843, 846 en 849), maar alle drie pogingen faalden, hoewel het ze lukte om Rome in 846 te plunderen en het Vaticaan te beschadigen. Het eiland Malta viel in 870 in moslimhanden. In 882 hadden de moslims een basis tussen Napels en Rome. Pas in 915 verloren ze deze basis tijdens de slag bij Garigliano. In 873 verwoesten moslimbendes het klooster van San Vincenzo al Volturno en in 882 en opnieuw in 883 werd het klooster van Monte Cassino door moslims geplunderd en verwoest. Bij die laatste aanval werd de abt Bertharius en enkele monniken vermoord. In 918 kwam Reggio Calabria onder moslimbewind. Genua wordt in 934 aangevallen en La Spezia in 935. De moslimlegers veroveren daarna Asti en Novi Ligure in Piemonte (Noord-Italië). Van 942-964 veroveren ze Savoie en bezetten zelfs een gedeelte van Zwitserland van 952-960. De Zwitserse plaatsnaam Saaz herinnert nog aan deze islamitische aanwezigheid. Pisa werd in 1004 geplunderd door moslimlegers.
• Tegen het einde van de 9^e eeuw vestigen moslimpiraten zich langs de Zuid-Franse en Noord-Italiaanse kust. Ook in Oosterse richting vestigen de moslimpiraten havens, zoals in Sicilië, Kreta, Cyprus en Zuid-Italië. Van 824 tot 961 beheersen moslimpiraten de gehele Middellandse Zee. Deze islamitische Barbaarse Corsairs vormden in de 11^e eeuw een alliantie van moslimpiraten die tot en met de 19^e eeuw actief bleven. Ze opereerden vanuit havens als Tunis, Tripoli, Algiers, Salé en havens in Marokko. In de Middeleeuwen werd de Noord Afrikaanse kustlijn door de Europeanen de Barbaarse Kust genoemd vanwege deze moslimpiraten. Hun werkgebied besloeg de gehele Middellandse Zee, de Noord- en West Afrikaanse kustlijn en de Noord Atlantische zee zover als Ierland en IJsland, waar zelfs enkele aanvallen uitgevoerd zijn. Doel was vooral het ontvoeren van christenen en Afrikanen en hen verkopen als slaven op slavenmarkten. Daarnaast vernietigden ze duizenden Spaanse, Franse, Italiaanse en Britse schepen. Volgens schattingen zijn 800.000 tot 1,25 miljoen Westerse slaven op deze manier gevangen en verkocht.
• In 904 plunderden moslimlegers de Griekse stad Saloniki.
• In 937 worden christelijke Heilige Plaatsen in jeruzalem door moslims verwoest. De Kerk van het Heilig Graf wordt plat gebrand. Ook andere kerken worden verwoest. In 966 zijn er opnieuw vervolgingen van christenen in Jeruzalem. In 1003 wordt de kerk van St. Marcus in Fustat, Egypte, verwoest. In 1003 wordt tevens de kerk van Het Heilig Graf opnieuw verwoest, ditmaal in opdracht van Al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah. In 1004, 1005 en 1012 vaardigt al-Hakim discriminerende decreten uit tegen joden en christenen.
• In 1048 is de restauratie van de kerk van het Heilig Graf voltooit en in 1055 wordt het eigendom van de kerk van Het Heilig Graf in beslag genomen door de moslimautoriteiten.
• Moslimlegers, bestaande uit Almoraviden, veroveren West-Ghana in Afrika. Almoraviden, (ook wel bekend als Moerabitoen) zijn een coalitie van west-Saharische Berbers; volgelingen van islam, gefocust op de koran, de hadith en de Malikitische wet.
• In 1064 veroverd Mehmed Alp Arslan met zijn moslimleger Caesarea, de hoofdstad van Cappadocië (nu Turkije), en opnieuw geheel Armenië en Georgië.
• In 1068 valt Alp Arslan het Byzantijnse Rijk binnen, maar Keizer Romanus IV Diogenes lukt het om de moslimlegers terug te dringen tot over de Eufraat in Iraq. In 1071 komt het opnieuw tot een treffen en wordt een groot Byzantijns leger onder aanvoering van Keizer Romanus IV Diogenes verslagen door de moslimlegers van Mehmed Alp Arslan tijdens de slag bij Manzikert. Door deze nederlaag was de machtsbalans in het voordeel van de islamitische turken beslecht en speelde het Byzantijnse Rijk een bijrol in Klein-Azië. Hierna viel Alp Arslan, het land van zijn voorvaderen, Turkistan aan. De Slag van Manzikert was de aanleiding voor de Eerste Kruistocht van de christenen naar het Heilige Land (1096-1099).
• In 1071 trokken de islamitische turken Israël binnen en in 1073 veroverden ze Jeruzalem.
• In 1075 wordt Nicea (nu Iznik in Turkije) veroverd door de moslimlegers en tot hoofdstad van Anatolië gemaakt.
• In 1094 vraagt de Byzantijns keizer Alexios I Komnenos het christelijke westen om hulp tegen de moslim invasies van zijn gebied; deze Seldsjoeken zijn moslim turken van oosterse origine. In 1095 preekt Paus Urbanus II de eerste kruistocht; ze veroveren Jeruzalem in 1099.
• En zo kunnen we doorgaan, want ook na de eerste christelijke kruistochten bleven de islamitische aanvallen op Europa doorgaan. Zoals vermeld viel Constantinopel in 1453, waarna de weg open lag voor de moslimlegers om Europa vanuit het Oosten te veroveren. Wenen is zelfs tweemaal belegerd, in 1529 en in 1683, door de turkse islamitische Ottomanen. Deze turkse Ottomanen heersten lange tijd over de Balkanlanden.
• Paul Fregosi geeft in zijn boek “Jihad in the West,” aan dat gedurende de expansiedrift van de islam “een groot gedeelte van Europa veroverd is door moslims, soms eeuwenlang bezet is gehouden, soms verwoest en soms geislamiseerd. Landen en gebieden als Spanje, Portugal, Frankrijk, Italië, Sicilië, Oostenrijk, Bosnië, Servië, Kroatië, Hongarije, Roemenië, Walachië, Albanië, Moldavië, Bulgarije, Griekenland, Armenië, Georgië, Polen, Oekraïne, en Oost-en Zuid-Rusland; allen waren jihad oorlogsgebieden.”
• En is het tevens ook niet een feit dat de islamitische expansiedrift de moslimlegers brachten tot in het Verre Oosten, zover als Afghanistan, Pakistan, Noord-India, en China?
• Piers Paul Read schrijft in zijn boek “The Templars: The Dramatic History of the Knights Templar, the Most Powerful Military Order of the Crusades” (1999), dat “vanaf het moment dat Mohammed zijn eerste expeditie organiseerde, de christelijke perceptie van oorlog voeren tegen de islam slechts bestond uit het verdedigen van het Christendom of het bevrijden en heroveren van gebieden die de christenen met recht toebehoorden.”

Rise of Islam. Expansion of the Islamic World to 1500

Laat het duidelijk zijn dat dit niet bedoeld is als een verdediging voor de Kruistochten, want deze waren op zichzelf genomen gewelddadig en niet in de geest van hun leider Jezus Christus. Waar het echter omgaat is om de feiten te laten spreken met betrekking tot de oorsprong en karakter van de Kruistochten. Want wie durft na het lezen van deze opsomming van feiten nog te beweren dat de islam een religie van vrede is en dat de moslims willoze slachtoffers waren ten tijde van de Kruistochten?

De islam heeft vanaf haar oorsprong de wereld willen onderwerpen aan de islam, aan Allah en aan Mohammed. En dit hebben ze vanaf haar oorsprong gedaan door middel van jihad. In dit opzicht kunnen we de Kruistochten terecht zien als de eerste grote reactie van de christelijke wereld op de expansionistische en gewelddadige islam. En niet zoals sommige “historici” ons willen doen geloven dat de Kruistochten een gevolg waren van een agressieve en imperialistisch Christendom.

Het ergste van alles is dat door dit te zeggen de jihadisten onder de moslims gesterkt worden in hun haatgevoelens jegens christenen en het vrije Westen. Het gaat zelfs zover dat sommige jihadisten geloven dat zij moslimland heroveren als ze spreken over jihad tegen Israel, Spanje en Turkije, terwijl het juist de islam was die deze landen binnen is gevallen, veroverd en geïslamiseerd hebben. Waar het de christenen gelukt is om gebied te heroveren, dan was dat slechts het terugnemen van wat al rechtsgeldig van hun was.

Timothy Furnish zegt in zijn artikel “How the media misconstrue Jihad and the Crusades,” dat

“de kruistochten in het geheel niet de eerste keer waren dat moslims en christenen met elkaar vochten, maar dat het in feite wel de eerste keer was dat christenen, na ruim 4 eeuwen van nederlaag op nederlaag, eindelijk terugsloegen.”

In zijn artikel “The Crusades in the Checkout Aisle: Crusade nonsens from the U.S. News & World Report,” gaat Thomas F. Madden^[2] wat dieper in op het stuk van Andrew Curry in het U.S. News & World Report. Hij wijst op enkele veel voorkomende algemeenheden die in de discussie omtrent de Kruistochten blijkbaar als vaststaand worden aangenomen.

Zo gaat hij in op het fabeltje dat de verovering van Jeruzalem door de Kruisvaders in 1099 gepaard ging met een massale slachting van de bevolking in de stad, zodat “het bloed kniehoog door de straten van Jeruzalem liep.” Andrew Curry verwijst ter vergelijking in zijn stuk op de verovering van Jeruzalem door de “barmhartige” Saladin in 1187, omdat de christelijke inwoners vrijelijk de stad mochten verlaten, na het betalen van een losgeld en hen geen haar gekrenkt werd. Madden wijst erop dat geen enkele geleerde de overdreven verslagen accepteert als bewijs voor de zogenaamde slachtingen in 1099. Geen enkele van deze verslagen komen namelijk van ooggetuigen. De verslagen die gebruikt worden komen van Europese Kroniekschrijvers die maar al te graag een reinigingsritueel wilden beschrijven alsof het kwaad volledig uitgeroeid diende te worden in de stad. Authentieke moslimbronnen die schrijven over het verlies van Jeruzalem beschrijven dat er hooguit enkele duizenden doden te betreuren waren. Iedereen die Jeruzalem op een kaart bekijkt uit die tijd kan nagaan dat het onmogelijk is om op die manier kniehoog in het bloed te staan in de straten van Jeruzalem. Zelfs als alle mensen in de gehele regio afgeslacht waren, zou dit nog niet mogelijk zijn geweest. Een belangrijke toevoeging is dat het zowel voor christenen als voor moslims een normale Middeleeuwse gewoonte was om manschappen die zich niet wilden overgeven toch te doden als ze levend gevangen waren genomen. Ook is het volgens Madden niet waar dat Saladin de christenen in 1187 gespaard zou hebben vanwege zijn tolerantie en wijsheid.

Het was tijdens het beleg van Jeruzalem in 1187 zeker Saladins bedoeling geweest om de christelijke verdedigers van de stad te doden als vergelding voor 1099, maar de verdedigers van Jeruzalem hadden een vrije aftocht onderhandeld waarbij ze in ruil beloofden om de moslimbewoners van Jeruzalem niet te doden en de islamitische heilige plaatsen niet te verwoesten. In tegenstelling dus tot wat de moslimverdedigers van Jeruzalem in 1099 deden gaven de christenen de stad in 1187 vredig over aan Saladin en redden zo hun eigen leven, terwijl in 1099 de moslimverdedigers van Jeruzalem vochten tot de dood. Dus in beide gevallen verliep het geheel volgens de maatstaven van die tijd.

Aangezien Curry in zijn artikel erg de nadruk legt op de 3^e Kruistocht, krijgt Saladin veel aandacht bij hem. Curry beklaagd zich er dan ook over dat het onterecht is dat Saladin in Westerse bronnen vaak in de schaduw moet staan van zijn tegenstrever, Richard I Leeuwenhart van Engeland. Volgens Madden wijst dit er ook op dat Curry meer geschiedenisboeken moet lezen. Curry wijst de lezer erop dat Saladin door moslims herinnerd wordt vanwege zijn edelmoedigheid hoewel hij te maken had met de haat en agressie van de christenen. Hij vergeet echter dat moslims over de Kruistochten leren door Westerse bronnen en niet de moslimbronnen. De waarheid is dat Saladin in de Westerse bronnen geprezen wordt vanwege zijn ridderlijkheid, maar in moslimbronnen een minder prominente plaats inneemt en andere heersers benadrukt worden zoals Baybars en Qalawun. Deze Egyptische moslimheersers worden in de islam geprezen, omdat ze met succes hun slavenlegers inzetten tegen het Kruisvaarders Rijk, waarbij ze alle tegenstand bruut uit de weg ruimden, steden met de grond gelijk maakten en de bevolking afslachten hoewel ze beloofden hun levens te sparen en tenslotte alle herinneringen aan de Kruisvaarders in Israël en Syrië uitwissen. Het zijn deze die in het Midden Oosten nog steeds bewierookt worden, hoewel ze in Curry’s artikel niet voorkomen.

Ook volgt Curry enkele populaire geschiedkundigen in hun bewering dat “hoewel de Kruistochten militair gezien een mislukking waren, ze wel in aanraking kwamen met de rijke Arabische cultuur” en dat dit ervoor zorgde dat Europa na de Kruistochten de donkere Middeleeuwen achter zich liet en daarna tot grote hoogte kon stijgen dankzij de renaissance. Volgens Madden is ook dit in het geheel niet op waarheid gebaseerd. Er was vrijwel geen intellectuele en culturele uitwisseling tussen moslims en christenen ten tijde van het Kruisvaarders Koninkrijk. De christenen in het Midden Oosten zagen zichzelf als buitenstaanders die een buitenpost van het Christendom bemanden en de christelijke Heilige Plaatsen bewaakten. Ze hadden geen interesse in de bibliotheken van de moslims en die hadden op hun beurt geen interesse in de dingen van de “ongelovigen.” Waar wel interactie was tussen moslims en christenen was Spanje en de luxe goederen uit het Verre Oosten kwamen via Constantinopel en Egypte Europa binnen en niet via het Beloofde Land. De opkomst en ondergang van het Kruisvaarders Koninkrijk had geen invloed op de Middellandse Zeehandel tussen christenen en moslims.

Daarnaast kan gesteld worden dat de Kruistochten er in ieder geval voor gezorgd hebben dat de expansionistische en imperialistische islam een gevoelige slag werd toegebracht en de opmars van de Islam richting Europa in ieder geval tijdelijk tot stilstand werd gebracht. Gaandeweg heroverden de christelijke ridders gebieden als Corsica, Sicilië, Malta, Cyprus en brachten deze opnieuw onder christelijke invloed tot op de dag van vandaag.

Andrew Curry beëindigt zijn artikel door op te merken dat “de erfenis van de Kruistochten, bestaande uit onbegrip en vijandigheid bij moslims, ons achtervolgt tot op de huidige dag.” Maar Thomas F. Madden merkt terecht op dat

“er was en er is vijandigheid tussen de islam en het Westen, dat is zeker. Maar deze vijandigheid was er al eeuwen voor het begin van de Kruistochten. Wat het onbegrip betreft, juist het artikel van Curry, houdt deze traditie in ere.”

[1] Andrew Curry is een in Berlijn wonende journalist die schrijft over onderwerpen als Internationale Zaken, Wetenschap, Cultuur en de Geschiedenis in Centraal Europa.

[2] Thomas F. Madden is Professor in Geschiedkunde en Directeur van het Centrum voor Middeleeuwse en Renaissance Studies aan de Saint Louis Universiteit. Hij heeft als auteur en expert meegewerkt aan bijdragen voor de New York Times, de Washington Post, de Wall Street Journal, USA Today en de History Channel. Recente boeken van zijn hand zijn onder andere “the New Concise History of the Crusades“, “Empires of Trust“, and het bekroonde “Enrico Dandolo and the Rise of Venice.” Hij heeft intensief geschreven en lezingen gegeven over de Oude en Middeleeuwse Mediterrane en over de geschiedenis van het Christendom en de Islam. Hij heeft meerdere prijzen gewonnen, onder andere de Otto Grundler Prijs in 2005 en de Haskins Medaille in 2007. Hij is op dit moment bezig met het schrijven van een nieuw boek over Venetië.

Related posts:

1. Wie de Waarheid Spreekt Riskeert Vervolging in Zweden
2. Islamitische bloemen en liefde
3. De As van de Jihad

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June 04-08, 2010 | Lose-lose for Turkey and Israel [also published in the Jerusalem Post], Who’s Afraid of Turkey [also published in Newsweek] and Turkey’s Clash of Civilizations [also published in the Wall Street Journal] | By Soner Cagaptay

Under the Islamist Erdogan government, Turkey can no longer be considered an ally of Israel or the West.

Lose-lose for Turkey and Israel

Turkish-Israeli ties, born in March 28, 1949 when Turkey became the first Muslim-majority country to recognize Israel, effectively ended on May 31, 2010. This happened as IDF commandos boarded a convoy of ships reportedly bringing humanitarian assistance to Hamas-run Gaza.

Previously, Israeli officials had pleaded with the Turkish officials not to allow the convoy to set sail from Istanbul, suggesting that it would be intercepted if it entered Israeli waters. Turkey’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) government nevertheless let the mission sail. In the ensuing scrimmage in the Mediterranean, the commandos boarding the ship were faced with stiff resistance from members of the convoy. Bloodshed followed; troops killed a number of people, and wounded more, including at least 14 Turkish citizens.

This episode means that bilateral ties between Turkey and Israel are effectively over, at least for the foreseeable future. Not only have the two countries lost each other, but they have also lost a bit of themselves.

Israel has lost its second most important ally, a rare friend in a hostile region, and with this a major part of its security. Since the 1950s when Turkey and Israel established a secret treaty known as the Peripheral Pact, Israel has trusted Turkey as the only genuine regional ally, rain or shine. For instance, the treaty stipulated that, if attacked, Israel could park its navy in Turkish waters. Effective May 31, 2010, Israel cannot trust the AKP government to defend it.

Turkey has lost what makes it special: its ability to be Muslim and Western at the same time, a uniquely Turkish characteristic. They had it coming ever since the AKP took power in 2002.

Turkish-Israeli ties have been on a downhill trajectory, which began with the AKP’s sharp criticism of Israeli policies following Operation Cast Lead. While some dismissed this rhetoric as domestic politicking, it was the ideological periscope of the AKP’s subsurface foreign policy. The AKP did not have any intention of aligning with Israel. Rather, it went along with Israel until the opportunity presented itself to call off the relationship.

Its rhetoric served as the litmus test of what lay ahead.

The Israelis, having few real friends in the region and therefore not knowing what to do with harsh rhetoric coming from this rare ally, first denied the problem and then overreacted.

In the incident known as the “low chair affair,” Israeli Foreign Ministry officials decided to humiliate the Turkish ambassador by seating him on a low chair in a televised meeting. In the ensuing scandal, the entire Turkish nation felt insulted, rallying behind the AKP’s negative criticisms and stance toward Israel.

This is also what happened on May 31. Turkey is a proud nation; perhaps this is its hallmark. It would have been enough for it to turn against Israel had the Israelis bloodied the nose of one Turk. Hence, after news of bloodshed surfaced, tens of thousands of protesters gathered across Turkish cities, chanting “Down with the Zionist state,” and “We are all Hamas.”

Surprisingly, T-shirts and headbands with these slogans were readily available, perhaps signaling that for some, the crisis was anticipated. The AKP government then recalled its ambassador and canceled three bilateral military exercises. AKP officials have called Israel a “pirate state,” and a “terrorist state,” and right-wing pundits have followed, illuminating a Nasserite trend – Israel is fast becoming the country-whose-name-shall-not-be-uttered in Turkish politics. The AKP also added that Turkish-Israeli relations would not be revived unless Israel recognizes Hamas and lifts the blockade on Gaza. This provides another avenue for the AKP to say that Turkish-Israeli ties are dead

For Israel, this means that Turkey has switched camps. From now on, barring a change of government in Ankara or a change in Israel’s policy toward Hamas, Turkey is on the other side of the Middle East debate regarding Israel. What is more, Turkey cannot be expected to act as a mediator between Israel and its neighbors, a role some had suggested Ankara could play under the AKP.

The trick for Israel is to make new calculations to win back Turkey’s support. Israel now sorely lacks the region’s strongest power that has watched its back for decades, and there is no replacement in sight.

For Turkey, the challenge is to remain true to itself. Ever since 2001, Turkey’s Muslim identity has come to the fore as a precious feature praised in Washington, Brussels and Tel Aviv. Being Muslim does not make Turkey unique though; there are, after all, 57 other Muslim-majority countries.

Rather, what made Turkey special was the country’s unique Western overlay in domestic and foreign policy, specifically its secular democratic political culture, NATO membership and good ties with Israel.

If Turkey is to continue to be unique, this view has to drive its policy.

For now, the effective end of Turkish-Israeli ties is more than just an issue of bilateral relations between these two important states. This is also the end of at least a bit of Turkey as we have come to know it.

May Turkish-Israeli ties rest in peace.

Who’s Afraid of Turkey?

Turkey is starting to scare Americans, for good reason. There was the high-profile clash at Davos over the Palestinians, fraying Turkish ties to Israel. Then came the surprise uranium deal with Tehran, undermining Western pressure on Iran to come clean about its nuclear program. Now there’s a new clash with Israel over Turkish support for the convoys challenging Israel’s embargo on Gaza. But just as Turkey is starting to look more assertively pro-Islamist than ever, there are signs that a big internal shift may reshape Turkish politics and redirect its foreign policy back toward the West.

This would end a drift that began in 2002, when the Justice and Development Party (AKP), rooted in the country’s Islamist movement, came to power. It has grown more authoritarian, and anti-Western, ever since. The NGO that sponsored the Gaza flotilla has close ties to the AKP, has sponsored numerous fundraisers in the Istanbul convention center controlled by the AKP city government, and has been designated by the U.S. as part of an umbrella group of terrorist organizations. Now AKP leaders are pressing the U.S. for a more aggressive response.

But for the first time in years, the AKP faces a real challenge. Turkey’s main opposition, the Republican People’s Party (CHP), lately has been a mere shadow of the secular force that once ruled the country and made it a staunch NATO ally. Now the resignation of CHP leader Deniz Baykal over an alleged sex-tape scandal has ushered in a new boss, Kemal Kilicdaroglu, a charismatic people’s man who is committed to Western values. He might be the one to rebuild an effective opposition and redirect Turkish foreign policy toward the West.

Kilicdaroglu has already voiced support for Turkey’s effort to join the European Union, which has stalled in part due to European resistance to admitting a Muslim member, but also due to the AKP’s withering interest in the process since Ankara started membership talks in 2005. Kilicdaroglu has backed some of the government response to the latest Gaza incident—it would be impossible for any Turkish politician not to, given that Turkish activists were killed—but he could still bring change in the future.

Kilicdaroglu will have to recalibrate his party’s commitment to the ideals of Kemal Atatürk, who founded modern Turkey as a secular state. This New Kemalism would recall Atatürk’s 20th-century desire for Turkey to become European, making EU membership and realigning with the West top priorities while downplaying the AKP’s rapprochement with Iran and Russia. There are signs that this is happening already, including Kilicdaroglu’s encouragement of prominent pro-EU Turkish diplomats to join the CHP. New Kemalism would abandon the AKP’s ideological sympathy with Iran in favor of a pragmatic nationalist view: a nuclear Iran is against Turkish interests.

Kilicdaroglu, nicknamed “Gandhi Kemal” for his humility, to which the Turks have taken a liking, is already changing the CHP, taking the party, the heir to a social-democratic politics, back to the working and middle classes. He is also beginning to make New Kemalism more attractive at home by keeping its liberal aspects while coming to terms with religious issues: the new party assembly includes both a record number of women and an imam.

The CHP needs to challenge the AKP’s success at creating what Turks see as a forward-looking vision—one that respects the nation’s conservative social values and carves out a position of respect for Turkey within the transatlantic community. In recent years the CHP has defined itself mainly by saying no to the AKP, so the change in leadership presents an unprecedented opportunity—Turkish leaders do not usually quit politics until they die—to introduce New Kemalism. Can Kilicdaroglu win? For now the Gaza debacle is boosting the AKP’s popularity, but the CHP has a solid base. Opinion polls suggest that 32 to 38 percent of Turks would never support the AKP. Kilicdaroglu’s politics can expand this base. The AKP has won repeated elections since 2002 with strong support among lower-middle-class voters, Turkey’s demographic plurality, thanks to its rhetoric of social justice laced with conservative overtones. Kilicdaroglu’s pro-working-class message will help him win over these voters. If Kilicdaroglu can advance New Kemalism as a pro-Western, social-democratic movement at peace with both secularism and religion, Atatürk’s party might once again return to power in Turkey. It can’t happen soon enough to change the dynamics of the Gaza crisis, but it can happen.

Turkey’s Clash of Civilizations

Ever since the Islamist Justice and Development Party (AKP) assumed power in 2002, Turkish foreign policy has made a 180-degree turn. The country’s once-strong ties with the United States and Israel have been weakened, and entry talks with the European Union have stalled while Ankara has come to the defense of the Iranian nuclear program and Hamas. The reason for this shift is simple: Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his government believe that Samuel Huntington was right, that there is a clash of civilizations. Only they are on the side of the Islamists, not the West.

For the AKP, “Turkey’s traditionally strong ties with the West represent a process of alienation.” This is a quote from “Strategic Depth,” the opus written by Ahmet Davutoğlu, Turkey’s foreign minister. Unfortunately, “Strategic Depth” has not been translated into English, though Westerner would do well to read it to get a better understanding of Ankara’s thinking. The work’s executive summary answers all questions about the AKP’s foreign policy:

“Since the end of the Ottoman Empire, Muslims have gotten the short end of the stick, and the AKP is here to correct all that.”

The AKP won’t correct all wrongs against Muslims, though. This is because Islamism—a political ideology that sees Muslims in perpetual conflict with the West and with “non-believers“–and not Islam, guides the AKP’s foreign policy. Ankara will therefore favor other Islamists over Muslims that don’t share their Manichean worldview. Thus, the party will forgive and even defend the ills of Islamist regimes against fellow-Muslims, such as the Sudanese genocide of Darfuris or Tehran’s suppression of its own population. Likewise, it will support Islamist Hamas and its violent goals, but not the secular Palestinian Authority or the peaceful Palestinian cause.

This selective solidarity also applies to ills committed against Muslims by non-Muslims, as long as those non-Muslims are anti-American or anti-European. That’s because political Islam has made the strategic decision that the enemy of its enemy is its friend . Hence, Russia will get a pass regardless of how many Chechens it kills.

Ankara, though, will always singularly target Israel, because the AKP adheres to the Islamist view that the Jewish state as such—irrespective of its specific borders or policies—will always be a sore in the “Muslim world.”

There is little the West can do to change the AKP’s foreign policy outlook. In fact, some policymakers and pundits in Washington and European capitals have, perhaps unwittingly, helped empower this development in the first place. Believing that the supposedly reformed Islamist AKP could be a bridge-builder between Western and Muslim countries, they promoted the new Turkish government as a special mediator in the region while shielding it from those critics who worried early on about the AKP’s worldview.

Allowing such an Islamist catalyst into the Middle East’s conflicts produced devastating results. Because the AKP sees a clash of civilizations everywhere it looks, it cannot be an impartial mediator. Hence, when the AKP was allowed to interject itself between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority, or the United States and Iran, it quickly became a tribune for the Islamist side, rising in their defense. After eight years of increasingly authoritarian and dominant AKP rule at home, many Turks now also see the world through the Islamists’ eyes of a civilizational clash.

Even though the AKP is the main political force in the country, the party’s popularity has been sliding after the opposition Republican Peoples’ Party elected a new charismatic leader. One survey even showed the opposition party pulling ahead of the AKP for the first time since 2002. Recent polls, however, show that the Gaza debacle that resulted in the tragic death of Turkish citizens has boosted the AKP’s popularity.The government will no doubt continue to use populist, anti-Western foreign policy to boost its popularity in the run up to next year’s elections.

The West needs to face the reality that, despite the country’s NATO membership, Turkey can no longer be considered a Western ally under the AKP. In order to contain the AKP’s Islamists influence not just in Turkey but also in the region, the West must deny the Erdogan government the influence and prestige that comes with being promoted as a regional mediator. It’s time for Western leaders to distance themselves somewhat from Ankara.

Related posts:

1. Will Turkey Lead a Revived Islamic Empire?
2. Turkey and Israel on the Brink of War or New “Ship Intifada”?
3. An Open Letter to Mr. Recep Tayyip Erdogan

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Tue, June 08, 2010 | ICLA | By Delecluze

Suzanne Hirzel, toen en nu

Oud verzetsstrijder waarschuwt voor ‘appeasers’

Na de verkiezingen gaat het politieke showproces tegen Geert Wilders de volgende ronde in. Het zal mede van de verkiezingsuitslag en kabinetsformatie afhangen of meer van dergelijke processen in de toekomst zullen volgen en de politiek incorrecte meningsuiting verder zal worden ingeperkt.^[1]

Hoewel van een andere orde (er was geen werkelijke verdediging mogelijk en werden doodstraffen uitgedeeld), vonden bijna zeventig jaar geleden in nazi-Duitsland aan de lopende band politieke processen plaats tegen dissidenten die zich in woord en geschrift verzetten tegen de ongekend moordlustige socialistische politiestaat.

Suzanne Hirzel, één van de laatste nog levende leden van de Duitse verzetsgroep de Weiße Rose (“Witte Roos”), waarvan meerdere leden tot de doodstraf veroordeeld werden, is nu lid van de anti-islamiseringsbeweging Pax Europa [Bürgerbewegung Pax Europa, BPE] en waarschuwt voor “docenten en hoogleraren die zich als islamofielen en multiculturalisten etaleren en het islamisme ten dienste willen zijn. Die doen nu hetzelfde als degenen die indertijd met de nazi’s heulden.”^[2]

De Weiße Rose was een groep jongeren die zich tijdens de Tweede Wereldoorlog in Nazi-Duitsland actief verzetten tegen de nationaal socialist Adolf Hitler en zijn regering. De meeste leden van de Weiße Rose waren studenten van de Universiteit van München en hun hoogleraar filosofie- en psychologie, prof. Kurt Huber, had zich ook bij de groep aangesloten. De Weiße Rose werd bekend door hun anonieme vlugschriften-campagne tussen juni 1942 en februari 1943, waarin zij hun landgenoten opriepen in verzet te komen tegen Hitler en het Derde Rijk.

In heel Duitsland werden duizenden vlugschriften van de Weiße Rose verspreid, wat leidde tot een aanvankelijk vruchteloos onderzoek door de Gestapo. Pas nadat Sophie en Hans Scholl op 18 februari 1943 tijdens het verspreiden van vlugschriften in het auditorium van de Universiteit van München werden betrapt, konden de verzetsgroep door de Gestapo worden opgerold.

In een reeks daarop volgende politieke processen veroordeelde de beruchte nazi-rechter Roland Freisler^[3] zes verzetsleden tot de doodstraf (Sophie Scholl, Hans Scholl, Christoph Probst — die direct na het eerste proces al werden onthoofd — en Alex Schmorell, Kurt Huber en Willi Graf). De overigen, waaronder Susanne Hirzel, veroordeelde hij tot gevangenisstraffen variërend van zes maanden tot tien jaar.^[4]

Richard Hanser over de rechter en president van de Volksrechtbank^[5], Roland Freisler:

“Freisler leidde het proces alsof de toekomst van het Rijk er vanaf hing. Hij brulde de aanklachten op alsof hij niet de rechter, maar de aanklager was. Hij gedroeg zich afwisselend als een acteur die gezwollen een overgeacteerde rol speelde in een ongeloofwaardig melodrama, en een Groot Inquisiteur die de eeuwige verdoemenis over de drie onverbeterbare ketters afriep die voor hem zaten. Er waren geen getuigen opgeroepen, omdat de verdachten toch alles al hadden bekend. De procedure bestond bijna geheel uit Roland Freisler’s beschuldigingen en schofferingen, van tijd tot tijd onderbroken door het halfhartige optreden van de door de rechtbank aangestelde advocaten, van wie één zijn zaak samenvatte met de opmerking:

“Ik kan alleen maar zeggen: ‘Fiat Justitia’. Laat het recht zijn loop hebben.”

Waarmee hij bedoelde: Laat de verdachten maar krijgen wat ze verdienen. (…) Sophie Scholl schokte de aanwezigen in de rechtszaal toen ze tegen Freisler zei:

“Iemand moest uiteindelijk ergens een begin maken. Wat wij geschreven en gezegd hebben wordt door veel anderen gedeeld. Alleen durven zij zich niet te uiten zoals wij dat deden.”

Het verhaal van de verzetsgroep de Weiße Rose was het onderwerp van de film “Sophie Scholl-Die letzten Tage“ ^[6] en “Weiße Rose”, een kameropera van Udo Zimmerman, dat na première in Hamburg internationale bekendheid kreeg en aanleiding was tot de publicatie van een reeks van boeken over de verzetsgroep, waaronder “Sophie Scholl and the White Rose“ van Annette Dumbach en Jud Newborn.^[7]

In het eerste vlugschrift van de Weiße Rose schreven de verzetsstrijders onder andere:

“Niets is een cultuurvolk onwaardiger dan zich zonder weerstand te bieden te laten ‘regeren’ door een onverantwoordelijke en door duistere driften geleide heerserskliek. Is het niet zo dat iedere oprechte Duitser zich vandaag de dag doodschaamt voor zijn regering? Wie van ons kan zich op enigerlei wijze een voorstelling maken van de omvang van de schande die over ons en onze kinderen zal neerdalen wanneer op een zekere dag de sluier voor onze ogen wegtrekt en de meest verschrikkelijke misdrijven, die iedere menselijke maat te boven gaan, het daglicht zien? Als het Duitse volk in zijn diepste wezen al zo gecorrumpeerd en uiteengevallen is dat het zonder een vinger uit te steken — lichtzinnig vertrouwend op een twijfelachtige historische wetmatigheid — het hoogste prijsgeeft wat een mens bezit en wat hem verheft boven alle andere schepselen, namelijk: de vrije wil, de vrijheid om de loop der geschiedenis mede te bepalen en te onderwerpen aan rationele beslissingen — als de Duitsers, aldus gespeend van iedere individualiteit, al in een zo geestloze, laffe massa veranderd zijn, ja dan, dan verdienen ze ten onder te gaan. (…) Goethe spreekt van de Duitsers als een tragisch volk, net als de Joden en Grieken, maar vandaag lijkt het er eerder op dat ze een oppervlakkige, willoze kudde meelopers zijn, die met het merg uit het binnenste weggezogen en nu van het eigene beroofd, bereid is zich in het verderf te laten storten.”

Citaat uit het tweede vlugschrift:

“Sinds de verovering van Polen (1939) zijn driehonderdduizend joden vermoord in dit land, op de meest beestachtige wijze … Het Duitse volk sluimert door in hun suffe, domme slaap en moedigt deze fascistische misdadigers aan (…) Ieder mens wil gevrijwaard zijn van een dergelijke schuld en gaat met het meest geruste geweten door met zijn dagelijkse bezigheden. Maar die mens mag niet worden ontzien, want die is schuldig, schuldig, schuldig!”

Citaat uit het derde vlugschrift:

“Alle “ideale staatsvormen” zijn utopieën. Een staat kan niet puur op een theorie geconstrueerd worden, maar moet net als ieder mens groeien en rijpen. (…) Onze huidige “staat” echter is een dictatuur van het kwaad. “Maar dat wisten we al lang,” hoor ik u als bezwaar opperen, en “we hebben er geen behoefte aan dat het ons nog eens een keer onder de neus gewreven wordt.” Maar, vraag ik u, als u dat weet, waarom staat u dan niet op, waarom staat u toe dat die macht stapje voor stapje, zowel openlijk als in het geniep, het ene na het andere recht van u afpakt, tot er op een dag niets, maar dan ook absoluut niets resteert dan een gemechaniseerd systeem onder leiding van criminelen en dronkaards? Is uw geest dan al zo ver heen door het misbruik dat ervan gemaakt is dat u vergeet dat het hier niet alleen uw recht betreft, maar dat het uw morele plicht is om te helpen dit systeem tot een einde te brengen?”

Citaat uit het vierde vlugschrift:

“Het is een goede oude wijsheid dat men een kind altijd maar weer moet moet zeggen wat het niet horen wil. Een slim kind zal zijn vingers maar éénmaal aan de kachel branden. (…) Wij zwijgen niet, wij zijn uw slechte geweten, de Weiße Rose zal u niet met rust laten.”

Citaat uit het vijfde vlugschrift:

“De vrijheid van meningsuiting, de vrijheid van godsdienst, de bescherming van de individuele burger tegen de willekeur en het geweld van criminele regimes, dát moeten de fundamenten worden van het nieuwe Europa. Steun de verzetsbeweging, verspreid de folders!”

Het zesde vlugschrift (tevens laatste) van de verzetsgroep was naar aanleiding van het drama in Stalingrad.

Het zesde Vlugschrift

Citaat uit dit laatste vlugschrift:

“Studiegenoten! Verbijsterd is ons volk door de ondergang van de mannen in Stalingrad. Driehonderddertigduizend Duitse mannen zijn door die geniale strategie van die Wereldoorlogkorporaal zinloos en verantwoordingsloos in het verderf gestort. Führer, u wordt bedankt!

Het rommelt onder het Duitse volk: Gaan wij door het lot van onze legers toe te vertrouwen aan een dilettant? Willen wij aan aan de laagste instincten van een partij-kliek de rest van onze Duitse jongeren opofferen? Nooit meer! De dag van de afrekening is aangebroken, de afrekening van de Duitse jeugd met de meest afschuwelijke tirannie die ons land ooit gekend heeft. In naam van het hele Duitse volk, eisen wij van Adolf Hitler’s regering de persoonlijke vrijheid terug, het meest kostbare goed van de Duitsers, die hij op de meest ellendige wijze heeft belazerd.

Wij zijn opgegroeid in een staat van meedogenloze kneveling van iedere vrije meningsuiting. HJ [Hitler Jügend], SA en SS hebben zich ingespannen om ons in de vruchtbaarste vormingsjaren van ons leven radicaal te veranderen, op te jutten, te verdoven. “Maatschappelijke vorming” heette die verachtelijke methode waarmee gepoogd werd de ontluikende eigenwaarde en het vermogen zelfstandig te kunnen denken in een mist van holle frasen te verstikken.”

Dit zesde vlugschrift was het Derde Rijk uitgesmokkeld en opnieuw uitgegeven als “Manifest van de studenten uit München“ [najaar 1943]. Van deze “flyer” werden een half jaar nadat de Weiße Rose was opgerold en de leden ervan veroordeeld, met geallieerde vliegtuigen miljoenen exemplaren boven Duitsland gedropt.

Suzanne Hirzel is één van de twee leden van de verzetsgroep Weiße Rose die nog in leven is. Zij is lid van de Burgerbeweging Pax Europa (Bürgerbewegung Pax Europa, BPE) die zich tegen de islamisering van Duitsland en Europa verzet. Suzanne Hirzel is tevens de auteur van het boek Vom Ja zum Nein: eine schwäbische Jugend 1933-1945 ["Van Ja naar Nee, een Schwabische Jeugd"], een verhandeling over haar ervaringen tijdens het Hitler-tijdperk in Duitsland.^[8]

Hieronder volgt een vertaling van het interview dat D.L. Adams van Stop the Islamization of America (SIOA) had met mevrouw Suzanne Zeller-Hirzel.

Adams: Tijdens de oorlog waren u en Sophie Scholl, voorafgaand aan de oprichting van de Weiße Rose, lid van de ‘Bond van Duitse Meisjes’ (Bund Deutscher Mädel, BDM). Was er een bepaalde gebeurtenis die u van het nationaal socialisme deed afkeren en er actief stelling tegen te nemen?

Zeller-Hirzel: “Ik leerde Sophie Scholl kennen in de BDM toen ze mijn groepsleidster was. Ik bewonderde haar om haar welbespraaktheid en haar manieren en ze werd al snel mijn allerbeste vriendin. Ik kwam vaak bij Sophie thuis en leerde daar haar broer Hans en haar zus Inge kennen. De BDM was een soort padvindersorganisatie voor meisjes. Politieke indoctrinatie was slechts een van de vele aspecten ervan en ik werd er zelfs clubleidster (Scharführerin). Sophie’s vader Robert Scholl was een stellig katholiek pacifist en oprecht christen. Hij vertelde ons over zijn ervaringen en dat heeft mijn denken beïnvloed. In die tijd hebben we gezamenlijk besloten dat we iets tegen Hitler moesten gaan doen.”

Adams: Welke karaktertrekken hadden de leden van de Weiße Rose gemeen?

Zeller-Hirzel: “Wij waren allemaal oppositionele patriotten, maar met een christelijke notie. Hoewel de Scholls katholiek waren en ik protestant — mijn vader was een Luthers pastor — hadden we bijna alles met elkaar gemeen.”

Adams: Ik begrijp dat de broer van Sophie een dienstplichtig soldaat was in Werhmacht. Was ook uw broer Hans [Hans Hirzel, eveneens lid van de Weiße Rose] betrokken bij een geheime beweging binnen de Werhmacht tegen het Hitler? Indien een dergelijke beweging bestond, kunt u ons erover vertellen? Heerste er onder de Duitsers een gevoel tegen het Hitlerisme waar jullie van dachten dat de Weiße Rose het zou kunnen aanmoedigen?

Zeller-Hirzel: “Ja, er was binnen de krijgsmacht een ondergrondse anti-nazi beweging.^[9] Daar waren vooral officieren bij betrokken. Mijn broer Hans was maar een gewone soldaat en soldaten werden zelden in vertrouwen genomen door officieren. Dus had hij geen contact met hen. Er was ook geen echte steun voor onder de bevolking, omdat het heersende, verkeerde devies was:

“Zolang onze zonen aan het front voor hun land vechten, is verzet een daad van verraad.”

Een andere collega die contact zocht met sympathisanten van de Weiße Rose in Berlijn, Falk Harnack, was ook al gedwongen in de strijdkrachten te dienen. Het is hem daar niet gelukt contact te leggen met het ondergrondse verzet. Verrassend genoeg werd hij op 19 april 1943 vrijgesproken door Freisler’s Volksgerechtshof. Harnack heeft kunnen profiteren van zijn beroepsmatige kwaliteiten: hij was artistiek leider in het theater geweest. Tijdens het proces had Freisler’s inschatting dat ik slechts een jong naïef meisje was, ervoor gezorgd dat ik er nog redelijk goed vanaf gekomen ben, hoewel ik in de gevangenis voor een doodvonnis had gevreesd.”

Adams: Het is bekend dat Hitler een grote fascinatie en adoratie had voor de islam. Hitler heeft eens gezegd dat hij liever had gezien dat Duitsland een islamitische cultuur had gehad, want dan zou het Duitse volk uit meer brute vechtersbazen bestaan. Hitler wist ook dat de joden door Mohammed werden veracht. De onderdrukking van mensen en het vermoorden van joden is een rode draad die tussen het nazisme en de islamitische doctrine loopt. Was u bekend met deze overeenkomsten in de tijd van de Weiße Rose, en waren er in toen moslims in München? Heeft professor Huber of enig ander lid van de Weiße Rose ooit wel eens in de groep over dat verband tussen de islam en het nazisme gesproken?

Zeller-Hirzel: “Met de Islam en moslims in het algemeen hielden wij ons in die tijd niet bezig. Of er moslims in Duitsland waren was mij toen niet bekend. De samenwerking van Hitler met Haj Amin al-Husseini, de grootmoefti van Jeruzalem, was ook niet algemeen bekend, hoewel Hitler hem in 1941 had uitgenodigd om naar Berlijn te komen waar hij tot aan het eind van de oorlog bleef, en dat de grootmoefti zijn [moslim] SS-divisies recruteerde onder Bosnische moslims. Dit was ons toendertijd allemaal niet bekend.”

Adams: Er is een documentaire over één van de persoonlijke secretaresses van Hitler, Traudl Junge [video]. De film heet “Blind Spot”. Een uitstekende film, die laat zien hoe een anderszins fatsoenlijk mens zich weet te excuseren en maar blijft zwijgen in het zicht van wreedheden en bruutheden die door dictators en totalitaire systemen worden aangericht. Heeft u enig commentaar op gewone Duitsers als Trudle Junge, die gingen samenwerken met de nationaal socialisten en Hitler, maar toch mogelijk wel in de gaten hebben gehad dat wat ze steunden verkeerd was? Het is bekend dat dictaturen en totalitaire systemen slechts kunnen functioneren zolang fatsoenlijke mensen blijven zwijgen.

Traudl Junge -- Secretary to Hitler -- Part 1

www.youtube.com/watch?v=y2xbEbbdbtg

Traudl Junge -- Secretary to Hitler -- Part 2

www.youtube.com/watch?v=iSCjsXONX5c

Traudl Junge -- Secretary to Hitler -- Part 3

www.youtube.com/watch?v=PTPDfoSBnLM

Zeller-Hirzel: “Ik ken de film en het boek, “Until the Final Hour”. Mevrouw Junge was waarschijnlijk een jonge vrouw die wel aantrekkelijk was maar verder vrij eenvoudig. Hitler liet zich graag omringen door dat type vrouwen.

Waarom miljoenen de nazi’s achterna liepen? In veel delen van de bevolking werd armoede geleden. Daar kwam nog bij dat de meerderheid van de bevolking de schande voelde van Versailles, wat culmineerde in beschuldigingen van verraad tegen de politici van de Weimar Republiek. Hitler gaf ze, althans emotioneel, een gevoel van nationale eigenwaarde terug.

Ik was in die tijd behoorlijk boos en teleurgesteld om te zien hoe mijn docenten, hoogleraren en ook de rector op de universiteit, vrijwillig bruine overhemden gingen dragen (de nazi “dress-code”). Zij deden dat omdat ze de nazi’s “een helpende hand” wilden bieden. Dat waren dan de mensen die in die tijd voor mij als rolmodel hadden moeten fungeren. Ik denk dat vandaag de dag hetzelfde aan de hand is met docenten en hoogleraren die zich als islamofielen en multiculturalisten etaleren en het islamisme ten dienste willen zijn. Die doen nu hetzelfde als degenen die indertijd met de nazi’s heulden. Ik moet er echter bijzeggen dat de ouderwetse geleerden toen de meest moedigen en afhoudenden waren onder de hoogleraren.”

Adams: U bent nu betrokken bij de Burgerbeweging Pax Europa (BPE). We begrijpen dat dit een van de belangrijkste anti-Jihad organisaties in Duitsland is. Wat bracht u ertoe bij de anti-islamiseringsbeweging betrokken te raken?

Zeller-Hirzel: “Ik lees veel, heel veel boeken over het onderwerp, met name ook de boeken van Mark Gabriel. Dus ik besefte dat men deze zaken gewoonweg niet passief kan laten voor wat het is, maar er iets tegen moet doen. Men moet deze zaak steunen, uit noodzaak.“

Adams: Ziet u overeenkomsten tussen de islam en het nazisme? En indien die er zijn, wat zijn die overeenkomsten dan?

Zeller-Hirzel: “Het fanatisme, de absolute claim de enige waarheid te bezitten en de spirituele simpliciteit, zijn vrijwel hetzelfde bij de islam en het nazisme.”

Adams: Beschouwt u oppositie tegen de islamisering als een vergelijkbare strijd die de Weiße Rose tegen het nazisme voerde?

Zeller-Hirzel: “Nog niet helemaal. Critici van de nazi-ideologie werden onmiddellijk gearresteerd. Wij hebben dat punt nog niet bereikt. Maar als we niets doen zal het daar wel op uitdraaien. Dan zouden ze de islam-critici kunnen gaan opsluiten.”

Adams: Wat zou volgens u er zo moeilijk aan zijn om de dreiging van de islamisering aan het grote publiek uit te leggen? Wat weerhoudt ons deze boodschap aan het publiek over te kunnen brengen? Wat kunnen we daaraan verbeteren?

Zeller-Hirzel: “De algemene onverschilligheid die ten aanzien van religieuze onderwerpen heerst maakt het lastig. Het publiek gelooft dat wij ten opzichte van iedereen maar “fair” moeten zijn. Dat is contraproductief. Daar komt nog bij dat de algemene welvaart met de relatief hoge levensstandaard mensen lui maakt. Ik zeg altijd maar: alleen educatie kan daar iets aan doen. Educatie kan helpen.”

Adams: Wat is de beste manier om iemand aan te spreken die helemaal niets van de islam weet? Hoe kunnen we aan een draagvlak onder de bevolking werken om te vookomen dat we ooit in eenzelfde wanhopige positie bekneld raken als u, Sophie en de andere helden van de verzetsgroep Weiße Rose indertijd?

Zeller-Hirzel: “Zoals ik daarnet zei: Educatie! We moeten buurtvergaderingen en gemeenschapelijke- en kerkelijke activiteiten organiseren. De zorgen zijn er inderdaad wel bij de bevolking, maar die zijn blijkbaar nog niet groot genoeg. “Hitler is de gesel van God”, zei Robert Scholl eens, de vader van Sophie, en werd er toen prompt voor veroordeeld.”

Adams: Wanneer u en uw collega’s van de Weiße Rose vlugschriften in München en elders verspreidden, dacht u toen dat de bevolking naar een anti-Hitler standpunt zou kunnen worden bijgedraaid?

Zeller-Hirzel: “Jazeker, wij geloofden dat echt. Wij dachten werkelijk dat wij de publieke opinie konden beïnvloeden. En zelfs als het uiteindelijk tevergeefs zou zijn geweest, hadden we het dan in ieder geval geprobeerd. Toch waren we bang. De weinige supporters die wij hadden waren bang. Wij waren bang voor de doodstraffen die werden uitgedeeld door Freisler’s Volksgerechtshof [video], bang voor zijn geschreeuw [video]. Maar schreeuwen is uiteindelijk ook een teken van zwakte.”

Volksgerichtshof (Nazi Peoples Court) -- NEW FOOTAGE -- Part 1

www.youtube.com/watch?v=_GuEM0w9Td4

Judge Roland Freisler -- aka “Raving Roland”

www.youtube.com/watch?v=aNi5256dhvM

Adams: De herinnering aan Sophie Scholl, aan u en uw collega’s, wordt wereldwijd bijzonder hoog gehouden door mensen die de vrijheid en rechtvaardigheid lief hebben. Hoe kunnen wij in deze tijd de burgers het beste motiveren om zich te verweren tegen de islamisering van Europa en het Westen?

Zeller-Hirzel: “Ik denk dat er iets vreselijks moet gebeuren voordat de Duitsers wakker worden. Maar 9/11 stond te ver af van het Duitse volk. De kerken falen jammerlijk in hun taak de mensen te informeren over de islamitische ideologie. Dat kan dus alleen maar gedaan worden met burger-activisme, met educatie en informatie. Zelfs al spelen de kerken in Europa een steeds kleinere sociale rol, zouden de mensen zich ondanks dat moeten roeren in de kerkelijke instellingen, in de parochies, enzovoort.”

Adams: Welke bemoedigende woorden heeft u voor ons in de strijd tegen de vijanden van vrijheid en de menselijkheid?

Zeller-Hirzel: “Streef naar eenheid. Dat maakt het verzet krachtig en geeft het moed!”

1. Dat demissionair minister Ernst Hirsh Ballin (CDA) — onder wiens bewind bijvoorbeeld ook Gregorius Nekschot van zijn bed is gelicht wegens het maken van een moslim-onwelgevallige spotprent — computers wil “isoleren als die gevaarlijke virussen blijken te bevatten” en een “cyberautoriteit” wil instellen is in dit licht gezien alarmerend, zeker gezien het feit dat hij eveneens (op aandringen van de VVD) het voornemen [pdf] heeft “trojans” in “verdachte” computers te installeren om ze zo “virtueel te kunnen doorzoeken”.

2. Eigentijdse voorbeelden zijn de emeritus hoogleraar en gemeenteraadslid voor de PvdA, Maarten van Rossum die de bezorgdheid om de aantasting van onze seculiere staat door de toenemende invloed van de islam onder de categorie “waanbeelden” schaart en meent dat deze “waanbeelden” gebaseerd zijn op “niet noemenswaardige incidenten”; maar ook emeritus-hoogleraar en voormalig CDA prominent Anton Zijderveld. Citaat Bart Jan Spruyt: “Over de islam is Zijderveld ongekend naïef. Er komt vanzelf een ‘ontmoskeelijking’, betoogt hij, en we zullen ‘over enkele decennia’ net zo vreemd tegen de huidige angst voor islamitische dominantie aankijken als we nu aankijken tegen de protestantse angst voor katholieke dominantie in de jaren vijftig.”

3. Roland Freisler (1893-1945) was als voormalige Luitenant in de Eerste Wereldoorlog krijgsgevange geweest van de Russen. Tijdens zijn krijgsgevangenschap ontwikkelde hij een interesse in het Marxisme en werd na zijn vrijlating in 1918 een overtuigd Bolsjewiek [een revolutionair socialistische afsplitsing van de Russische Sociaaldemocratische Arbeiderspartij, RSDAP]. Volgens sommigen was Freisler geen echte communist [of revolutionair socialist], maar behoorde hij eerder tot de linkervleugel van de NSDAP [Nationaal Socialistische Arbeiders Partij]. Na de machtsgreep van de Nationaal Socialisten werd hij Staatssecretaris van Justitie (in welke hoedanigheid hij deelnam aan de Wannsee Conferentie over de Endlösung der Judenfrage (“definitieve oplossing van het Jodenprobleem”), en president van het Volksgerechtshof.

4. Hans Conrad Leipelt en Marie-Luise Jahn, typten het zesde vlugschrift over en verspreidden het in Hamburg. Toen zij geld inzamelden voor de weduwe van Weiße Rose lid Kurt Huber, werden zij verraden en gearresteerd. Hans Conrad Leipelt kreeg de doodstaf en Marie-Luise Jahn 12 jaar stafkamp. Zie ook: Hans Leipelt und Marie-Luise Jahn – Studentischer Widerstand in der Zeit des Nationalsozialismus am Chemischen Staatslaboratorium der Universität München. [Amazon].

5. Het Volksgerechtshof (Volksgerichtshof) was door Rijkskanselier Adolf Hitler in 1934 opgericht met de bevoegdheid om o.a. “politieke misdrijven” te behandelen, ofwel tegen mensen die zich in woord, geschrift en/of daad distantiëerden danwel verzetten tegen het socialistische bewind. Dit Volksgerechtshof deelde onder leiding van Roland Freisler meer dan 5000 doodstraffen uit (zowel door ophanging als onthoofding).

6. Sophie Scholl—The Final Days (Sophie Scholl—Die letzten Tage [trailer] — zie ook De laatse dagen van Sophie Scholl) is een Duitse film (regie Marc Rothemund) over de laatste dagen in het leven van Sophia Magdalena Scholl (1921-1943), een 21-jarige lid van de Duitse verzetsgroep Weiße Rose. Sophie Scholl werd door rechter Freisler schuldig bevonden [video] aan hoogverraad en dezelfde dag onthoofd (22 februari 1943) net als twee andere Weiße Rose leden, Hans Fritz Scholl (1918-1943) en Christoph Hermann Probst (1919-1943). Tijdens een reeks opvolgende processen stonden Wilhelm Geyer, Harald Dohrn, Josef Soehngen, Manfred Eickemeyer, evenals veertien anderen terecht, waaronder Suzanne Hirzel. In dat proces werden Alexander Schmorell, Kurt Huber en Eilhelm (Willi) Graf tot de doodstraf veroordeeld.

7. Annette Dumbach, Jud Newborn, “Sophie Scholl and the White Rose“, Oneworld Publications, Oxford 2007.

8. Susanne Hirzel, “Vom Ja zum Nein : eine schwäbische Jugend 1933-1945″; Klöpfer und Meyer, Tübingen 1998 [ISBN 3-931402-28-2]

9. Andere bekende verzetsbewegingen waren bijvoorbeeld die van graaf Claus von Stauffenberg en de Kreisauer Kring. De meeste leden van ‘de Kring’ waren conservatieven uit de traditionele aristocratie en adel, waaronder enkele van de meest illustere namen uit die tijd zoals graaf Helmuth von Moltke, maar ook leden met andere achtergronden, officieren en academici. Hoewel sommigen zich richtten op een politieke coup, en enkelen [waaronder Adolf Reichwein] betrokken waren bij de mislukte moordaanslag door de groep van Von Stauffenberg op Adolf Hitler op 20 juli 1944, was het belangrijkste doel een gezamenlijke visie te ontwikkelen voor een regering ná de oorlog, gebaseerd op christelijke principes. Graaf Helmuth von Moltke schreef vlak voor zijn executie aan zijn vrouw Freya von Moltke daarom: “We worden opgehangen voor het gezamelijk nadenken.”

Related posts:

1. De Dubbele Moraal Tegen Israel
2. Boycotcampagne tegen Israel ‘Misleidend’ en ‘Oneerlijk’
3. Wie de Waarheid Spreekt Riskeert Vervolging in Zweden

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Thu, June 10, 2010 | Jerusalem Post | By David Horovitz

Geert Wilders (Photo: ANP, Ed Oudenaarden)

‘We have no problem to be tolerant of the tolerant’

Geert Wilders, leader of the Freedom Party (PVV), was a major winner during the recent elections in the Netherlands (Wednesday, June 9, 2010). His party went from 9 to 24 seats in the Dutch 150-member parliament.

Geert Wilders is pro-Israel and permanently indicating the dangers of Islam and the immigration from Muslim countries to Europe. He has made the struggle against Islamism and the ongoing Islamisation of the Netherlands the centerpiece of his campaign.

His views brought him, besides the recent election victory, also a great discomfort. He can not leave his home without his bodyguards because of the many death threats against him, and he faces trial on the accusation of inciting hatred and discrimination for his outspoken anti-Islamic comments and comparing the Koran with Hitler’s Mein Kampf.

“This trial is not just about me. It is about the future of freedom of speech in the Netherlands. The outcome of this trial affects the freedom of all Dutch citizens,” says Geert Wilders.

The following are excerpts from a recent telephone interview Geert Wilders had with the Jerusalem Post:

Jpost: What does the rise in support for your party say about Holland?

GW: “People are waking up. They see that we are losing our identity, that neighborhoods are unsafe, that women are shouted at and hassled in the streets, that schools are unsafe. If my party were extremist, we’d be at the margins and we’d be getting 1.5 or 2 percent of the vote.”

“We’re not. In Holland, fortunately, we don’t have many racists. The Dutch are a very tolerant people. We have no problem to be tolerant of the tolerant, but we should be intolerant of the intolerant.”

“The struggle is not lost. If it were lost, I would not be fighting the fight, with all the costs I have paid. It’s not too late, but we can’t afford to wait any longer. The gap between the ruling elites [in Europe] and the vox populi is very wide. If you look at the UK, Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, the change is not for the better.”

“Still, we are gaining some ground. The Danish People’s Party, which supports the government [from outside the coalition, having come third in 2007’s elections], made sure that Denmark has some of the toughest laws on immigration and emigration, without going too far. That can happen in Holland, too. My first choice would be to be in government.”

“My second preference is to give support [from the outside] for a minority government, like in Denmark. Change has to be made. Denmark proves it is possible, and it is possible in Holland and other European countries, too.”

Jpost: Do you believe there is such a thing as moderate Islam?

GW: “I believe there are moderate Muslims. Most of those living in Western society are moderate, seeking a good life, and [are concerned for their] family.”

“Law-abiding persons. But I don’t believe there is a moderate Islam. It’s a totalitarian ideology – against freedom, and the rule of law, and the separation of church and state – [against] free Western society.”

“I fear the Islamification of our societies, and there’s evidence of it happening.”

“In the UK, people don’t know, but there are 60 active Sharia courts. I was taken to a criminal court in the Netherlands for things I said about Islam [in the 2008 film Fitna].”

“Freedom of speech is under attack. It wouldn’t have happened if I had criticized Catholicism. Cartoonists, politicians, journalists are getting into legal trouble. Our society is changing. It’s not a change for the better.”

Jpost: Is there no room for coexistence?

GW: “I advocate integration [with Muslims already in Europe who genuinely wish to integrate]. But it can’t be in the framework of Islam and the Koran.”

“Islam doesn’t want to integrate.”

“It wants to dominate. So I say stop the mass immigration from Muslim countries – not because the people are bad but because our cultural heritage and society, based on Christian and Judaic values, on humanity, is better than the Islamic [framework]. If you abide by our laws, rules, values, constitution, you integrate. But if you cross red lines and don’t act according to our rule of law, we need to be stricter.”

“There are too many carrots and not enough sticks, [such as] extradition.”

Jpost: How grave do you consider the situation to be in Holland at present?

GW: “In some European countries, the Muslim population has grown from 5, to 10, to 15, to 20%. In the Netherlands today, it is one million out of 16 million.”

“In Amsterdam and other of our cities, homosexuals, women and apostates – they are not harassed by Jews, or Buddhists. This growth [in the immigrant Muslim populace] has to stop. Tens of thousands are still arriving each year, from Somalia, Iraq, Morocco, Turkey…”

Jpost: So Europe is losing the battle?

GW: “It is five minutes to midnight.”

“The biggest [disease] is cultural relativism. We don’t know who we are anymore. So it’s hard to know who we are not. Liberals promote this concept that all cultures are equal.”

“And you’re a nudnik if you say your culture is better than the Islamic culture. This should stop. We should know which values we share and which we do not. If we don’t deal with this and don’t stop immigration, because of [misguided] politically correct reasons, then we’ll lose Europe [to Islam].”

Jpost: Where does Israel fit in your mindset?

GW: “Israel is the canary in the coal mine. The jihad against Israel isn’t against Israel only.”

“It’s against the whole West. It’s not a territorial conflict but an ideological one. If Israel gave, say, the West Bank to the Palestinians, this will not bring peace. The next step would be for the Palestinians to claim that Ashkelon, Ashdod, Haifa and Jerusalem are the next ‘settlements’ to be conquered.”

“I always say that parents elsewhere in the West sleep well at night because parents in Israel lie awake at night – because their children are fighting the jihad. You’re fighting our fight. People need to take this into account. Territorial compromise won’t solve the conflict. And after Israel, we are next.”

Jpost: Is Israel going to win?

GW: “Israel is a democracy. The only democracy in the Middle East, with an independent judiciary, parliament, one man one vote, civil society, and independent press. Israel should make its own decisions.”

“Its decisions should be respected.”

Jpost: Where did you live in Israel?

GW: “Moshav Tomer, 10 kilometers north of Jericho in the Jordan Valley [as a volunteer for two years after high school].”

Jpost: Have you traveled elsewhere in our region?

GW: “I’ve been to Iran three or four times, the last time about six years ago. And Iraq and Syria. What these countries have in common is that they are dictatorships, non-democracies.”

“In Iran, I was present when a local journal’s office was sealed and closed because they had criticized the regime.”

“I spoke myself to students, military cadets, and spoke a bit about Israel, and was hassled.”

Jpost: How concerned are you by Iran’s nuclear drive?

GW: “The danger is in the intention and the capacities. Iran has both. It has fooled the world. It is a very dangerous regime based on an Islamic ideology. A non-free Islamic society. The worst. It is underestimated.”

“It poses a danger not only for Israel, but for the whole geopolitical situation – one of the worst threats we are facing today.”

Related posts:

1. Al-Gaddafi, Wilders and the Jihad Against Switzerland
2. Wafa Sultan about Islam
3. How Islamists Came to Dominate European Islam