In contrast, the Christian Romans used force to convert
all the countries under their dominion to Christianity. When Roman Catholicism became the state religion, the Romans persecuted
the Orthodox Christians who did not convert. The number of Orthodox Christians killed by Rome reached 200,000 which is huge
considering the small population of Egypt at the time (elshaab.com, 1/4/99, page2).
The spread of Islam in the 7th century threatened the Romans
and Persians who shared dominion over Arabia and collected heavy taxes from the Arabs. This led to
a series of wars between the Romans and Persians on one side and the Muslims on the other.
The Muslims won the war with Persia
and restricted the Romans to Asia minor until the Ottoman Turks conquered Constantinople
in the 16th century. This spread the Muslim influence over the civilized world from the seventh to the fourteenth centuries.
The way Muslims conducted the affairs of state and their personal lives led many Christians, Jews and others to embrace Islam.
Muslims in Europe:
When the Muslims ruled European countries including Spain,
Portugal, southern France,
southern Italy, and Sicily;
Christians and Jews thrived and were allowed in Muslim Universities. This gave Europeans the scientific and artistic tools
which helped them start the Renaissance several centuries later when the hold of the Catholic Church over Europe was weakened.
Muslim taxes were a fraction of the Roman taxes. Muslims
considered their sphere of influence as one nation. They did not transfer wealth from the countries they occupied to Arabia
or practice genocide against the native population.
When the tables were turned and the Catholic Spaniards
defeated the Muslims in Spain and Portugal,
they instituted the Spanish Inquisition which killed or expelled millions of Muslims who refused to convert to Christianity.
The Jews suffered a similar fate at the hands of the Spaniards.
While millions of Christians and Jews continue to thrive
in the Muslim countries after 14 centuries of Muslim domination, there is no trace of the millions of Muslims who lived for
centuries in Spain and Portugal.
Evidence of their past existence can only be found in beautiful palaces like Alhambra
in Granada, flamenco music and dancing, Portuguese fado singing, and the abundance
of Arabic words in the Spanish and Portuguese languages.
The Crusades:
The "real" holy wars were waged by the Crusaders against
the Muslims in the Middle East. The Crusaders were brutal in their treatment of Muslim prisoners of
war and civilians. When the Crusaders conquered Jerusalem, they killed 70,000
Muslims. When the Muslims re-conquered the city they did not kill anybody.
Orthodox Christians were considered heretics and therefore
did not escape the Crusaders' brutality. The Orthodox Churches, which were safe during centuries of Muslim rule, were looted
by the Crusaders. The Holy Grail was not the only thing the Crusaders took from the Orthodox churches.
When Muslims ended the Crusades by re-conquering Acre
from the Crusaders, Pope Nicolas IV barred Christians from selling timber to Muslims. This embargo did not result in
persecution of the Christians in the Muslim countries.
Napoleonic Crusade:
The Crusades were not an unfortunate episode during the
dark age in Europe that ended a long time ago. When Napoleon invaded Egypt,
he ordered his troops to destroy the face of the sphinx and the tip of the great pyramid to leave his mark on them.
His cavalry desecrated al-Azhar mosque, the Muslim World's
equivalent of the Vatican and the first university in the
world, with their horses. The French soldiers burned the rare manuscripts in its library to keep warm.
Napoleon was proud that he had ordered beheading 5-6 people
daily and parading their heads in the streets to scare the population!
After defeating the Turks in Jaffa,
Napoleon ordered his troops to kill about 2500 Turkish soldiers from the city garrison who surrendered. The soldiers
were led to the shore and the French kept firing at them until they ran out of ammunition then finished them off with bayonets.
The water turned red from the blood of the slain Turks. In the city, the killing, raping, looting and burning lasted
for 2 days and did not stop until the French troops were too exhausted to continue.
When a survivor of the Jaffa
massacre killed a French general, his hands were cut, his wrists were burned then he was impaled. After his slow death,
his head was severed and was given to a French surgeon who showed the skull to his students in Paris
as an example of a terrorist and a criminal.
It seems that the principles of the French revolution:
Freedom, equality and brotherhood did not apply to Muslims! This was later confirmed when the French occupied
Morocco, Algeria,
and Tunisia and declared them French territories. The
French citizenship was given to Jews and Christians but not to Muslims!
Modern Crusades:
When general Allenby, the commander of the British forces
in the Middle East during World War I, entered Jerusalem
and Damascus he proclaimed the end of the Crusades.
Nazi Crusade:
Abdel Wahab El-Messeri (Al-Ahram Weekly, 23 - 29 December
1999, Issue No. 461) reported:
"In the course of my research for the Encyclopedia of Jews,
Judaism and Zionism, I was surprised to find how frequently the word "Muselmann" (Muslim) appeared in the Auschwitz
concentration camp lists. According to one source, the victims who were led off to the gas chambers were called "aliens" ((??))
and according to other sources, "Muselmanner". In the Encyclopedia Judaica, I came across the following entry:
"Muselmann (Muslim in German) was a commonly used terms
in the concentration camps, used to refer to the prisoners who were on the brink of death, that is to say those who began
to show the final symptoms of starvation, disease, mental apathy and physical weakness. The term was primarily used in Auschwitz,
but was also used in other camps."
We see here an epitome of one central dimension of the
Western mentality. Whenever it destroys its victims it perceives them as "other," and the other, since the time of the Crusades,
has always been the Muslim. In the Middle Ages, moreover, Muslims and Jews were closely linked in the Western mind. One can
find, for instance, many paintings which portray the Prophet Muhammad (born 570 AD) flogging Christ.
The Nazi experience is an authentic product of this Western
mindset. The Nazis were the standard bearers of this vision. They epitomized the Western confrontation with the oriental civilization
closest to Europe: the Islamic civilization. They never forgot this burden, even when annihilating
millions of inhabitants of Europe. The connotation of the term "Muselmann" was simply extended to include
the "other" in general, whether Slavs, Jews or Gypsies (as has occurred in a similar manner with the word "Arab" in Zionist
discourse).
The writer of the preceding entry in the Encyclopedia Judaica
attempted to explain how this term came into currency in the camps. The Nazis' victims, he said, would crouch cross-legged
in the "oriental" manner and the expression on their faces would be wooden, as lifeless as a mask. One notes that the writer,
in his definition, made no attempt to avoid the customary Western stereotype of Muslims. He simply substituted the word "oriental"
for "Muselmann"."
Terrorist and fundamentalist have frequently replaced the
word "oriental".
Muslims revere Moses, Jesus and all the prophets and consider
Judaism and Christianity earlier phases of the primordial religion of God: Islam. The Muslims in Bulgaria, for example, were
very active in protecting Jewish groups from persecution, and King Hussein V of Morocco refused to hand over his Jewish subjects
to the Vichy government in France.
Unfortunately, Jews and Christians do not recognize Islam
or the Prophet Muhammad's mission. Most Christians and Jews consider Muslims sinners who are not chosen by God or saved
and are, therefore, not entitled to equal or humane treatment.
Jewish Crusade:
The United Nations records document countless atrocities
against Muslim civilians by the Jews in Palestine. Infamous examples are
the massacres in Kafr Qasim, Dir Yasin by the Jewish terrorist gangs before the UN divided Palestine
into a Palestinian and Jewish states.
An Israeli historian uncovered credible evidence that troops
massacred 200 Palestinians in a single village on the day Israel
came into being in 1948.
Teddy Katz, who researched events in the village
of Tantura for a masters degree, said he had spoken to witnesses including soldiers
who were present to support his findings.
``It started at night and was over in a few hours,'' Katz
said 14 Israeli soldiers were killed in the ambush on the village. Tantura, near Haifa
in northern Israel, had 1,500 residents at the time. It was
later demolished to make way for a parking lot for a nearby beach and the Nahsholim kibbutz, or cooperative farm.
Katz said the killing spree in Tantura was more tragic
and bigger than in the village of Deir Yassin
just west of Jerusalem, where scores of Palestinians were killed on April 9, 1948, in an assault by Jewish armed groups.
Reports just after the Deir Yassin killings spoke of some
240 deaths. Up to 700,000 Palestinians fled from their towns and villages or were driven out by Jewish troops in the conflict
between Arab and Jew that surrounded Israel's creation.
Fawzi Tanji, now 73 and a refugee at a camp in the West
Bank, is from Tantura and worked until May 1948 as a guard for the army in British Mandate Palestine.
He told Reuters he had watched as Israeli troops took over
the village, lined men up against a cemetery wall and shot them. Katz said 95 men were killed at the cemetery.
``I was 21 years old then. They took a group of 10 men,
lined them up against the cemetery wall and killed them. Then they brought another group, killed them, threw away the bodies
and so on,'' Tanji said.
The Israeli newspaper Maariv, which reported Katz's findings
Wednesday, quoted the commander of the Tantura attack as saying his troops had no grounds to ask questions or spare lives.
``It was war...When you see the enemy opposite you, he
doesn't have a note saying he doesn't mean to shoot you. When you see him, you shoot him,'' retired colonel Bentz Pridan said.
(New York Times, January 19, 2000)
Other infamous massacres include the massacres in Palestinian
refugee camps in Sabra and Shatila, and the recent massacre in Qana (where Jesus once attended a wedding and changed water
into wine!) More than 200 women, children and old men who were seeking shelter near a UN camp were killed by deliberate
Israeli bombing.
Israel
occupied southern Lebanon for 20 years. In 1978, UN Security
Council Resolution 425 called " upon Israel immediately to
cease its military action against Lebanese territorial integrity and withdraw forthwith its forces from all Lebanese territory.
Instead of complying with the UN Security Council Resolution,
Israel invaded additional Lebanese territory in 1982, 1993,
and 1996 killing tens of thousands and displaced hundreds of thousands of Lebanese civilians.
Israel
has been holding scores of innocent Lebanese hostages, some for more than a decade, in prisons in Israel
and Israeli-occupied south Lebanon. Recent news reports
also suggest that Israel has been systematically stealing
fertile topsoil from Israeli-occupied southern Lebanon and
trucking it to Israel.
The value of property, seized by Israel
from 700,000 Palestinians who fled Palestine when the Jewish terrorists announced
the formation of Israel in 1948, is estimated at more than
6 billion dollars excluding interest.
Violation of the civil, religious and human rights of the
Muslim and Christian minorities in Israel, which are 18% of
the population, had no effect on the flow of unlimited aid to Israel.
Israel has destroyed about 400 mosques and 400 churches since
the UN divided Palestine into Palestinian and Jewish States in 1948.
It seems that the US
policy of linking foreign aid to human rights and religious persecution records of foreign countries does not apply to Israel.
Serbian Crusade:
The Serb Christians waged war on the Muslim civilians
in Bosnia and Kosovo. In Bosnia,
more than 200,000 Muslims have been killed and more than 1400 mosques have been destroyed or damaged. About 200 villages
have been destroyed in Kosovo and about 250,000 refugees have fled for their lives.
When the Serb Christians invaded Kosovo, they destroyed
all mosques despite the fact that the Christian monasteries were safe for centuries in the predominantly Muslim Kosovo.
Double Standards:
The mentality of the Crusades still exists today under
the guise of fighting terrorists or Muslim fundamentalists, or fighting the spread of weapons of mass destruction (meaning
leaving the Muslim countries vulnerable to the threat of mass destruction by Israel or others), or stemming the tide of immigration
by North Africans to Europe."
The economic sanctions, advocated by Pope Nicolas IV, continue
today against Muslim countries labelled by the State Department as "rogue nations" or "nations that sponsor terrorism" or
"nations that violate civil rights of minorities" or "nations that oppose peace with Israel"
Despite the media's attempts to demonize the Muslims, the
facts show that about 80% of the 23 million refugees in the world today are Muslims!
The facts contradict all the rhetoric by the media and
government officials linking Muslims to terrorism. The State Department's "Patterns of Global Terrorism" 1997 report, there
were 123 anti-U.S. attacks in that year; 97 occurred in Latin America, seven took place in Europe
and six in Asia. The Middle East ranked fourth as a location of anti-American
attacks.
The previous State Department report showed a similar pattern.
In 1996, there were 73 anti-American attacks world-wide; 58 were in Latin America, eight in Europe
and three in the Middle East.
When the Afghani Mujahideen ( those who conduct Jihad ),
aided by fighters from Saudi Arabia trained and armed by the US,
fought the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, they were hailed
as freedom fighters. Jihad was good in those days. The US
was calling for a worldwide Islamic Jihad against the Soviets.
When the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan,
the Mujahideen were quickly denounced as terrorists because of their opposition to the Israeli occupation of Palestinian,
Syrian, and Lebanese territories.
Christian fundamentalists are waging a Crusade to end the
separation between church and state in the US and put the
first nail in the coffin of the American system of government. They have replaced modern science with the Bible in their schools.
They advocate a pre-renaissance philosophy. This proves the Muslims provided the knowledge that launched the Renaissance in
Europe. It is ironic that the West opposes Muslim fundamentalists who teach evolution in their schools.
Some Christian fundamentalists even turned to violence
when they could not impose their views legally and killed law enforcement officers in Waco
and bombed abortion clinics in several cities. The government and the media never refer to the threat of Christian fundamentalists.
Jewish fundamentalists murdered Rabin, their own prime
minister, when he finally saw the light. Rabin realized that Israel
has to make peace with the Palestinians and the rest of the Arab World to secure its long term prospects in the region.
Jewish fundamentalists oppose peace and conduct demonstrations
with banners calling for killing the Arabs. Many of these fundamentalists have killed Palestinian civilians and desecrated
the Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem and were either never arrested or quickly released
from police custody because there were judged mentally unstable.
These activities are never reported by the media in the
US the way they cover suicide bombings by desperate militants who have lost everything to illegal destruction of their homes
and killing of their family members by the Israeli government or by Jewish settlers who are illegally taking over Palestinian
territories and barring Palestinians from access to their farms and places of worship to pressure them into submission to
the illegal status quo.
The West ignores the threat of Christian and Jewish fundamentalists
while actively opposing Muslim fundamentalists, even when they are democratically elected.
The military takeovers of the elected governments in Algeria,
Sierra Leone, Tajikistan
and Turkey were encouraged by the West. However, the
military takeover of the elected government in Haiti was not
tolerated. The UN authorized a US invasion to return
the elected government to power.
The Crusade against Iraq:
The US
vetoed many UN decisions condemning Israeli actions. The Muslim countries were told peace can be achieved only by direct
negotiations with Israel. Military action or sanctions
against Israel were never options for attaining peace in the
Middle East.
This policy did not apply to Iraq
- the former US ally during the Iran/Iraq war. The US
obtained a UN decision against Iraq the day following the
invasion of Kuwait. Kuwait
had been a province of Iraq until the
British decided to make it a separate protectorate after World War I. Iraq
was not allowed (like Israel) 32 years of procrastination
and frivolous negotiations with the Sheik of Kuwait. In short, there was no peace process.
Iraq
was bombed into the Stone Age and unprecedented sanctions were imposed which led to the death of more than one million Iraqis
to-date. A whole generation of Iraqis was murdered by the sanctions against Iraq
since 1991. Swift military action is ready to kill more Iraqis if they protest the frivolous inspections that have been
going on all these years.
More than 270 teams of inspectors have conducted 9340 inspections.
Since 1991, the inspectors verified the destruction of 30 warheads, 18 ballistic missiles, 700,000 tons of chemicals they
claimed could produce weapons, and 40,000 tons of chemicals that could be used in weapons.
The inspectors claim they still need to do their work.
The US maintains the sanctions will continue until the inspectors
"finish" their work.
Americans who oppose the U.S.
government's policy on Iraq ended a Christmas visit Tuesday
meant to focus attention on the suffering of Iraqi children (December 28, 1999 9:32 a.m. EST http://www.nandotimes.com).
During their weeklong visit, the group spent Christmas
among the Iraqi Christian community in Basra, a city some 335 miles south of Baghdad.
"We spent Christmas morning in one of the hospitals where
we saw for ourselves infants dying because there is never enough medicine," said Chuck Quilty of Rock
Island, Ill., one of eight American Catholics in the Voices in the Wilderness
delegation.
UN officials keep resigning in protest of the sanctions
against the Iraqi people. The latest resignations came February 14, 2000
from Hans von Sponeck the top UN official in Iraq and Jutta
Burghardt the head of the World Food Program.
Current Crusade:
Unfortunately, the holy war against Islam will continue
to claim more Muslim victims in the foreseeable future. In an effort to keep the military industrial complex going after the
end of the cold war, Islam has been targeted as the new enemy and new threats have been invented. This keeps tax payers' subsidies
flowing to the cold war industry and protects it from competition from the productive economy.
The US
spends more on the military than the rest of the world combined. The government needs terrorists and Islamophobia to
justify this level of military expenditures. It is ironic that the current most dangerous enemies, according to the US
government, were trained and armed by the US!
The US
accounts for half of the weapons exports around the world. These exports need wars and conflicts to sustain them.
This is a major disappointment to all the people who hoped that the collapse of the Berlin Wall would bring world peace and
prosperity for all.
The oil producing countries in the Middle East
purchase a significant portion of the US arms sales. US
taxpayers subsidize massive military aid to Israel. A just
peace in the Middle East would eliminate most of the US
arms sales.
Muslim militants in the Middle East
are resisting Israeli occupation of the West Bank, Lebanon,
and Syria. This occupation violates international law and
numerous UN resolutions. Targeting the militants will not bring peace to the Middle East but will bring
the downfall of the moderate leaders. Ending the occupation will bring peace and help the moderates on both sides build a
better future for all the people in the Middle East.
The racial conflicts in the US
in the 1960s offer a useful analogy. The assassinations of Dr. Martin Luther King, Malcolm X and militant black leaders
did not end the riots and the strife. The conflicts were not obviously caused by the militants. The militants
and the conflicts emerged from the anger and frustration of the black masses who were helpless in the face of persistent discrimination.
Respecting and supporting equal rights for Blacks ended
all the conflicts and allowed blacks to play a productive role that benefited the whole society.
The Muslim militants are the product - not the cause of
the anger and frustration in the Muslim countries which are helpless to defend themselves in the face of Israeli arrogance
backed by unlimited US support.
In the mean time The US provides Israel
with military and financial aid so they can continue their occupation of Arab lands by force for more than 32 years and disregard
UN resolutions.
Respecting the rights of the Muslim countries and implementing
the UN resolutions protecting the rights of the Palestinians, Syrians, and Lebanese would bring just peace to the Middle
East. This would also restore the friendly and beneficial relations the US
had with all the Muslim countries after World War II.
American national interest would significantly benefit
from good relations with Arab and Muslim countries. Unfortunately, that has been totally ignored and replaced with
a policy of supporting outrageous Israeli actions and policies at any price.
The Jewish influence on American foreign policy which started
during the Lyndon Johnson administration and reached an unprecedented level in the Clinton
administration is responsible for this shift.
The Muslim world occupies about one fourth of the world
area. Muslims represent about one sixth of the World population. American Muslims outnumber American Jews in the US.
Yet the media consider the Muslims invisible and portray them in the worst possible image.
American interests in the vast Muslim world are being sacrificed
for the benefit of 5 million Israelis and their US supporters!
Comprehensive campaign finance reform is sorely needed to free US
policy from lobbies and pressure groups and focus it on real "national" interest.
Christians and Jews are better off studying their Bible which anticipated Islam, the Qur'an and the Prophet Muhammad. Instead of trying to beat the Muslims,
Christians and Jews should join them so they can all turn to God and fulfill the promise of His creation.
Most Christians in the Middle East
were converted to Christianity by Jesus and his disciples. After considering the message of the Qur'an, most of those Christians
embraced Islam during the last 14 centuries because Islam delivered what the Bible promised.
Muslims are not the enemy terrorizing the West. They
are the victims of the nonstop Crusades. Islam is not a threat to the West. It is the only religion that can solve
the social and moral problems of the West.