Corruption and Cruelty Soon the Ottoman Empire began to decline into corruption and degeneracy. When Sultan Murab III died in AD 1595, his son Muhammad had his 19, brothers murdered to prevent them from claiming his throne. He also had seven of his father's pregnant concubines sown into sacks and thrown into the river. Many of his nephews were incarcerated in "the cage". Sultan Ibrahim threw his grand vizier into a cistern. One morning, after an orgy, Ibrahim had all 300 women of his harem put into sacks and thrown into the Bosporus. Only one survived by being picked up by a ship bound for France. When Ibrahim was finally assassinated, the Ottoman Empire was torn apart by corruption, nepotism, inefficiency, misrule and power struggles. A New Wave of Muslim Massacres In the early 19th Century, after the Ottoman Empire suffered defeats at the hands of Russia and Austria, and as the Greeks and Serbs mounted successful wars of national liberation, Sultan Mahmut II decided to massacre all the janissaries. The reforms and westernisation of state institutions, however, was accompanied by escalating persecution of Christians. Despite the adopting of a Western style constitution in 1839, to placate the European powers, the last century of Ottoman rule witnessed the most thorough and complete destruction of Christian communities throughout the Middle East, Asia Minor, the Caucasus and the Balkans. In 1822, the entire population of the Island of Chios, tens of thousands of people, were massacred or enslaved. In 1823, 8750 Christians were slaughtered by the Turks at Missolonghi. Thousands of Assyrian Christians were murdered in the province of Mossul in 1850. In 1860 over 12,000 Christians were slaughtered in Lebanon. In 1876, 14,700 Bulgarians were murdered by the Turks. At the town of Batao, out of 7,000 inhabitants, 5,000 were put to the sword. "THE SCANDALOUS ALLIANCE" The reports of these and other routine atrocities by the Ottoman Turks were generally suppressed by the British government of Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli, who promoted an alliance with Turkey against Russia. Gladstone opposed the Turkophile policies of Disraeli in these words: "He is not such a Turk as I thought. What he hates is Christian liberty and reconstruction." What Gladstone observed 125 years ago, could easily be applied to the foreign policies of many Western governments today: the Islamophilia in the West is not so much love of the Turk, but hatred of Christianity. As Serge Trifkovic in "The Sword of the Prophet" observes: "The great Western powers - the heirs of those who had looted Constantinople in the Crusades and refused to help when the Turks were breaking through the walls with a cannon built by an Hungarian Catholic, who forced the last Emperors to forswear their Orthodox faith at the Council of Florence as the price of Western help that never came - those same Western powers, and Great Britain in particular, actually supported the Turkish subjugation of Christian Europeans on the grounds that the Muhammadan empire was a stabilising force and a counter-weight against Austria and Russia. The scandalous alliance with Turkey against Russia in the Crimean war reflected a pernicious frame of mind that has manifested itself more recently in the overt, covert, or de facto support of certain Western powers for the Muslim side in Bosnia, Kosova, Macedonia, Chechnya, Cyprus, Sudan, East Timor and Kashmir." The Forgotten Holocaust The Turks slaughtered over 200,000 Armenian Christians in Bayazid (1877), Alashgurd (1879), Sassun (1894), Constantinople (1896), Adana (1909) and in Armenia (1895 - 1896). And in 1915 the Turks massacred over 1.5 million Armenian Christians. "Passage to Ararat" describes how along the road to Adana, Turkish women were given daggers to stab dying Armenians in order to gain the credit in the eyes of Allah of having killed a Christian. In 1881 the Turks slaughtered the Christians in Alexandria. In 1915 - 1916 over a 100,000 Maronite Christians in Lebanon and Syria were murdered. Benjamin Disraeli It is no wonder that the British Prime Minister Gladstone described the Muslim Turks as: "They were, upon the whole, from the black day when they first entered Europe the one great anti -human specimen of humanity. Wherever they went a broad line of blood marked the track behind them, and, as far as their dominion reached, civilisation disappeared from view. They represented everywhere government by force as opposed to government by law." Slaughter in Smyrna Even as the Ottoman Empire crumbled and was replaced by the new Republic of Turkey under Mustafa Kemal Ataturk the ancient city of Smyrna with its 300,000 Christian population was destroyed. The burning of Smyrna and the massacre of its Christian population marked the end of Greek civilisation in Asia Minor. On the eve of its destruction, Smyrna was a bustling port and a vibrant commercial centre. The seafront promenade was a popular tourist destination. On 9 September 1922 the Turkish mob, organized and mobilized by the Turkish army under the command of Mustafa Kemal, attacked the Greek Orthodox Metropolitan Chrysostomos. The mob ripped his eyes out, and dragged him by the beard, bleeding though the streets, beating and kicking him. Every now and then, when he had the strength to do it, he would raise his right hand and bless his persecutors, repeating: "Father, forgive them." One Turk became so infuriated at this that he cut off the Metropolitan's hand with his sword. Father Chrysostomos was hacked to pieces by the angry mob. The burning of Smyrna began on 13 September. The inhabitants were trapped between the flames on the one side and the Turkish bayonets on the other. On 13 September 1922, the Turks burned Smyrna to the ground. The Curse of Neutrality Incredibly, English, American, Italian and French ships anchored in Smyrna's harbour were ordered to maintain neutrality. Some of the eye witnesses described the scene: "The pitiful throng - huddled together, sometimes screaming for help, but mostly waiting in a silent panic beyond hope - didn't budge for days. Typhoid reduced their numbers, but there was no way to dispose of the dead. Occasionally a person would swim from the dock to one of the anchored ships and try to climb the ropes and chains, only to be driven off. On the American battleships, the musicians on board were ordered to play as loudly as they could to drown out the screams of the pleading swimmers. The English poured boiling water down on the unfortunates who reached their vessel. The harbour was so clogged with corpses that the officers of the foreign battleships were often late to their dinner appointments because bodies would get entangled in the propellers of their launches... A cluster of women's heads bound together like coconuts by their long hair floated down a river toward the harbour..." "An Unmitigated Cultural Disaster" That was the end of Christianity in Turkey. As Trifkovic observes: "At the very time that Europe achieved its military and geopolitical advantage, the moral and religious decline that culminated in the auto-genocides of 1914 and 1939 had become evident. Having found in their grasp places their Crusader predecessors had only dreamed of reclaiming: Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Antioch, Alexandria, and Constantinople - effete and demoralised European governments made no effort to re-Christianise them and, within a few decades neatly abandoned them. The moral disarmament of contemporary post-Christian Europe is now nearly universal. After World War I, with the installation of nominally pro- Western governments in many Muslim countries fashioned from the wreckage of the Ottoman Empire, the West seemed to have convinced itself of the existence of benign Islam." Entire peoples have been obliterated in the Middle East. The Nestorians, the Chaldeans and other Christian communities were wiped out. As late as 1955 Istanbul's Christians suffered what one reporter called "the worst race riot in Europe." It is no wonder that William Muir, (1819 - 1905), one of the greatest Orientalist of all times, concluded at the end of a long and distinguished career: "the sword of Muhammad and the Quran are the most fatal enemies of civilisation, liberty and truth which the world has yet known. ...an unmitigated cultural disaster parading as God's will..." Intellectual Dishonesty The persecution of Christians by Muslims has become a forbidden subject in Western circles. Thirteen Centuries of religious discrimination and persecution, causing the suffering, oppression, murder and enslavement of countless millions have been buried under a thick whitewash of myths of Islamic "tolerance". The deceit, cowardice and silence by all too many western journalists and academics continues to facilitate the religious discrimination and persecution of radical Islam to this day. The intellectual dishonesty of those westerners who engage in academic gymnastics to justify the invasion of other peoples lands, the looting, pillaging, raping, murdering and enslaving of whole peoples, needs to be exposed. The hypocrisy of those who justify the military expansion of Muslims, but condemn those who inflicted defeats upon these Islamic invaders, needs to be challenged. The fiction that Jihad has never been an aggressive, but only a defensive concept, should be dismissed with the contempt that such deception deserves. When Islam defines a refusal to submit to Sharia law under Islam as aggression, and when they define peace as submission to Islam, then we must know that we are not talking the same language. Sharia in Saudi For an up to date 21st Century glimpse of Islam look at Saudi Arabia. The US State Department report on Human Rights in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in AD 2000 gives some indication of what is in store for those countries in Europe and Africa if Islam achieves a majority and enforces Sharia law: "Freedom of religion does not exist. Islam is the official religion, and all citizens must be Muslims. Neither the government, nor society in general, accepts the concepts of the separation of religion and state, and such separation does not exist. Under Sharia, conversion by a Muslim to another religion is considered apostasy. Public apostasy is a crime punishable by death if the accused does not recant. Islamic religious education is mandatory in public schools at all levels. All children receive religious instruction ...citizens do not have the right to change their government. ...there is legal and systematic discrimination based on sex and religion." The Saudi religious police, (the Committee to Promote Virtue and Prevent Vice) routinely intimidates, abuses and detains citizens and foreigners. The authorities flog, amputate, execute by beheading and stoning, or firing squad. A Saudi Arabian court even ordered that the eye of an Egyptian man be removed as a punishment. Most trials are closed, and defendants usually appear without an attorney before a judge who determines their guilt or innocence according to the Sharia. Banners and adverts offer financial rewards to Saudis who inform on fellows Saudis who attend a Christian meeting or who have a Bible. Although Saudi Arabia has paid for the construction of over a thousand mosques in the United States, and several thousands in other parts of the world, no churches or synagogues are allowed in Saudi Arabia. Jihad Seeks to Conquer our Souls As one Italian described Jihad: "seeks to conquer our souls. That seeks the disappearance of our freedoms and civilisation. That seeks to annihilate our way of living and dying, our way of praying or not praying, our way of eating and drinking and dressing and entertaining and informing ourselves. We don't understand or don't want to understand that if we don't oppose them, if we don't defend ourselves, if we don't fight, the Jihad will win. And it will destroy the world that for better or worse we've managed to build... it will destroy our culture, our art, our science, our morals, our values, our pleasures." "Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free." John 8:32 Dr. Peter Hammond This article was adapted from the Slavery, Terrorism and Islam - Historical Roots and Contemporary Threat book (290 pages with over 200 pictures, charts and maps), available from: Christian Liberty Books, PO Box 358 Howard Place 7450
Cape Town South Africa, Tel: 021-689-7478, Fax: 086-551-7490, Email: [email protected], Website: www.christianlibertybooks.co.za.
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