url= http://www.islam-watch.

org/Fjordman/Fourteen-Centuries-of-Jihad-Against-European-
Civilization.htm

Fourteen Centuries of Jihad against European

Civilization
by Fjordman

01 Oct, 2008

The following essay is an amalgam of my previous online essays, among them Who Are
We, Who Are Our Enemies The Cost of Historical Amnesia, Why We Should Oppose
an Independent Kosovo, Refuting Gods Crucible and The Truth About Islam in Europe.

The Jihad, the Islamic so-called Holy War, has been a fact of life in Europe, Asia, Africa
and the Near and Middle East for more than 1300 years, but this is the first history of the
Muslim wars in Europe ever to be published. Hundreds of books, however, have
appeared on its Christian counterpart, the Crusades, to which the Jihad is often compared,
although they lasted less than two hundred years and unlike the Jihad, which is universal,
were largely but not completely confined to the Holy Land.

Moreover, the Crusades have been over for more than 700 years, while a Jihad is still
going on in the world. The Jihad has been the most unrecorded and disregarded major
event of history. It has, in fact, been largely ignored. For instance, the Encyclopaedia
Britannica gives the Crusades eighty times more space than the Jihad.

The above quote is from Paul Fregosis book Jihad in the West from 1998. Mr. Fregosi
found that his book about the history of Islamic Holy War in Europe from the 7th to the
20th centuries was difficult to get published in the mid-1990s, when publishers had the
Salman Rushdie case in fresh memory.

A few years later, perhaps the most comprehensive and scholarly book on the subject to
date, The Legacy of Jihad, was published by Andrew G. Bostom. He has written about
what he calls Americas First War on Terror. Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, then
serving as American ambassadors to France and Britain, respectively, met in 1786 in
London with the Tripolitan Ambassador to Britain, Sidi Haji Abdul Rahman Adja. These
future American presidents were attempting to negotiate a peace treaty which would
spare the United States the ravages of Jihad piracy murder and enslavement emanating
from the so-called Barbary States of North Africa, corresponding to modern Morocco,
Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya.

Bostom notes that an aggressive jihad was already being waged against the United
 States almost 200 years prior to America becoming a dominant international power
in the Middle East. Israel has nothing to do with it. The Barbary Jihad piracy had
been going on since the earliest Arab-Islamic expansion in the 7th and 8th
centuries. Francisco Gabrieli states that:

According to present-day concepts of international relations, such activities

amounted to piracy, but they correspond perfectly to jihad, an Islamic religious
duty. The conquest of Crete, in the east, and a good portion of the corsair warfare
along the Provencal and Italian coasts, in the West, are among the most conspicuous
instances of such private initiative which contributed to Arab domination in the
Mediterranean.

A proto-typical Muslim naval razzia occurred in 846 when a fleet of Arab Jihadists
arrived at the mouth of the Tiber, made their way to Rome, sacked the city, and carried
away from the basilica of St. Peter all of the gold and silver it contained. The creation of
the Vatican as a walled city within a city was in response to the recurrent threat of
Islamic Jihad raids.

Bostom notes that By June/July 1815 the ably commanded U.S. naval forces had dealt
their Barbary jihadist adversaries a quick series of crushing defeats. This success ignited
the imagination of the Old World powers to rise up against the Barbary pirates.

Yet some Arabs seem to miss the good old days when they could extract jizya payments
from the West. Libyan terrorist-sponsoring leader Muammar Gaddafi has stated that he
thinks that European nations should pay 10 billion euros ($12.7 billion dollars) a year to
Africa to help it stop migrants seeking a better life flooding northwards into Europe. He
added without elaborating: Earth belongs to everybody. Why they (young Africans)
emigrated to Europe this should be answered by Europeans. Apart from being a clear-
cut example of how migration, or rather population dumping, has become a tool for
blackmail in the 21st century, this is a throwback to the age when Tripoli could extract
payments from Europe.

Robert Davis, professor of history at Ohio State University, developed new methodical
enumeration in his book Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters which indicates that perhaps
one and one-quarter million white European Christians were enslaved by Barbary
Muslims just from 1530 through 1780 a far greater number than had been estimated
before:
---------

Enslavement was a very real possibility for anyone who traveled in the Mediterranean, or
who lived along the shores in places like Italy, France, Spain and Portugal, and even as
far north as England and Iceland. Much of what has been written gives the impression
that there were not many slaves and minimizes the impact that slavery had on Europe,
Davis said. Most accounts only look at slavery in one place, or only for a short period of
time. But when you take a broader, longer view, the massive scope of this slavery and its
powerful impact become clear.

Corsairs from cities in North Africa Tunis, Algiers etc. would raid ships in the
Mediterranean and Atlantic, as well as seaside villages to capture men, women and
children. The impact was devastating France, England, and Spain each lost thousands
of ships, and long stretches of the Spanish and Italian coasts were almost completely
abandoned by their inhabitants.

At its peak, the destruction and depopulation of some areas probably exceeded what
European slavers would later inflict on the African interior. The lives of European slaves
were often no better than the victims of the transatlantic slave trade, which tapped into
the pre-established Islamic slave-trade in Africa. As far as daily living conditions, the
Mediterranean slaves certainly didnt have it better, Davis says. While African slaves did
grueling labor on sugar and cotton plantations in the Americas, European slaves were
often worked just as hard and as lethally in quarries, in heavy construction, and above
all rowing the corsair galleys.

Throughout most of the seventeenth century, the English alone lost at least 400 sailors a
year to the slavers. One American slave reported that 130 American seamen had been
enslaved by the Algerians in the Mediterranean and Atlantic just between 1785 and 1793
(which prompted the later military response from the Americans). In his book White
Gold, Giles Milton describes how regular Jihad razzias in Europe extended as far north as
Iceland. Even during the time of Queen Elizabeth I, while William Shakespeare was
writing his plays and poems, young Englishmen risked being surprised by a fleet of
Muslim pirates showing up at their village, or being kidnapped while fishing at sea:

By the end of the dreadful summer of 1625, the mayor of Plymouth reckoned that 1,000
skiffs had been destroyed, and a similar number of villagers carried off into slavery.
Such events took place across much of Europe, also in Wales and southern Ireland: In
1631200 Islamic soldierssailed to the village of Baltimore, storming ashore with
swords drawn and catching the villagers totally by surprise. (They) carried off 237 men,
women, and children and took them to AlgiersThe French padre Pierre Dan was in the
city (Algiers) at the timeHe witnessed the sale of the captives in the slave auction. It
was a pitiful sight to see them exposed in the marketWomen were separated from their
husbands and the children from their fatherson one side a husband was sold; on the
other his wife; and her daughter was torn from her arms without the hope that theyd ever
see each other again.

The Englishman Thomas Pellow was enslaved in Morocco for twenty-three years after
being captured by Barbary pirates as a cabin boy on a small English vessel in 1716. He
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.
Gods Crucible: Islam and the Making of Europe, 570-1215 was written by David
Levering Lewis, the American historian and two-time winner of the prestigious Pulitzer
Prize. He states that Muslims did not enslave their co-religionists, only infidels. Yes, but
why is that better?

As Robert Spencer writes in his book Religion of Peace?: The Quran says that the
followers of Muhammad are ruthless to the unbelievers but merciful to one another
(48:29), and that the unbelievers are the worst of created beings (98:6). One may
exercise the Golden Rule in relation to a fellow Muslim, but according to the laws of
Islam, the same courtesy is not to be extended to unbelievers. That is one principal reason
why the primary source of slaves in the Islamic world has been non-Muslims, whether
Jews, Christians, Hindus, or pagans. Most slaves were non-Muslims who had been
captured during jihad warfare.

Slavery was taken for granted throughout Islamic history. When it was finally abolished
this was due to Western pressure, especially the efforts of the British Empire. Spencer
again: Nor was there a Muslim abolitionist movement, no Clarkson, Wilberforce, or
Garrison. When the slave trade ended, it was ended not through Muslim efforts but
through British military force. Even so, there is evidence that slavery continues beneath
the surface in some Muslim countries notably Saudi Arabia, which only abolished
slavery in 1962; Yemen and Oman, both of which ended legal slavery in 1970; and Niger,
which didnt 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. There are even slavery cases involving Muslims in the United States.
A Saudi named Homaidan al-Turki was sentenced in September 2006 to twenty-seven
years to life in prison for keeping a woman as a slave in his Colorado home. For his part,
al-Turki claimed that he was a victim of anti-Muslim bias.

Jihad slavery was widespread in Africa and in many regions of Asia. 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.

Briefly summed up, Gods Crucible laments the fact that Charles Martel, the Hammer,
halted the advancing Islamic Jihad at the Battle of Tours or, Battle of Poitiers, in 732:

Had Abd al-Rahmans men prevailed that October day, the post-Roman Occident would
probably have been incorporated into a cosmopolitan, Muslim regnum unobstructed by
borders, as they hypothesize one devoid of a priestly caste, animated by the dogma of
equality of the faithful, and respectful of all religious faiths. Curiously, such speculation
has a French pedigree. Forty years ago, two historians, Jean-Henri Roy and Jean
Deviosse enumerated the benefits of a Muslim triumph at Poitiers: astronomy;
trigonometry; Arabic numerals; the corpus of Greek philosophy. We [Europe] would
have gained 267 years, according to their calculations. We might have been spared the
 wars of religion. To press the logic of this disconcerting analysis, the
victory of Charles the Hammer must be seen as greatly contributing to the
creation of an economically retarded, balkanized, fratricidal Europe that, in
defining itself in opposition to Islam, made virtues out of religious
persecution, cultural particularism, and hereditary aristocracy.

David Levering Lewis is clearly sympathetic towards this view, and writes
that the Carolingian order, established Charles Martel (Carolus in Latin)
and his grandson Charlemagne, was religiously intolerant, intellectually
impoverished, socially calcified, and economically primitive. Curiously, he mentions in
passing that there was continuous out-migration to the Christian kingdoms from al-
Andalus. Why did they move to the Christian lands, whose economy was little better
than late Neolithic, if life was so sweet in al-Andalus? Lewis states that: At the end of
the eighth century, Europe was militarily strong enough to defend itself from Islam,
thanks in part to Charlemagne and his predecessors. The question was whether it was
politically, economically, and culturally better off for being able to do so.

Gods Crucible was published during a time when Spain and Portugal under Islamic
occupation are being hailed as a model of coexistence with Islam. The European Union
recently announced its intentions of expanding to include the Muslim Middle East and
North Africa. There is a concerted effort going on to present Islam as something non-
threatening, indeed benevolent. In May 2008, Germanys Der Spiegel, Europes largest
weekly magazine, hailed al-Andalus as a Multicultural model for Europe: For nearly
800 years, the inhabitants of al-Andalus, as the Arab dynasties called their empire on the
Iberian Peninsula, allowed Jews, Christians and Muslims to coexist in a spirit of mutual
respect a situation that benefited all. Never mind that Richard Fletcher states in his
book Moorish Spain that Moorish Spain was not a tolerant and enlightened society even
in its most cultivated epoch.

The European Union, the Council of Europe and numerous Islamic organizations are
working hard to rewrite European school textbooks in order to promote Islam. In the
European Parliament, the German Christian Democrat Hans-Gert Pttering has stated that
textbooks should be reviewed for intolerant depictions of Islam to ensure that they dont
propagate prejudice. He suggested that the EU should co-operate with the Organization
of the Islamic Conference to create a textbook review committee. The OIC desires to
rewrite textbooks around the world to remove anything critical of Islam, silence
mentioning of the victims of 1400 years of Islamic Jihad and glorify the achievements of
Islamic civilization.

Robert Spencer writes in Religion of Peace?: Why Christianity Is and Islam Isnt:
Islamic apologist Karen Armstrong enunciates the common wisdom when she says that
until 1492, Jews and Christians lived peaceably and productively together in Muslim
Spain a coexistence that was impossible elsewhere in Europe. Even the U.S. State
Department has proclaimed that during the Islamic period in Spain, Jews, Christians, and
Muslims lived together in peace and mutual respect, creating a diverse society in which
 vibrant exchanges of ideas took place.

Those who want a second opinion can start with reading the online essay
Andalusian Myth, Eurabian Reality by Bat Yeor and Andrew G. Bostom: There
were rarely periods of peace in the Amirate of Cordova (756-912), nor later. Al-
Andalus represented the land of jihad par excellence. Every year, sometimes
twice a year, raiding expeditions were sent to ravage the Christian Spanish kingdoms to
the north, the Basque regions, or France and the Rhone valley, bringing back booty and
slaves. Andalusian corsairs attacked and invaded along the Sicilian and Italian coasts,
even as far as the Aegean Islands, looting and burning as they went. Thousands of people
were deported to slavery in Andalusia, where the caliph kept a militia of tens of thousand
of Christian slaves brought from all parts of Christian Europe (the Saqaliba), and a harem
filled with captured Christian women.

David Levering Lewis mentions a small group of Andalusian Christians filled with
fanaticism who engaged in a senseless spike in religious provocation where
individual Christian priests and laypersons publicly disrespected mosques, the Quran,
and the Prophets name. Because of this, Cordobas qadi (Islamic judge), poor thing, had
no choice. The ruler Muhammad I approved his qadis death sentence in 851-52 for
thirteen Christians for whom clemency was impolitic if not impossible under Malikite
Sharia.

Unfortunately, these Christian militants, as Mr. Lewis calls them, were still deaf to all
pleas of behaving in a properly submissive manner to Muslims, and more death sentences
ensued:

Twenty or so Mozarab martyrs were dispatched in 853 or the year following, and a
dozen more afterward. In another wave of Christian blasphemy in 859, thirteen more
were executed, along with two daughters of a prominent Muslim family living in distant
Huesca who defiantly disclosed their secret Christian conversion.

Lewis believes that: A poll taken of Andalusians of all faiths would have shown an
overwhelming disapproval of the Mozarab martyrs. These Christian extremists were an
aberration not because they acted outside history but because they were premature
three centuries ahead of the history whose intense cultural nationalism and religious
intolerance were inculcated in the decades after the Battle of Clavijo.

The religious intolerance he is referring to is not the Jihad waged against Christians and
Jews in Spain and Portugal; it is the Reconquista, the Christian reconquest of the Iberian
Peninsula. It is traditionally seen to have begun with Pelayo in 718. Although initially
slow, it speeded up from the eleventh century onwards. The Portuguese had been
liberated in 1249 under King Afonso III. The concept Holy War was originally alien to
Christianity and was imported to Europe only after Europeans had been confronted with
centuries of Islamic Jihad.
Lewis himself states (correctly) that people during this golden age of tolerance were
executed for criticizing Islam. Isnt that disturbing, given that al-Andalus is now
supposed to serve as the blueprint for our coexistence with Islam, according to our
authorities and media? Blasphemy against Islam and Muhammad is punishable by
death in sharia law, which is why the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh was murdered by
a Muslim in Amsterdam in 2004.

Even for those non-Muslims who accept Islamic rule life is harsh, with severe economic
strains and the constant threat of violence in the back of your mind. Scholar Bat Yeor is
an expert on dhimmitude, the oppressive system for non-Muslims under Islamic rule,
described in the book Islam and Dhimmitude. She writes this about the Jihad slave
system:

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. 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 [Iranian central Asia], Sijistan
[eastern Iran], 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 [non-
Islamic regions] and the military expeditions which swept more deeply into the infidel
lands, emptying towns and provinces of their inhabitants.

According to Robert Spencer, Although the strictness with which the laws of
dhimmitude (the subservient status of Jews and Christians) were enforced varied, they
were never abolished, and during times of relaxation the subject populations always lived
in fear that they would be enforced with new stringency. Muslim rulers did not forget that
the Quran mandates that both Jews and Christians must feel themselves subdued. One
notable instance is recounted by Arab historian Philip Hitti: The caliph al-Mutawakkil in
850 and 854 decreed that Christians and Jews should affix wooden images of devils to
their houses, level their graves even with the ground, wear outer garments of honey color,
i.e., yellow, put two honey-colored patches on the clothes of their slaves and ride only
on mules and asses with wooden saddles marked by two pomegranate-like balls on the
cantle.

In 1888, a Tunisian Jew noted: The Jew is prohibited in this country to wear the same
clothes as a Muslim and may not wear a red tarbush. He can be seen to bow down with
his whole body to a Muslim child and permit him the traditional privilege of striking him
in the face, a gesture that can prove to be of the gravest consequence. Indeed, the present
writer has received such blows. In such matters the offenders act with complete impunity,
for this has been the custom from time immemorial.

Maimonides, the renowned medieval Jewish philosopher and physician who had to flee
Islamic-ruled Spain due to an aggressive Jihad, stated that the Arabs have persecuted us
severely, and passed baneful and discriminatory legislation against us Never did a
 nation molest, degrade, debase, and hate us as much as they. Jews could teach
rabbinic law to Christians, but Muslims will interpret what they are taught
according to their erroneous principles and they will oppress us. [F]or this
reason they hate all [non-Muslims] who live among them. Christians admit
that the text of the Torah, such as we have it, is intact.

What about science and learning? Scholar Toby E. Huff, author of the book The Rise of
Early Modern Science: Islam, China and the West, warns that if Islam had taken over
Europe, later Western scientific achievements would have been impossible:

If Spain had persisted as an Islamic land into the later centuries say, until the time of
Napoleon it would have retained all the ideological, legal, and institutional defects of
Islamic civilization. A Spain dominated by Islamic law would have been unable to found
new universities based on the European model of legally autonomous corporate
governance, as corporations do not exist in Islamic law. Furthermore, the Islamic model
of education rested on the absolute primacy of fiqh, of legal studies, and the standard of
preserving the great traditions of the past. This was symbolically reflected in the ijaza, the
personal authorization to transmit knowledge from the past given by a learned man, a
tradition quite different from the Wests group-administered certification (through
examination) of demonstrated learning. In the actual event, the founding of Spanish
universities in the thirteenth century, first in Palencia (1208-9), Valladolid, Salamanca
(1227-8), and so on, occurred in long-established Christian areas, and the universities
were modeled after the constitutions of Paris and Bologna.

Greek learning was never integrated into the regular curriculum at Islamic schools, as it
was in European universities. The German-Syrian writer Bassam Tibi points out that
science in the Islamic madrasa meant the study of the Koran, the hadith, Arab history
etc.: Some Islamic historians wrongly translate the term madrasa as university. This is
plainly incorrect: If we understand a university as universitas litterarum, or consider,
without the bias of Eurocentrism, the case of the universitas magistrorum of the
thirteenth century in Paris, we are bound to recognise that the university is a seat for free
and unrestrained enquiry based on reason, is a European innovation in the history of
mankind.

According to the leading scholar Edward Grant in Science and Religion, 400 B.C. to A.D.
1550: From Aristotle to Copernicus, Islam is a theocracy in which religion and state form
a single entity. There is thus no secular state apparatus distinct from the Islamic religion:

[Islamic madrasas] had as their primary mission the teaching of the Islamic religion, and
paid little attention to the foreign sciences, which, as we saw, were comprised of the
science and natural philosophy derived ultimately from the Greeks. The analytical
subjects derived from the Greeks certainly did not have equal status with religious and
theological subjects. Indeed, the foreign sciences played a rather marginal role in the
madrasas, which formed the core of Islamic higher education. Only those subjects that
illuminated the Quran or the religious law were taught. One such subject was logic,
which was found useful not only in semantics but was also regarded as helpful in
avoiding simple errors of inference. The primary function of the madrasas, however, was
to preserve learning and defend orthodoxy (Mottahedeh 1985, 91). In Islam, most
theologians did not regard natural philosophy as a subject helpful to a better
understanding of religion. On the contrary, it was usually viewed as a subject capable of
subverting the Islamic religion and, therefore, as potentially dangerous to the faith.
Natural philosophy always remained a peripheral discipline in the lands of Islam and was
never institutionalized within the educational system, as it was in Latin Christendom.

Fear and uncertainty afflicted all too many Islamic natural philosophers. As Grant states,
Without the separation of church and state, and the developments that proceeded as a
consequence, the West would not have produced a deeply rooted natural philosophy that
was disseminated through Europe by virtue of an extensive network of universities,
which laid the foundation for the great scientific advances made in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries, advances that have continued to the present day.

The Age of Exploration during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was undertaken in
order to get away from Muslims and re-establish contact with the civilizations of Asia
without hostile Muslim middlemen. Norman Davies puts it this way in his monumental
Europe: A History:

Islams conquests turned Europe into Christianitys main base. At the same time the great
swathe of Muslim territory cut the Christians off from virtually all direct contact with
other religions and civilizations. The barrier of militant Islam turned the [European]
Peninsula in on itself, severing or transforming many of the earlier lines of commercial,
intellectual and political intercourse.

Jihad piracy, slavery and attacks on European countries were a constant menace from the
Jihad in the seventh century until the so-called Barbary States in North Africa in the
nineteenth century. Some would argue that it is resurfacing again now, for instance in the
form of kidnapping of Western tourists which is becoming increasingly common as I
write these words, encouraged by the ransom money often paid by European authorities.

Jihad continues to this day in the Balkans, a region which was for centuries under brutal
Turkish rule. According to writer Ruth King, When Serbia became independent of
Byzantine rule in the 12th century, its economic, cultural, social and religious institutions
were among the most advanced in Europe. Serbia functioned as a bridge between Greco-
Byzantine civilization and the developing Western Renaissance. The center of the Serbian
Orthodox Church was in Kosovo where churches, monasteries and monastic communities
were established. A form of census in 1330, the Decani Charter, detailed the list of
chartered villages and households, of which only two percent were Albanian. The
Ottomans invaded Serbia in 1389 and consolidated their rule in 1459, propelling major
parts of the Balkan peninsula and adjacent southeast Europe into a Koran-dictated Dark
 Ages.

Early in the twentieth century Serbian Christians comprised roughly two-

thirds of the population of Kosovo. After WW2, Communist dictator Tito
did not allow Serbs who fled from their homes to return and did not enforce border
controls as thousands of Albanians moved into Kosovo. This later led to escalating
violence against Christian Serbs.

As King says, Initially, the media reported the situation in Kosovo fairly. For example,
in July 1982 The New York Times noted: Serbs have been harassed by Albanians and
have packed up and left the region. The Albanian nationalists have a two-point platform,
first to establish what they call an ethnically clean Albanian republic and then to merge
with Albania for a greater Albania. Some 57,000 Serbs have left Kosovo in the last
decade. Five years later, in 1987, the Times was still reporting the persecution of Serbs
within Kosovo. Slavic Orthodox churches have been attacked, wells poisoned, crops
burned, Slavic boys knifed. Young Albanians have been told to rape Serbian girls
Officials in Belgrade view the ethnic Albanian challenge as imperiling the foundations of
the multinational experiment called federal Yugoslavia Ethnic Albanians already
control almost every phase of life in the autonomous province of Kosovo, including the
police, judiciary, civil service, schools, and factories.

It was this situation that led to the rise of Serb nationalist leader Slobodan Milosevic.
However, according to Ruth King, While the brutality of the Milosevic regime was
indeed a complicating factor, he is long gone, but the KLA [Kosovo Liberation Army]
continues its assault on Serbs, on their churches, priests, homes, even on civilians sitting
in cafes, this under the nose of the U.S. and UN troops.

Bosnias wartime president Alija Izetbegovic died in 2003, hailed as a moderate Muslim
leader. Little was said in Western media about his 1970 Islamic Declaration, where he
advocated a struggle for creating a great Islamic federation from Morocco to Indonesia,
from the tropical Africa to the Central Asia, and that The Islamic movement should and
must start taking over the power as soon as it is morally and numerically strong enough to
not only overthrow the existing non-Islamic, but also to build up a new Islamic
authority.

According to Hugh Fitzgerald, One must keep in mind both the way in which some
atrocities ascribed to Serbs were exaggerated, while the atrocities inflicted on them were
minimized or ignored altogether. But what was most disturbing was that there was no
context to anything: nothing about the centuries of Muslim rule. Had such a history been
discussed early on, Western governments might have understood and attempted to
assuage the deep fears evoked by the Bosnian Muslim leader, Izetbegovic, when he wrote
that he intended to create a Muslim state in Bosnia and impose the Sharia not merely
there, but everywhere that Muslims had once ruled in the Balkans. Had the Western world
shown the slightest intelligent sympathy or understanding of what that set off in the
imagination of many Serbs (and elsewhere, among the Christians in the Balkans and in
Greece), there might never have been such a violent Serbian reaction, and someone like
 Milosevic might never have obtained power.
In 1809, after the battle on Cegar Hill, by order of Turkish pasha Hurshid the skulls of the
killed Serbian soldiers were built in a tower, Skull Tower, on the way to Constantinople. 3
meters high, Skull Tower was built out of 952 skulls as a warning to the Serbian people
not to oppose their Muslim rulers. Some years later, a chapel was built over the skulls.

Similar Jihad massacres were committed not only against the Serbs, but against the
Greeks, the Bulgarians and other non-Muslims who slowly rebelled against the Ottoman
Empire throughout the 19th century. Professor Vahakn Dadrian and others have clearly
identified Jihad as a critical factor in the Armenian genocide in the early 20th century.

As Efraim Karsh notes, The Ottomans embarked on an orgy of bloodletting in response

to the nationalist aspirations of their European subjects. The Greek war of independence
of the 1820s, the Danubian uprisings of 1848 and the attendant Crimean war, the Balkan
explosion of the 1870s, the Greco-Ottoman war of 1897all were painful reminders of
the costs of resisting Islamic imperial rule.

In his book Onward Muslim Soldiers, Robert Spencer quotes a letter from Bosnia, written
in 1860 by the acting British Consul in Sarajevo, James Zohrab :

The hatred of the Christians toward the Bosniak Mussulmans is intense. During a period
of nearly 300 years they were subjected to much oppression and cruelty. For them no
other law but the caprice of their masters existed Oppression cannot now be carried on
as openly as formerly, but it must not be supposed that, because the Government
employs do not generally appear as the oppressors, the Christians are well treated and
protected.

The Islamic world is now using the Balkans as a launching pad for Jihad against the rest
of Europe. There are religious centres in Bulgaria that belong to Islamic groups financed
mostly by Saudi Arabian groups, the head of Bulgarian military intelligence has warned.
According to him, the centres were in southern and southeastern Bulgaria, where the
countrys Muslims, mainly of Turkish origin, are concentrated, and had links with
similar organisations in Kosovo, Bosnia and Macedonia. For them Bulgaria seems to be a
transit point to Western Europe. He said the steps were taken to prevent terrorist groups
gaining a foothold in Bulgaria, which shares a border with Turkey. Bulgarias Muslim
minority accounts for more than 10 percent of the countrys population.

The Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia passed a law allowing ethnic Albanians to
display the Albanian national flag in areas where they form the majority. The decision
came as a result of seven months of heavy fighting in 2001 involving Albanian
separatists, and following pressure from the European Union, always ready to please
Muslims.

Ethnic Albanians make up about 25 per cent of Macedonias population. If the

demographic trends are anything like in Kosovo, where the predominantly Muslim
 Albanians have been out-breeding their non-Muslim neighbors,
Macedonians could be facing serious trouble in the future. In Kosovo,
dozens of churches and monasteries have been destroyed or damaged
following ethnic cleansing of Christian Serbs, all under the auspices of
NATO soldiers.

Martti Ahtisaari, former President of Finland and later Chief United Nations negotiator
for Kosovo, caused anger in Serbia when he stated that Serbs are guilty as a people,
implying that they would have to pay for it, possibly by losing the province of Kosovo. I
disagree with Mr. Ahtisaari. It is one thing to criticize the brutality of the Milosevic
regime. It is quite another thing to claim that Serbs are guilty as a people. If anybody in
the Balkans can be called guilty as a people, it is the Turks, not the Serbs. The Turks have
left a trail of blood across much of Europe and the Mediterranean for centuries,
culminating in the Armenian genocide in the 20th century, which Turkey still refuses to
acknowledge, let alone apologize for.

Dimitar Angelov elucidates the impact of the Ottoman Jihad on the vanquished Balkan
populations:

the conquest of the Balkan Peninsula accomplished by the Turks over the course of
about two centuries caused the incalculable ruin of material goods, countless massacres,
the enslavement and exile of a great part of the population in a word, a general and
protracted decline of productivity, as was the case with Asia Minor after it was occupied
by the same invaders. This decline in productivity is all the more striking when one
recalls that in the mid-fourteenth century, as the Ottomans were gaining a foothold on the
peninsula, the States that existed there Byzantium, Bulgaria and Serbia had already
reached a rather high level of economic and cultural development.The campaigns of
Mourad II (1421-1451) and especially those of his successor, Mahomet II (1451-1481) in
Serbia, Bosnia, Albania and in the Byzantine princedom of the Peloponnesus, were of a
particularly devastating character.

This Ottoman Jihad tradition is still continued by secular Turkey to this day. Michael J.
Totten visited Varosha, the Ghost City of Cyprus, in 2005. The city was deserted during
the Turkish invasion of Cyprus in 1974 and is now fenced off and patrolled by the
Turkish occupiers. The Turks carved up the island. Greek Cypriot citizens in Varosha
expected to return to their homes within days. Instead, the Turks seized the empty city
and wrapped it in fencing and wire.

In March 2006, Italian Luigi Geninazzi made a report from the same area. 180,000
persons live in the northern part of the island, 100,000 of whom are colonists originally
from mainland Turkey. According to Geninazzi, the Islamization of the north of Cyprus
has been concretized in the destruction of all that was Christian. Yannis Eliades, director
of the Byzantine Museum of Nicosia, calculates that 25,000 icons have disappeared from
the churches in the zone occupied by the Turks. Stupendous Byzantine and Romanesque
churches, imposing monasteries, mosaics and frescoes have been sacked, violated, and
 destroyed. Many have been turned into restaurants, bars, and nightclubs. Geninazzi
confronted Huseyn Ozel, a government spokesman for the self-proclaimed Turkish
Republic of Northern Cyprus, with this. Most of the mosques in Greek Cypriot
territory have been restored. So why are churches still today being turned into
mosques? The Turkish Cypriot functionary spreads his arms wide: It is an
Ottoman custom

Yosef Bodansky, director of the Congressional Task Force on Terrorism and

Conventional Warfare in Washington in the USA, has stated that the Balkans was a
springboard for Islamic extremism in Europe, with the Islamic Republic of Iran
as the main driving force behind it. Iran and Saudi Arabia supplied funding,
weapons and men to the Bosnians during the war in the 1990s, and terrorist
organization Al-Qaeda gained a foothold in the Balkans. Saudi Arabia has invested
more than $1 billion in the Sarajevo region alone, for projects that include the
construction of 158 mosques. Sarajevo has by now become an almost entirely
Muslim city.

Miroljub Jevtic, professor at the Belgrade University and author of a number of

books on the topic of Islam and politics, believes the Western world is in favor of
detaching Kosovo from Christian Serbia by fiat and making it into an independent
(Muslim) state. The main argument of those supporting this scenario, notably in the
United States, is to improve their image in the eyes of the Islamic world and co-opt the
influence of Islamic extremists.

Jevtic notes that the fact that since the arrival of NATO to Kosovo over 150 Christian
churches have been destroyed and some 400 mosques have been built, or are under
construction, is for the Muslims a proof that if there is a faith which is supported by true
God it is Islam! Because, why would the Christian God, why would Jesus, permit the
destruction of churches, where He, Jesus, is glorified? Why would He, at the same time,
permit the construction of mosques, where His existence as God is denied? Why would
He permit it, moreover, in the presence of men who bear arms and who claim to be
Christians?

Miroljub Jevtic warns that the European Unions support for Albanian Muslim demands
could backfire badly: Granting the independence to Kosovo will be taken as proof of
Europes own wish to cease to exist, as it not only allows the expansion of Islam but is
actively promoting it by aiding those who are destroying churches, raping nuns, spitting
on crosses and daubing with excrement holy images of Christ.

In Kosovo, dozens of churches and monasteries have been destroyed following ethnic
cleansing of Christian Serbs by the predominantly Muslim Albanians, all under the
auspices of NATO soldiers, and Muslims are not ungrateful. Kosovo Albanians plan to
honor their savior, former US President Bill Clinton, by erecting a statue of him. Yet in
2007, four Albanians from Kosovo along with other Muslims were arrested for
conspiring to attack Fort Dix, a military base in New Jersey, the USA, in order to kill as
many soldiers as possible.
 Western governments are pushing for independence for a group of Jihadist thugs
who recently wanted to create the Osama bin Laden mosque in Kosovo. This name
was eventually changed for public relations reasons since the Albanians knew they
needed American political support. In June 2007 the visiting US President George
W. Bush was hailed as a hero by a group of Albanians, who allegedly also stole his
watch. Sooner rather than later youve got to say Enoughs enough Kosovo is
independent, Bush told cheering Albanians. As German newspaper Sddeutsche
Zeitung later commented, Why should the Albanians settle for autonomy when George
W. Bush had already promised them their own state?

President Bush declared a war on terror after the Jihadist attacks on the United States in
2001. Six years later, all he has achieved is bleeding American tax payers financially and
American soldiers literally while overseeing the eradication of non-Muslim communities
in Iraq. Now his administration supports independence for terrorist-sponsoring Muslims
in the Balkans and in the Palestinian territories. George W. Bush risks being remembered
as one of the worst presidents in American history.

In a commentary, We bombed the wrong side? former Canadian UNPROFOR

Commander Lewis MacKenzie wrote, The Kosovo-Albanians have played us like a
Stradivarius. We have subsidized and indirectly supported their violent campaign for an
ethnically pure and independent Kosovo. We have never blamed them for being the
perpetrators of the violence in the early 90s and we continue to portray them as the
designated victim today in spite of evidence to the contrary. When they achieve
independence with the help of our tax dollars combined with those of bin Laden and al-
Qaeda, just consider the message of encouragement this sends to other terrorist-supported
independence movements around the world.

I once listened to a speech by Patrick Sookhdeo, a brave former Muslim who has
published books such as Global Jihad: The Future in the Face of Militant Islam.
Sookhdeo had done a lot of excellent and frightening research regarding the
Islamization of Western Europe, especially Britain. He recalled having a conversation
with a senior Western official regarding what would happen if Muslims in a region of,
say, Britain or the Netherlands, should declare that they would no longer accept the laws
of the central government and formed a breakaway Islamic Republic. This official then
replied that they would probably have to quietly accept that. When witnessing Muslim
riots in France and elsewhere, which more and more resemble a civil war, this question is
no longer just hypothetical.

As writer Julia Gorin has warned, An independent Kosovo will serve as a nod to
secessionists worldwide, and history will show what no one cares to understand: the
current world war began officially in Yugoslavia in the 1990s.
 Granting Jihadist Muslims independence in Kosovo after
they conducted ethnic cleansing of non-Muslims has
established an extremely dangerous precedent. Not only is it
immoral to sacrifice the freedom or perhaps existence of
smaller nations, be that the Serbs or the Israelis, in order to
save your own skin. As the example of Czechoslovakia
demonstrated prior to WW2, it is also counterproductive.
Supporting independence for Muslim Albanians in Kosovo
will not lead to stabilization of the Balkans; it will rather
lead to the Balkanization of the West. The new thug state
will serve as a launching pad for Jihad activities against
non-Muslims, just like an independent Palestinian state
would do in the Middle East. In the case of Kosovo, the
Russians are right and Western leaders, both in the
European Union and the United States, are wrong. The
Serbs have suffered enough, and dont need to be stabbed in
the back by the West as well.

Janos (John) Hunyadi, Hungarian warrior and captain-general, is today virtually unknown
outside Hungary and the Balkans, but he probably did more than any other individual in
stemming the Turkish invasion in the fifteenth century. His actions spanned all the
countries of south-eastern Europe, leading international armies, negotiating with kings
and popes. He died of plague after having destroyed an Ottoman fleet outside Belgrade in
1456. His work slowed the Muslim advance, and may thus have saved Western Europe
from falling to Islam. By extension, he may have helped save Western civilization in
North America and Australia, too. Yet hardly anybody in West knows who he is. Our
children dont learn his name, they are only taught about the evils of Western colonialism
and the dangers of Islamophobia.

Western Europe today is a strange and very dangerous mix of arrogance and self-
loathing. Muslims are creating havoc and attacking their non-Muslim neighbors from
Thailand to India. It is extremely arrogant to believe that the result will be any different in
the Netherlands, Britain or Italy, or for that matter in the United States or Canada, than it
has been everywhere else. It wont. If we had the humility to listen to the advice of the
Hindus of India or even our Christian cousins in south-eastern Europe, we wouldnt be in
as much trouble as we are now.

On the other hand, if we didnt have such a culture of self-loathing, where our own
cultural traditions are ridiculed in favor of a meaningless Multicultural cocktail, we
probably wouldnt have allowed massive Muslim immigration, either. There doesnt have
to be a contradiction between being proud of your own cultural heritage and knowing that
there may still be lessons you can learn from others. A wise man can do both. Westerners
of our age do neither.

Sun Tzu, a contemporary of the great Chinese thinker Confucius, wrote The Art of War,
the extremely influential book on military strategy, 2500 years ago. It is a book that
deserves to be read in full, but one of the most famous quotations is this one: So it is
said that if you know your enemies and know yourself, you will not be imperiled in a
hundred battles; if you do not know your enemies but do know yourself, you will win one
and lose one; if you do not know your enemies nor yourself, you will be imperiled in
every single battle.

The West has forgotten who our enemies are, but worse, we have also forgotten who we
are. We are going to pay a heavy price for this historical amnesia.