When talking about Jews who suffers, what about Muslims who had suffered during Crusade Knights conquering Jerusalem?
Holy War (Jihad):
http://home.att.net/~a.f.aly/jihad.htm
Non - Muslim authors accuse Muslims of spreading Islam by the sword, by waging holy wars. They ignore the fact that Islam is the fastest growing religion in the world today. They cannot find a trace of evidence showing that swords or force of any kind are responsible for the current high rate of conversion to Islam.
The concepts of "holy war" and "just war" were developed by the Holy (Christian) Roman Empire to force the pacifist Middle Eastern Christians into the Roman army. These Christians believed in turning the other cheek and renounced violence for 3 centuries before the Romans converted to Christianity under the rule of Constantine.
It is not surprising that the Christian Roman Empire was militant, It's first emperor believed he conquered Rome after a vision in which he saw a cross over the sun and heard a voice telling him that he would win under the religion of the cross.
Those who claim that Jesus preached only love and peace ignore Jesus' words: "Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword." [Matthew 10:34]. " Early in the morning, as he was on his way back to the city, he was hungry. Seeing a fig tree by the road, he went up to it but found nothing on it except leaves. Then he said to it, "May you never bear fruit again!" Immediately the tree withered. [Matthew 21:18,19].
Jesus died in his thirties leaving behind few followers. He was not responsible for a new nation under siege by the hostile Persian and Holy Roman Empires as Muhammad was.
Western authors erroneously translate the Arabic term jihad to mean holy war. Jihad means struggle or resistance. Muhammad defined the struggle with the self to be a better person or to resist temptation as the major jihad. He also defined the struggle with others to defend the Muslim Nation and to resist their threat as the minor jihad.
Islam is spreading today for the same reasons it spread rapidly in the past (since the time of Abraham). Islam presents the seeker with a natural, sound, logical, believable, practical, simple, balanced and achievable belief and practice system. Islam does not contradict human nature or modern science.
The Qur'an anticipated many of the modern scientific discoveries which were beyond human imagination 14 centuries ago. This separates the Qur'an from other religious texts.
The Qur'an advises against using force to change people's religion [Qur'an 2:256] or being the aggressor [Qur'an 2:190]. Muslims are asked to refrain from vengeance against prisoners of war or civilians in defeated regions [Qur'an 16:126,127; 8:67]. Muslims were bound by the guidelines of the Qur'an since they fought and did everything, in the name of God.
Muslims fought against the rulers who opposed them and their armies not against the people or their institutions. Non - Muslims were admitted to Muslim Universities. Those who excelled became top advisers to Muslim leaders regardless of race, religion, color, or ethnic background. This was another factor which accelerated the spread of Islam.
A search for the word "kill" found it 442 times in the Revised Standard Version, and 271 times in the King James Version of the Bible compared to 40 times in the Pickthall Version and 22 times in the Yusuf-Ali Version of the Qur'an!
The facts show that Islam tolerates non - Muslim minorities within the Muslim Nation and treats them as independent nations free to worship and live according to their own religious laws. This was outlined in the Covenant of Medina which became the world's first written constitution in 622 AD.
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 like what had been practiced by Portugal, Britain, Holland, and the US.
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 in Palestine 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 epitomised the Western confrontation with the oriental civilisation closest to Europe: the Islamic civilisation. 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 (nor Israel, instead Zionism was brought to Palestine and Aaliyah of unknown Jews flogging into Palestine through Britain and Western World effort to lease their burden from Economically being controlled by Jews, as the result Muslims and Eastern Christians were punished without any reason). 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.