format_quote Originally Posted by
Independent
In fairness, this is hardly exclusive to Christians - everyone tends to exaggerate the wickedness of their enemies.
If we are being fair, ongoing lies and distortions cannot be justified by saying everyone does it, because in this case, it is simply not true. Till this day we have historical programmes like
The War of the Worlds aired on television, presented by professors, devoting their most passionate words to 'Turkish crimes', their genocides of Christians, minimising victims of Western genocides and on the other hand multiplying the crimes of others - up to three times that of older historians. That is just one example amongst many. Where do we find such a relentless campaign for more than ten centuries led by Muslims against anyone else? The following excerpt summarises it well:
The Muslims do not have writing and studies in which the Western Christians are painted in demonic images, as bloodthirsty murderous fanatics so as to justify attacking them, colonising them and killing them en masse. Even during the Middle Ages, when Islamic civilisation was at its zenith, and most Western nations were at a barbarian level, some even at their pre-historic level, Muslims did not use this as a justification to conquer them, slaughter them and loot their wealth. There is not one single work written by a Muslim where the Westerners are represented as sub-human barbarians who warrant sending armies to civilise them by slaying them en masse. Western Christian writing and opinion making, on the other hand, as already seen, is crammed with such writing and image-painting of their foes: thousands of books, tens of thousands of articles in learned reviews and the media, every year; conferences, seminars, films, radio and television broadcasts; hundreds of university courses and thousands of academics and researchers, all dedicated to the task of darkening Islam and Muslims, using as already seen, distortions in all forms and all sorts for the purpose...
S. E. Al-Djazairi, The Myth of Muslim Barbarism and its Aims
It's one of the things that makes looking at the past difficult - our morality, our standards have changed enormously.
I am not so sure they have. We are constantly confronted by the stereotyped, hostile view of the Turks, to the point that it is perfectly normal to hear of 'Turkish atrocities', and these of course being the worst atrocities committed. But this is contradicted by reality, which shows that Turkish humanity and tolerance have remained unique in history. Nobody would ever know that if the myth of 'Turkish Barbarism' was never challenged. The problem is the culture of regarding history as only being true when it denounces Muslim crimes, and distorted if it ever makes the cardinal error of praising anything Islamic or in denouncing Western genocides.