THINK-ISRAEL |
To hear Muslim polemicists tell it, Islam is a religion of peace but the world has been trying destroy Islam since its beginning -- what with Jewish animosity and Christian military aggression throughout the centuries. When Muhammad and his followers invaded and conquered Medina and then Mecca, they punished the reluctance and resistance of the Arab Jewish tribes by expelling some of the Jews and committing atrocities on others, raping the women, selling the children into slavery, beheading the men and looting their craft tools and possessions. These atrocities were of course the fault of the Jews for treacherously resisting Islam. (See here). Christian Arabs were at fault because they tried to keep the Christian kingdoms of the Middle East from being forced to convert to the one true religion and -- what is more outrageous -- the Crusaders, European Christians, attempted to reconquer Jerusalem.
What actually happened is that -- whenever conditions have been right -- the Muslims have been on the warpath since the inception of Islam, and they have no intention of changing. The truth of 9/11 is something that the American people have yet to understand.
The attack on 9/11 was not an attack of terrorists as such, but rather an expression of radical Islam's traditional attempts at destroying what it considers to be a satanic world order. They truly see themselves as involved in a holy war against the West and all it stands for. In order to understand this better we should look at history.
After the conquest of North Africa and the conversion of the Berbers to Islam, the Arabs were frustrated that they faced the Sea (Atlantic Ocean) with no more lands to conquer. According to Arab chronicles, when the Arab army reached the seashore for the first time, the Arab commander Uqba-ibn-Nafe waded into the sea and swashed his sword at the water to express his frustration that there were no more lands to conquer in which to spread the glory of Islam by terrorizing the conquered people to accept Islam or death.
The Arabs now started eyeing Spain the country that lay across the Mediterranean. They faced the legendary Pillars of Hercules (later renamed by the Arabs as Jebel-ut-Tarik or Gibraltar as we know it today). Spain was then under the rule of the Visigoths, who had embraced Christianity. The Visigothic king who was ruling the Visigothic Spain was Roderic, or Rodrigo (in Spanish)
King Rodrigo of Spain married the daughter of one of his noblemen, Count Julian against the wishes of her father. To avenge what Julian perceived as his violated honor, he opened secret parleys with the enemy and invited with the Emir (Governor) Musa ibn Nusayr, the Muslim ruler of North Africa, who was based in Tunisia to invade Spain. The Caliph al-Walid authorized the invasion of Spain (710-711 AD), on condition that Count Julian recited the Shahada and embraced Islam.
The two armies met on the banks of the Guadalete river on July 19, 711 in the extreme south of the Iberian peninsula. The Muslim army was victorious and stuck the Spanish Emperor's head on a pole and paraded it before those contingents of the Spanish army that were still engaged in opposing the Muslims in crossing of the Guadalete River.
After conquering Spain, the Muslims immediately began the campaign against Europe. Soon the Jews along with the Christians were made to pay the Jiziya poll tax was imposed on all non-Muslims (Kafirs) by the Muslims. They were also drafted for slave labor to demolish churches and build mosques from the columns of the destroyed churches.
The Jews and Christians also could not carry weapons, ride horses, wear shoes, ring church bells, wear anything green, or resist a Muslim assault. From these earliest times proclaiming Jesus' divinity and attempting conversion from Islam were made capital offences. In the 9th century, Spanish Jews in Muslim areas had to wear on their shoulders a patch of white cloth that bore the image of an ape; Christians, since they ate pork, wore the image of a pig. On the Caliph al-Mutawakkil's orders a yellow badge for Jews was made compulsory, setting a precedent that would be followed centuries later in Nazi Germany.
Thus began the Muslim invasion of France under the leadership of Abd-ur Rahman, who was then been appointed the chieftain of the Muslim occupiers of Spain.
The Franks were a Gothic (Germanic) tribe who eventually became the French as we know it today. It was another related Gothic clan - the Ostrogoths, who were ruling Spain when the Muslims attacked. The tales of mindless Muslim cruelty, savage torture, subterfuge deception, and blood chilling ruthlessness that the Ostrogoths who fled Muslim occupied Spain told their Frankish clansmen, had contributed to further stiffen the Frankish resolve to defeat the Muslim invaders.
The ferocity with which Charles (Karl) Martel fought against the invading Arabs, and the personal weapon of a hammer like axe that he used, earned him the title of Karl the Hammer. October 10, 732 AD marks the conclusion of the Battle of Tours, arguably one of the most decisive battles in all of history. Martel gathered his forces directly in the path of the oncoming Moslem army and prepared to defend themselves by using a phalanx style of combat. It was one of the rare times in the Middle Ages when infantry held its ground against a mounted attack. The exact length of the battle is undetermined; Arab sources claim that it was a two day battle whereas Christian sources hold that the fighting clamored on for seven days. In either case, the battle ended when the French captured and killed Abd-ur Rahman. And Europe was safe for the next 700 years until the Muslims breached the Eastern Gateway when they overran Constantinople in 1453. Constantinople proved far more difficult to conquer than the Muslims had expected, and did not fall until 1453. The great expansion of Islam had obviously lost steam, and the final battle would be fought by a ragtag group of defenders: Jews, Lithuanians, Hapsburgs, Saxons, Bavarians, and Poles against Grand Vizier Merzifonlu Kara Mustafa Pasha and the might of the Ottoman army. Vienna would be the decisive battle.
The Battle of Vienna ended in defeat for the Muslims, and began the long slide by Islam into near irrelevance, as far as the Europeans cared. The battle opened after a 2-month siege of the Holy Roman Empire's capital city on September 12, 1683 in the pre-dawn hours. It ended that era of Islamic expansion with a defeat at the hands of Jan Ill Sobieski and Charles V of Lorraine.
When the World Trade Center was destroyed in 2001, nobody in the news media seemed to understand the choice of September 11 by al Qaeda as their attack date. It has often been suggested that this was merely a random date chosen for convenience. I beg to differ. It seems clear to me that bin Laden was sending America and the West a message. Al Qaeda had an old score to settle, and was putting us on notice that the era of expansion is resuming after the interruption of Vienna. Night fell on September 12 for the soldiers of Allah, and so our towers fell on the preceding morning three hundred and eighteen years later.
It is important to understand this history in order to understand what we are up against; our enemy has a long memory and seeks to avenge this defeat of its ancestors. The radical Islamists are not upset about our presence in their lands, nor are they upset about Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, nor about our "exploitation" of their oil fields, nor our invasion of Iraq. They are taking a much longer view, a view with vengeance in mind! Vengeance for Tours, vengeance for Granada, vengeance for Vienna. They want to reinvigorate Islam, return to the days of pride and victory and submission by their foes. They want to establish the Caliphate and place the entire world under Sharia law.
9/11 was the first step in this process of re-establishing Jihad as a divine force of conversion and conquest but it will not be the last. If America, Europe and Israel fail to understand this, then they have made a fatal mistake in warfare in that they have failed to understand their enemy
David Ramati is a writer and lives in Kiryat Arba. He has two books in progress: "Destiny of Memories", a story about his Vietnam War experiences and "Physics and Kabbalah", co-authored with Marshall Onellion, Professor in the Physics Department at the University of Wisconsin. He is also writing the "Masada Chronicles." The first of the series, "The Blue Beads, The Masada Chronicles, CE 42-80, Book One" is currently available as an ebook. Contact him at david.ramati@gmail.com This article was submitted September 14, 2011.
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