The Mohammed Code: Why a Desert Prophet Wants You Dead (28 page)

Meanwhile both the pecking order and its combatants are evolving. Evolving into new forms of emergent collective intelligences, new forms of learning machines, new forms of mass mind. And preparing to fight with new weaponry. Weaponry that can eradicate our species. Nuclear, chemical, and biological weaponry.

The problem for you and me is that militant Islam’s global jihad has never stopped. [^^from this point on, check to remove repetitions of material in Lucifer principle] From the 7
^th
century onward Islam isolated, encircled, besieged, and terrified the West in ways that we moderns prefer to forget. John Esposito, former president of the Middle East Studies Association, like many other writers on the topic, justifies the ferocity of today’s Islamic anti-Western sentiments by reminding us that, "Many in the Arab and Muslim world view the history of Islam and of the Muslim world's dealings with the West as one of victimization and oppression at the hands of an expansive imperial power."
⁶⁸⁹
He is right about the modern Islamic perception. But he is wrong about the facts.

It was the
Islamic
empire that held the upper hand in the struggle between East and West for over 1,100 years. The Moslem conquest of the Middle East in the 7
^th
century AD gave Islam the land of the Jews and, more important geopolitically, the land of Christianity’s birth. Islam became the permanent occupier of territory that gave birth to most of the Fathers of the Church, territory that included Galatia, Bithynia, Pontus and Cappadocia--where St. Paul established many of the first Christian churches. These are the cities to which St. Paul wrote the letters, the epistles, central to the New Testament.

Islamic Imperialists took Syria, whose capital, Damascus, was one of the earliest major Christian centers. Damascus was the city St. Paul set out for when he fell off his ass and was smacked by a vision of blinding light. Four hundred years later, Syria was the land of Christian ascetics like St. Simeon the Stylite, who lived on a 60-foot-high, custom-built masonry column in the desert for 36 years to demonstrate his dedication to Christ.
⁶⁹⁰
Four Christian basilicas were built around the pillar of St. Simeon when he died.
⁶⁹¹
St. Simeon’s act of sacred endurance took place in a Christian and Jewish land that’s remained in Islamic hands for over 1,200 years.

Christianity counter-attacked in the twelfth century with the Crusades. The Crusades were imitations of an Islamic invention, Holy War. They came only after Europe had been pounded and surrounded for 384 years by the forces of jihad. And they were a miserable failure.

The Crusaders’ battles were over a postage-stamp-sized piece of territory, primarily the land where Christ had lived and preached—land Christ was able to reach on foot. And the Crusaders were initially greeted with enthusiasm by many of the region’s Islamic rulers, who had divided the Middle East into tiny Moslem principalities, then gone to war with each other. To some of these petty sultans, princes, atabegs
⁶⁹²
, and emirs, the foreign invaders seemed like superb allies with whose help they could crush a rival or two.
⁶⁹³

The knights of the cross—the Western Crusaders—were hideously barbaric and bloody. When they besieged Jerusalem in 1099, they promised safety to many of the city’s communities if those communities would help them breach the city’s walls. But once they penetrated the city’s defenses they broke their promises and killed every man, woman, and child they could find. One ancient historian
⁶⁹⁴
says that the blood became a flood that swelled up to the Christian warriors’ ankles.
⁶⁹⁵

But these European butchers did not retain their reconquered fiefdoms in the Christian and Jewish Holy Land long. They were expelled by 1187…giving them a total stay of 88 years, a flea’s sneeze compared to Islam’s nearly 1,400-year grip on North Africa, the Middle East, Central Asia, and much of the Pacific Rim. Nonetheless, according to historian Amin Maalouf, the author of
The Crusades Through Arab Eyes
⁶⁹⁶
, modern Arabs tend to see today's world events as a continuation of the Crusades. And so do many of us.

Frankly, we are blind to the blunt facts of history. We forget that for 700 years after the fall of the Crusader states, Islamic forces returned to the attack, crusading against and capturing Greece, parts of Italy, and chunks of Eastern Europe, raiding towns in Sicily, the coasts of Italy,
Cornwall, Ireland, England
,
⁶⁹⁷
France
,
Brittany, Ile de Groix, the Biscay coast, Portugal, and Spain
. We forget that in 1625 the naval forces of the Islamic Jihad established a base on the island of Lundy off the coast of England to support its raids on towns in Britain.
⁶⁹⁸
We forget that seaborne Moslem Crusaders took more than a
million Europeans
as slaves.
⁶⁹⁹
We forget that these Moslem Holy Sailors followed the principles of jihad established by Mohammed in his land-based military campaigns. The Islamic sea-warriors seized the citizens of entire villages as slaves and took the goods of these captives as loot, just as the Quran’s chapter eight,
“The Spoils of War, The Booty”,
⁷⁰⁰
says they should.

One night in 1631, for example, the Islamic raiders silently slid their warships onto the Irish beach near the town of Baltimore.
⁷⁰¹
In the morning Baltimore was a ghost town. All the citizens had been taken captive or killed. Those allowed to live were destined for sale in the slave markets of cities like Algiers,
⁷⁰²
Damascus, Baghdad, and Mecca. And their homes were stripped of everything of value. This is the “booty” and the “loot” the Qur’an and the biographies of Mohammed promise to the faithful.

Twelfth century Islamic military tactician Abu Bakr of Tortosa
⁷⁰³
went through the Qur’an and the Hadith to derive Allah's own dictates for combat methodology. He wrote, "In the battle he [a commander] must urge his men to victory, by ...promising those who are steadfast the rewards of Allah if they should reach the next world, and, if they remain alive in this world, tribute and an extra share of booty.”
⁷⁰⁴
,
⁷⁰⁵
Towns like Baltimore provided that extra booty. And they provided this sanctified loot in the beginning of the modern era, fifteen years after William Shakespeare had gone to his grave. No wonder Shakespeare wrote of Moslem warriors and of Islam’s gargantuan navies in his play about a converted Moslem general,
Othello
⁷⁰⁶
.

[^^insert battle of Lepanto and Othello’s reference to it—the fact that the Christian world was a world that, like the Jewish towns Mohammed had attacked, felt encircled and besieged in Shakespeare’s day. Mohsin Farooqi claims that the terror of Islam hung over the European heart—and the Christian writers of the day affirm that he was right. Make sure we have Mohsin Farooqi’s words in here.]

There’s much more that we forget. We forget that for 1,094 years—from 711 AD
⁷⁰⁷
to 1805 AD
⁷⁰⁸
--much of the Mediterranean was an “Islamic Lake,”
⁷⁰⁹
a private sea that Christians sailed at their peril. We forget that the forces of Islam gathered over 300 warships and close to 30,000 fighters for just one epic Mediterranean battle against the combined navies of Christendom, 1571’s Battle of Lepanto. It was one of the very few sea-borne showdowns the Moslems lost.
⁷¹⁰
And we forget that a mere six months later, the followers of the one true prophet took their revenge and chased the Christian fleet back to its homeports.

We forget that Islam’s naval guerrilla raiders preyed on Mediterranean commercial shipping, capturing, enslaving, and chaining Europeans like Miguel Cervantes—the author of
Don Quixote
-- to the oars of their galleys.
⁷¹¹
We forget why the Moslem “corsairs” could afford to pounce at will. To quote the Wikipedia, the Empire of Islam “made the entire coast of the Mediterranean from the Straits of Gibraltar to Croatia and Slovenia–––two thirds of its total shoreline–––a nearly unbroken stretch of” Moslem “territory more than ten thousand miles long.”
⁷¹²

We forget that back on land Mohammed’s militant followers were just as successful. We repress the brutal fact that until 1826 the rulers of the Islamic empire forced Christian parents in Albania, Serbia, Greece, and Hungary to give up their male children to Moslem overlords, who brought up these ten-year-olds on the Qur’an, killed the kids who would not accept Islam, then turned the remainder into crack Moslem soldiers known as Janissaries.
⁷¹³

We forget what Islamic historian
Dr. Mohsin Farooqi makes plain when he reminds his fellow Moslems that from roughly 1530 to 1780, in his opinion, “Europe [was] under Muslim Rule”—the rule of what Farooqi calls with great pride a reign of “terror of Muslim invaders”
⁷¹⁴
.

And we forget that militant Islam’s 1,200-year-long imperialist push landed it more of the world than Mohammed had ever heard of. Islam colonized Africa’s Libya, Tunisia, Morocco, Algeria, Egypt, Sudan, Somalia, Kenya, Mombassa, Zanzibar, Nigeria, Uganda, and Ghana. Islam swallowed all of Spain, took Eastern Europe’s Bulgaria
⁷¹⁵
, Albania, Serbia
⁷¹⁶
, Macedonia
⁷¹⁷
, Bosnia, and Herzegovina
⁷¹⁸
. Moslem armies seized and held the birthplace of Zoroastrianism—Iran. As we’ve seen, it grabbed the birthplace of Hinduism and Buddhism, India. Militant Islam also bagged the South Caucasus
⁷¹⁹
, Asia’s Afghanistan, Pakistan, Dagestan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Chechnya, Kyrgistan, and Uzbekistan. Militant Islam invaded China’s Xinjiang Province and snatched the Pacific Rim islands of Indonesia, Malaysia, Sumatra, Aceh, Brunei, and parts of the Philippines. That means militant Islam gripped and still holds over 15,000 islands on the seas east of China.