Jerusalem News 876. Views, Jews, Ten Tribes News
13 September 2009, 24 Elul 5769
Contents:
1. Libya 'will resist IRA victims' claims'
2. Lost world of fanged frogs and giant rats discovered in Papua New Guinea
3. Arabs were Never Tolerant; Islam Made No Contributions
The Twin Myths of Eurabia
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1. Libya 'will resist IRA victims' claims'
http://www.scotsman.com/latestnews/Libya-39will-resist-IRA-victims39.5625385.jp
08 September 2009
LIBYA will fight any claims for compensation by the families of people killed by Irish republican bombs they say were made using Libyan-supplied explosives, the son of Libyan leader Muammar al-Gaddafi has said.
Saif al-Islam said his country would contest any such cases in the courts, putting him at odds with Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who on Sunday performed a U-turn to support compensation claims.
The IRA killed more than 1,000 men, women and child with the help of Libya.
Saif al-Islam said his country would contest any such cases in the courts, putting him at odds with Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who on Sunday performed a U-turn to support compensation claims.
According to the Jane's Intelligence Review, Colonel Gaddafi provided the IRA with five tonnes of weaponry, including 1,000 rifles and two tonnes of Semtex.
As Michael Burleigh, author of Blood and Rage: A Cultural History of Terrorism, said: "The Libyans provided the IRA with several tonnes of Czech-manufactured Semtex used in several major bombing atrocities.
The Libyans seem to have a problem of understanding that terrorism is a crime."
The exact date of the first contact between the IRA and the Libyan leadership is not known, but Joe Cahill, the commander of the IRA Belfast Brigade, visited Tripoli in 1972. Col Gaddafi saw the IRA as kindred spirits fighting for the freedom of their nation and, in March 1973, dispatched Cahill with five tonnes of arms and ammunition.
On 28 March, he was arrested on board the Claudia. He told his trial: "If I am guilty of any crime, it is that I did not succeed in getting the contents of the Claudia into the hands of freedom fighters."
It is thought three other shipments of a similar size were landed and that the Libyan dictator gave "3 million to "5 million to the IRA.
2. Lost world of fanged frogs and giant rats discovered in Papua New Guinea
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/sep/07/discovery-species-papua-new-guinea
A lost world populated by fanged frogs, grunting fish and tiny bear-like creatures has been discovered in a remote volcanic crater on the Pacific island of Papua New Guinea.
3. Arabs were Never Tolerant; Islam Made No Contributions
The Twin Myths of Eurabia
http://www.brusselsjournal.com/node/1211
Extracts:
Bat Ye'or is the most informed contemporary scholar of the unique Islamic institution of dhimmitude, the repressive and humiliating apartheid system imposed upon those non-Muslims (i.e., dhimmis) subjugated by Jihad. Sir Jadunath Sarkar, the pre-eminent historian of Mughal India, wrote the following in 1920 regarding the impact of centuries of Jihad and dhimmitude on the indigenous Hindus of the Indian subcontinent:
"The conversion of the entire population to Islam and the extinction of every form of dissent is the ideal of the Muslim State. If any infidel is suffered to exist in the community, it is as a necessary evil, and for a transitional period only. Political and social disabilities must be imposed on him, and bribes offered to him from the public funds, to hasten the day of his spiritual enlightenment and the addition of his name to the roll of true believers." "A non-Muslim therefore cannot be a citizen of the State; he is a member of a depressed class; his status is a modified form of slavery. He lives under a contract (zimma, or "dhimma") with the State: for the life and property grudgingly spared to him by the commander of the faithful he must undergo political and social disabilities, and pay a commutation money."
According to Bat Ye'or, Eurabia is essentially a political project for a demographic and cultural symbiosis between Europe and the Arab Muslim world, a new extended Mediterranean "continent" made possible by EU authorities through deliberately favoring Muslim immigration, promoting Multiculturalism and the dissemination of Arab and Islamic culture in Europe. In the essay Andalusian Myth, Eurabian Reality, co-authored with Andrew G. Bostom, editor of the comprehensive book The Legacy of Jihad: Islamic Holy War and the Fate of Non-Muslims, Bat Ye'or dispels one of the founding myths of Eurabia: that of the alleged "tolerance" of medieval Spain under Islamic rule.
During the completion of the new Granada Mosque, which was marked by celebratory announcements July 10, 2003 of a "return of Islam to Spain," disconcerting statements were made by European Muslim leaders. Specifically, the keynote speaker at this conference, Umar Ibrahim Vadillo, a Spanish Muslim leader, encouraged Muslims to cause an economic collapse of Western economies (by ceasing to use Western currencies, and switching to gold dinars), while the German Muslim leader Abu Bakr Rieger told Muslim attendees to avoid adapting their Islamic religious practices to accommodate European (i.e., Western Enlightenment") values.
Bat Ye'or and Andrew Bostom state that: "We believe that reiterating these ahistorical, roseate claims about Muslim Spain abets the contemporary Islamist agenda, and retards the evolution of a liberal, reformed "Euro-Islam" fully compatible with post-Enlightenment Western values."
"Iberia [Spain] was conquered in 710-716 AD by Arab tribes originating from northern, central and southern Arabia. Massive Berber and Arab immigration, and the colonization of the Iberian peninsula, followed the conquest. Most churches were converted into mosques. Although the conquest had been planned and conducted jointly with a strong faction of royal Iberian Christian dissidents, including a bishop, it proceeded as a classical jihad with massive pillages, enslavement, deportations and killings."
"In the regions under stable Islamic control, Jews and Christians were tolerated as dhimmis " like elsewhere in other Islamic lands " and could not build new churches or synagogues nor restore the old ones. Segregated in special quarters, they had to wear discriminatory clothing. Subjected to heavy taxes, the Christian peasantry formed a servile class attached to the Arab domains; many abandoned their land and fled to the towns. Harsh reprisals with mutilations and crucifixions would sanction the Mozarab (Christian dhimmis) calls for help from the Christian kings."
The humiliating status imposed on the dhimmis and the confiscation of their land provoked many revolts, punished by massacres, as in Toledo (761, 784-86, 797), Saragossa from 781 to 881, Cordova (805), Merida (805-813, 828), and yet again in Toledo (811-819). The insurgents were crucified, as prescribed in the Koran 5:33.
According to Bat Ye'or and Bostom, "Feuding was endemic in the Andalusian cities between the different sectors of the population: Arab and Berber colonizers, Iberian Muslim converts (Muwalladun) and Christian dhimmis (Mozarabs). 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. Society was sharply divided along ethnic and religious lines, with the Arab tribes at the top of the hierarchy, followed by the Berbers who were never recognized as equals, despite their Islamization; lower in the scale came the mullawadun converts and, at the very bottom, the dhimmi Christians and Jews."
Bat Ye'or and Bostom state that: "The Muslim Berber Almohads in Spain and North Africa (1130-1232) wreaked enormous destruction on both the Jewish and Christian populations. This devastation " massacre, captivity, and forced conversion " was described by the Jewish chronicler Abraham Ibn Daud, and the poet Abraham Ibn Ezra. Suspicious of the sincerity of the Jewish converts to Islam, Muslim "inquisitors" (i.e., antedating their Christian Spanish counterparts by three centuries) removed the children from such families, placing them in the care of Muslim educators."
These days, we also hear claims that we in the West owe so much to Muslims because Muslim Spain preserved and passed on Greek knowledge to the West, without which there would have been no Renaissance. The funny thing is, nobody seems to ask the Greeks about how good Muslims have been at preserving their cultural heritage. They might disagree.
The classical and Greek heritage did not die when the Western Roman Empire collapsed, it continued in the Eastern Roman Empire, later known as the Byzantine Empire, as it was more Greek than Roman. It lived on there uninterruptedly until the 15th century when it was finally destroyed by, well, Turkish Muslims. The Byzantine Empire upheld the unbroken succession of Roman emperors for a thousand years after the fall of the Western Roman Empire. The Byzantines played a crucial part in the transmitting the classical and Greco-Roman heritage to Renaissance Italy, especially after the Ottoman Muslim conquest and the many Greek scholars fleeing to the West.
The Greeks bore the brunt of the Jihad for more than a thousand years. Muslims wiped out Greek communities all over the Eastern Mediterranean for centuries, a process that continued in countries such as "Turkey," the formerly Greek-dominated region of Anatolia, and Egypt even after WW2. If this is how Muslims "preserve Greek heritage," I hope they will never be in a position to "preserve" mine.
One of the worst burdens on the dhimmi population in the Ottoman Empire was devshirmeh, the forced collection of young boys from Christian Greeks, Croats, Bulgarians, Serbs and Albanians to build a slave army of Janissaries.
We often hear that "Islamic culture" was superior to Western culture in the Middle Ages, and that Westerners owe much of our technological progress to Muslims. If we say that the "Middle East" and the Eastern Mediterranean were culturally and economically superior to Europe in the Middle Ages, then this is true. However, this had been the case for thousands of years before Islam entered into history. The oldest civilizations know to mankind originated in a belt stretching from today's Egypt via Syria, Lebanon, Iran and Iraq to Pakistan. It is not a coincidence that the first European civilizations began in countries that were geographically close to the Middle East: The island of Crete, later mainland Greece and the Balkans, then Rome. Even in the Roman Empire, the Eastern part of the empire was stronger and more urbanized than its Northern and Western regions, which is one of the reasons why the Eastern half proved much more durable while the Western half collapsed in the 5th century.
It is true that no civilization exists in a vacuum. Modern Western civilization owes much to Egyptians, Persians, Sumerians, Byzantines, Assyrians, Jews, Indians and Chinese. We owe little, if anything to Islam.
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