The Pentagon’s New War

“The [Obama] administration continues to tie itself in knots to avoid offending Muslims, but offers no such courtesy to Christians.

“The Pentagon recruited [atheist] Michael I. Weinstein, founder of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, to shape the military’s policies on religious tolerance.” The Washington Times, May 6, 2013, p. 34

EDITORIAL, The Washington Times, May 6, 2013, p. 34

The administration continues to tie itself in knots to avoid offending Muslims, but offers no such courtesy to Christians. The latest example of official intolerance is the blocking of access on military bases to the Southern Baptists’ website because it contains “hostile content.”

The Department of Defense says this was a mistake and that overzealous Web filtering software was to blame, not the relatively conservative Baptist views on abortion and homosexual marriage. The department’s pattern of abuse over the past few years suggests otherwise. The poor computer gets blamed for everything.

The Pentagon recruited Michael L. Weinstein, founder of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, to shape the military’s policies on religious tolerance. Mr. Weinstein gives extremism a bad name, demonstrating what he means by tolerance by persuading the military to disinvite distinguished Christian clergymen such as Franklin Graham, the son of the famous evangelist, from participating in a national day of prayer for the troops. “Franklin Graham is an Islamophobe,” writes Mr. Weinstein, “an anti-Muslim bigot and an international representative of the scourge of fundamentalist Christian supremacy and exceptionalism.” Mr. Weinstein sued to cancel the day of prayer in 2010.

Christian prayer is bad; Muslim events are OK. Last July, Leon E. Panetta, then the secretary of defense, was the featured guest at the Pentagon’s annual iftar dinner during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. But the Roman Catholics are insulted like the Baptists. An Army Reserve training brief listed “Catholicism” and “Evangelical Christianity” with the Ku Klux Klan and al Qaeda as examples of “religious extremism.” The Pentagon, dogged by mistakes, brushed this off as an “isolated occurrence,” but the Archdiocese for Military Services asked the Department of Defense “to review these materials and to ensure that taxpayer funds are never again used to present blatantly anti-religious material to the men and women in uniform.”

There are other examples of Pentagon intolerance of Christianity: crosses taken from a chapel in Afghanistan and a Pentagon war game that identified Christian groups as an enemy. Two years ago, Col. C.W. Callahan, the chief of staff of Walter Reed Hospital, set guidelines for visits to patients that prohibited the distribution of Bibles to the wounded. After protests the Bible ban was lifted. The Army even ordered soldiers to use a steel-wire brush to erase tiny Bible verses encoded into the serial numbers of Trijicon rifle scopes issued to troops. One says “2COR4:6” — referring to a biblical passage that says “Let light shine out of darkness” — in letters so tiny it would offend only a soldier who packs a magnifying glass in his rucksack.

We’ve come a long way from the more tolerant days of World War II. President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Prime Minister Winston Churchill once joined sailors on the deck of the USS Augusta to lustily sing all the verses of “Onward Christian Soldiers,” and Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower sent his troops to the Normandy beaches with the message, “Let us beseech the blessing of Almighty God upon this great and noble undertaking.”

Congress should open an inquiry into these “isolated” incidents that have become a habit under President Obama. The administration must understand that religious freedom doesn’t require the elimination of the faith of our fathers — and the faith of the men and women who defend America.

The Washington Times

 

Islam and Terrorism

“Indeed it is evident that Christianity must always exert a modifying influence on men’s passions, and protect them from the more violent forms of fanatical fever.  But the Mohammedan religion increases, instead of lessening, the fury of intolerance.  It was originally propagated by the sword…Civilization is confronted with militant Mohammedanism.”  Winston Churchill, The Story of the Malakand Field Force (1898)

“The persecution of Christians by Muslims has become a taboo subject in Western circles.  Over thirteen centuries of religious discrimination and persecutions, causing the suffering oppression, murder and enslavement of countless millions has been buried under a thick whitewash of myths of ‘Islamic tolerance.’”  Peter Hammond, Slavery, Terrorism and Islam…210

“In the first five centuries of Islam, Muslim forces killed Christians, kidnapped their children to raise them as Muslims, or compelled people at the point of the sword to convert to Islam.  Up to 50% of all the Christians in the world were wiped out during the first three centuries of Islam.” Ibid. 197

“Islam is a religion based upon peace, goodwill and the ethical treatment of all people on this planet.”  Dennis Kucinich in Lisa Graas, “Friend of CAIR, Dennis Kucinich Pontificates: ‘Islam is Peace.”” NewsReal Blog, March 14, 2011.

1. 627 A.D.  All men in the Jewish tribe Banu Qurayza were beheaded and their women and children enslaved. (See Wikipedia “Banu Quraya”)

2. 634 A.D. Muslim invasion of Syria resulted in thousands of Christians massacred.

3. 640, 641 A.D.  The Muslim conquest of Egypt saw the towns of Behnesa, Fayum, Nikiu and Aboit were all put to the sword.

4. 643 A.D. When Tripoli was captured all Jews and Christians were forced to hand over all their women and children as slaves.

5. 698 A.D.  Carthage was captured by Muslim forces, burned to the ground and most of its inhabitants slaughtered.

6. 712 A.D. Muslim armies invaded India, smashed statutes, demolished temples, plundered the palaces, slaughtered vast numbers of Indian men and enslaved their women and children.  Will Durant in The Story of Civilization referred to this invasion as “probably the bloodiest story in history.”  At Somnath, e.g., 50,000 Hindus were slaughtered at the command of Mahmud.

7. 923 A.D. Caliph Abd-Er-Rahman III destroyed Cordova, Zarajoza, and Merida were destroyed with all adult males executed and all women and children enslaved.

8.  A.D. the Muslims burned to the ground the Buddhist’s famous library and over ran Bihar.

9. 1351 A.D. Firuz Shah commanded all Hindus to be killed and all Hindu temples to be destroyed.

10. 1453 A.D. Mehmet II conquered Constantinople with tens of thousands of civilians slaughtered in the streets.  Christianity’s greatest church the Hagia Sophia was overrun with the Turks slaughtering the entire congregation—men, women and children.

11. 1526 A. D. The Turks conquered Budapest enslaving 200,000 Hungarian Christians and took them back to Turkey as slaves.

12. 1568 A.D. following the Battle of Chitod, Moghul emperor Akbar ordered the 30,000 captured Hindus to be executed.

13. 1628 A.D. Shah Jahan (builder of the Taj Mahal) captured Hugh, a Portuguese enclave near Calcutta, had its 10,000 inhabitants “blown up with powder, drowned in water or burned by fire.”

14. 1915 A.D. The Turks exterminated 1.5 million Christian Armenians.

15. 1922 A.D. The Turks destroyed the city of Smyrna with its 300,000 Christian inhabitants…The Turks shot, hacked and burned them to death. U. S. and British ships were in the Smyrna harbor and did nothing to help.

16. 1996 A.D. the Armed Islamic Group kidnapped and beheaded seven Trappist monks in Algeria.

17. 2001 A. D. 3,000 killed in the New York City World Trade Center’s Twin Towers destroyed on September 11 by Saudi Arabia Wahabi terrorists.

18. 2011 A.D.  New Year’s Day Massacre in Alexandria, Egypt with 23 Coptic Christians murdered and 79 injured by Muslim terrorists.

19. 2011 A.D. “Christianity may have been nearly eradicated in Tunisia.”  (Charlotte Allen, “Before the Deluge” in The Weekly Standard, March 14, 2011, 29.

20. 2011 A.D. “On Friday night [March 11], twelve-year old Tamar Fogel came home to find both her parents, Ruth and Udi Fogel, two brothers Yoav (11) and Elad (four), and her three-month old sister Hadas murdered in their beds.  They had had their throats cut and been stabbed through the heart. That’s not shocking: There is no shortage of young Muslim men who would enjoy slitting the throat of a three-month old baby, and then head home dreaming of the town square or soccer tournament to be named in their honor.  Back in Gaza, the citizenry celebrated the news by cheering and passing out sweets….The western media simply averted their eyes from their Palestinian house pets’ unfortunate effusions.”  Mark Steyn, National Review Online, March 14, 2011.

21. 2011 A.D.  “The spokesman of the Muslim Brothers, the 84-year old Sheikh Qaradawi, is one of the most influential and popular figures in the Muslim world.  Originally Egyptian, he has long been in exile in Qatar, where he broadcasts on Al Jazeera.  He advises Muslims not to make friends with Jews as this might diminish their desire to wage jihad against them. ‘O Allah, take this oppressive Jewish Zionist band of people,’ he preaches, ‘kill them down to the very last one.’” David Pryce Jones, National Review, March 21, 2001, 24.

22. 2011 A.D.  “In the village of Sole, just outside of Cairo, local Muslims decided they now had the freedom to burn down the town’s Coptic Church (the Church of the Two Martyrs).  After torching the sacred place, the Muslims promised to build a mosque on that very spot.  When Christians peacefully protested the church burning, 13 were killed and 150 wounded by Muslims who attacked with firearms, stones and Molotov cocktails.”  Paul Cooper, NewReal Blog, March 20, 2011.

23. 2011 A.D.  “Muslims in Ethiopia have torched 69 Christian churches, a Bible school, and an orphanage beginning March 2, 2011…with roughly 10,000 displaced Christians while the media, including the White House and the U.S. State Department, has said nothing.” Lisa Graas, NewsReal Blog, March 25, 2011.

24. “The problem is so serious that in February 2012, Newsweek magazine’s cover bore the title, ‘The War on Christians.’  The article explains that in recent years, ‘ the violent oppression of Christian minorities has become the norm in Muslim-majority nations stretching from West Africa and the Middle East to South Asia and Oceania.’” Erwin W. Lutzer, The Cross in the Shadow of the Crescent,139

25. “In July 2012, a Muslim convert to Christianity was beheaded in Tunisia, and the grisly murder was shown on Egyptian TV.” Ibid.

26. “More Christians have been martyred in the last 100 years than in the previous 1900 years of church history…One estimate is that ‘the current rate [2012] is 159,000 martyrs per year.’” Ibid., 168.  See Justin D. Long, More Martyrs Now Than Then? Available at http://jmm.aaa.net.au/articles/2904.htm.

27. “According to Voice of the Martyrs, an organization that reports on the persecution of Christians worldwide, notices like this [leave or be killed] have been appearing on the doors of Christian homes and churches in Muslim countries…In these places [Sudan, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Pakistan, Egypt, Somalia] Christians are systematically jailed and killed. ‘The scale of persecution of Christians by Muslims has caused the death of thousands, including pastors, and the destruction of hundreds, even thousands, of churches.” Lutzer, 163.

28. “The Muslim Brotherhood has dozens of front organizations through which they operate.  We’ve already referred to one of the best known, which is CAIR.  Other prominent groups are the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) and the Muslim Student Association (MSA).” Lutzer, 181, 182

29. “The motto of the Muslim Brotherhood is explicit as well: ‘Allah is our objective, the Prophet is our leader, the Quran is our law, jihad is our way, and dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope.’” Ibid., 179

30. “In their investigation of the Muslim Brotherhood archives, seized in 2004, the FBI was able to determine that ‘the groups’ sole objectives are to implement Islamic law in America in furtherance of reestablishing the global caliphate.’ Such goals, of course, would require the replacement of the US Constitution with Sharia.” Lutzer, 183.  Also, see Shariah: The Threat to America—An Exercise in Competitive Analysis Report of Team BII (Washington, D.C.: The Center for Security Policy, 2010).

31. “Just hours after the two suspects in the Boston Marathon bombing were identified as Muslims, Representative Peter T. King of New York, the Republican chairman of the House Subcommittee on Counterterrorism and Intelligence, called for an ‘increased surveillance’ of Islamic communities in the United States.” Suhaib Webb, The New York Times, April 24, 2013

32. “There were likely twice as many martyrs in the twentieth century than in the previous nineteen centuries of Christian history combined.  The great majority of these twentieth century martyrs gave their lives for Christ at the hands of communism.”  George Weigel, “All War, All The Time,” in First Things, April 2011, 29, 30.

Editor’s Note:  It appears that Islamists have now replaced the Communist thugs as the world’s executioners. 

Bibliography

LaTourette, Kenneth, A History of Christianity. Harper,1953.

Davis, Robert, Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters:  White Slavery in the Mediterranean. Palgrave MacMillan, 2004.

Morey, Robert, The Islamic Invasion. Christian Scholars Press, 1992.

Thomas, Hugh, The Slave Trade. Simon and Schuster, 1997.

Trifkovic, Serge, The Sword of the Prophet.  Regina Orthodox Press, 2002.

Muir, William, The Life of Mohammad.  T & T Clark, 1923.

Hammond, Peter, Slavery, Terrorism and Islam. Xulon Elite, 2010.

Lutzer, Erwin W., The Cross in the Shadow of the Crescent, Harvest House, 2013.

Prepared by David A. Noebel

May 2013

White Slaves

“A new study suggests that a million or more European Christians were enslaved by Muslims in North Africa between 1530 and 1780—a far greater number than had ever been estimated before.

“In a new book, Robert Davis, professor of history at Ohio State University, developed a unique methodology to calculate the number of white Christians who were enslaved along Africa’s Barbary Coast, arriving at much higher slave population estimates than any previous studies had found.”

“Davis has calculated that between 1 million and 1.25 million European Christians were captured and forced to work in North Africa from the 16^th to 18^th centuries.”  Jeff Grabmeier

WHEN EUROPEANS WERE SLAVES: RESEARCH SUGGESTS WHITE SLAVERY WAS MUCH MORE COMMON THAN PREVIOUSLY BELIEVED

 Jeff Grabmeier, Researchnews.osu.edu/archive/whtslav.htm, May 3, 2013

COLUMBUS, Ohio – A new study suggests that a million or more European Christians were enslaved by Muslims in North Africa between 1530 and 1780 – a far greater number than had ever been estimated before.

In a new book, Robert Davis, professor of history at Ohio State University, developed a unique methodology to calculate the number of white Christians who were enslaved along Africa’s Barbary Coast, arriving at much higher slave population estimates than any previous studies had found.

Most other accounts of slavery along the Barbary coast didn’t try to estimate the number of slaves, or only looked at the number of slaves in particular cities, Davis said. Most previously estimated slave counts have thus tended to be in the thousands, or at most in the tens of thousands. Davis, by contrast, has calculated that between 1 million and 1.25 million European Christians were captured and forced to work in North Africa from the 16th to 18th centuries.

Davis’s new estimates appear in the book Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters: White Slavery in the Mediterranean, the Barbary Coast, and Italy, 1500-1800 (Palgrave Macmillan).

“Enslavement was a very real possibility for anyone who traveled in the Mediterranean, or who lived along the shores in places like Italy, France, Spain and Portugal, and even as far north as England and Iceland.”

“Much of what has been written gives the impression that there were not many slaves and minimizes the impact that slavery had on Europe,” Davis said. “Most accounts only look at slavery in one place, or only for a short period of time. But when you take a broader, longer view, the massive scope of this slavery and its powerful impact become clear.”

Davis said it is useful to compare this Mediterranean slavery to the Atlantic slave trade that brought black Africans to the Americas. Over the course of four centuries, the Atlantic slave trade was much larger – about 10 to 12 million black Africans were brought to the Americas. But from 1500 to 1650, when trans-Atlantic slaving was still in its infancy, more white Christian slaves were probably taken to Barbary than black African slaves to the Americas, according to Davis.

“One of the things that both the public and many scholars have tended to take as given is that slavery was always racial in nature – that only blacks have been slaves. But that is not true,” Davis said. “We cannot think of slavery as something that only white people did to black people.”

During the time period Davis studied, it was religion and ethnicity, as much as race, that determined who became slaves.

“Enslavement was a very real possibility for anyone who traveled in the Mediterranean, or who lived along the shores in places like Italy, France, Spain and Portugal, and even as far north as England and Iceland,” he said.

Pirates (called corsairs) from cities along the Barbary Coast in north Africa – cities such as Tunis and Algiers – would raid ships in the Mediterranean and Atlantic, as well as seaside villages to capture men, women and children. The impact of these attacks were devastating – France, England, and Spain each lost thousands of ships, and long stretches of the Spanish and Italian coasts were almost completely abandoned by their inhabitants. At its peak, the destruction and depopulation of some areas probably exceeded what European slavers would later inflict on the African interior.

Although hundreds of thousands of Christian slaves were taken from Mediterranean countries, Davis noted, the effects of Muslim slave raids was felt much further away: it appears, for example, that through most of the 17th century the English lost at least 400 sailors a year to the slavers.