ARABS AND AZTECS > by Dr. Jack Wheeler

ARABS AND AZTECS
Behind The Lines
Dr. Jack Wheeler
Friday, April 30, 2004

Cortez and his Spanish soldiers who conquered the Aztecs are known to history as Conquistadors. That label of Conquerors was applied to them by their contemporaries -- but it originated a generation earlier. It was first used to describe the Spaniards who liberated their own country from Islam.

Arab invaders had swept across Spain in the early 700s, and it took centuries for the Spanish to kick them out. Cortez was not yet 10 years old when they were finally ejected from their last stronghold in Grenada in 1492. When Cortez first looked upon the pyramid temples of the Aztec gods, he called them mezquitas -- mosques.

Cortez saw himself as a liberator -- just as his fathers had liberated Spain from the Islamic yoke, so he would liberate New Spain from the Aztec yoke. Yet he had little idea of how deep were the political-religious parallels between the Arabs and the Aztecs.

The parallels go beyond the death worship of Aztec warriors and Arab suicide-bombers. One of the latter responsible for the train bombings in Madrid declared in a letter: You (Christians) love life -- we (Moslems) love death. Compare this Aztec poem:

There is nothing like death in war Nothing like the flowery death So precious to the gods who give us life Far off I see it! My heart yearns for it!

The deeper parallel is this: both the Arabs and the Aztecs invented a Religion of Jihad as a rationale to justify their imperialist empires.

For the Aztecs, war was their purpose for existence, the sacred manifestation of their religion. War for the Aztecs was always Holy War.

The Aztecs were a tribe of primitive nomads when they first entered the Valley of Mexico in the early 14th century. They were shunned as barbarians by the inhabitants, descendants of the disintegrated Toltec Empire, and were forced to live on swampy islands in the valleys huge lake.

The one thing the Aztecs knew was how to fight. So they hired themselves out as mercenaries to the warring Toltec-remnant principalities. Before long, they had an army big enough to take over the principalities -- which they proceeded to do.

No empire can be held together with simple brute force, however. It requires a rationale, and the Aztecs soon invented one: a religion with gods who need them, the Aztecs, to wage continual war to keep the universe together.

The Aztec god of the hunt was Huitzilopotchtli (The Hummingbird on the Left). Once the Aztecs began conquering other kingdoms in the 1430s, he was transformed into a universal power controlling the earth, the heavens, and the rising of the sun. For reasons the Aztec Witch-Doctors could never explain, Huitzilopotchtli, although a god, required food to sustain his labors in keeping the cosmos in one piece.

The food the Aztec god must have so the sun would rise tomorrow was a daily -- daily -- supply of dozens -- dozens -- of live, beating human hearts, physically ripped out of a living human being chest and placed in the chacmool, the sacred receptacle, fresh, hot, and still palpitating.

In 1487, to celebrate the completion of the Great Temple of Huitzilopotchtli in the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan, 20,000 prisoners were sacrificed in fourteen days, with long lines of victims stretching from the temple in four directions as far as the eye could see.

It was decreed that other gods were perpetually hungry. Tlaloc, the rain god, needed the hearts of children and babies so that it would rain. Xipe, the plant god, needed human skins acquired by skinning a victim alive, so that plants would grow.

Naturally, the tens of thousands of victims needed annually for these cosmic sacrifices could not come from the Aztec people, or else they would quickly kill themselves off. The only way to get them was to capture them as prisoners of war.

Thus war -- Holy War -- became the purpose of the Aztec State. All soldiers in the Aztec Army were Holy Warriors, Warriors of the Gods. Peace was dangerous. No war meant no prisoners to sacrifice, no food for the gods, which risked the destruction of mankind and the universe itself. The only way to avoid cosmic disaster was for the Aztecs to accept the burden fate had given them and wage perpetual war for the salvation of humanity.

All in all, a pretty clever rationalization for a monstrous imperialist tyranny, wouldn't you say? Sounds like they were taking religion-inventing lessons from the Arabs.

For just as the worship of Huitzilopotchtli was an invention to provide a religious justification for Aztec imperialism, so Islam was an invention for the purpose of providing a religious justification for Arab imperialism.

It is commonly taught that the purpose of the Arab Conquest -- Arab hordes exploding out of Arabia in the middle of the 7th century to conquer all of the Christian Middle East, Zoroastrian Persia and Central Asia, Hindu Northern India, and Christian North Africa and Spain in 100 years -- was to spread Islam. It turns out this is the opposite of what actually happened.

That is, just like other nomad hordes that swarmed out of a desert and infested civilizations through history -- like Attila Huns or Genghiz Khan Mongols -- so did the Arabs. Finding themselves in sudden possession of a vast empire of vastly different peoples and all of them non-Arab, the Arabs invented a religion to justify their ruling it, and aptly named it Islam, which in Arabic means Submission. They claimed it meant submission to the Will of God, but what it really meant was submission to them.

This is detailed in The Myth of Mecca, written shortly after the September 11 Moslem attack on America. It is posted in the Classics section of To The Point News, and I could not encourage you more strongly to read it. [ed., article is open to non-subscribers]

At long last, serious scholars have begun researching the history of Islam origins. Their conclusion, in the words of one, I.M. Al-Rawandi, is that the life of Mohammed chronicled in the Sira (the official Islamic hagiography) is a baseless fiction. It was made up. He never lived in Mecca, and if he lived at all, he was a bandit chieftain named Ubuâl Kassim (Mohammedis not a name, it a title meaning The Praised One) who lived in what is now southern Jordan.

An additional conclusion is that the Koran is made up as well -- stories and quotations from scores of varying sources and authors stitched together over a century or two after the Conquest.

This is why the Call to Jihad is hard-wired into the Koran. Jihad is why Islam exists. The Moslem religion was invented by Arabs in order to claim their conquering of other peoples and religions was ordained and approved by God.

After the tide of Arab imperialism was turned back in 15th century Spain, the Ottoman Turks took up the call of Jihad, plundering southeastern Europe for slaves and booty. The Islamic threat to Europe was stopped at Vienna, where the German-Austrian-Polish forces led by Polish King Jan Sobieski defeated the Ottoman invaders on September 12, 1683. Now the threat of Jihad has arisen once again from the deserts of Arabia.

The threat is much closer than in Iraq. Earlier this week (April 26), the New York Times featured an article entitled Militants in Europe Openly Call for Jihad and the Rule of Islam. It focused on a group of Moslem radicals in England called Al-Muhajiroun (The Immigrants) and one of its leaders, a young man calling himself Sayful Islam (Sword of Islam).

The Times story was based on interviews reporter David Cohen of the London Evening Standard had with Sayful and his followers. Mr. Cohen article, Terror on the Dole, is in this issue of the TTP Weekly Report under Guest Authors. Here is an excerpt:

It was the events of 11 September that crystallized Sayful's worldview. "When I watched those planes go into the Twin Towers, I felt elated," he says. "That magnificent action split the world into two camps: you were either with Islam and al Qaeda, or with the enemy. I decided to quit my job and commit myself full-time to al-Muhajiroun."

Now he does not consider himself British. "I am a Muslim living in Britain, and I give my allegiance only to Allah." According to Sayful, the aim of al-Muhajiroun (The Immigrants) is nothing less than Khilafah - "the worldwide domination of Islam". The way to achieve this, he says, is by Jihad, led by Bin Laden. "I support him 100 per cent." Does that support extend to violent acts of terrorism in the UK?

"Yes," he replies, unequivocally. "When a bomb attack happens here, I won't be against it, even if it kills my own children. Islam is clear: Muslims living in lands that are occupied have the right to attack their invaders."

I suggest you re-read that quote and let it sink in. And lest you think this is just an _expression of radical Islam to which all moderate Moslems are opposed, here are the words of Sayful followers:

The mosques say one thing to the public, and something else to us. Let's just say that the face you see and the face we see are two different faces, says Abdul Haq. Believe me, adds Abu Musa, "behind closed doors, there are no moderate Muslims. Centuries ago, Western Civilization had the ability to produce heroes like Cortez and Sobieski who had no qualms over fighting murderously evil empires. Today, even the most courageous leader on earth, George W. Bush, proclaims Islam to be a religion of peace-- when the terrifying reality is that it is a religion of war.

Without perpetual war against the infidels, without Jihad, Islam has no driving purpose. It is therefore incumbent on all those who wish not to someday submit to an Islamic yoke to demand of Moslems that they publicly renounce the Koran Call to Jihad. Civilization only path to peace is for Arabs and their Islamic converts to stop behaving like Aztecs

I'm somewhat skeptical about the whole "Islam only used to justify Arab imperialism" idea. If Muhammad never existed, who was leading all these nomadic invaders at first?

Now he does not consider himself British.
"I am a Muslim living in Britain, and I give my allegiance only to Allah." -Sayful

Now they do not consider themselves American.
"We are democrats living in America, and we give our allegience only to the Democrat party."-Pelosi, Kennedy, Daschle , et al.....

The people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders...tell them they are being attacked ~Herman Goering

No need to tell Americans this. We saw it on TV. Your friends made their intentions very clear.

"We may be facing the same situation now."

What do you mean "we MAY be." My friend, we ARE facing the same situation now. And we better realize it and do something about it before it's too late.

Hey Saladin: If you hate us so much, all I can say is what President Bush said: Bring it on! You and your ilk have been spoiling for a fight with us for a long time, so I'm here to tell you the battle will be joined.

In high school, the history books we used always tried to condemn Cortez. My teacher went out of his way to try to show us just who the Aztec's were and why Cortez felt he had to destroy them. In short, the Aztec's were evil. We may be facing the same situation now.

Good thing the King and Queen of Spain didn't go around calling Aztec human sacrifice a "religion of peace."

The older I get, the more I am thankful for the education I got at that high school in the middle of a corn field. In general, the teachers pulled no punches. History was taught pretty objectively, and this was just one instance.

Today most of the teachers from when I was there have retired. I am afraid the students at my old high school now do not receive the type of education I did. While we did look at some of the bad things the US did (Sheridan wiping out the Indians, Japanese internment camps in WWII), he always went out of his way to show that those policies were viewed as necessary at the time.

Muslims have been a threat to the life and liberty of their neighbors for 14 centuries. Nothing has changed.

29 posted on 06/02/2004 6:19:30 AM PDT by Gritty ("Equality is unacceptable to Islam. The non-believer cannot be the equal of the believer-Amir Taheri)

Great article.

But, I still say we had our own jihad, right here in the good ol' US of A.

Only, we called it "Manifest Destiny".

Don't beat yourself up too badly. Think about the folks the Indians exterminated before their turn came.
And about the internment camps: Have you ever thought what would have happened to those Japanese Americans when we found out about things like the Bataan Death March? In many ways, the internment camps were protective custody...

"How easily evil seeps into pagan and idol worshipping cultures and infests their people with a murderous heart.
On the bright side, Christ always wins."

With prayer, as well as the will to fight as needed when needed (and no more) . . . The Christians prayed for the success of the Battle of Lepanto (at the request of the Pope), and Austria prayed itself out of the Soviet zone in the 50s -- with the rosary. Could/would they do it again today?

Will is necessary, but action without faith and prayer is not going to defeat Muslimism or any other evil. Just a reminder ;).

I never have felt "guilty" about the Indians or the Japenese. Those things happened in times of war, and while some of Sheridan's tactics would be labeled "war crimes" the fact that we can debate them now means that they worked.

My Grandpa remembered WWII very well. They burned all the German hymnals to avoid having the rest of the town burn down their houses.

My thoughts also.

Why did the author feel the necessity of ascribing a human origin to the Koran? I think it DID have a supernatural origin. Muhammed was talking to an unclean spirit in a cave and that's how the Koran was written.

The day will come, of course, when the Muzzies overreach.

They already have. 9/11 is a prime example of overreaching. Now if they'd waited till they had 'Nukes or a useable biological device...

(The red cross stated that 70-90% of prisoners held were innocent of any crime)or maybe you may call this a little fun, well the Nazis would have also called it a little fun.

And just how did the Red Cross arrive at that little statistic? Picked out of thin air, I bet.

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