Posted on 06/22/2004 11:49:46 AM PDT by clintonbaiter
Watching and listening to the Democrat Party candidates is tantamount to enduring the Chinese water torture The blah, blah, blah goes on and on and nothing of value comes out, except the pain of listening to the same nothingness over and over again. I won't take the time or space to repeat what you have heard so many mind numbing times, but what you have not heard is crucial.
President Bush and his administration spokesmen are not telling the American people what they really need to know about this "war." If they don't do that between now and November, it may cost them the election.
The war against terror did not begin on September 11, 2001, nor will it end with the peaceful transition to civilian authority in Iraq, whenever that may be. In fact, Iraq is but a footnote in the bigger context of this encounter, but an important one nonetheless.
This war is what the Shadiest themselves are calling the "Third Great Jihad." They are operating within the framework of a time line which reaches back to the very creation of Islam in the seventh century, and are presently attempting to recreate the dynamics, which gave rise to the religion in the first two hundred years of its existence.
No religion in history grew as fast, in its infancy, and the reasons for the initial growth of Islam are not hard to explain when you understand what the world was like at the time of Muhammad's death, in 632 AD. Remember that the Western Roman Empire was in ruins, and the Eastern Empire, based in Constantinople, was trying desperately to keep the power of its early grandeur, while transitioning to Christianity as a de facto state religion. The costs to the average person were large, as he was being required to meet the constantly rising taxes levied by the state, along with the tithes coerced by the Church.
What Islam offered was the "carrot or the sword". If you became a convert, your taxes were immediately eliminated, as was your tithe. If you didn't, you faced death. The choice was not hard for most to make, unless you were a very devoted martyr in the making. At the beginning, even the theology was not too hard for most to swallow, considering that both Jewry and Christianity were given their due by the Prophet. There is but one God - Allah, and Muhammad is His Prophet, as was Jesus, and the pre-Christian Jewish prophets of the Torah (Old Testament). Both were called "children of the book" - the book being the Koran, which replaced both the Old and New Testaments for former Christians and Jews.
With this practical approach to spreading the "word," Islam grew like wild-fire, reaching out from the Saudi Arabian Peninsula in all directions. This early growth is what the Muslims call the "First great Jihad," and it met with little resistance until Charles Martel of France, the father of Charlemagne, stopped them in the battle of Tours, in France, after they had firmly established Islam on the Iberian Peninsula. This first onslaught against the West continued in various forms and at various times, until Islam was finally driven out of Spain in 1492 at the battle of Granada.
The "Second great jihad" came with the Ottoman Turks. This empire succeeded in bringing about the downfall of Constantinople as a Christian stronghold and an end to Roman hegemony in all of its forms. The Ottoman Empire was Islam's most successful expansion of territory even though the religion itself had fractured into warring sects and bitter rivalries with each claiming the ultimate truths in "the ways of the Prophet". By 1683 the Ottomans had suffered a series of defeats on both land and sea and the final, unsuccessful attempt to capture Vienna set the stage for the collapse of any further territorial ambitions and Islam shrunk into various sheikhdoms, emir dominated principalities, and roving tribes of nomads. However, by this time a growing anti-western sentiment, blaming its internal failures on anyone but themselves, was taking hold and setting the stage for a new revival known as Wahhabism, a sect which came into full bloom under the House of Saud on the Arabian Peninsula shortly before the onset of WWI. It is this Wahhabi version of Islam which has infected the religion itself, now finding adherents in almost all branches and sects, especially the Shiites.
Wahhabiism calls for the complete and total rejection, or destruction, of anything and everything which is not based in the original teachings of The Prophet and finds its most glaring practice in the policies of the Afghani Taliban or the Shiite practices of the late Ayatollah Khomeini, in Iran. Its Ali Pasha (Field Marshall) is now known as Osama bin Laden, the leader of the "Third Jihad," who is Wahhabi as were his 9/11 attack teams, 18 of which were also Saudi.
The strategy for this "holy war" did not begin with the planning of the destruction of the World Trade Center. It began with the toppling of the Shah of Iran, back in the late 1970's. With his plans and programs to "westernize" his country, along with his close ties to the U.S. and subdued acceptance of the State of Israel, the Shah was the soft target. Remember "America Held Hostage"?
Thanks, in large part to the hypocritical and disastrous policies of the Jimmy Carter State Department, the revolution was set into motion, the Shah was deposed, his armed forces scattered or murdered and stage one was complete. The Third Jihad now had a base of operations and the oil wealth to support its grand design, or what they call the "Great Caliphate"......
(Excerpt) Read more at iconoclast.ca ...
bump for later read
New Iraqi army officers gather under a portrait of Jordan's King Abdullah after a graduation ceremony, following ten weeks of training in the Jordanian city of Zarqa, June 17, 2004. Some 850 Iraqi army officers consisting of Kurds, Sunnis and Shi'ites, graduated in Jordan on Thursday after receiving training in internal security, democracy reinforcement and fighting terrorism. REUTERS/Ali Jarekji
You don't say...
Love it! A heart-warming dream, altho' I fear 'twill be the other way around.
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