The True History of Christendom and Islam

Posted By Raymond Ibrahim On February 13, 2015 @ 12:30 am In Daily Mailer,FrontPage | 3 Comments

U.S. President Barack Hussein Obama’s recent condemnation of medieval Christian history as a way to exonerate Islam is a reminder of how woefully ignorant (or intentionally deceptive) a good many people in the West are concerning the true history of Christian Europe and Islam.

The problem is that those who condemn things like the Crusades—including “mainstream” academics, journalists, movie-makers, and politicians—do so without mention of any historical context. Worse, they imply “we” already know the context: evil popes and greedy knights exploiting Christianity to seize Muslim lands and wealth. Or in the words of Karen Armstrong, “the idea that Islam imposed itself by the sword is a Western fiction, fabricated during the time of the Crusades when, in fact, it was Western Christians who were fighting brutal holy wars against Islam.”

Of course, the true story of Christendom and Islam is antithetically different. Consider some facts for a moment:

A mere decade after the birth of Islam in the 7^thcentury, the jihad burst out of Arabia. Leaving aside all the thousands of miles of ancient lands and civilizations that were permanently conquered—today casually called the “Islamic world,” including Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Iran, and parts of India and China—much of Europe was also, at one time or another, conquered by the sword of Islam.

Among other nations and territories that were attacked and/or came under Muslim domination are (to give them their modern names in no particular order): Portugal, Spain, France, Italy, Sicily, Switzerland, Austria, Hungary, Greece, Russia, Poland, Bulgaria, Ukraine, Lithuania, Romania, Albania, Serbia, Armenia, Georgia, Crete, Cyprus, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Macedonia, Belarus, Malta, Sardinia, Moldova, Slovakia, and Montenegro.

In 846 Rome was sacked and the Vatican defiled by Muslim Arab raiders; some 600 years later, in 1453, Christendom’s other great basilica, Holy Wisdom (or Hagia Sophia) was conquered by Muslim Turks, permanently. (Till this day, Turkish Muslims celebrate this day of great rapine and slaughter.)

The few European regions that escaped direct Islamic occupation due to their northwest remoteness include Great Britain, Scandinavia, and Germany. That, of course, does not mean that they were not attacked by Islam. Indeed, in the furthest northwest of Europe, in Iceland, Christians used to pray that God save them from the “terror of the Turk.” This was not mere paranoia; as late as 1627, Muslim corsairs raided the Christian island seizing four hundred captives and selling them in the slave markets of Algiers.

Nor did America escape. A few years after the formation of the United States, in 1800, American trading ships in the Mediterranean were plundered and their sailors enslaved by Muslim corsairs. The ambassador of Tripoli explained to Thomas Jefferson that it was a Muslim’s “right and duty to make war upon them [non-Muslims] wherever they could be found, and to enslave as many as they could take as prisoners.”

In short, for roughly one millennium—punctuated by a Crusader-rebuttal that the modern West is obsessed with demonizing—Islam daily posed an existential threat to Christian Europe and by extension Western civilization.

And therein lies the rub: Today, whether as taught in high school or graduate school, whether as portrayed by Hollywood or the news media, the predominant historic narrative is that Muslims are the historic “victims” of “intolerant” Western Christians. (Watch my response to a Fox News host asking why Christians have always persecuted Muslims.)

So here we are, paying the price of being an ahistorical society: A few years after the Islamic strikes of 9/11—merely the latest in the centuries-long, continents-wide jihad on the West—Americans elected (twice) a man with a Muslim name and heritage for president; a man who condemns the Christian Crusades while openly empowering the same ideology that the Crusaders fought for centuries.

Surely the United States’ European forebears—who at one time or another either fought off or were conquered by Islam—must be turning in their graves.

But all this is history, you say? Why rehash it? Why not let it be and move on, begin a new chapter of mutual tolerance and respect, even if history must be “touched up” a bit?

This would be a somewhat plausible position—if not for the fact that, all around the globe, Muslims are still exhibiting the same imperial impulse and intolerant supremacism that their conquering forbears did. The only difference is that the Muslim world is currently incapable of defeating the West through a conventional war.

Yet this may not even be necessary. Thanks to the West’s ignorance of history, Muslims are flooding Europe under the guise of “immigration,” refusing to assimilate, and forming enclaves which in modern parlance are called “ghettoes” but in Islamic terminology are the ribat—frontier posts where the jihad is waged on the infidel, one way or the other.

All this leads to another, perhaps even more important point: If the true history of the West and Islam is being turned upside its head, what other historical “orthodoxies” being peddled around as truth are also false?

Were the Dark Ages truly benighted because of the “suffocating” forces of Christianity? Or were these dark ages—which “coincidentally” occurred during the same centuries when jihad was constantly harrying Europe—a product of another suffocating “religion”?

Was the Spanish Inquisition—also condemned by Obama—a reflection of Christian barbarism or was it a reflection of Christian desperation vis-à-vis the hundreds of thousands of Muslims who, while claiming to have converted to Christianity, were practicing taqiyya and living as moles trying to subvert the Christian nation back to Islam?

Don’t expect to get true answers to these and other questions from the makers, guardians, and disseminators of the West’s fabricated epistemology.

In the future (whatever one there may be) the histories written about our times will likely stress how our era, ironically called the “information age,” was not an age when people were so well informed, but rather an age when disinformation was so widespread and unquestioned that generations of people lived in bubbles of alternate realities—till they were finally popped.

Don’t miss Shillman Fellow Raymond Ibrahim on The Glazov Gang discuss “ISIS’s Islamic Inspirations”:

Remember the massacre of Christians by Muslim in Otranto in the 15th century and Famagosta in the 16th century

THE CHRISTIAN MARTYRS OF OTRANTO (1480) AND FAMAGOSTA (1570)

2015, History repeats itself…

On May 12, 2013, Pope Francis Set to Canonize 800 Christians Slaughtered By Muslims in Otranto in 1480.
Those who depict Islam as a “religion of peace” are ignoring History, and as Spanish philosopher, George Santayana said: “Those who do not learn from history are damned to repeat it.”

OBAMA: ISLAM IS A RELIGION OF PEACE
THE REAL FACE OF ISLAM

OTRANTO - MASSACRE OF CHRISTIANS BY MUSLIMS (1480)
THE SIEGE OF FAMAGOSTA (1570)

800 Italians Men Beheaded in Otranto in 1480 for Refusing Islam, by the Turks, with the Approval of Sultan Mehmet II
http://www.antisharia.com/2011/07/26/800-italian-men-beheaded-in-otranto-in-1480-for-refusing-islamby-the-turks-with-the-approval-of-sultan-mehmet-ii/

On August 14, 1480, a massacre happened on a hill outside the city of Otranto, in southern Italy, here 800 of the town’s men were taken to a place called the Hill of the Minerva, and, one by one, beheaded in full view of their fellow prisoners. It became known as the Hill of the Martyrs.

They died because they refused to convert to Islam. The 800 men of Otranto were martyrs. But due to their sacrifice, however, the Ottoman invasion was slowed and Rome was spared the same fate that had befallen Constantinople only 27 years before.

The people of Otranto knew of the siege of Constantinople and that when that city fell the Muslims pillaged the city, but the key moment came when they reached Hagia Sophia.

In Constantinople, after breaking down the church’s bronze gates, they found inside a huge throng of Byzantines who had taken refuge and who were praying that the city might be delivered by some miracle. The Christians were seized and separated according to age and gender. The infants and elderly were brutally murdered; the men, including some of the city’s most prominent senators, were carted off to the slave markets; and the women and girls were taken by soldiers to be raped or sent into a life of slavery.

At Otranto, the terms of the Muslims were ostensibly generous. If the town surrendered, the defenders would be permitted to live. They said no, it was repeated and again it was no. It was the city against 18,000 Muslims and it lasted 2 weeks.
]
Slaughter, Sacrilege, and Slavery

Turkish troops entered and killed anyone in their path. They made their way to the cathedral. As in the Hagia Sophia, the invaders found the church filled with people praying with Archbishop Stefano Agricoli, Bishop Stephen Pendinelli, and Count Largo, the commander of the soldiers. The Ottomans commanded:

1.The archbishop to throw away his crucifix, abjure the Christian faith, and embrace Islam. When he refused, his head was cut off before the weeping congregation.

2.Bishop Pendinelli and Count Largo likewise would not convert and were also put to death, reportedly by being slowly sawed in half.

3.As was the custom, the priests were murdered and the cathedral was stripped of all Christian symbols and turned into a stable for the horses. The Ottomans then gathered up the surviving people of Otranto and took them as captives.
The people of Otranto faced the same end as the Christians of Constantinople. All of the men over the age of 50 were slaughtered; the women and children under the age of 15
were either slain or sent away to Albania to be slaves.

According to some contemporary sources, the total number of dead was as high as 12,000, with another 5,000 pressed into slavery.

800 Men who survived told to Convert to Islam or Die
The Muslim commander ordered the men of Otranto, 800 survivors of the battle, those who were not over 50 and had not been already killed in battle or later, or were not children and had not be killed or enslaved, to be brought before him.

He gave them one chance to convert to Islam or die. To convince them, he instructed an Italian apostate priest named Giovanni to preach. The former priest called on the men of Otranto to abandon the Christian faith, and they would get many benefits.

One of the men of Otranto, a tailor named Antonio Primaldi (he is also named Antonio Pezzulla in some sources), came forward to speak to the survivors. He called out that he was ready to die for Christ a thousand times. He then added, according to the chronicler Giovanni Laggetto in the Historia della guerra di Otranto del 1480:

“My brothers, till today we have fought in defense of our country, to save our lives, and for our lords; now it is time that we fight to save our souls for our Lord, so that having died on the cross for us, it is good that we should die for him, standing firm and constant in the faith, and with this earthly death we will win eternal life and the glory of martyrs.”

At this, the men of Otranto cried out with one voice that they too were willing to die a thousand times for Christ.

The Execution

The next morning, August 14, the 800 prisoners were bound together with ropes. The victims repeated their pledge to be faithful to Christ, and the Ottomans chose the courageous Antonio Primaldi as the first to be executed.
The old tailor gave one final exhortation to his fellow prisoners and knelt before the executioner. The blade fell and decapitated him, but then, as the chronicler Saverio de Marco claimed in the Compendiosa istoria degli ottocento martiri otrantini (“The Brief History of the 800 Martyrs of Otranto”), the headless corpse stood back upright. The body supposedly proved unmovable, so it remained standing for the entire duration of the gruesome executions.

Stunned by this apparent miracle, one of the executioners converted on the spot and was immediately killed. The executioners then returned to their horrendous business.
The bodies were placed into a mass grave, and the Turks prepared to begin their march to Rome.

So here we are, paying the price of being an ahistorical society:

A few years after the Islamic strikes of 9/11—merely the latest in the centuries-long, continents-wide jihad on the West — Americans elected (twice) a man with a Muslim name and heritage for president; a man who condemns the Christian Crusades while openly empowering the same ideology that the Crusaders fought for centuries. Surely the United States’ European forebears—who at one time or another either fought off or were conquered by Islam — must be turning in their graves.

But all this is history, you say? Why rehash it? Why not let it be and move on, begin a new chapter of mutual tolerance and respect, even if history must be “touched up” a bit?

This would be a somewhat plausible position — if not for the fact that, all around the globe, Muslims are still exhibiting the same imperial impulse and intolerant supremacism that their conquering forbears did. - The only difference is that the Muslim world is currently incapable of defeating the West through a conventional war.

Yet this may not even be necessary.

Thanks to the West’s ignorance of history, Muslims are flooding Europe under the guise of “immigration,” refusing to assimilate, - and forming enclaves which in modern parlance are called “ghettoes” but in Islamic terminology are the ribat — frontier posts where the jihad is waged on the infidel, one way or the other.

Were the Dark Ages truly benighted because of the “suffocating” forces of Christianity? Or were these dark ages — which “coincidentally” occurred during the same centuries when jihad was constantly harrying Europe — a product of another suffocating “religion”?

Was the Spanish Inquisition — also condemned by o-bama — a reflection of Christian barbarism or was it a reflection of Christian desperation vis-à-vis the hundreds of thousands of Muslims

who, while claiming to have converted to Christianity, were practicing -- taqiyya -- and living as moles trying to subvert the Christian nation back to Islam?

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