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Server OF JUST Desserts (SJD)
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Date Posted: 23:40:59 05/30/04 Sun
The Violence of Islam in the Modern Era
Muslim atrocities against non-Muslim conquered populations continue into the modern era. In 1894, Sultan Abdul Hamid II instituted a pogrom against Orthodox Armenians who refused to abide by a 100% increase in the rents which the Turkish government charged them. Between 1894-1896, over 150,000 Armenians were killed by either the sword or starvation, another 100,000 driven into exile, and 40,000 escaped by conversion to Islam 33. Again, between 1915 and 1918, the Turks carried out genocide against the Armenians. Families were torn apart, the men being taken out and shot, and the women and children forced to march until they died of exhaustion or starvation 34. In this time, a quarter of a million Armenians were able to escape to Russia, while another 200,000 saved themselves by converting to Islam. However, the best estimates say that more than one and a half million Armenians were killed by this Muslim atrocity. Turkish Armenia ceased to exist.
The Greeks also have suffered holocaust at the hands of Muslims in this century. In an effort to complete the Islamisation of Turkish dominions, efforts to destroy or drive out the mostly Orthodox Greek populations were begun in 1913. That year, 16,000 Greeks were murdered in Eastern Thrace (on the European side of the Dardanelles). In 1914, Greeks were ordered to vacate the city of Pergamum, and were massacred in Erythrea and Phocaia. That same year, 400,000 Greeks died from malnourishment and mistreatment in forced-labour battalions, and 120,000 Greeks were driven from their homes in Eastern Thrace, fleeing as refugees to the Kingdom of Greece. In 1917, 23,000 Greeks were deported from Cydoniae, and in 1918, another 8,000 Greek families were expelled from southwestern Asia Minor. In 1922, 300,000 more Greeks were forced out of Eastern Thrace, and at Smyrna, 150,000 Greeks and Armenians were massacred by Turkish forces 35. It is important to keep in mind that all of these areas mentioned: Eastern Thrace, the Ionian isles, and southwestern Asia Minor, were all traditionally Greek cultural areas, dating back to the Mycenaean period over 1000 years before Christ. The Islamisation of these areas by the removal of the Greeks is therefore very clearly seen as an act of jihad, the conquest of territory for Islam. Muslim apologists even today try to claim that these actions were not Muslim, but secular, since it is often touted that Enver Pasha and other Turkish leaders who ordered these atrocities were secular. However, their "secularity" is demonstrated by the fact that the Young Turk regime "resumed the teaching of Islamic religion in the public schools, opened state schools for the training of religious functionaries and taken such measures for the promotion of religion as putting Qur'anic programs on the state radio" 36.
Jihad is still alive and well today, and is not just the province of a few militant radicals. The forcible advancement of Islam, coupled with a contrived hatred for the Western world, appeals to the hearts and minds of millions of disaffected Muslims worldwide, many of them young and eager to give their lives in the cause of Allah. Many well-educated Muslims, in the Middle East and in the West, have taken hold of the intellectual cause of Islamism and support this jihad wholeheartedly. Witness the exultation of Muslims worldwide at the destruction of the World Trade Centre towers...not only in Palestinian, Pakistani, and Egyptian villages and slums, but also in more well-to-do North African neighbourhoods in France and on many college campuses in North America.
The fields of battle which radical Islam is pushing range all across the globe. In 1974, Turkey invaded Cyprus and waged war on the Greeks yet again, who were ostensibly Turkey's NATO ally. Pakistani mujahedeen and terror bombers seek to force the Indians out of Kashmir and unite that province with Pakistan. Muslims in East Timor murdered and displaced hundreds of thousands of Roman Catholics before the UN intervened with Australian troops. In Mindanao, Muslims are murdering Roman Catholics and Christians, and throughout the Middle East, Christians and others of all kinds of religions are persecuted and killed. In 1981, Muslim fanatics rioted in Cairo against the Coptic Christian population, murdering over 100 individuals. In 1947, after the splitting of the Indian subcontinent between Muslim Pakistan and Hindu India, Muslims instituted a reign of terror against Christian, Hindu, and Buddhist minorities in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh). People were killed, property was confiscated, refugees left penniless, and Hindu women were taken and given to Muslim men for the purposes of polygamy. The wickedness of the Muslim actions earned for Islam the turning of its name into an acronym standing for "Intolerance, Slaughter, Loot, Arson and Molestation" 37. In 1950, half a million more Hindus were butchered, and in 1971, during Bangladesh's war for independence from Pakistan, Pakistani soldiers murdered another 3 million Hindus and other religious minorities. In 1981, after gaining complete control of Iran, the Islamist revolutionaries under the Ayatollah Khomeini engaged in a systematic oppression of Iran's Bahai minority, murdering them and taking their property. Presently, Sudanese Muslims are waging a war of jihad against Christians and animists in the southern part of that country, killing many, and taking others as slaves. In Mauritania, thousands of black Africans have been murdered or expelled by Islamist radicals who have instituted sharia law in that nation. In that country, over 90,000 people are still reported to be living in slavery 38. Muslims in northern Nigeria continue their effort to establish sharia Islamic law over non-Muslims.
Of course, there is also the continual intifada which the Palestinians under Yasser Arafat and other radical Islamist leaders carry out. Thousands of Israelis have been killed or maimed through cowardly Palestinian terror bombings. Many of these bombs have been specifically targeted at children, as have rifle and mortar attacks on schools and homes in Israel. Perhaps the most notorious Arab crime against Israel was the murder of eleven Israeli athletes which Fatah (Arafat's terror organisation) terrorists had taken hostage at the 1972 Olympics in Münich, Germany. Of course, Muslim jihad has also launched five wars against Israel, which have all failed to drive the Jews from the Holy Land.
This voluminous amount of information about Islamic practice, even in the present, only constitutes a small portion of what could be said about Islamic violence against non-Muslims. It seems evident that every place in which Muslims make up a significant portion of the population, efforts are made to subjugate or drive out non-Muslims. The conclusion pretty much has to be made that Islam is most certainly NOT the peaceful, tolerant, loving religion which it is claimed to be. More on the "tolerance" of Islam will be seen in the next chapter.
Please note that the above should not be construed to say that every Muslim is a violent individual. Many Muslims are indeed peaceful people who get along well in non-Muslim societies. I have known several Muslims with whom I have worked, who did not take the Islamic faith very seriously and were decent, kind individuals. Still, the record of Islam on violence and forcible conversion is practically unrivaled in sheer magnitude, even by Roman Catholicism with all of its inquisitions, conquistadors, and counter-reformations. One is forced to wonder when Islam will begin to practice that verse in the Qur'an which their apologists love to quote, "Let there be no compulsion in religion..." (Surah 2:256)
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