A fool lies here who tried to hustle the East (Kipling) barfarama

Think about this from another perspective. Nothing seems what it really is. First, civilians and military people are really the same people—citizen and soldier. And not all “soldiers” wear uniforms. Many of our Revolutionary soldiers, for example, came as is. Were they “enemy combatants”? May be to the British. The military is always composed of the nation’s citizens unless they hire soldiers-of-fortune. Civil wars (an oxymoron, I know) are called “civil” because they are composed of civilians and military who take sides in a domestic divide. Sometimes they wear uniforms and sometimes they don’t. This is why the Viet Nam war, regardless of the force imposed by an outsider, was not “winnable” (By US definition). This was because it really was two wars: a civil war and a war of nationalism—which appears when there is a foreign occupier in the “homelands.” Invaders never can settle a civil war because they are then forced to take sides. And their side may loose. That certainly is not a good reason to die. Same, same for Iraq. It is principally a civil war today—civilians joining one of many tribal armies, and fighting each other. Even el Qaeda is odd army out and a bit player today. It didn’t have to be that way in Iraq, but because of the way we conducted the war, for example dismantling the Iraq army and going in under strength, we set up Iraq up for a fall, and it fell indeed. Remember Tip O’Neill’s famous line about all politics being local? Well, that is not just an American truism. The conflict in Iraq is local . . . neighborhood by neighborhood, region by region, and tribe against tribe. And it is national—there is a foreign occupying force in their midst’s. And when you add the cultural and psychological nature of Arab ways, you simply can never win and we had no business being there. This is what Kipling warned the world about when he wrote Solo from Libretto of 'Naulahka' : Now, it is not good for the Christian’s health to hustle the Aryan [1] brown, For the Christian riles, and the Aryan smiles, and he weareth the Christian down; And the end of the fight is a tombstone white, with the name of the late deceased, And the epitaph drear: ‘A fool lies here who tried to hustle the East.’ by Rudyard Kipling

In this case the “Fool” is not getting shot or dying, but his surrogates certainly are. There are over 3,000 "tombstone white" to date. And the Aryan smiles.

No one has ever stilled the Arab passion for independence, tribal ways, and any Nation from the West or East who tried, lost in the end. We too have lost even though we win all battles. We have also lost the region, we have lost our Arab allies, and we soured that part of the world (If not the rest of the World) on this concept we call “democracy.” Further, the Persians (Iranians) have always been either the dominate power of that region, or in pursuit of that power for many thousands of years and they like it that way. It is their habit and it not going to stop. Interestingly, much of our present and past cultural traditions find their roots in the East as well. This is where Bush and the US military leaders failed: they simply ignored history of the region, and ignored the cultural traditions of the local people, not only in Iraq, but in Iran, Syria, and Afghanistan (which, by the way, we will lose in time according to history). The fact that many of our social and science heritages are really Arabic, from the intuition of marriage, to our math, medicine, and physics, for example, and goes mostly unrecognized, says much about Americans’ ignorance about their roots as is their President's. The Muslims learned science and math from the Greeks, Egyptians, Indians, and Babylonians. Many translations took place in the House of Wisdom in Baghdad, the capital of the Abbasid Empire. The Muslim scholars there translated the works of the Greeks who loved mathematics and geometry, including Euclid's work on geometry. They borrowed from India a number system that had a zero and rewrote it as their own. They borrowed from the Babylonians whose number system was based on 60 (just like the minutes in an hour we use today), and from the ancient Egyptians who had the math and geometry skills to build incredible pyramids. So from the beginning, "Arabic math" was a mixing of international knowledge. But the Muslims made additional contributions of their own and through their study and written work, they preserved the knowledge of mathematics that otherwise might have been lost to the world. Our invention of the computer, our trip to the moon, our agriculture power, or discoveries in medicine, to mention few, would not have appeared had not the Muslims, Persians, and Arabs guarded the secrets of math and science from the anti-science Christians and invading Armies from Europe and Asia. While Galileo was locked up under house arrest by Christians for expanding the Arabic understandings of the Universe, math, geometry, and our galaxy, the Arabs guarded these sciences from religious fundamentalists. That said, there are the social and cultural traditions from this region that went to Europe, then crossed the Atlantic to the good old USA. Our slave ownership tradition used for agriculture is Arabic. Our marriage traditions, including the vale over the brides face until married, are Arabic and started in about 1,800 BC. Other marriage Arabic traditions include the woman taking her husband's family name, and until the 20th Century, about the 1960’s, women in our culture could not get credit unless it was tied to her husbands credit. In 1776, New Jersey and only New Jersey gave the vote to women owning more than $250. Later the state reconsidered and women were no longer allowed to vote. Until the 20’s American women could not vote, readily go to college, own property, divorce, enter politics, and so forth. These are all Arabic traditions, many of which started in Iraq. Women's dress in Islamic culture is based on a principle of female modesty. Look at the Muslim women’s dress today, and there is not much difference between them and a traditional Catholic nun’s, or an Amish or Mormon women, or the dress of the pilgrims and first Americans. These dress codes are not Christian, but Arabic. Our dress traditions really didn’t start to change from these traditions until the 1920’s. The point in all of this is we tend to ignore history and the understandings they bring to the table of life. We do so at our peril. And Bush continues in his ignorance in not only the history of the Nations he chose to invade, but the history of his own nation. I suspect Bush was popular because he reminded the average American of himself . . . ignorant of the world’s ways and black-and-white thinking. Well, as we have painfully learned, our President needs to be above average. He/she needs to be knowledgeable in the ways of the street, in science, world history, military history, and the cultural realities of foreign people. The president should be above average in smarts. And lacking any of these skills, he needs to be surrounded by people who do have these understandings. Bush went to war ignorant, surrounded himself by ignorance, and still fails to understand or appreciate what is really going on in Iraq and the rest of the world. His eyes truly are wide shut. So were the Flag officers in our military who put their thumb print on their failed battle plan, and failure to stick to known historic understandings of how many boots on the ground are necessary to occupy a foreign land the size of Iraq and large cities. The basics of Military Science 101 has not changed for thousands of years. Some of our senior officers seriously failed both their Nation’s citizens and their soldiers and Marines. FOOT NOTE: [1] Indo-Iranian languages of the 3rd or 4th millennium BC, "Aryan" may or may not have had any racial meaning, certainly not in the sense that the concept of race is distorted today. In this sense an "Aryan" (Spiritual, Noble) identity is mentioned in Old Persian inscriptions and other Persian sources from c. 500 BC onwards. The word originally (and legitimately) applied to the Indo-Iranian culture, became tied in nineteenth century linguistics to Indo-European culture as a whole as ethnologists and linguists speculated that Europeans descended from an ancient people called the Aryans from the Middle East and Persia (Iran).

I suggest you might copy the following and send to your brother as an antidote- I can't help that he's a liberal but can't allow him to remain so totally ignorant of history:

What Arab Civilization?
This letter was sent to Carly Fiorina, CEO of Hewlett Packard Corporation, in response to a speech given by her on September 26, 2001.

November 7, 2001

Carly Fiorina
Hewlett-Packard
3000 Hanover Street
Palo Alto, CA 94304-1185

Dear Madame Fiorina:

It is with great interest that I read your speech delivered on September 26, 2001, titled "Technology, Business and Our way of Life: What's Next" [sic]. I was particularly interested in the story you told at the end of your speech, about the Arab/Muslim civilization. As an Assyrian, a non-Arab, Christian native of the Middle East, whose ancestors reach back to 5000 B.C., I wish to clarify some points you made in this little story, and to alert you to the dangers of unwittingly being drawn into the Arabist/Islamist ideology, which seeks to assimilate all cultures and religions into the Arab/Islamic fold.

I know you are a very busy woman, but please find ten minutes to read what follows, as it is a perspective that you will not likely get from anywhere else. I will answer some of the specific points you made in your speech, then conclude with a brief perspective on this Arabist/Islamist ideology.

Arabs and Muslims appeared on the world scene in 630 A.D., when the armies of Muhammad began their conquest of the Middle East. We should be very clear that this was a military conquest, not a missionary enterprise, and through the use of force, authorized by a declaration of a Jihad against infidels, Arabs/Muslims were able to forcibly convert and assimilate non-Arabs and non-Mulsims into their fold. Very few indigenous communities of the Middle East survived this -- primarily Assyrians, Jews, Armenians and Coptics (of Egypt).

Having conquered the Middle East, Arabs placed these communities under a Dhimmi (see the book Dhimmi, by Bat Ye'Or) system of governance, where the communities were allowed to rule themselves as religious minorities (Christians, Jews and Zoroastrian). These communities had to pay a tax (called a Jizzya in Arabic) that was, in effect, a penalty for being non-Muslim, and that was typically 80% in times of tolerance and up to 150% in times of oppression. This tax forced many of these communities to convert to Islam, as it was designed to do.

You state, "its architects designed buildings that defied gravity." I am not sure what you are referring to, but if you are referring to domes and arches, the fundamental architectural breakthrough of using a parabolic shape instead of a spherical shape for these structures was made by the Assyrians more than 1300 years earlier, as evidenced by their archaeological record.

You state, "its mathematicians created the algebra and algorithms that would enable the building of computers, and the creation of encryption." The fundamental basis of modern mathematics had been laid down not hundreds but thousands of years before by Assyrians and Babylonians, who already knew of the concept of zero, of the Pythagorean Theorem, and of many, many other developments expropriated by Arabs/Muslims (see History of Babylonian Mathematics, Neugebauer).

You state, "its doctors examined the human body, and found new cures for disease." The overwhelming majority of these doctors (99%) were Assyrians. In the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries Assyrians began a systematic translation of the Greek body of knowledge into Assyrian. At first they concentrated on the religious works but then quickly moved to science, philosophy and medicine. Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Galen, and many others were translated into Assyrian, and from Assyrian into Arabic. It is these Arabic translations which the Moors brought with them into Spain, and which the Spaniards translated into Latin and spread throughout Europe, thus igniting the European Renaissance.

By the sixth century A.D., Assyrians had begun exporting back to Byzantia their own works on science, philosophy and medicine. In the field of medicine, the Bakhteesho Assyrian family produced nine generations of physicians, and founded the great medical school at Gundeshapur (Iran). Also in the area of medicine, (the Assyrian) Hunayn ibn-Ishaq's textbook on ophthalmology, written in 950 A.D., remained the authoritative source on the subject until 1800 A.D.

In the area of philosophy, the Assyrian philosopher Job of Edessa developed a physical theory of the universe, in the Assyrian language, that rivaled Aristotle's theory, and that sought to replace matter with forces (a theory that anticipated some ideas in quantum mechanics, such as the spontaneous creation and destruction of matter that occurs in the quantum vacuum).

One of the greatest Assyrian achievements of the fourth century was the founding of the first university in the world, the School of Nisibis, which had three departments, theology, philosophy and medicine, and which became a magnet and center of intellectual development in the Middle East. The statutes of the School of Nisibis, which have been preserved, later became the model upon which the first Italian university was based (see The Statutes of the School of Nisibis, by Arthur Voobus).

When Arabs and Islam swept through the Middle East in 630 A.D., they encountered 600 years of Assyrian Christian civilization, with a rich heritage, a highly developed culture, and advanced learning institutions. It is this civilization that became the foundation of the Arab civilization.

You state, "Its astronomers looked into the heavens, named the stars, and paved the way for space travel and exploration." This is a bit melodramatic. In fact, the astronomers you refer to were not Arabs but Chaldeans and Babylonians (of present day south-Iraq), who for millennia were known as astronomers and astrologers, and who were forcibly Arabized and Islamized -- so rapidly that by 750 A.D. they had disappeared completely.

You state, "its writers created thousands of stories. Stories of courage, romance and magic. Its poets wrote of love, when others before them were too steeped in fear to think of such things." There is very little literature in the Arabic language that comes from this period you are referring to (the Koran is the only significant piece of literature), whereas the literary output of the Assyrians and Jews was vast. The third largest corpus of Christian writing, after Latin and Greek, is by the Assyrians in the Assyrian language (also called Syriac; see here.)

You state, "when other nations were afraid of ideas, this civilization thrived on them, and kept them alive. When censors threatened to wipe out knowledge from past civilizations, this civilization kept the knowledge alive, and passed it on to others." This is a very important issue you raise, and it goes to the heart of the matter of what Arab/Islamic civilization represents. I reviewed a book titled How Greek Science Passed to the Arabs, in which the author lists the significant translators and interpreters of Greek science. Of the 22 scholars listed, 20 were Assyrians, 1 was Persian and 1 an Arab. I state at the end of my review: "The salient conclusion which can be drawn from O'Leary's book is that Assyrians played a significant role in the shaping of the Islamic world via the Greek corpus of knowledge. If this is so, one must then ask the question, what happened to the Christian communities which made them lose this great intellectual enterprise which they had established. One can ask this same question of the Arabs. Sadly, O'Leary's book does not answer this question, and we must look elsewhere for the answer." I did not answer this question I posed in the review because it was not the place to answer it, but the answer is very clear, the Christian Assyrian community was drained of its population through forced conversion to Islam (by the Jizzya), and once the community had dwindled below a critical threshold, it ceased producing the scholars that were the intellectual driving force of the Islamic civilization, and that is when the so called "Golden Age of Islam" came to an end (about 850 A.D.).

Islam the religion itself was significantly molded by Assyrians and Jews (see Nestorian Influence on Islam and Hagarism: the Making of the Islamic World).

Arab/Islamic civilization is not a progressive force, it is a regressive force; it does not give impetus, it retards. The great civilization you describe was not an Arab/Muslim accomplishment, it was an Assyrian accomplishment that Arabs expropriated and subsequently lost when they drained, through the forced conversion of Assyrians to Islam, the source of the intellectual vitality that propelled it. What other Arab/Muslim civilization has risen since? What other Arab/Muslim successes can we cite?

You state, "and perhaps we can learn a lesson from his [Suleiman] example: It was leadership based on meritocracy, not inheritance. It was leadership that harnessed the full capabilities of a very diverse population that included Christianity, Islamic, and Jewish traditions." In fact, the Ottomans were extremely oppressive to non-Muslims. For example, young Christian boys were forcefully taken from their families, usually at the age of 8-10, and inducted into the Janissaries, (yeniceri in Turkish) where they were Islamized and made to fight for the Ottoman state. What literary, artistic or scientific achievements of the Ottomans can we point to? We can, on the other hand, point to the genocide of 750,000 Assyrians, 1.5 million Armenians and 400,000 Greeks in World War One by the Kemalist "Young Turk" government. This is the true face of Islam.

Arabs/Muslims are engaged in an explicit campaign of destruction and expropriation of cultures and communities, identities and ideas. Wherever Arab/Muslim civilization encounters a non-Arab/Muslim one, it attempts to destroy it (as the Buddhist statues in Afghanistan were destroyed, as Persepolis was destroyed by the Ayotollah Khomeini). This is a pattern that has been recurring since the advent of Islam, 1400 years ago, and is amply substantiated by the historical record. If the "foreign" culture cannot be destroyed, then it is expropriated, and revisionist historians claim that it is and was Arab, as is the case of most of the Arab "accomplishments" you cited in your speech. For example, Arab history texts in the Middle East teach that Assyrians were Arabs, a fact that no reputable scholar would assert, and that no living Assyrian would accept. Assyrians first settled Nineveh, one of the major Assyrian cities, in 5000 B.C., which is 5630 years before Arabs came into that area. Even the word 'Arab' is an Assyrian word, meaning "Westerner" (the first written reference to Arabs was by the Assyrian King Sennacherib, 800 B.C., in which he tells of conquering the "ma'rabayeh" -- Westerners. See The Might That Was Assyria, by H. W. F. Saggs).

Even in America this Arabization policy continues. On October 27th a coalition of seven Assyrian and Maronite organizations sent an official letter to the Arab American Institute asking it to stop identifying Assyrians and Maronites as Arabs, which it had been deliberately doing.

There are minorities and nations struggling for survival in the Arab/Muslim ocean of the Middle East and Africa (Assyrians, Armenians, Coptics, Jews, southern Sudanese, Ethiopians, Nigerians...), and we must be very sensitive not to unwittingly and inadvertently support Islamic fascism and Arab Imperialism, with their attempts to wipe out all other cultures, religions and civilizations. It is incumbent upon each one of us to do our homework and research when making statements and speeches about these sensitive matters.

I hope you found this information enlightening.

Thank you for your consideration.

Peter BetBasoo

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LOL ...and another reason some may tend to discount much of what this writer has to say, is that he evidently doesn't spend a lot of time 'proof-reading'...

Personally, I much preferred reading this...