Posted on 06/02/2004 4:13:40 AM PDT by dennisw
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 would settle for seeing the British vs. Islamists in the early 20th Century.
Enjoy the complementary chicharonnes, Don't forget to pay your tab before you leave.
What?!!! Gone? And I just told him off so good!! Dang it. :)
Hmmmm, interesting comparison.
Is he OK in Israel and studying hard?
Seemed pretty specific in the article. Reminded me of that black congressman who said so many slaves were dumped overboard that sharks patrolled those waters for 70 years afterwards.
Not that I don't believe the Aztecs were exactly as described. The vileness potential of human beings has never been sounded.
Often many victims were killed at once. In 1487, according to legend, Aztec priests sacrificed more than 80,000 prisoners of war at the dedication of the reconstructed temple of the sun god in Tenochtitlán.
http://216.239.53.104/search?q=cache:fXrrOBoSVT0J:encarta.msn.com/encyclopedia_761593151/Aztec_Empire.html+AZTECS+KILLED+DEDICATION+SUN&hl=en
If Ms. England hadn't stacked them up, they would have eventually done it themselves, just like at Gitmo.
Excellent article!
So, dennisw - did you pick up "Hummingbird and the Hawk"? I wanted to know what you thought of it.
I have not picked it up yet. There is very little on the internet about it. For me to get a better idea about it.
Is it unique among books about the Azteca?
It was among the first books to interpret human sacrifice not just as a religion but as a tool to subjugate the neighboring tribes. The tributes were mostly young men of military age and tended to increase when crops were bad or other factors made the Mexica's grip looser.
The title comes from the Aztec (Mexica) god Xuitzilopotchli which was the humminbird god to which most of the victims were sacrificed. The Hawk is Cortez. The book is mostly a history of the initial contacts, battles, and eventual conquest of the Mexica. There are some sections that read like something out of Indiana Jones - it is not excessively dry history. The author makes it a fairly easy and interesting read.
One of the more horrifying things I didn't know before reading the book was that after the Europeans landed several vicious epidemics of colds, flu, measles, and other diseases ravaged the Mexica. The priests assumed that meant that the gods were displeased, and the only way to get back in their good graces was to drastically increase the number of sacrifices.
bttttt
I do like Jack Wheeler
btttttttttttt
mark
Amusing to hear that you are concerned about prisoner "abuse" while the Islamic killers cut the heads off of people and feel God commands them to do so. This shows the corrupt understanding of God which has unbalanced this bunch and unleashed this war.
Should the "abuse" be multiplied by 10 it still wouldn't amount to much and the Iraqis have pretty much laughed these absurd charges off having great familiarity with REAL abuse.
Obviously you have no knowledge of the Nazi's methods or you would not have made such a ridiculous comparison. Nor have you indicated any willingness to face the truth of the Nazi/Islamic connection during that era. This connection provided the war machine with soldiers and intelligence against the Allies.
Your Goering quotation is meaningless since American leaders did not have to TELL the people they were under attack; it was painfully obvious on 9/11 that we were and it was clear from which quarter that attack came, the Islamic terror movement. This movement will be destroyed and the only question is how much of Islam will go down with it. Or will it decide that civilization is better than oblivion?
So you don't know anything about Manifest Destiny or jihad.
Greed and Gold had nothing to do with it....right? Or the license to steal called "Manifest Destiny".
While I personally believe Christ is the true G-d, I notice that evil seeps into even the hearts of those who claim to be His followers. The heart appears to still be deceitful above all things.
Shalom.
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