No Clash of Civilizations but a Clash between... Middle Ages and 21st Century

MEMRI TV (Middle East Media Research Institute ^ | 2/21/06 | Wafa Sultan

[Albion Wilde]

Wafa Sultan:The clash we are witnessing around the world is not a clash of religions, or a clash of civilizations.... It is a clash between a mentality that belongs to the Middle Ages and another mentality that belongs to the 21st century. It is a clash between civilization and backwardness, between the civilized and the primitive, between barbarity and rationality. It is a clash between freedom and oppression, between democracy and dictatorship. It is a clash between human rights, on the one hand, and the violation of these rights, on other hand. It is a clash between those who treat women like beasts, and those who treat them like human beings. What we see today is not a clash of civilizations. Civilizations do not clash, but compete... [snip]

Host: I understand from your words that what is happening today is a clash between the culture of the West, and the backwardness and ignorance of the Muslims?

Wafa Sultan: Yes, that is what I mean.

[M. Espinola]

Thanks for those very informative links.

The West needs to wake up an fathom Islamic jihadism is the largest death cult in the world today, an extremely dangerous cult hell bent on the total destruction of Western civilization .

Here are some quotes how the top Islamic terrorists trick the unsuspecting Muslim youth into self detonating and slaughtering 'infidels':

Yesterday ...

and ...

Today, still Nazis!

The relevant verses from the Koran are:

Koran 78:31
As for the righteous, they shall surely triumph. Theirs shall be gardens and vineyards, and high- bosomed virgins for companions: a truly overflowing cup.

Koran 37:40-48
...They will sit with bashful, dark-eyed virgins, as chaste as the sheltered eggs of ostriches.

Koran 44:51-55
...Yes and We shall wed them to dark-eyed houris. (beautiful virgins)

Koran 52:17-20
...They shall recline on couches ranged in rows. To dark-eyed houris (virgins) we shall wed them...

Koran 55:56-57
In them will be bashful virgins neither man nor Jinn will have touched before.Then which of the favours of your Lord will you deny ?"

Koran 55:57-58
Virgins as fair as corals and rubies. Then which of the favours of your Lord will you deny ?"

Koran 56:7-40
...We created the houris (the beautiful women) and made them virgins, loving companions for those on the right hand.. "

Koran 55:70-77
"In each there shall be virgins chaste and fair... Dark eyed virgins sheltered in their tents whom neither man nor Jin will have touched before..

[Fred Nerks]

You've certainly done your research. There will always be individuals on FR who defend muslim 'friends' or relatives - sometimes the apologists are recent converts. I understand their need to do so. Some are cowards, some are fools, some have simply not been exposed to enough pain and suffering, nor have they read anything of the history of islam. And even when the truth is presented to them, as here on FR, many resort to personal attack because they are in denial.

I have been called bigot more times than I can count. Doesn't bother me, history and the truth about the LIFE OF MUHAMMAD speaks for itself.

While it's possible to accept the reasons why any individual might defend a muslim individually, through personal attachment - one thing I notice they NEVER do, is defend islam.

Because islam is indefensible.

[Fred Nerks]

You might enjoy this - it's a favourite of mine.


http://www.ninevehsoft.com/fiorina.htm


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. For more information, refer to the web links below. You may contact me at keepa@ninevehsoft.com for further questions.

Thank you for your consideration.

Peter BetBasoo

[az_jdhayworth_fan]

Thanks to both you and M. Espinola for the great links and commentary. This is important and I wish it could be disseminated more widely.

[stand watie]

once more, just using the REVISIONIST/LEFTIST-inspired "splc" term of abuse of "neo-confederate" marks the USER as a FOOL, a ignorant south-HATER & a DUNCE.

you certainly fit ALL those descriptions.

you should stick to posting your SILLY, meaningLESS cartoons.

free dixie,sw

[stand watie]

i only insult HATERS, LUNATICS, RACISTS & KNOWING liars.

PITY that you haven't dealt with some of the more radical/REVISIONIST/statist/hate-FILLED lunatics of the "DAMNyankee coven", as long/frequently as the members of "the dixie forces on FR" have. then, you would KNOW what i'm talking about.

free dixie,sw

[stand watie]

Kirk Lyons is a prominent American LAWYER (and NO, as an Aussie, you wouldn't have any reason to know who he is), who represents ALL SORTS of clients of every nationality/ethnic group/religious persuasion/political opinion/etc.

i'm reasonably sure that you know that attorneys represent people based on (frankly) $$$$$$, rather than on political/social/ethnic identity.

as Kirk has represented COMMUNISTS (whose freedom of speech was being violated) does that make him a "commie"????? i think NOT!

sadly, "m.eSPINola" is either too DUMB or too DIShonest to recognize that rather simple concept.

btw, request that "mr. spin" repost his #645 & see for yourself if you believe that he is a RACIST. (i can save you the effort, as even he KNOWS that reposting it would get him banned forever from FR.)

free dixie,sw

[stand watie]

"calling all hateful FOOLS & BIGOTS!" is what you SHOULD have posted, as that is what you are & associate with.

go back to posting your SILLY & off-point cartoons & leave the attempts at intelligent discussion to the adults.

free dixie,sw

[Wurlitzer]

"fwiw, PLEASE do NOT lump all Muslims together. my adopted daughter, "Tuna", is a Turkish national, a devout follower of the Prophet AND a wonderful LADY!"

Sorry but we should never make policy based on one out of 2,000,000,000. You may have a good one but 99.9999995% is as good as ALL in my book. (1/2,000,000,000=.0000000005).

The deafening silence of the alleged moderate mudslimes to 40+ years of terrorism tells me my math is not too far off.

[stand watie]

actually, the percentage of GOOD Muslims is likely about 95%. the other 5% is the PROBLEM.

frankly i think that that bunch of lunatics should be "wiped out" to the last man, as our military forces & our gallant allies ARE DOING, right now, around the world!

free dixie,sw

[Wurlitzer]

"in other words, you are an ANTI-Muslim bigot????"

Must be out of ammo and had to break out the bigot word. Muslims have created their history for the rest of us to see. To reach the conclusion that Is-SLIME is fundamentally evil is common sense based on the evidence. To conclude otherwise is foolish.

[Wurlitzer]

"actually, the percentage of GOOD Muslims is likely about 95%. the other 5% is the PROBLEM."

That would be an impossible number to verify and history tells all thinking people otherwise. I did not see 95,80,50,20, or 1% of this cult protesting in the streets against the actions of terrorist mudslimes. They and their apologist cannot be trusted.

[stand watie]

based solely on your posts, may i simply say,"pardon me, but your prejudice is showing".

free dixie,sw

[stand watie]

did you MISS that "the 95% figure" was my opinion/guess of the percentage?

taking a page from most of the people's comments on this thread (who have acted as if their OPINIONS were incontrovertible FACT!),i won't bother spending the time & effort to prove/disprove the percentage.

may i suggest that we two simply agree to disagree??

in my humble opinion, your mind is tightly CLOSED & you are also UNlikely to listen to anything that disagrees with your preconceived notions. PITY!

free dixie,sw

[stand watie]

btw, IF the word(s) "Moslem", "Muslim", "Islamic", etc (in most of these comments on this thread)were simply changed into "AmerIndian","Asian","Black", "Latino", "Jewish",etc., how long do you think it would be until:

1. the thread was PULLED and.

2.everyone, who made those comments, were BANNED???

the answer is NOT LONG!

that simple substitution of words should tell you "something" about the level of IGNORANT prejudice, mean-spiritedness & HATE-filled opinions of the "anti-Moslem forces" posted here.

free dixie,sw

[az_jdhayworth_fan]

However, if the words, Muslim, Islamist, etc. were replaced with Nazi, fascist, etc. there would be no reason to pull the thread. The flaw in your argument is that there would be no reason to apply the arguments here to the Native American, or the other groups you mention. But it would be appropriate to replace them with the analogy of the Nazis.

[Polybius]

"alles Gallae in tres partum divisa est"

I remember it as "Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres."

My memory says Omnia Gallia in tres partes

How could you ever forget someone who taught you that the world was divided into two kinds of people: those who remember the immortal opening line of Caesar's Gallic War as "Omnia Gallia in tres partes divisa est," and those who remember it as "Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres"?

It seems that there are four types of people in the world: The ones who remember the three versions above and the fourth type who has no idea what the other three are babbling about. ;-)

For the record, the Loeb Classical Library edition version is "Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres".

[stand watie]

don't you WISH you were correct????

in point of fact PREJUDICE against "persons from the Mid-East" & specifically "Moslems" is A-OK with MOST people, because of 9-11.

as HORRIBLE as 9-11 was, that is NOT a good reason (there is NO good reason!) to be a BIGOT/RACIST.

free dixie,sw

[stand watie]

rotflmRao!

actually, there is a 5th sort,i.e., the "vicktims uv duh gubmint apruvd publick screwl sistim", who cannot read ANY of the different versions in Latin/English.

free dixie,sw

[Albion Wilde]

Sorry, I have to go with sandbar on not exonerating the silent followers of Islam who do not beligerently denounce the EXCESSES & RADICAL ACTS of the MANY!

The "people in the street" in too many in Islamic countries are literally enslaved by repressive governments. The ones who arouse my contempt are the ostensibly "free" nations of Europe who sympathize and rationalize, and that goes double for the UN and for all the leftist muddle-brains in this country who scream about women's rights, abortion and homosexuality and then support terrorist nations that subjugate women, use rape as a method of community control and a tool of war, and publicly deny homosexuality while tolerating its open practice by married men. Those mindless sympathizers are enablers of terror and oppression.