Posted on 09/11/2007 11:31:49 AM PDT by Pyro7480
In 1683, over 138,000 Muslim Ottoman Turks surrounded Vienna, Austria. For two months they starved the 11,000 Hapsburg-Austrian defenders. Sultan Mehmed IV sent a message to the Austrian King, Leopold I: "Await us in your residence...so we can decapitate you."
Secretly, the Polish King, Jan Sobieski, gathered 80,000 Polish, Austrian and German troops and on SEPTEMBER 11, 1683, led a surprise attack causing the Turks to flee in confusion.
Upon entering the abandonded Turkish tents, there were found bags of beans - coffee beans - revealing how the Turks could fight day and night. Shortly after was opened the first Vienna coffeehouse and coffee subsequently spread across Europe.
Whereas Jan Sobieski was looked upon as the "Savior of Western Civilization" from Muslim Turks, the humiliated Muslim army beheaded their general, Mustafa Pasha, and sent his head back to Sultan Mehmed IV in a velvet bag.
President Theodore Roosevelt wrote in his 1916 book, "Fear God and Take Your Own Part": "From the hammer of Charles Martel to the sword of Jan Sobieski, Christianity owed its safety in Europe to the fact it...could and would fight as well as the Mohammedan aggressor."
Let's hope that continues.
Catholic ping!
I don't doubt our soldiers' abilities in that regard, but as a nation; we don't have it.
Oh, JAN Sobieski? Was was alright, I guess. Saving Europe from the teeming heathen hordes was a good move on his part.
I didn't know Starkbuck's was founded in 1683.
Cordially,
Agreed. Wow! Thanks for posting. Just goes to show that in recent history, and this one by our own president, Teddy Roosevelt, we’ve had US leaders remarking about the fight against “the Mohammedan aggressor”, something our lefties would like us to forget. I think I’ll get another cup of coffee...
I like that. It goes will with the tagline I've had for the past couple of months.
Absolutely. e.g. the Battle of Warsaw that destroyed a numerically superior - heck, numerically unbeatable - Russian army sometime between the World Wars IIRC.
Very interesting history lesson.
God bless all who fight these evil hordes!
And we got coffee out of it, too!
Also, beware of velvet bags.
Here’s one you may not know about: the croissant roll was developed by French bakers to celebrate the victory over Islamic enemies.
Unfortunately, the Poles wound up using the coffee beans sparingly, essentially drinking it 1/4 coffee, the other 3/4 milk, in effect inventing Cafe Au Lait. This tradition continues on my father’s side of the family.
ping
Theodore Roosevelt wrote
“The Greeks who triumphed at Marathon and Salamis did a work without which the world would have been deprived of the social value of Plato and Aristotle, of Aeschylus, Herodotus, and Thucydides. The civilization of Europe, America, and Australia exists today at all only because of the victories of civilized man over the enemies of civilization, because the victories stretching through the centuries from the days of Miltiades and Themistocles to those of Charles Martel in the eighth century and those of John Sobieski in the seventeenth century.”
“During the thousand years that included the careers of the Frankish soldier and the Polish king, the Christians of Asia and Africa proved unable to wage successful war with the Moslem conquerors; and in consequence Christianity practically vanished from the two continents; and today nobody can find in them any “social values” whatever, in the sense in which we use the words, so far as the sphere of Mohammedan influence. There are such “social values” today in Europe, America, and Australia only because during those thousand years the Christians of Europe possessed the warlike power to do what the Christians of Asia and Africa had failed to do - that is, to beat back the Moslem invader.”
About every other line's a potential tagline in Lepanto.
Poland triumphant ping!
Teddy wasn’t the only US President to comment on Islam:
In 1786 Jefferson and John Adams went to negotiate with Tripoli’s envoy to London, Ambassador Sidi Haji Abdrahaman or (Sidi Haji Abdul Rahman Adja). They asked him by what right he extorted money and took slaves. Jefferson reported to Secretary of State John Jay, and to the Congress:
The ambassador answered us that [the right] was founded on the Laws of the Prophet (Mohammed), that it was written in their Koran, that all nations who should not have answered their authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found, and to make slaves of all they could take as prisoners, and that every Mussulman (or Muslim) who should be slain in battle was sure to go to heaven.[
John Quincy Adams wrote:
In the seventh century of the Christian era, a wandering Arab of the lineage of Hagar [i.e., Muhammad], the Egyptian, combining the powers of transcendent genius, with the preternatural energy of a fanatic, and the fraudulent spirit of an impostor, proclaimed himself as a messenger from Heaven, and spread desolation and delusion over an extensive portion of the earth. Adopting from the sublime conception of the Mosaic law, the doctrine of one omnipotent God; he connected indissolubly with it, the audacious falsehood, that he was himself his prophet and apostle. Adopting from the new Revelation of Jesus, the faith and hope of immortal life, and of future retribution, he humbled it to the dust by adapting all the rewards and sanctions of his religion to the gratification of the sexual passion. He poisoned the sources of human felicity at the fountain, by degrading the condition of the female sex, and the allowance of polygamy; and he declared undistinguishing and exterminating war, as a part of his religion, against all the rest of mankind. THE ESSENCE OF HIS DOCTRINE WAS VIOLENCE AND LUST: TO EXALT THE BRUTAL OVER THE SPIRITUAL PART OF HUMAN NATURE (Adams’s capital letters)… Between these two religions, thus contrasted in their characters, a war of twelve hundred years has already raged. The war is yet flagrant… While the merciless and dissolute dogmas of the false prophet shall furnish motives to human action, there can never be peace upon earth, and goodwill towards men.”
John Quincy Adams also wrote in 1829:
“The precept of the Koran is, perpetual war against all who deny, that Mahomet is the prophet of God. The vanquished may purchase their lives, by the payment of tribute; the victorious may be appeased by a false and delusive promise of peace; and the faithful follower of the prophet, may submit to the imperious necessities of defeat: but the command to propagate the Moslem creed by the sword is always obligatory, when it can be made effective. The commands of the prophet may be performed alike, by fraud, or by force”.
bump
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