Posted on 01/14/2015 8:50:32 AM PST by Kaslin
It is much easier to count the dead in Paris than in rural Nigeria.
Islamist terrorists connected to al-Qaida or Islamic State (perhaps both) murdered 17 people in the modern, globally linked capital of France. Seventeen is a definite number.
Last week, Boko Haram, the Nigerian Islamist terror movement, murdered several hundred people. Initial reports claimed 2,000. U.N. and Nigerian sources have trimmed the death toll but confirmed the massacre occurred and most of the victims were women and children.
The Paris butchers claimed their slaughter of 12 in the office of the satirical journal where Charlie Hebdo avenged the magazine's publication of cartoons, which -- according to the terrorists' religious dogma -- blasphemed Muhammad. A terrorist pal, however, also killed five people in a Jewish deli. Brutally murder editors and satirists in order to intimidate the press and silence free expression, and then target European Jews: both acts of carnage engage a vast store of ugly history.
The Islamist murders in Nigeria also touch terrible history. The 10th Parallel north, as it cuts across the continent, crudely divides Muslim North Africa from Christian and animist South Africa. In Uganda in 2002, I heard a Ugandan call it Africa's "green line," with green denoting Islam. He said for a millennium, Muslim imperialists had pushed south with two objectives, conversion and enslavement. Arab Muslims were running African slaving operations in the early 20th century.
The 10th Parallel north crosses Nigeria. Boko Haram bases its right to rule the whole of Nigeria on its Islam. Allah gives Muslims the right to rule. For roughly the same reason, the terrorists in Paris thought Islamic law superseded French press freedoms.
Remember the Chibok schoolgirls, seized by Boko Haram in a raid in April 2014? The Obama administration made it a cause celebre, with the twitter hashtag, "bringbackourgirls." The girls aren't back. In The Daily Telegraph, David Blair recently noted that Boko Haram'semir, Abubakar Shekau, intends to sell the Chibok girls as slaves. "Allah instructed me to sell them (the girls); they are his properties," Shekau said. Blair dubbed it "a primeval business." Apt phrase, that.
Every culture has its rejectionists, people who have disagreements with modernity. Sometimes they get violent. Terror is a tactic. Three decades ago Catholic and Protestant terror gangs squared off regularly in Northern Ireland.
The 30 Years War, spurred by Martin Luther's Protestant Reformation, savaged Europe -- but it ended in 1648. Here and now in our time, the most violent and dangerous struggle of the terms of modernity is within the world's Muslim communities, and it spills out across the globe.
"Islam needs its own Martin Luther," a Turkish professor friend of mine mused in 1992 as we watched an Ayatollah Khomeini-inspired demonstration in Istanbul. Moderate Muslim clerics argue their religion has been hijacked by extremists (like Khomeini) who use terror to silence religious and political opponents. Presumably, a "reformed" Islam would tolerate political pluralism and accept Charlie Hebdo's cartoons as the inevitable consequence of democratic toleration.
The Turkish professor was a Muslim and a Kemalist (follower of Kemal Ataturk, founder of the modern Turkish Republic). He supported a secular state, arguing only secular state can ensure political pluralism.
Radical Islamists, however, contend this is impossible. Within their Islam, mosque and state do not separate.
Ataturk provided a model for modernizing a culturally Islamic society, but his secular state is under attack by Turkish Islamists.
Perhaps the reformers have a new protector and advocate, this time an Arab Muslim.
On Jan. 1, Egyptian president Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi delivered a speech to the imams of al-Azhar University in Cairo. The speech was rich with echoes of Ataturk.
"We are in need of a religious revolution," al-Sisi said. "You, imams, are responsible before Allah," el-Sisi said. "The entire world ... is waiting for your next move ... because (the Islamic world) is being torn, it is being destroyed, it is being lost -- and it is being lost by our own hands.
"Is it possible that 1.6 billion people (Muslims) should want to kill the rest of the world's inhabitants ... so that they themselves may live? Impossible! You cannot feel it if you remain trapped within this mindset," al-Sisi said. "You need to step outside of yourselves to be able to observe it and reflect on it from a more enlightened perspective."
Yes. Welcome to The Enlightenment.
“Is it possible that 1.6 billion people should want to kill the rest of the world’s inhabitants ... so that they themselves may live?
Sure, why not? That’s how people are.
It would have been much easier to reform the NAZI Party into a womens’ garden club.
Islam is at its core evil.
Mohammed was the perfect Muslim. Mohammed was a liar, a thief, a rapist, and a murderer.
“Islam needs its own Martin Luther,”
Mohammad specifically forbade the altering or moderating of Islam - to do so would be to gainsay both mohammad and allah; any one doing so must be killed.
An Islamic Martin Luther’s career would be short and bloody.
They don’t want to kill us so they can live. They want to kill us because their religion and prophet tell them too.
Islam needs to be eradicated.
The only thing that will ‘reform’ islam are a lot of fast neutrons and gamma rays.
So, suddenly Islam is going to believe women are equal to men before God?
The West can NOT reform Islam. Any idea that we can help, participate, prod or poke in any direction is sheer fantasy.
We can only watch, and protect ourselves from its malign influence.
The guys who need reforming have all the guns and don’t want reform of Islam. The targets (who want reform) do not.
How’s that gonna go?
Uhhhh, the emergence of radical Islam WAS the Muslim reformation. It took them back to their original fundamentals.
When the Bolsheviks took over Russia, they were a very small group. There were many other socialist parties in Russia. But the Bolsheviks were the most radical. Many millions would die or live in slavery thanks to the Bolsheviks.
When the Nazis started out they were just another small, socialist group. But the radicals quickly took over, and we saw how that ended.
Islamism is the same. Most muslims are not violent people. But because of the radical tenets in the religion, the most violent and ruthless Muslims rise to the top.
Look at Turkey. Kemal Ataturk tried to create a secular society inside a Muslim country. Well, who is running Turkey now? Erdogan...another Islamist tool.
So what does that mean for Islam? Can it be reformed without taking out what it means to be a Muslim? I don't think so.
Evil cults cannot be restored to decency, love, joy and peace.
A disease cannot be reformed, it must be cured - think cancer.
A good case can be made that today's jihadis ARE the "Reformation" period of Islam. There are differences, of course, but today's Islamic Reformation shares these characteristics with earlier historic Reformations:
Of interest: #15.
Remember the massacre of Christians by Muslim in Otranto in the 5th century and Famagosta in the 6th century THE CHRISTIAN MARTYRS OF OTRANTO (1480) AND FAMAGOSTA (1570
History repeats itself…
On May 12, 2013, Pope Francis Set to Canonize 800 Christians Slaughtered By Muslims in Otranto in 1480. Those who depict Islam as a “religion of peace” are ignoring History, and as Spanish philosopher, George Santayana said: “Those who do not learn from history are damned to repeat it.”
THE REAL FACE OF ISLAM
OTRANTO - MASSACRE OF CHRISTIANS BY MUSLIMS (1480) THE SIEGE OF FAMAGOSTA (1570)
800 Italians Men Beheaded in Otranto in 1480 for Refusing Islam, by the Turks, with the Approval of Sultan Mehmet II
http://www.antisharia.com/2011/07/26/800-italian-men-beheaded-in-otranto-in-1480-for-refusing-islamby-the-turks-with-the-approval-of-sultan-mehmet-ii/
On August 14, 1480, a massacre happened on a hill outside the city of Otranto, in southern Italy, here 800 of the town’s men were taken to a place called the Hill of the Minerva, and, one by one, beheaded in full view of their fellow prisoners. It became known as the Hill of the Martyrs.
They died because they refused to convert to Islam. The 800 men of Otranto were martyrs. But due to their sacrifice, however, the Ottoman invasion was slowed and Rome was spared the same fate that had befallen Constantinople only 27 years before.
The people of Otranto knew of the siege of Constantinople and that when that city fell the Muslims pillaged the city, but the key moment came when they reached Hagia Sophia.
In Constantinople,after breaking down the church’s bronze gates, they found inside a huge throng of Byzantines who had taken refuge and who were praying that the city might be delivered by some miracle. The Christians were seized and separated according to age and gender. The infants and elderly were brutally murdered; the men, including some of the city’s most prominent senators, were carted off to the slave markets; and the women and girls were taken by soldiers to be raped or sent into a life of slavery. At Otranto, the terms of the Muslims were ostensibly generous. If the town surrendered, the defenders would be permitted to live. They said no, it was repeated and again it was no. It was the city against 18,000 Muslims and it lasted 2 weeks.
Slaughter, Sacrilege, and Slavery
Turkish troops entered and killed anyone in their path. They made their way to the cathedral. As in the Hagia Sophia, the invaders found the church filled with people praying with Archbishop Stefano Agricoli, Bishop Stephen Pendinelli, and Count Largo, the commander of the soldiers. The Ottomans commanded:
1.The archbishop to throw away his crucifix, abjure the Christian faith, and embrace Islam. When he refused, his head was cut off before the weeping congregation.
2.Bishop Pendinelli and Count Largo likewise would not convert and were also put to death, reportedly by being slowly sawed in half. 3.As was the custom, the priests were murdered and the cathedral was stripped of all Christian symbols and turned into a stable for the horses. The Ottomans then gathered up the surviving people of Otranto and took them as captives.
The people of Otranto faced the same end as the Christians of Constantinople. All of the men over the age of 50 were slaughtered; the women and children under the age of 15 were either slain or sent away to Albania to be slaves.
According to some contemporary sources, the total number of dead was as high as 12,000, with another 5,000 pressed into slavery.
800 Men who survived told to Convert to Islam or Die The Muslim commander ordered the men of Otranto, 800 survivors of the battle, those who were not over 50 and had not been already killed in battle or later, or were not children and had not be killed or enslaved, to be brought before him.
He gave them one chance to convert to Islam or die. To convince them, he instructed an Italian apostate priest named Giovanni to preach. The former priest called on the men of Otranto to abandon the Christian faith, and they would get many benefits.
One of the men of Otranto, a tailor named Antonio Primaldi (he is also named Antonio Pezzulla in some sources), came forward to speak to the survivors. He called out that he was ready to die for Christ a thousand times. He then added, according to the chronicler Giovanni Laggetto in the Historia della guerra di Otranto del 1480: “My brothers, till today we have fought in defense of our country, to save our lives, and for our lords; now it is time that we fight to save our souls for our Lord, so that having died on the cross for us, it is good that we should die for him, standing firm and constant in the faith, and with this earthly death we will win eternal life and the glory of martyrs.”
At this, the men of Otranto cried out with one voice that they too were willing to die a thousand times for Christ.
The next morning, August 14, the 800 prisoners were bound together with ropes. The victims repeated their pledge to be faithful to Christ, and the Ottomans chose the courageous Antonio Primaldi as the first to be executed.
The old tailor gave one final exhortation to his fellow prisoners and knelt before the executioner. The blade fell and decapitated him, but then, as the chronicler Saverio de Marco claimed in the Compendiosa istoria degli ottocento martiri otrantini (“The Brief History of the 800 Martyrs of Otranto”), the headless corpse stood back upright. The body supposedly proved unmovable, so it remained
Stunned by this apparent miracle, one of the executioners converted on the spot and was immediately killed. The executioners then returned to their horrendous business.
The bodies were placed into a mass grave, and the Turks prepared to begin their march to Rome.
"Those who ignore History are damned to repeat it." George Santayana
Reforming Islam is a concept similar to reforming Bubonic Plague or Staphylococcus aureus.
Muslims don’t want to kill the other 5+ billion humans so that they may live, because they don’t NEED to kill 5 billion others to live.
War-making and murdering was in Mohammed’s nature, and it is in the nature of those who honestly follow his teachings. You can’t make peace with an ideology that has taking over the rest of the world as a core value.
You can’t make peace with Staphylococcus aureus, either; you just have to use a whole lot of bleach.
All muslims abide by the koran and how does it tell them to deal with infidels: Kill, enslave or tax them under muslim RULE! Until they are enough of the population they also practice taqiyya! Religion of peace my big fat butt!
most definitely it is true.
convert or die. jizzya. worldwide caliphate. peace under islam means you convert or die - either way is submission. they butcher other muskimsmfor not being in a “correct” sect of islam.
western govts have failed to protect their people from islam and lamely try to state lies to our faces that they don’t know what the motivation is, not religious targeting, these people don’t represent true islam. they expect us to sit there like the idiots they think we are and believe their lies, and get pissed at the people they’re lying to, when we don’t.
they are trying to cover their own asses, covering up their failures to do anything about this, to let it spread in their countries, to downplay a problem they know exactlythey are lying about.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.