Jihad Watch Board Vice President Hugh Fitzgerald discusses what might happen if Jerusalem is turned over to the “Palestinians,” as Muslims around the world called for on Friday’s Al-Quds Day:
The history of Muslim conquest all over the world is nothing less than a virtually unmitigated history of destruction. The Bamiyan Buddhas of Afghanistan, now lost forever to the violent fanaticism of the Taliban, were spared until recently only because in the past, machine-guns and Western-invented explosives were not available. Then there are the tens of thousands of Hindu temples, listed in a 2-volume work by Sita Ram Goel and others, and the churches of Constantinople alone: go to the second floor of the Archeological Museum at the Topkapi Complex, and you will see a diorama of Constantinople just before it was conquered by Mehmet Fatih on May 29, 1453, and a color-key will show you the hundreds of churches that existed then, and that no longer exist. And the same was true all over the Middle East and North Africa — destroyed, the stone quarried to build mosques. Leaf through Paul Lester Stenhouse’s translation of the Futuh Al-Habasa and you will see the Muslim chronicler complacently noting the wholesale burning of Abyssinian churches by the warriors of jihad.
In some cases a building that was not Islamic at all was appropriated for Islam. Thus the Dome of the Rock, it now appears from the convincing work of Christoph Luxenberg (see his essay in the just-published “Die dunkel Anfang”), while it has Arabic writing, the writing is neither Qur’anic, nor even Islamic, but rather Christian in its significance. Too many people confuse Arabic writing with Islam, but Arabic is independent of Islam, and certainly was in the first century of Islam. And the Omayyad Mosque in Damascus is nothing but a reworked version, an expansion upon, the Church of St. John the Baptist. And those who worked on it were Byzantine craftsmen working in the Byzantine tradition.
Of course, if the Muslim Brotherhood had its way in Egypt, the pyramids themselves, those pre-Islamic monuments, would be destroyed. The face of the Sphinx was defaced, over time, as it had to be according to Islamic tenets (statues are impermissible unless defaced or vandalized — see Al-Qaradawi’s book on the haram and the halal for easy confirmation). Yet almost no one has pointed out how, and why, the Sphinx’s face was defaced — though the first and second generation of Western archeologists, Austen Henry Layard, Howard Carter, Leonard Woolley, and all the others, knew exactly what Islam caused people to do.
Now some Jewish holy books have been destroyed in Hebron. But perhaps more telling would be to show pictures of the attacks on the tombs of Rebecca and Joseph, and especially the chilling mound of rubble to which one of them — I forget which — was reduced by “Palestinians” (i.e. local Muslim Arabs), prompted by the teachings of Islam to behave in the way that they did.
We already know what would happen to the Jewish sites in Jerusalem. After all, between 1948 and 1967 even the “good” Jordanians, with the British-led Arab Legion (Glubb Pasha, Alec Kirkbride), managed to rip up the ancient Jewish tombstones from the cemetery on the Mount of Olives and use them to line the floor of Jordanian army latrines. They managed to blow up nearly every single synagogue (perhaps one was left) in the Old City.
Query: why didn’t they do more damage to the Christian sites? Well, back then, before the oil revenues, local Christians, both Arab and non-Arab clergy, could be easily manipulated and exploited to do the bidding of local Muslims, to push the Muslim agenda, in order to win favor. The local Christians thought (and some still do) that for their own interests, and even possibly their own survival, they had to parrot the Muslim agenda. The Muslims, meanwhile, back then needed Western governments. Now, with OPEC money and the thirty years of Jihad that it has funded, there is a lot more naked expression of that hitherto cleverly disguised — for Western audiences — Jihadist impulse.
But were the Muslim Arabs to again take possession of any part of Jerusalem, given what they have done and have been doing, to Christians in Iraq and Egypt and Jordan and Lebanon, given what has been happening even to the most appeasement-minded Arab Christians among the “Palestinians,” there is no doubt that the mask is off. The Jews of Israel are a warm-up for the Greater Jihad. And Christian sites, of every kind, should expect no mercy, no quarter.
That is why, one suspects, the Armenian Patriarch carefully put the Armenian Quarter of the Old City under Israeli and not “Palestinian” control (earning the fury of the local Arabs). He knew about Islam. He had reason to know.