Hey, we're not the only ones who indulge in a bit of fantasizing now and again! The only problem is that our fantasies become public policy, while the Iranians' fantasies are just TV shows.
In Muhammad's life, the siege of Khaybar followed the disappointment of the Treaty of Hudaybiyyah, which Muhammad concluded with the pagan Quraysh on terms unfavorable to the Muslims -- much to the confusion and anger of some of his companions. A new revelation promised the Muslims disgruntled by the Treaty of Hudaybiyya “much booty” (Qur’an 48:19). Perhaps to fulfill this promise, Muhammad led them against the Khaybar oasis, which was inhabited by Jews -- many of them exiles from Medina. One of the Muslims later remembered: “When the apostle raided a people he waited until the morning. If he heard a call to prayer he held back; if he did not hear it he attacked. We came to Khaybar by night, and the apostle passed the night there; and when morning came he did not hear the call to prayer, so he rode and we rode with him….We met the workers of Khaybar coming out in the morning with their spades and baskets. When they saw the apostle and the army they cried, ‘Muhammad with his force,’ and turned tail and fled. The apostle said, ‘Allah Akbar! Khaybar is destroyed. When we arrive in a people’s square it is a bad morning for those who have been warned.’”
The Muslim advance was inexorable. “The apostle,” according to Muhammad's first biographer, Ibn Ishaq, “seized the property piece by piece and conquered the forts one by one as he came to them.” Another early Muslim chronicler, Ibn Sa‘d, reports that the battle was fierce: the “polytheists…killed a large number of [Muhammad’s] Companions and he also put to death a very large number of them….He killed ninety-three men of the Jews…” Muhammad and his men offered the fajr prayer, the Islamic dawn prayer, before it was light, and then entered Khaybar itself.
The Muslims immediately set out to locate the inhabitants’ wealth. Kinana bin al-Rabi, a Jewish leader of Khaybar who was supposed to have been entrusted with the treasure of the Banu Nadir, was brought before Muhammad. Kinana denied knowing where this treasure was, but Muhammad pressed him: “Do you know that if we find you have it I shall kill you?” Kinana said yes.
Some of the treasure was found. To find the rest, Muhammad gave orders concerning Kinana: “Torture him until you extract what he has.” One of the Muslims built a fire on Kinana’s chest, but Kinana would not give up his secret. When he was at the point of death, Muhammad bin Maslama, killer of the poet Ka’b bin Al-Ashraf, beheaded him.
Muhammad agreed to let the people of Khaybar go into exile, allowing them, as he had the Banu Nadir, to keep as much of their property as they could carry. However, he commanded them to leave behind all their gold and silver. He had intended to expel all of them, but some, who were farmers, begged him to allow them to let them stay if they gave him half their yield annually.
Muhammad agreed: “I will allow you to continue here, so long as we would desire.” He warned them: “If we wish to expel you we will expel you.” They no longer had any rights that did not depend upon the good will and sufferance of Muhammad and the Muslims. And indeed, when the Muslims discovered some treasure that some of the Khaybar Jews had hidden, he ordered the women of the tribe enslaved and seized the perpetrators’ land. A hadith notes that “the Prophet had their warriors killed, their offspring and woman taken as captives.”
"Iranian TV Series: '40 Soldiers', Depicts Mythological Persian Heroes Vanquishing U.S.," from MEMRI (thanks to the Constantinopolitan Irredentist):
During the second half of 2007, Iran's Channel 2 aired a 28-episode series called "40 Soldiers." The series, created by Mohammad Nouri-zad, examines the development of Iranian culture from four historical perspectives: the mythological pre-Islamic period, the life of national poet Hakim Abol-Qasem Ferdowsi Tusi (935-1020 CE), the life of Imam Ali, and the modern era.In his portrayal of the life of Imam Ali, the director depicts the Muslim siege of the Jewish fortress of Khaybar. The Muslim army, led by Imam Ali, manages to conquer the fortress, following a sword fight between Imam Ali himself and the Jewish military commanders.
The last part of the series, which aired in December 2007, is set on an island in the southern Persian Gulf at some unspecified time in the future. The story is as follows: Dr. Mohsen Tabesh, an Iranian bank manager, weds his daughter Pantea to the son of Farid Memarian, who is a lecturer and also a newspaper editor. At the wedding, Tabesh's security guards betray him to the American soldiers, and rob the wedding guests. The American soldiers take this opportunity to invade the island where the wedding is being held. The Islamic resistance that is subsequently formed against the American soldiers summons the "40 soldiers" - heroes from Persian mythology - who vanquish the soldiers.
To view the part of the "40 Soldiers" series depicting the life of Imam Ali on MEMRI TV, visit:
http://www.memritv.org/clip/en/1680.htm .To view the part of the "40 Soldiers" series depicting the American invasion of the Iranian island on MEMRI TV, visit:
http://www.memritv.org/clip/en/1681.htm .Clip No. 1680: Imam Ali and the Muslim Conquest of the Jewish Fortress of Khaybar
"The Jews [Who Lived] in the Suburbs of Al-Madina Harassed the Muslims, Especially the Prophet [Muhammad]; They Repeatedly Violated Agreements"
Narrator: "The Jews [who lived] in the suburbs of Al-Madina harassed the Muslims, especially the Prophet [Muhammad]. They repeatedly violated the agreements. This is Khaybar, an inhabited region far from Al-Madina. Some of the fortresses of the Jews have been liberated by the Muslims, but their most important fortress still stands, and all the Muslims efforts to take control of it have been unsuccessful. Hunger afflicts the Muslim army, making the campaign even more difficult. They are all hungry - even the commanders and the Prophet's companions."
Muslim: "Abu Rafah, tell the Messenger of God to give up this useless siege."
Abu Rafah: "What are you talking about?"
Muslim: "What I'm saying is true. Either the Jews of Khaybar will kill us, or else we will die of hunger."
A herd of sheep wanders into the encampment.
Abu Rafah: "What's going on? What are you doing? Abu Saleh!"
Abu Saleh: "God sent the Israelites sustenance from heaven, and to us, He has sent sustenance by land."
Muslims lead a captured Jew, Abu Aswad.
Muslim: "Where is Muhammad?"
Another Muslim (to Abu Aswad the Jew): "Come with us."
Abu Rafah: "Who is this man? Where are you taking him?"
Abu Saleh: "He is a shepherd from Khaybar."
Muslim: "[We captured him] along with 50 fat sheep..."
Abu Saleh: "Praise God for not forsaking the Muslims."
Muslim: "The people of Khaybar have provided us with food."
Abu Rafah: "Leave him alone, until the Messenger of God rules what to do with him and his sheep."
Muhammad: "I have already made my decision."
Abu Rafah (to Muslims slaughtering sheep): "Get up. Stop."
"Muhammad, Accept Me as One of Your People"; "Allah Akbar, Allah Akbar, This Man has Become a Muslim"
Muhammad and Abu Aswad the Jew walk together, talking.
Abu Aswad: "You are so calm. Do you accept the prophets of the Jews?"
Muhammad: "I accept them all, but the way God conveyed to me, not the way the Jews view them."
Abu Aswad: "I have lived among the Jews for many years. Will God accept me?"
Muhammad: "He is kindhearted."
Abu Aswad: "Will He accept me?"
Muhammad: "Look inside your heart. What do you see?"
Abu Aswad: "I see light."
Muhammad: "This is the grace of God."
Abu Aswad: "Muhammad, accept me as one of your people."
Abu Rafah: "Allah Akbar, Allah Akbar, this man has become a Muslim."
Abu Aswad: "Oh Messenger of Allah, you will decide what to do with these sheep. I will do with them whatever you command."
Muhammad: "Return all the sheep."
Abu Saleh: "Oh Prophet of God, we are hungry. We have no food."
Muhammad: "Do as I say. These sheep belong to the Jews. Tell the Jews to open the gates of the fortress and take them back."
Muslim: "Oh Messenger of Allah, these sheep are our booty."
Muhammad: "Booty is something you take in war."
Abu Aswad: "For years, I have been talking to you in my heart."
Muhammad: "You have been destined to end your days in good fortune."
Abu Aswad: "Do you mean because I have become a Muslim?"
Muhammad: "Rise and behold the end of this good man. He is as close and dear to my heart as you. Embrace him, and take a good look at him, because in one hour, you will see him no more." [...]
"I Have Come Here to Recount the Story Of Khaybar Once Again, in Order to Gain From It the Knowledge Sought by the Universe.... I Have Come From... Future Centuries... From an Era in which People Yearn for the Truth"
Narrator: "I have come here to recount the story of Khaybar once again, in order to gain from it the knowledge sought by the universe. I have come from afar. I have come from tomorrow, from future centuries. I have come from an era in which people yearn for the truth. I have come to pick a flower of truth of what happened at Khaybar, for the people of tomorrow. Here the Jews built seven strong fortresses, and here they organized their rebellions against the Muslims."
Muslim: "Oh people of Khaybar, open the fortress and get your sheep back. Have no fear, we are not going to harm you."
The people of Khaybar open the drawbridge. Jewish fighters leave to bring the sheep back inside.
Jewish guard: "Abu Aswad, get inside. I'm talking to you, old man. Get inside. I'm talking to you, old man."
Abu Aswad: "I, Abu Aswad, am no longer a Jew. I am a Muslim, a Muslim."
Abu Aswad beats the guard to death with his staff.
The Muslims cheer: "Allah Akbar!"
Abu Aswad: "Allah Akbar!
"Allah Akbar!
"Allah Akbar!
"Allah Akbar!"
Another Jewish guard: "Shut up."
Abu Aswad: "I will send you to Hell too."
Jewish guard: "Prepare to die."
The Jewish guard beheads Abu Aswad, and the Jews carry the body of the slain guard into the fortress.
Young boy, son of the narrator: "Mother."
Narrator: "Darling, did you see how short is the distance between the birth and death of the lovers of truth?"
Phew. Read it all, if you have the stomach. The part featuring the defeat of the Americans is particularly rich with ironies.
So he converts and the first thing he does is kill a man.
“To find the rest, Muhammad gave orders concerning Kinana: “Torture him until you extract what he has.” One of the Muslims built a fire on Kinana’s chest, but Kinana would not give up his secret. When he was at the point of death, Muhammad bin Maslama, killer of the poet Ka’b bin Al-Ashraf, beheaded him.”
I wish all Americans would read this and stop agonizing over the possible CIA use of waterboarding! Here the model alpha male for our mortal Muslim enemies is having a man cruelly tortured, not to get info to stop a deadly attack on his people, but just to get at some more treasure – which is clearly what spread-the-loot-but-keep a-fifth Mo and his followers are very interested in. And this is the great man no infidel can draw a picture of and not deserve death? What crap this cult eats for breakfast.
Hmmm. 40 soldiers? Where did I hear that before?
Ah, got it. Ali Baba and the 40 thiefs.
I knew it rang a bell.
Abu Aswad: "I will send you to Hell too."
Jewish guard: "Prepare to die."
Come on! This is brilliant stuff! Oscar! Oscar!
Yet another contrast between Christianity (and Buddhism and Judaism) and Islam. Islam is the only religion where booty is a tenet. What other religion has rules on how much of an opponent's property can be seized and how much of it goes to your leader?
"Ah, got it. Ali Baba and the 40 thiefs." -- thieves.
How stupid can these people be? I suppose it's the way Barbarians think and I'm civilized so I can't think that way. Thank You, Jesus.
Mohammed really hit the Arabian people with the stupid stick when he came up with Islam. He should have let them continue to be pagans.
"The series . . . examines the development of Iranian culture from four historical perspectives: the mythological pre-Islamic period . . . ."
For 1200 or 1300 years pre-Mo, Persia had a succession of empires, from the Achaemenid thru the Sassanid, that made it a center of culture and advanced civilization, worthy to be ranked with the other great centers of civilization like China, India, and the Mediterranean. But with the Moslem conquest, all this real, historical past went down the memory-hole to become the "mythological pre-Islamic period". In reality, it's Mohammad that could better be termed "mythological". Darius, Xerxes, Seleucus, and Shapur were real people, well-attested in any number of contemporary accounts. But a number of scholars have questioned whether there ever was a real Mohammad, seeing as how the first records of him come from nearly a century after his time.
In any case, it's clear what's coming for the West after the Moslems conquer it: everything pre-Islamic beoomes "mythology". Good-bye to: Homer, the Parthenon, and Aristotle; Scipio, Augustus, Roman roads and aqueducts; Chartres and Canterbury and Dante; Giotto, daVinci, and the Campanile in Florence; Columbus, Magellan, Cartier, and Lasalle; Shakespeare, Cervantes, and Goethe; Newton, Galileo, and Darwin; etc. What a wonderful world it will be! Scholarship will consist of memorizing the Koran, art of drawing colorful curlicues on mosques, and medicine of driving evil jinns out of the ailing.
I saw MO's nose!
A fatwa on the movie makers!
Blasphemy!
I did some research into this MEMRI TV that is talked about so much on this website as an impartial source of translated middle eastern media, and I checked out the website. MEMRI, the middle eastern media research institute, is based in Washington D.C., and was founded in 1998 by its president, Yigal Carmon, a retired colonel from Israeli Military Intelligence, and the academic, Dr. Meyrav Wurmser, and her husband David Wurmser, who were both co authors of "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm (Israel)" which was the precursor for the Wolfowitz Doctrine. Now this is fine, no laws are being broken here, but as intelligent people, do you think that the translations and reports that they offer might have some bias in favor of the Israeli governments policies and lobby? In my opinion it's almost funny how apparent this is just by glancing at the pictures used on the website. If you want reliable and honest "middle eastern media" as it's says, would it not just make more sense just to go directly to the source, the KSA, Lebanon, UAE, Oman, Egypt, Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, Iraq, Iran (not really a middle eastern county}, and the list goes on all have English news sites freely available online, some with streaming video. If you need the links I can post them.
Talib writes: "If you want reliable and honest "middle eastern media" as it's says, would it not just make more sense just to go directly to the source, the KSA, Lebanon, UAE, Oman, Egypt, Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, Iraq, Iran (not really a middle eastern county}, and the list goes on all have English news sites freely available online"
1) First of all, I would not trust the English translations put out by Muslim countries. There have been too many examples of Muslims saying one thing in Arabic to their Arabic listeners, and quite another thing in English what they want the Infidels to hear.
2) Secondly, if Talib would click on the MEMRI link provided in this article above, and if he has capacity to watch and listen to the video clip from Iran, he would note that MEMRI provides the video in the original language -- thus, anyone who knows Farsi can easily compare the audio with the translation transcript provided by MEMRI.
These Persian arch-heroes should throw out the mullahs instead, and threaten everyone else with coversion from Islam or death.
What they'd convert *to* would be free to choose. Zoroastrianism an obvious option, as would be the Baha'i faith or Christianity, which is said to be doing quite well there.
I lived in Iran as a kid. My heart still cries when I see what Islam has done to that exiting country.
Talib
I have already gone to the source. The Quran and ahadith, as well as learned commentary etc.
Is there something I should know that is not covered under the Allahu Akbar department of Islam?
I got an 'A' in Allahu Akbarism, an esoteric study
of illegitimate power. You should take that class sometime. You might find a course on Ali Sina's 'Faithfreedon.org. Why don't you go there and check out his site, you may find something that interests you...
Let's make a show, for U.S. audiences, in which Washington, Commodore Perry, Z. Taylor, Grant, Sherman, T. Roosevelt, Pershing, Eisenhower, Nimitz, and McArthur are all resurrected, Schwarzkopf comes out of retirement, and they all join Petraeus in kicking some terrorist tush.
Well, non-mythological Persians have been vanguishing Americans by hundrerds for more than a quarter of a century now, with the Big American Coward never daring to fight back. The cowardice at the top is now all-pervasive with the entire top brass of our so-called military up-in-arms against the very idea of taking any action against Iran. They have sent one of their own, a cowardly retired US Army Brig. Gen. John Johns around the country to meet with newspaper editors to lobby the already cowardly dhimmi media against the war. "Even if Iran obtains an atomic bomb, it will not commit suicide by using it", he recently told The Seattle Times editors. Yeah, right, the nation that aided hundreds of suicide bombings around the world, and is led by a totally deranged suicidal-himicidal-genocidal nutter can be trusted to shun suicide. This is what Bismark called "committing suicide out of fear of death". Our government and military "leaders'" uncontrollable fear of Iran is not logical, it is pathological".
If they are this cowardly before Iran when it (yet) does not have nuclear weapons, is there any doubt they will surrender this country to the Mullahs' mercy the moment Hezbollah suicide bombers already pre-positioned here start Holocausting our cities with the nukes smuggled-in from Iran?
Coward Johns candidly admitted the NIE treason paper was issued on the request from our cowardly military to sabotage any chance of military action aganst Iran.
Murdering Serb Christians for Muslims is the only thing those cowards in uniform are good for.
Ruslan Tokhchukov, EnragedSince1999.
Ruslans, there are quite a few Europeans deeply worried about the US policy in the Balkans. The mere fact that it didn't recieve a complete overhaul on Sept. 12th 2001 shows that something simply didn't penetrate in the White House.
I'm posting about the Kosovo situation whenever I have time.
Am reading Deliso and Peter Brock, too. It ain't easy to get to the bottom of this, but at least I'm trying. And we pushed Dansk Folkeparti to take a solid stand against Kosovo independence, though the Danish government went ahead anyway.
Henrik,
Here is some truth about Kosovo, that exposes US & NATO Big Lie that they used as an excuse for their criminal war of aggression on the Serbian people:
http://www.hirhome.com/massey.htm
http://www.hirhome.com/yugo/ranta.htm
Keep visiting this site, and I'll get you more info as I get a chance.
Henrik, you are on the right track: speaking the truth and giving unshakable support to both Serbia and Israel is what we must do if there is to be any hope for the suvival of the Western civilization.
Ruslan.
Well, ancient Israel is already of pre-mythological status according to the way the world lionises the Palestinian Arabs.
Most of the world's media accepts the constant lies that the Pali's are the original, indigenous inhabitants of "Palestine" (rather the the original Judea and Samaria), the victims of the "Zionists'" colonial project etc etc.
Islam and the Arabs is all that counts in that world, and everyone else is irrelevant, except of course, as slaves and sources of booty.
The American invasion episode is really cheezey.
Completely inaccurate uniforms. Fire-crackers going off on walls to represent bullets. Insipid plot-line. Operatic make-up. Unmethodical acting.
These people really need to hire a Bollywood director! There again, if their military is as bad as their production values, what have we to fear?
I saw MO's nose!
A fatwa on the movie makers!
Blasphemy!
Yes, death to the blasphemers!
But on a serious note, how about that big plastic honker on the Jewish guy? Nothing like a good ol' fashioned stereotype to lend credibility to a 'historical drama.' (Read: FICTION)
the Muslim mind, a.k.a. the Arab mind or in this case the Persian mind seem to live in a fantasy world. There is no way any mythological Persian fantasy can vanquish the USA except in the childlike minds of Muslims from Iran
.....all this and no writer's strike....hmmm
Such talent!
They can stick Obama's face in there with those Persian heroes too. Because if this (Muslim, yeah I said, MUSLIM)) guy gets into the White House he will almost certainly do everything humanly and inhumanly possible to see to it that Iran gets to attack every western country including the USA with nuclear missiles with impunity...
If Obama wins this election, the western democracies LOSE. (And Iran becomes the BIG winner!).