Bat Ye'or, whose groundbreaking historical research on dhimmitude opened my eyes, made sense of a great deal I was seeing in Islamic doctrine and history but which was not explained elsewhere, and inspired me to do the work I am doing now, speaks at the Vienna Forum in Austria.
Her talk was sponsored by the Hudson Institute, the Educational Initiative for Central and Eastern Europe, and Kairos Journal. The Forum topic was "The Future of Europe and the Challenge of Islam." Bat Ye'or spoke as part of a panel, "Historical Background and Thorny Issues," with Douglas Murray, Paul Marshall and me.
What an amazing and inspiring lady!
She's had a big influence on a whole generation of writers, and arguably almost STARTED that generation with Eurabia...
Bat Ye'Or's video illustrates again the dichotomy or dualism of Islam. Islam claims Jesus as "Isa", a muslim prophet, denying the existence of biblical history as Islam claims all biblical figures and history as Muslim. Additionally claiming all existence prior to biblical & Judaic times, all were Muslim.
At the same time, Islam destroys or erases remnants of history and historic artifacts that reflect specific religious cultural existence because they are jahiliyya, representing the pre-Islamic age of ignorance.
Again, playing both sides of the fence, Islam confesses a period of Jahiliyya (pre-Islamic)existed and is not worthy of preservation or acknowledgement yet claims people of the book and those that came prior to the biblical period were all Muslims.
Fitzgerald: History and Jahiliyya
Epistemology
here's something from our late Dominic Tabrar-Synge, 'necessitasnonhabetlegem', from February 2007, in *this* thread:
http://www.jihadwatch.org/2007/02/pakistan-islamic-supremacist-party-against-teaching-pre-islamic-history.html
describing Islam's attitude toward the non-Islamic past, towards history and archaeological remains, as he had had bitter experience of it himself, and as colleagues had recounted to him:
"Many times on this site, Google it, I have tried to warn you all about how mawzlems view history and archaeology (my specialism).
"Occasionally I have been hooted down but mostly I have been ignored and sometimes laughed at. Some of that is obviously my fault for I tend to post in haste and repent at leisure - I am currently trying to work out how I can apologise to all of you, and Hugh (Fitzgerald) in particular, for my post on the thread concerning Bulgaria the other day (I was mostly wrong and relying too heavily on out of date textbooks).
"However, I do feel that the head post here by Robert - Mr. Spencer - vindicates my position and the views which I hold vis-a-vis the islamic approach to history - if it doesn't chime with what they believe then re-write it or ignore it (better still: blow it up) - and I urge you all to consider this head post in the light of everything else which I have tried to tell you about the mawzlem approach to historical, and verifiable historical, fact.
"And, please, do not be mislead by the likes of Naseem (who posts here). Whilst she, herself, is undoubtedly a deeply convinced person with a well developed sense of the immanent she, and her belief group, are amongst the worst and most violent offenders against any knowledge of the past and they are the group most often convicted of violence and murder against historians and archaeologists.
"That is hardly surprising since she, and the group to which she belongs, are amongst the most persistent offenders when it comes to re-writing history.
"Most of what she, and her belief group, believe about the past - her groups' history or our history - is, quite simply, wrong and completely unsupported by any physical evidence.
"That aside, the information in the head post to this thread is completely typical of the mawzlem response everywhere.
"I, personally, know of no mawzlem country - not one - where historians and archaeologist are not routinely threatened and subjected to violence if they try to look at the world before the alleged prophet whom we know as 'mohammed the damned' and whom they, in their crass stupidity, revere.
"Recently, a colleague of mine returned to the UK from a visit to the Sangiran cave and Brangkal River sites on Java (Indonesia).
"Quite apart from having to endure the most awful vilifications from the local mawzlems he, and his party, were also attacked by the locals and only managed to get out alive because one of the party had contacts in the Indonesian military who rescued them from what was a life threatening situation.
"Even so, the military refused to carry out any of the equipment and, what is much more important, the soldiers refused to permit the carrying out of essential supplies of insulin for one of the party, female, and cited as their reasons for not so permitting that 'it was probably illegal heroin' and that 'it didn't matter if she died because she was a woman and had no value'.
"What further enraged my colleague was the statement from the senior Indonesian Army Officer present that 'since she was the only woman on the expedition it was patently obvious that she must be the employed whore'.
"The lady in question, and no, I will not name her, even though by now you have probably guessed her identity, only happens to be one of the world's foremost experts on pre-history and ancient man. She survived. Thank God.
"This sort of thing is what we face as archaeologists and historians every day - near enough.
"What sickens me is that we are now facing this in our own countries.
"I have recounted on this site (Google it) in the past that I and my team have been confronted by groups of mawzlem youths [sometime before Feb 2007 – so between Feb 06 -07] as we emerged from an overnight rescue dig, who have attempted to physically attack us as well as yelling verbal abuse at us.
"The substance of their complaint - in as much as it can be said to have any substance - was that we were disturbing an ancient mawzlem burial ground that was, and I quote, 'thousands of years old' and destroying the evidence of the first built mosk in England which, according to them, was built before Stonehenge.
"Risible, of course, but also dangerous.
"So, don't be surprised by the actions of the members of the six-party Muttahida Majlis-i-Amal because this is the sort of thing, coupled with the wholesale destruction of ancient sites (don't get me started!) which happens everywhere in the islamic world on a daily basis.
"Violence against academics who dare to speak out is routine in islam but they seem to reserve a very special kind of hatred for the historian and the archaeologist - is that, perhaps, because we can prove them wrong?
"Dominic.
- Posted by: necessitasnonhabetlegem at February 24, 2007 12:21 AM
And another devastating post by Dominic, archaeologist, describing his experiences of Muslim hatred and vandalism of the record of the past, at a fantastic historical site in Pakistan which dates back to long before the rise of Islam.
Found in the comments to this article -
http://www.jihadwatch.org/2007/02/pakistan-asks-eu-to-look-inwards-to-stop-radicalization.html
necessitasnonhabetlegem | February 11, 2007 12:51 AM
'The government of Pakistan actually controls very little of that country - most areas outside the capital are effectively self-governing and respond only to military pressure from the centre.
'Very little civilian authority remains, especially in the more remote areas, and sharia law predominates even in the larger towns.
'Pakistan is most certainly not safe for Western civilised people to visit. Furthermore, there is a widespread culture of bribery for everything from owning a vehicle to taking a taxi to shopping for necessities. In effect, law and order, as the average civilised Western person would understand those terms, has long since ceased to have any meaning; indeed, such meanings probably ceased to be relevant shortly after 1947.
'A couple of years ago I was privileged to be allowed to join a study team looking into the rock carvings (petroglyphs) and inscriptions along the Karakorum Highway - part of the old 'Silk Road' network - which are, or, rather, were, some of the most historically important artifacts in Pakistan.
'I had read, naturally, the opinions of Professors Jettmar and Hauptmann (Heidelberg University) and also Professor A.H. Dani (Quaid-i-Azam University Islamabad, Pakistan) a most civilised moslem of the 'old school' so to speak) and I looked forward to a very civilised and enjoyable two months pottering about amongst some very interesting carvings.
'Well, I was never more mistaken in my life!
'The rock carvings are mainly, but not exclusively, in the area around the village of Chilas in the Diamir District
'and it cost the whole team almost two thousand pounds (three thousand US dollars) in bribes, and three weeks of time in Islamabad, to have our travel documents made good for the journey to Chilas.
'It cost us an additional one thousand five hundred pounds for the 'arrangement' of a military escort - an escort, incidentally, which was never provided;
'we were, instead, escorted, if that could be construed to be the correct word, by a group of what I can only describe as barbarian, gun-toting ruffians who had to be paid off in US dollars on a daily basis.
'When we finally got to Chilas - a nightmare journey which took three days - *we had the added financial burden of having to pay a 'tax' to each and every mosk in the area in order to be allowed to stay there (this eventually came to over one-and-a-half thousand pounds)* {my emphasis - dda}
' and various moslem clerics routinely searched our baggage for what they called 'illegal works' and 'the devil's machines' and which we came to realise meant Christian writings and anything that looked like having a purpose more than that of a simple camera.
'We had been told that there were some 45 sites on a stretch of the Indus of about 80 miles in length, and on both banks, with about 40,000 petroglyphs and 10,000 inscriptions in more than 15 writing systems and that the carvings were scraped, or chiseled in some cases, into the larger stones scattered about on the river banks and the lower flood banks of the river valley.
' Certainly there are at least that number of sites *but at almost every site we visited systematic destruction of the carvings had obviously taken place* {my emphasis - dda}.
'At one site, a mere ten miles from Chilas, we witnessed for ourselves *a group of locals, obviously under the directions of several clerics, systematically destroying the stones with large hammers, steel rods and sundry other tools* {my emphasis - dda}.
'When we attempted to remonstrate with these people we were physically attacked and our interpreter - a young man from Islamabad - told us that our attackers were telling us that they were deliberately destroying the works of the ungodly that the British put there so that they could come back and claim the place as their own again!
'No amount of reasoning and explanation seemed to get through to these people.
'Some three days later we did manage to convince one imam that these rocks were much older than the British colonial era
'and he turned to us and said, according to our translator, that *if they (the rock inscriptions) were indeed as old as we claimed then they didn't matter and should be destroyed anyway for they obviously came from the mythical (his word) era before the coming of the prophet and so had no validity.* {my emphasis - dda}.
' He added that because we were interested in them then they all had to be destroyed to save his people from the evil ways which we infidels brought with us.
'All of this, you understand, from a man who was counted amongst the folk of that area to be educated and knowledgeable!
'I'm not ashamed to admit that on the aeroplane home to London I wept - yes, really, I cried. Why?
'*Because these damned barbarian moslems don't just want to rewrite the past, they want to destroy it also - they want to remove any evidence that anything is any different from that which they claim* {my emphasis - dda}.
'They are doing it everywhere and all the time - robbing all of us of our past, cutting us off from our various identities, systematically destroying our sense of us.
'Even here, in civilised old Britain, I have encountered moslem youths *who disrupt archaeological conferences, attempt to destroy archaeological sites, attack archaeologists and pervert knowledge in a desparate (sic: desperate?) attempt to deny that the past ever contained anything other that islam* {my emphasis - dda}
'And what do we do? Well, we give in as far as I can see. Some days it just all seems so hopeless.
- Dominic."