| FrontPageMag.com | By Robert Spencer | By Hugh Fitzgerald | Books | Jihad Watch | Robert Spencer | Islam 101 | Qur'an Blog |  |
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Jihad Watch Board Vice President Hugh Fitzgerald discusses the recurring and persistent problems of Islamic piracy and slavery, and the dhimmitude of France and Europe:
For centuries Muslim raiders went up and down the coasts of Europe, even as far as Ireland, and in one famous instance, Iceland. Rape and plunder were the intent. And the greatest wealth were the people themselves, the ones left alive after the raids and who were taken back to North Africa. There they were enslaved, set to work for their Muslim masters. A recent book, "White Gold," by Giles Milton, in telling the story of one Thomas Pellow of Cornwall, reminds us of the one million people from Western Europe seized over the centuries by Muslim raiders. No doubt with modern tools, those who are skilled in the analysis of DNA, were they allowed to test populations in North Africa and elsewhere in the Muslim countries, could find genetic markers for distant origins.In eastern and central Europe, and in present-day Russia, men were seized as slaves (and then forcibly converted). In certain areas, the kidnapping of women, especially Circassian and Georgian and other women from the Caucasus region, helped fill the harems not only of the rulers, but of ordinary Muslims.
And then there was, to fill in the gaps -- the trade in black African slaves. Some were simply seized for the usual purposes -- work, sexual slaves. But the young black Africans taken by the millions had a special role to fill: that of the eunuchs who attended to, and guarded, the women in the harems. Most people appear to believe that the "harem" was enjoyed only by the most powerful. The word "harem," in fact, is often associated in the Western world only with the ruler -- the famous "hareem" of the Ottoman rulers, the Padishahin, the "hareem" of this or that local potentate. But there were "hareems" everywhere in the Muslim lands. Ordinary Muslim men would, if they could afford it, have their harem. Any male slave who might come near such women, much less guard or attend to them, should be free from any sexual urges -- that is, he should be castrated. In Jan Hogedoorn's scholarly study of the economics of this "hideous trade" (as he titles his article), he explains that the Arab slave-traders would castrate the kidnapped black African boys on site, in the bush, and then march them northwards or eastwards by slave coffle all the way to the slave-markets of Egypt and North Africa, or to the coast where they were then taken by dhow to Arab slave-markets in Arabia, in Riyadh and Baghdad and Damascus and Cairo, and Constantinople and Smyrna, and in all the smaller slave markets. Only 10% survived this trek.
Islamic civilization had slave-soldiers, sex-slaves in the harems, slaves in the houses. For after all, slavery was part of 7th century Arabia, and is recognized in the Qur'an and by Muhammad. Thus whatever banning of slavery took place in the Muslim world took place under pressure from the non-Muslim world. It was the British (see J. B. Kelly, Britain and the Persian Gulf, 1795-1880) who managed to ban the Arab slave trade in African slaves -- much to the chagrin of the local Arabs. Slavery was "officially" abolished in Saudi Arabia in 1962. Arab enslavement of black Africans, however, continues wherever -- wherever it can be continued. In the southern Sudan, black Africans have been seized by Arab slavers. As is now well known, Western NGOs have managed to buy the freedom of some of those enslaved from their Arab masters. Black Africans are enslaved in Mali and Mauritania. And in Saudi newspapers one can find advertisements that read suspiciously. One that was brought to my attention a few years ago was an offer to swap a late-model American car for an Asian -- i.e. Indian or Sri Lankan or Thai -- female.As the Western world grew in power, the Muslim raiding parties that once went up and down the coasts of Europe concentrated more and more on Christian shipping in the Mediterranean. In the Western world, these raiders -- who were not working on their own, but carefully had to register their intended Christian targets in advance with, for example, the beylerbey of Algiers -- made much of the Mediterranean unsafe, just as the pirates of today may be making shipping unsafe. Everyone knows about the Barbary Pirates. Americans like to tell the story of how at long last the robust response of the American Republic under Jefferson accomplished what those tribute-paying fearful Europeans could not accomplish. But the pride is slightly misplaced, for in the end the Barbary Pirates renewed their attacks here and there. It was only the French invasion of Algeria in 1830 that put a definitive end to the war conducted from North Africa by Muslims on the Christian shipping.
Muslim pirates today, in and around Malaysia and Indonesia and off the coast of Somalia, are of course introduced in gain, like pirates always and everywhere. But Islam adds a different dimension, and justifies, even elevates the enterprise.
That is why, for example, what some attempt to describe what has been happening in France as mere hooliganism and anti-social activity of a sort that one can find among non-Muslim rioters misses a point. That behavior, that hatred, even where it is not in every case the direct result of the promptings of Islam, is provided a justification by Islam and the tenets it inculcates of permanent hostility toward all non-Muslims. And the actions, the rage, the hatred are not merely justified, but intensified, given a quality that makes them essentially inassuagable, implacable. Any attempts to buy one's way out of that hatred by the payment of jizyah (more housing, even more benefits beyond free medical care and free education and so many free things that Americans would hardly believe it), will not work. Islam is to dominate, Muslims are to rule. If they are not yet in their rightful positions, that is unjust. And whatever system exists will be unjust until Islam dominates, until the Infidel society has transformed itself so as to accommodate every Muslim demand, which is to say -- to give up what distinguishes a non-Muslim people, culture, civilization, from a Muslim one.
And this is what Tariq Ramadan and others of his ilk like to talk about: that Islam is "European" (no it isn't), that Islam is "here to stay in Europe and no one can do anything about it" (not so fast) and that's just "the way it's going to be" (not necessarily, not at all -- Europe has powers of recuperation, and it only requires enough people coming to their senses, through educating themselves, in time).
Of course there are hooligans and a criminal class everywhere. But that does not mean that there is nothing specifically Islamic about what has been happening in France. The French government spends more on public housing than any other country in Western Europe. It spends more on education than any other country in Western Europe. The Muslims, chiefly North Africans, who live in France know perfectly well what life is like in the countries that they or their parents or in a few cases grandparents came from. They know French and they know Arabic. They could be sent back. They have no claim on France, none. Geographic happenstance means nothing. The French can stop paying the quite unnecessary guilt-talk-cum-tribute now. It is more than 40 years since the French had left Algeria, where they had left a legacy, an interval, of civilization, and Morocco and Tunisia, where after a mere 40 years (some "colonialism") they had left similar legacies, and allowed at least some of the most intelligent members of those societies to begin, after a thousand years of mental enslavement, the space to think.
Islam tells people that they should not integrate -- how, really, can any Believer be expected to integrate into, to accept, the laws, manners, customs, ways, and above all the dominant position, of Infidels? It makes no sense. It is against Allah, against the Qur'an, the Hadith, the Sira. Islam is "to dominate and not to be dominated." Of course it is okay to rape "Brigitte," whether "Brigitte" is a real gang-raped French girl, or France itself. It is okay to vandalize, or steal, the property of Infidels -- it's not really theirs in the first place. The world belongs to Allah, and to the Believers. Why should not Muslims act on this belief? Why are we so unfeeling, and unthinking, as to deny the self-evident superiority of Muslim ways, and Muslim laws, and Muslims themselves? If we Infidels, in France or elsewhere, insist on being stubborn, then we deserve what we get. And in the end, the Western world, it is felt, will not exhibit the necessary determination, and even gratitude to those who left the legacy that was inherited and is now being abandoned, in a colossal act of collective self-immolation.
Posted by Robert at November 14, 2005 7:22 AM
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Well,that says a lot. But let's look more closely at the political/cultural/media leadership in the EU. They are the ones who allow their own laws to be trampled on, as when Blair and new & old Labour allow the mad imams to preach jihad. Isn't that sedition? Doesn't the UK have laws against sedition? If I am not wrong, then the British political class were the first ones in Europe to take a pro-Islamic position, going way back before WW One. I have a book written by Copts at that time complaining over the British favoritism in Egypt for Muslims over Copts. Now, of course, British official support for Islamic goals has led to the 7/7 bombings. And what has blair done about it other than to emit the hot air of tough TALK against jihadists? Just mere talk.
And of course the usual drivel of sociological explanation of terrorism, which they have also applied to the Muslim/Arab anti-social vandalism in France [soft jihad, so far].
While I am at it, why not talk about the stalwart and staunch American anti-terrorist, Geo W and his faithful foreign secretary, Miss Condi? Condi and Bill and Hill [W's forerunners in the Casa Bianca] are here in Israel now. And it sounds like they are all acting more like terrorism and jihad facilitators than like anti-terrorist leaders. Condi wants Israel to let PA citizens cross Israeli territory without any checks, between Gaza and Judea-Samaria. Bill Clinton, speaking at a commemoration for Yits'haq Rabin, called on the Jewish Diaspora to send money to the enemies of Jews in Gaza. What's the diff between the Reps and the Dems?
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at November 14, 2005 9:51 AM
Well,that says a lot. But let's look more closely at the political/cultural/media leadership in the EU. They are the ones who allow their own laws to be trampled on, as when Blair and new & old Labour allow the mad imams to preach jihad. Isn't that sedition? Doesn't the UK have laws against sedition? If I am not wrong, then the British political class were the first ones in Europe to take a pro-Islamic position, going way back before WW One. I have a book written by Copts at that time complaining over the British favoritism in Egypt for Muslims over Copts. Now, of course, British official support for Islamic goals has led to the 7/7 bombings. And what has blair done about it other than to emit the hot air of tough TALK against jihadists? Just mere talk.
And of course the usual drivel of sociological explanation of terrorism, which they have also applied to the Muslim/Arab anti-social vandalism in France [soft jihad, so far].
While I am at it, why not talk about the stalwart and staunch American anti-terrorist, Geo W and his faithful foreign secretary, Miss Condi? Condi and Bill and Hill [W's forerunners in the Casa Bianca] are here in Israel now. And it sounds like they are all acting more like terrorism and jihad facilitators than like anti-terrorist leaders. Condi wants Israel to let PA citizens cross Israeli territory without any checks, between Gaza and Judea-Samaria. Bill Clinton, speaking at a commemoration for Yits'haq Rabin, called on the Jewish Diaspora to send money to the enemies of Jews in Gaza. What's the diff between the Reps and the Dems?
at November 14, 2005 9:52 AM
Another fine article by H.F.
In the beginning, Allah created the Earth and its first inhabitant, the archetypical muslim, Adam. Allah told Adam that the whole place was his. Later in the story, the muslim clan got kicked out of paradise. Cain was afraid that the people outside would kill him. What people were those? Infidels, unbelievers of every ilk. Why didn't Allah tell them about this? What a shock.
Infidel squatters all over the place and the muslims were not numerous enough to do much about it. It took several thousand years for the decendants of the early muslims to consolidate any power. That came with Mohammad who talked with Allah, and was reasured that the whole place was still theirs (muslims), along with everything and everyone in it. Mohammad published this in his book 'The Quran'. It became, not just the duty, but the God given right for muslims to regain what Allah had given them. Which is everything. Except of course the bad stuff. Like garbage. That belongs to infidels. So does cleaning up dog poop. No muslim owns a pooper scooper, and would not know how to operate it if they did. Can you imagine the confusion? Thats why muslims disown dog poop.
Allah did not create 'that' for 'them'. If you ever see a muslim scooping dog poop, you know he's an apostate...But they 'own' "everthing" else and will fight to regain it....Allah said so, and Allah knows best...
at November 14, 2005 10:30 AM
Elyahu,
I agree with your comments, and I would just add that there is a strong element of economic self-interest at play in the EU policy towards Arabs. I'm reminded of a quote from the late Menachem Begin to the EU when he became frustrated with the EU over its pressure on Israel (this is not an exact quote, but it's close): "For 2,000 years the Europeans have spread anti-semitic stereotypes: Jews as backstabbers, Jews as money-grubbers. But now we know; it's not us, it's you."
I still believe that the instant someone invents a practical alternative to the gasoline-powered internal combustion engine, support for the Arab "cause" will collapse.
Posted by: Howard, Fine & Howard at November 14, 2005 10:41 AM
Howard: "I still believe that the instant someone invents a practical alternative to the gasoline-powered internal combustion engine, support for the Arab "cause" will collapse."
There is only one flaw in that 'Fine' plan.
Before the invention ever gets on the open market, both the inventor and the invented will disappear. Supposedly Tesla invented a rotary engine that would power most anything with no fuel, or at least not what we ordinarily think of as fuel. A two pound rotary of his design would develope twenty five horse power. Reports are that he took his rotary to race track in new York in about 1928. He hooked it up to a race car and it went five days at 95 mph and never stopped for fuel. Someone insulted him so he took his little black box and went home.
He claimed in an interview that he had twenty such engines in operation. He dies, all his good stuff and paperwork disappeared. A typical senario, often reported, of an inventor being bought off, scared off, disappears off or dies off. A lot of that is probably imaginary stuff, but it only takes one 200mpg carburator to make the case...
at November 14, 2005 11:04 AM
There is a new book out:
http://www.techcentralstation.com/111405C.html
This seemed like a good place to put this.
Posted by: Gary at November 14, 2005 11:25 AM
Swami,
It's hard to know how much stock to put in these urban legends (do you ever watch Mythbusters on the Discovery Channel?). But Israel has some of the best scientists and engineers in the world and a strong security interest in developing such a power plant. I would think that an inventor who developed such a product would not "disappear" there. If I were the PM of Israel, I would devote every available resource to funding research and development in this area.
Posted by: Howard, Fine & Howard at November 14, 2005 11:25 AM
Moe, Larry, and Curly: (I know your given names) There's nothing stoogey in your last comments. I've seen people literally squander whole inheritances on trying to reproduce Teszla's completely legendary results.
I confess. I really am your long-lost brother Shemp.
Posted by: Kepha at November 14, 2005 11:33 AM
A couple of details:
"the Muslim raiding parties that once went up and down the coasts of Europe concentrated more and more on Christian shipping in the Mediterranean"
In fact, Muslims had been raiding coasts throughout the Mediterranean ever since the 8th century and, as Henri Pirenne wrote, turning that Sea -- which for centuries before had been a great cultural and economic axis -- into a hostile wall between West and East.
Second detail: I have no source for this (only references in a couple of obscure books), but I think Muslim rulers had a penchant for using black Africans as public decapitators. I wonder if there is some Islamic reason for this, or just a matter of giving whom they considered the lowest the dirty work.
Posted by: Dr. Pepper at November 14, 2005 12:28 PM
Kepha,
A quick bit of trivia, (this is COMPLETELY off the subject, but I hope JW/DW will indulge me), What is the only Stooge film in which Moe, Larry, Curly and Shemp appeared together? Answer: Hold That Lion (Curly was the sleeping passenger on the train.)
Cheers
Posted by: Howard, Fine & Howard at November 14, 2005 1:00 PM
Kepha...Yep Tesla was phoney as a three dollar bill, and so is that alternating current he supposedly invented...
Posted by: duh_swami at November 14, 2005 5:24 PM
What's the diff between the Reps and the Dems? Posted by: Eliyahu
Humpty and Dumpty
my friend
Humpty and Dumpty who sat on that fall and fell.
Those of us who have two cells of grey matter to rub together, who are apolitical, and a-ideological, talk of Republicrats and Demipubs.
Let's talk of the suicide of the west, faciliated by craven, power hungry, self serving and greedy individuals who can't see their own shoe laces, or see beyond the 'morrow, let's talk of air headed ideologues who have been brainwashed by values that speak of the equality of men, of suffering of class and race.
Let's speak of Jews who militated for legislation against antisemites who would deny the Holocaust and speak blood libel against Jews, now watching that legislation for which they militated being turned against them by those who have a visceral 1350 year hatred.
Ironic isn't it, that the legislation that would arrest,extradite and try the likes of an Ernst Zuendel, is now used by Islamofascists for protection. And the tragedy is that the Zuendelites had no mass following, nor oil money to support their proslytezation, but the Islamists do, and this is a sad story repeated in England, France, Germany, Italy whose hate crimes and hate speech laws, originally enacted to protect Jews from slander by antisemites, has been expanded to protect Muslims whose ideology declared war on the Jews 1350 years ago.
Unintended adverse consequences.. having to lie in the bed of one's own making.
Unintended adverse consequences the phrase needs repeating till people get it, and start thinking before they act.
Posted by: Nariz at November 14, 2005 9:43 PM
What's the diff between the Reps and the Dems?
Posted by: Eliyahu at November 14, 2005 09:52 AM
Very little, according to many people who believe the CFR actually runs the country and most of the world. I must admit, there is overwhelming evidence to support their theories.
When the traitors in Washington decide to officially inform the American people that America, Mexico, and Canada have agreed to abolish their borders and create a unifed North American "community", for which the groundwork has already been laid, there will be no doubt left in my mind. The foundation has been established for a North American union analogous to the EU that includes a common currency and the free movement of people. I don't envision an American or Canadian stampede to Mexico, but I could be wrong.
The imminent "North American community" will take us one step closer to the grand finale, the elitist social engineers' utopian dream. It is so easy to understand why neither the Democrats nor the Republicans will enforce our immigration laws and protect our borders. Why bother, when borders will soon be relics of the past, just like our sovereignty.
Imagine the implications of such a "union." They are too frightening to contemplate. The leaders of both political parties are universalists and their goals are identical. The Democrats are a little more impatient to implement the final stages of their grand scheme, which has been achieved incrementally over the last sixty years, right under our noses. We won't have to wait for the muslims to abolish the Constitution; our own elected government officials have all but ripped it to shreds.
Posted by: Susanp at November 14, 2005 11:42 PM
Nariz:
If the anti-hate laws enacted after lobbying by Jews are being abused by Islamists, it's because the current judiciary are clueless, not because the laws were ill-conceived.
Holocaust deniers like Ernst Zundel make claims against the world's Jewish community that are patently false and are motivated by an obsessive unmitigated hatred. To suggest that claims made that Islam is an aggressively triumphalist ideology that threatens world peace, when such claims are founded on both its holy texts and the preachings by its religous authorities is the moral equivalent of Holocaust denial goes to show just how morally and intellectually bankrupt many proponents of "civil libertarianism" have become these days.
Posted by: waterdragon52 at November 15, 2005 10:21 AM
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