A certain unpleasant fellow named Richard Medhurst recently posted the following on X:
Why do Europeans invade other countries and then whine like cowards when people fight back?
Travelling from the US or UK to Iraq and Afghanistan, armed to the teeth, makes you the terrorist. Leaving your house in Poland to steal one in Palestine makes you the terrorist.
— Richard Medhurst (@richimedhurst) March 27, 2024
Why do Europeans invade other countries and then whine like cowards when people fight back? Travelling from the US or UK to Iraq and Afghanistan, armed to the teeth, makes you the terrorist. Leaving your house in Poland to steal one in Palestine makes you the terrorist.
Of course, the US and UK went to Iraq and Afghanistan not to colonize anyone, but to help overturn the regime of the despotic Saddam Hussein in the former, and the rule of the fanatical Taliban in the latter. And it was then hoped that functioning democracies could be established in both countries. Those American and British troops whom Medhurst describes as “whining cowards, invaders, and terrorists,” intent on suppressing the Iraqis and Afghanis, in fact went to those lands only to better the lot of the people in both countries, and the Americans spent five trillion dollars on that quixotic but hardly ignoble venture. As for Jews “leaving their houses in Poland to steal one in Palestine,” as the antisemitic Medhurst puts it, the return of Jews from all over the world to the Land of Israel, where there has been a Jewish population, admittedly at times greatly reduced, for the past 3500 years, for that reason they cannot be considered “settler-colonialists.”
Daled Amos has pointed out that Jews returning to the Land of Israel were not “stealing [houses] in Palestine” and that the most successful settler-colonialists in the world were the Muslims. You can find out more about his argument here: “Has There Ever Been More Successful Settler-Colonial Power Than Islam?,” by Daled Amos, Elder of Ziyon, April 5, 2024. Amos begins by rebutting Medhurst’s remark about people — clearly, Jews—leaving their houses in Poland to steal others in Palestine:
But these are not Europeans invading a foreign country.
These are Jews returning to and re-establishing their land.Also, Europe, and the US, do not have a monopoly on colonializing, invading, and occupying other countries.
More to the point, a case can be made for saying that Muslims themselves are the most successful colonizers in history. Bernard Lewis wrote in his book, The Crisis of Islam:
The then Christian provinces of Syria, Palestine, Egypt, and North Africa were absorbed and in due course Islamized and Arabized, and they served as bases for the further invasion of Europe and the conquest of Spain and Portugal and much of southern Italy. By the early eighth century the conquering Arab armies were even advancing beyond the Pyrenees into France. [p. 34; emphasis added]
The Islamic empire was very busy.
And like other colonizing powers throughout history, the Muslims, too, had to deal with the resistance from the indigenous people they had conquered. In Spain, that was called the Reconquista, the Reconquest, which was ultimately successful.
Meanwhile, the attempt to re-establish control over the Christian areas of the Middle East was known as the Crusades. Those were not successful.
Muslim expansionism goes even further.
Lewis writes about the next phase of Islamic colonialism, not by the Arabs but by “later recruits to Islam” — the Turks, who conquered Anatolia and Constantinople (which became the capital of the Ottoman Empire), and the Tatars, who went into Russia.
He writes that the time came when the Muslims were put on the defensive:
By this time the jihad had become almost entirely defensive–resisting the Reconquest in Spain and Russia, resisting the movements for national self-liberation by the Christian subjects of the Ottoman Empire, and finally, as Muslims see it, defending the very heartlands of Islam against infidel attack. This phase has come to be known as imperialism. [p. 35-36; emphasis added]
Today we have a skewed version of this era in history. We suffer from an ironic distortion of terminology, where the resistance and search for self-liberation from Muslim colonialism and occupation is labeled as imperialism….
It was “imperialism” for the Christians to spend 700 years of the “Reconquista” in slowly pushing the Muslims out of the Iberian Peninsula. It was “imperialism” for the Greeks to fight their war for independence in 1821 against the Ottoman Turks. It was “imperialism” for the Bulgarian Christians to wrest their country back from the Ottomans. It was “imperialism” for Serbia to acquire de facto independence from the Ottomans in 1867. And it was “imperialism” for the Maronite Christians to resist succumbing to Islamization in Lebanon, though they could not prevent large numbers of Muslim Arabs, both Shi’a and Sunni, from settling in the country.
In Palestine, such attempts at establishing a great Arab national past ran into a vexing problem. Since Palestine had never been an independent Arab country, its period of pride had to be sought in the biblical Israelite age.
And their claims of a rival connection to the land are periodically contradicted by archaeological discoveries.
There are more than 30,000 separate archeological sites in Israel. Almost all of them are Jewish sites. Only a handful of Arab sites exist, but of course none of them date from before the seventh century — which is when Islam itself came into existence.
Yet the return of the indigenous population, the Jews, to their own land, especially the influx that began in the twentieth century, has been presented by the Muslim Arabs and their antisemitic supporters as a “settler-colonial project” akin to the French settling Algeria, or the British settling Kenya. In both those cases, “colons” were sent out by the “colonial power” to settle in other lands that would then be tied politically, and economically, to the mother country. In the case of Israel, no “mother country” sent out Jews to “colonize” the Land of Israel; it was entirely an effort undertaken by Jewish pioneers themselves. And they were not connected to a “mother country” in Europe — Israel was their mother country.
Meanwhile, the Muslim Arabs who swept out of Arabia in the seventh century, conquering all of Arabia, then all of the Middle East, then North Africa and the Iberian Peninsula in the west, and Persia in the east, tried repeatedly to conquer the Christian empire of Byzantium. The Islamic conquerors of Byzantium were no longer the Arabs but islamized Turks, and it was they — the Seljuk and then the Osmanli Turks — who conquered Anatolia and then, on May 29, 1453, finally seized what had been between the 5th and the 13th century the largest and richest city in Christendom — Constantinople. The fall of Constantinople led to more Muslim conquests, by the Ottoman Turks, first of Greece, then the Balkans, and then all the way up to Hungary. That represented the high-water mark of Muslim conquest and imperialism in eastern Europe.
The Muslims established themselves throughout Afghanistan and the rest of Central Asia (where the five stans, now the independent states of Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, and Tajikistan, remain Islamized), they ruled over India for several hundred years during which the Muslims were responsible for the deaths of between 70 and 80 million Hindus, while traders from the Hadramaut (in Yemen) first brought Islam to what was then Buddhist and Hindu Indonesia. After some Indonesian sultans had been converted to Islam, their peoples did too, on the principle of cuius regio, eius religio, which is to say, the religion of the ruler determines the religion of the ruled.
Even in non-Arab lands, those who became Muslims often assumed Arab names, and learned Arabic so as to read the Qur’an. Some of those converts, and their progeny, began to think of themselves as “Arabs” for the prestige that identity conferred. That is why Daled Amos calls the Muslim Arabs the most successful imperialists in history. They managed to persuade many of those they conquered that they, too, were not just Muslims but also Arabs.
dumbledoresarmy says
Yes.
It makes my brain cramp when I hear people screeching about how dare the Jews Judaise Jerusalem… or when our mainstream media, such as Auntie ABC, primly refuse to call the Temple Mount the Temple Mount, preferring instead to prioritise the Arab Muslim imperial designation – The Dome of the Rock (even though they wouldn’t be caught dead referring to Uluru as ‘Ayers Rock’). To be consistent, they should all be using the term “Temple Mount” ONLY – or even do some research and thenceforward use the preferred and official Hebrew term, suitably transliterated.
As “Uluru” – the ancient indigenous place-name – must be preferred over the johnny-come-lately imperial label, ‘Ayers Rock’; so also the proper and ancient Hebrew name for the Temple Mount should be preferred over any of the imperial Arab terms!
Because anyone who actually knows history knows that there were three Jewish temples in succession on Mt Zion, long long long before the Muslims arrived and squatted on what was a pre-existing and very ancient Jewish sacred site! And that Jerusalem was the city of the Jews – of the people of Israel – for over a thousand years before ever Alfred became King of the West Saxons.
Those who condemn Jews for “Judaising” Jerusalem should be told they must now also condemnn the Irish for “Irishising” Tara, or shriek at the Welsh for “making Carnarvon Welsh”… or shriek at Italians for “Italianising” Rome.
Further: I find it personally disgusting that the Jew-haters today screech at Jews for being ‘white imperial invaders and colonisers’ in the Middle East, when for over a thousand years within every part of Europe Jews were viewed and treated as aliens in the land… as middle-eastern interlopers….and never, never, never viewed as ‘white’..
The very same people whose forebears actual or ideological gleefully assisted Hitler to exterminate millions of ‘non-Aryan’, ‘non-white’ Jews in order to render Europe Judenrein are now joining the middle-eastern Muslim imperialists to exterminate ‘white European’ Jews (!!) so as to render the land of Israel Judenrein…
It disgusts. It infuriates. It is just plain horrible.
TheyWantRevenge says
Correct, they see the light-skinned Europeans, regardless if Jewish, Christian, or Atheist, as colonizing capitalists & fascists who have enslaved the noble “indigenous” dark-skinned people since the beginning of time.
Brian Osborn says
Thank you. Excellent summation.
Brian says
Two Jewish temples not three surely?
Westpacwill says
Actually three Temples. The first built by Solomon on Mount Zion. Then after the return from Babylon allowed by the Persian ruler, the second Temple’s construction is described through the books of Ezra and Nehemiah. The third Temple created by Herod was the magnificent structure Jesus described, and was leveled by the Romans in 70 AD so that “not one stone remained on top the other.
All three were built
Westpacwill says
All three were built on Mount Zion, which also allowed construction over the Gihon Springs which is required for the ritual cleansing in the Temple. The so-called “Temple Mount” was never the location of any Temple because (1) there has never been a spring of fresh water there, and (2) it is there the Romans built their own Fort Antonio for approximately 10,000 men. That fort was built adjacent to Jerusalem but was never part of Jerusalem, because as Jesus prophesized, not one stone would remain on top of another of the Temple or Jerusalem itself. The “Temple Mount” was decreed by Crusaders when they took the city but didn’t understand what they were seeing. The next Temple will be built very soon on Mount Zion, which also was never on the “Temple Mount” but stood in the City of David, about 600 yards away from there, in the Jewish sector of the city. Israel has prepared the robes, ephods, and sacred instruments required for worship services to be continued before the Altar of God, and they have received six Red Heifers (without blemish) from Texas, so it could conduct the first services in almost 2,000 years tomorrow. The altar is all that is required, and the new Temple could follow, in the Jewish part of Jerusalem on the site of the other Temples, on what remains of Mount Zion, over the Gihon Springs. It would not in any way affect the pagan buildings that Islam erected in Fort Antonio, so it’s not a question of “if” but “when” Israel determines is the correct time. Perhaps God will reveal (or has already revealed) the cave in which the Ark of the Covenant has been hidden for Millennia, His sign for the re-establishment of Temple worship, beginning with the sacrifice of the six Red Heifers?
Chief Mac says
For over 3,000 years Judea and Samaria were Judea and Samaria and now summarily the west bank
Kepha says
And they forget that the slight majority of Israeli Jews are Mizrahi.
Daniel Bielak says
Dear dumbledoresarmy,
I appreciate, and agree with, everything that you wrote in your comment.
It’s good to see you commenting here again.
gravenimage says
Spot on, DDA.
And agreed, Kepha and Daniel.
Mick says
Sunni Islam is a top trumps invader. Shia is not: only Iran, Iraq, Azerbaijan, Gulf Saudi, Bahrain.
High fertility and the Koran are common to both. So why?
࿗Infidel࿘ says
Shi’a actually is an invader, but sunni doctrine found widespread acceptance among Arabs and Turks. For the shi’a, while Arabs did find Ismailiya, Zaidi and Alawite, the Twelver Imamiyeh found acceptance among Iranians due to the fact that after Hussein, subsequent imams were of both Arab and Iranian descent, since Hussein supposedly married a Sassanid princess (although the historicity of that is untenable). The only Turks who found the Twelvers acceptable were the Azeris. The Safavids were an Azeri dynasty that converted Iran from a sunni to a shi’a country
Lebanon has been transformed within its islamic ranks from sunni to an even sunni-shi’a split, while in Syria, the Alawites, after decades of control, have managed to grow significantly. If the Houthis ultimately win in Yemen, that country will be shi’a as well
gravenimage says
Good points, Infidel.
Phil Copson says
Hmm – so a few million Jews living in their own country is colonisation – but 77 million muslims living in Europe, isn’t? Got it….
gravenimage says
Yep…
Eric says
Calling him an “unpleasant fellow” is too kind.
Andrew Blackadder says
From current day Istanbul all the way across to Kabul there were only Jews, Christians, Hindus, Buddhists, Druze and other ethnic religious Sects until islamic warriors conquered,slaughtered,raped and beheaded their way across that vast area so who was colonized whom ?.
How many people know that Afghanistan was once a deeply serious Buddhist Nation ?.
gravenimage says
The Most Successful Settler-Colonialists in the World Were Muslims
……………………………………………
Good article, Hugh–all true.
But so often it is *only* Europeans and other Westerners who are presented as being capable of colonialism–which is obviously ludicrous. But Muslims regularly exploit this absurd Western self-hatred for their own ends.