Religious history lesson of the week-

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Religious history lesson of the week-

12/01/06

Great history lesson concerning the Pope's comments on Islam in Germany. I don't necessarily endorse this view as I get the feeling that people may be exaggerating the effect Islam has or will have on Western democracies just because they like conflict. It's an interesting point of view, however.

Follow up:

snip. you can read complete article on his website.

...It is said that the difference between neurotic and psychotic people is that neurotic people "dream" about castles in the air, while psychotic people "live" in castles in the air.

Adolph Hitler, I believe, was psychotic for many reasons. But for the purposes of this message, I will give only two reasons why Hitler was psychotic. Firstly, he thought he could conquer the Earth. Secondly he thought he could kill all the Jews on the face of the Earth. Both ideas represent psychoses in my opinion.

Firstly, conquering the Earth is an impossibility. Any one who thinks he can conquer the Earth is psychotic; he is living in castles in the air. Just as Hitler thought he could conquer the Earth, so, too, did Alexander the Great, the Romans, Genghis Khan, Napoleon, and Stalin. They were all psychotic, living in castles in the air. As a person who believes in God, I believe only the Lord has dominion over the Earth.

Secondly, Hitler thought he could kill all the Jews. Now, there are two types of people: Those who believe in God and those who don't. For those who believe in God, and His Bible, it is impossible to kill the Jews because God says in Jeremiah 31:25 that there will be no more Jews on the Earth when the sun, moon and stars stop shining, i.e. the end of the Earth and civilization.

But for those who don't believe in God and His Bible, about 4 billion human beings, they, too, know that the Jews have been scattered to the four corners of the Earth. If you can't conquer the Earth (1st psychosis) you can't reach all the Jews to kill them (2nd psychosis).

Now, without going into a deep investigation of Islam (which is what I have done in my first four books), I think it is fair to say that Islam wishes to conquer the Earth (Psychosis #1). Islam plans to kill every last Jew on the Earth (Psychosis #2). Up to here, this makes Islam just as psychotic as Hitler's Nazism. But then, even more so, Islam plans to kill two billion Christians which was not party of Nazism's plan. (Psychosis #3) (By the way it must be remembered by all and Moslems will never deny this that Jews and Christians together are the PEOPLE of the Book, not two peoples but one people. The only difference between Jews and Christians in the eyes of Islam is that Jews keep the Sabbath on Saturday, and Christians keep the Sabbath on Sunday. Together the Jews and Christians are called in Arabic: "Ahel al-Kitab" or People of the Book. Therefore, Moslems have a saying: We kill the Jews on Saturday and the Christians on Sunday.)

Then Islam plans to kill the pagans: The Hindus, Buddhists and Blacks. That's psychosis #4. And finally, if you tally this all up, 1.3 billion Moslems think they will get away with annihilating 5 billion non-Moslems. That's psychosis #5.

Then when they have finished off five billion non-Moslems, the Moslems will turn on each other Shiites killing Sunnis and vice-versa, Psychosis #6.

So, it would seem to me that Islam is a psychosis of killing and the annihilation of all mankind.

A firestorm of Islamic protests was aroused by Pope Benedict XVI as a result of his visit to his native Germany and his address to the science faculty of the University of Regensburg on September 12th, 2006.

His address dealt mainly with the relationship between faith and reason, but that theme was eclipsed by the Pope's comments on Islam. These comments were made with respect to a statement made by "the erudite Byzantine emperor Manuel II Palaiologos" just after the year 1391 as part of debate with a Persian scholar (Dialogue 7 of Twenty-six Dialogues with a Persian), in which the Emperor stated: "Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." He then continues, saying, "God is not pleased by blood – and not acting reasonably (syn logo) is contrary to God's nature."

Since psychosis is a way of not acting reasonably, I would venture to say that "God is not pleased by blood and irrational behavior."
Islam is indeed irrational behavior bent on the destruction of all non-Moslems at first and Moslems later.

The discourse by Palaiologos continues: "Faith is born of the soul, not the body. Whoever would lead someone to faith needs the ability to speak well and to reason properly, without violence and threats… To convince a reasonable soul, one does not need a strong arm or weapons of any kind, or any other means of threatening a person with death…"

On the one hand, there is this deception around the world that Islam is a religion of peace, but Islam calls itself the Religion of the Sword or in Arabic "Din e-seif". No Arabic speaking Moslem will deny this. Allah al-Ilahi is the moon god, the sword god and the war god. The god Allah is "greater" than the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, who is considered a weak, sissy love and peace God. Their god, Allah, is the macho sword and war god. This is the true meaning of the Moslem call to prayer "Allahu Akbar" or Allah is greater, greater than the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.

According to Christian theology, it was the Lucifer, Satan, the angel fallen from grace who said he was "greater" than God. Allah therefore can be considered a form of Satan. It is interesting that as a Jew, I cannot preach this theology in synagogues, but I do in churches of all denominations, and this concept of God vs. Satan/Allah is accepted as theologically sound and in conformance with Christian theology.

In the seventh conversation . . . Emperor Manuel II Palaiologos touches on the theme of Islamic Jihad or holy war. The emperor must have known that Surah 2, 256 reads: "There is no compulsion in religion". According to the experts, this is one of the suras of the early period, when Mohammed was still powerless and under threat. But naturally the emperor also knew the instructions, developed later and recorded in the Qur'an, concerning holy war.

One mustn't forget the circumstances surrounding the life of Emperor Manuel II Palaiologos. When he ascended to the throne of the Byzantine Empire in 1391, his empire was a mere shadow of what was once Byzantium or the Eastern Roman Empire. His territory was comprised merely of three small enclaves surrounding Constantinople, Salonica and a small part of the Peloponnese.

It must not be forgotten that Manuel's wife was Helena Dragas, the daughter of the Serbian prince Constantine Dragas. And that the Serbs lost a very important battle in 1389, two years before his ascension to the throne. It was the battle of Kosovo Field, a great defeat for the Serbs, the Balkans, and Christianity.

So what Emperor Manuel II Palaiologos was responding to in his discourses with the Persian philosopher was that Christians were being defeated and massacred by the Moslems in the heart of Europe!
The Byzantine Empire was rapidly reaching its demise.

One mustn't forget that the Byzantine Empire used to include all of Anatolia (modern day Turkey), the Balkans, and the Middle East. By 1391, there was already virtually no Byzantine Empire left.

In 1453, only 28 years after the death of Manuel II Palaiologos on 21st July 1425, the Byzantine Empire was dealt its final death blow by the Moslem Turks. Constantinople fell to the besiegers.

The following is an article by Robert Spencer posted on May 30th, 2006.

"On Tuesday, May 29th, 1453, the armies of the Ottoman Sultan Mehmet II entered Constantinople, breaking through the defenses of a vastly outnumbered and indomitably courageous Byzantine force. Historian Steven Runciman notes what happened next: the Muslim soldiers "slew everyone that they met in the streets, men, women and children without discrimination. The blood ran in rivers down the steep streets from the heights of Petra toward the Golden Horn. But soon the lust for slaughter was assuaged. The soldiers realized that captives and precious objects would bring them greater profit." (The Fall of Constantinople 1453, Cambridge University Press, 1965, p. 145.)

It has come to be known as Black Tuesday, the Last Day of the World. The jihadists also entered the Hagia Sophia, which for nearly a thousand years had been the grandest church in Christendom. The faithful had gathered within its hallowed walls to pray during the city's last agony. The Muslims, according to Runciman, halted the celebration of Orthros (morning prayer); the priests, according to legend, took the sacred vessels and disappeared into the cathedral's eastern wall, through which they shall return to complete the divine service one day. Muslim men then killed the elderly and weak and led the rest off into slavery.

Once the Muslims had thoroughly subdued Constantinople, they set out to Islamize it. According to the Muslim chronicler Hoca Sa'deddin, tutor of the 16th-century Sultans Murad III and Mehmed III, "churches which were within the city were emptied of their vile idols and cleansed from the filthy and idolatrous impurities and by the defacement of their images and the erection of Islamic prayer niches and pulpits many monasteries and chapels became the envy of the gardens of Paradise."

Tuesday has been regarded as unlucky by superstitious Greeks ever since. Why did this happen?

1. Realpolitik. Short-sighted Byzantine Emperors such as John VI Cantacuzenes made ill-advised alliances with the Ottomans; in 1347 he invited them into Europe to aid them in a dynastic dispute, and they haven't left yet.
2. Disunity. The Western European powers were themselves disunited and preoccupied with their own affairs. Compounding that was the fact that they couldn't rally much support for a bailout of the Byzantines without an ecclesiastical unity that, when it was affected on paper by the Patriarch of Constantinople and the Emperor, was rejected by the people of the Empire. The force the West finally sent was too small, and it was annihilated by the Muslims at Varna in Bulgaria in 1444. Far too many Westerners didn't see the peril of Constantinople as their peril, and far too many Easterners subscribed to the Byzantine official Lukas Notaras' quip: "Better the turban of the Sultan than the Tiara of the Pope.

Meanwhile, the world has forgotten what happened on Black Tuesday, and so many other days like it from India to Spain, and persists in the fantasy that Islam does not contain an imperialist impulse and that Muslims can be admitted without limit into Western countries without any attempt to determine how many would like ultimately to subjugate and Islamicize their new countries, the way their forefathers did to Constantinople so long ago.

And today we see the same ill-informed games of realpolitik, pragmatic alliances made with those who would conquer and subjugate us, and the same disunity and finger-pointing at each other instead of unity in the face of this threat to our common survival.

It is fitting that Black Tuesday coincided this year with Memorial Day. For only a strong defense – not just military, but cultural and spiritual, a civilizational defense – will conquer the forces of Jihad and keep there from being many more Black Tuesdays, many more Last Days of the World. May we mount that defense, speedily.

This leads me now to another part of the world, Spain. Now as a Jew, I always hated King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, "Los Reyes Catolicos" for what they did to my people, the Jews, in Spain. The same applies for the vast majority of Jews. My Egyptian born wife, Rachel, traces her lineage back to Turkey and Morocco, two Islamic countries which gave asylum to the Jews expelled from northern Christian Spain in 1391 and later from Granada in 1492. Rachel's family lived in Fez, Morocco, and Istanbul, Turkey for centuries until they immigrated to Egypt.

For Jewish people, 1492 was a kind of Holocaust in which over 100,000 Jews were killed in an Inquisition which was to last three hundred years in Spain, Portugal and the Americas. It was the end of the Golden Age of Spanish Jewry, a period of great science, culture, philosophy, wisdom peace and prosperity for all under the Moorish kings.

Spain, like many other parts of the Mediterranean Sea, was settled and influenced by Phoenicians, Greeks, Romans, Vandals, Goths, and Moslems. The Jews were also there from Day 1.

Unlike Byzantium, Spain in 711 was just becoming Christianized having been pagan, and was under the rule of the Goths and Vandals (hence the name Andalucia is derived from Vandalucia or Vandals.) There was no real centralized rule in Iberia and it was easy for the Arab invaders to sweep through the feudal Iberian peninsula: Spain, Portugal and much of France leading up to the battle of Poitiers only 21 years later. This was the beginning of the "Reconquista" or re-conquest of the Iberian Peninsula by the Christians which took place in stages over a period of almost 800 years.

French history speaks proudly of Charles Martel and Roland. The Spanish boast of the victories of El Cid Campeador, all Christian heroes in the battle to expel the Moslem invaders during centuries of battle.

Portugal was finally freed in 1147 (in the Middle of the Crusades in the Holy Land 1096-1293). And by 1492, all that was left in Spain of Islamic rule was the Moorish Kingdom of Granada in the South.

But it must be remembered that wave after wave of fanatic Islamic invasions came across the Straits of Gibraltar from Morocco to constantly reinforce the Moslem presence in Spain. The Christian re-conquest of Spain resembled waves of a sea pounding the beach and then slowly receding. The tide was slowly but surely moving ever-southward and against Islam in Spain.

There seems to be a disconnect in the minds of scholars who specialize in the history of either Western Europe or the Byzantine East. Today's scholars don't see that one directly influenced the other. And in many sections of today's academia, people neither know nor care.

When Constantinople finally fell in 1453, this was not only a localized victory on the Bosporus. This Turkish-Islamic victory now meant the end of the Italian city-states that made their livelihoods through the silk route to India and China over the now Turkish mainland. Not only did the Italians such as the traders of Genoa and Venice experience bankruptcy, but now, the entire Renaissance in Europe was threatened. The Turks, by conquering Constantinople and renaming it Istanbul now had a stranglehold on Christendom.

Is it any wonder that Christopher Columbus, the now unemployed Genoese maritime explorer, now tried to offer his services to Portugal only to be rejected and then later to Spain and was accepted? Queen Isabella reputedly had to sell her jewels to pay for the Nina, Pinta and Santa Maria caravels Columbus had built for his journey.

As a pupil in American schools in the 50's and 60's I will never forget the romanticized version of Columbus's voyage westward to "prove that the world was round." This is the stuff a Steven Spielberg movie is made of.

But the facts were as follows: The Turks controlled the Mediterranean in 1492, so there was not much to look for sailing eastward. And secondly, the Turkish navies and armies were already positioned in North Africa, just across the Straits of Gibraltar and were preparing to invade Spain just as the Moors had been doing for almost 800 years.

In order to prevent just such an invasion, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella decided to expel every last Moslem (and their Jewish allies) from Spain to make sure there was no Islamic foothold in Iberia. Unfortunately for the Jews, they were clearly identified as being totally in league with the Moslems, so by choosing the losing side, the Jews were expelled together with the Moslems.

I was in Spain in 2004. I drove from Valladolid in the north to Gibraltar in the south. Although Spain is a high plateau, it is primarily a plain. But once one reaches the highway 5 intersection at Bailen, one can see the mountains of Granada looming to the south.

As an Israel Defense Forces spokesman in the reserves for fourteen years, I was trained to understand that there would never be a Palestinian State in Judea, Samaria and Gaza, because whoever controlled the hills overlooking Israel's Mediterranean coast would eventually control the coast as well, meaning the destruction of Israel.

So, too, it became clear to me that with all the pain for me as a Jew to see the expulsion of my people from Granada in 1492, Spain had no choice but to expel the Moslems and their Jewish allies, because the Turks were preparing another wave of invasions for Spain. King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella must not be judged simply for being anti-Semitic, but for saving Christian and European civilization from Islam.

The last king of Granada, Boabdil, reputedly a pacifist, a liberal and an intellectual, refused to fight the Catholics to the north and preferred to go into exile in Morocco. "No war is worth it," was Boabdil's credo, so out went the Jews and Moslems from Granada. When he stood crying on the balcony of his palace in Granada preparing for his exile, his mother reputedly said to King Boabdil: "Don't cry like a woman for kingdom you wouldn't fight for like a man."

In came the Catholic barbarians with their Inquisition, auto-da-fe and burnings at the stake. The strategic decision was taken. The Moslems were not going to be allowed to have a foothold in Spain to make it easy for the Turks to invade.

Returning for a moment to Columbus, one of great accomplishments of Columbus and later all the other Christian explorers was the opening up of the Americas, Australia and the Philippines to Christian colonization. Now Christendom was no longer a dozen or so beleaguered countries in Europe. Now Christendom was the world.

Another accomplishment of the Spanish conquistadores with all their barbaric behavior toward the American natives was that the gold and silver mined by Pizarro in Peru and Cortes in Mexico was sent to Spain to build new fleets of ships and train new armies "For the glory of Christ."

It was in 1563 at the Battle of Lepanto that the Spanish Armada decimated the Turkish navy. This meant the end of Turkish control in the Mediterranean. It must not be forgotten as well, that the royal house of Spain intermarried now with the Hapsburg Dynasty in Austria, so that if the Turks were besieging Vienna, Austria, then Spain had to fight on the side of the Austrians. It must not be forgotten that the Turks were "parked" outside the gates of Vienna for 200 years!

It is also interesting for me as former American student that we were never taught about the Battle of Lepanto of 1563, but we were taught about the English/Dutch victory over the Spanish Armada in 1588, because it was a victory of the Protestants over the Catholics! But such a milestone victory of the Catholics over the Islamic Turks which saved Europe from being overwhelmed by Islam went untaught in American schools because this time, it was a Catholic victory.

One must not forget also that Sicily and southern Italy were conquered and ruled by Islam for close to 500 years until liberated by Christian Italy.

As a student of Russian and Eastern European Studies at Hebrew University in 1968-71, I had the opportunity to write a seminar paper on the Balkan Wars of 1902, 1903 and 1912. It was during these wars that Ottoman Turkey was finally pushed back virtually to the Bosphorus.

This is not a question of ancient history. The Turks controlled large portions of Eastern Europe for about 600 years. They were expelled from much of Europe as part of a process that ended in 1912, less than a century ago.

But now, peoples such as the Albanians and Bosnians, who until five hundred years ago were Christians, and then converted to Islam under the Turks are now working actively to re-conquer Europe for Allah and create a land bridge from the Adriatic Sea to Anatolia.

President Bill Clinton played an active role in punishing the Christian Serbs, in the best tradition of the Moslems and Nazis by taking away historic Serbian/Christian lands and giving them to the Moslems to create two new Islamic states in Europe in addition to Albania: Bosnia and Kosovo. Macedonia, which has a 40% Islamic population is next, I believe, to become a Moslem state. It will not take long before the Balkans are Islamized and returned to the bosom of Turkey.

Even democratic Greece under the Socialist PASOK Party made the mistake of inviting 500,000 Moslems from Albania to settle in Greece. Together with the 100,000 Turkish Moslems of Thrace, the total Moslem population of Greece now reaches 6%. With reproduction rates the way they are, the Moslems in a few decades will take Greece as well, especially if Turkey is admitted to the European Union.

One mustn't forget that during the disastrous Venizelos war against Turkey in 1923, there were 10 million Greeks and 10 million Turks. Today there are 10 million Greeks and 70 million Turks.

My wife, Rachel, and I had the opportunity to lecture in seven Swiss cities in 2003. We were often confronted by Moslems who came to my lectures. I even made first page of Saudi Arabia's largest newspaper "Al-Watan" as well as one of the biggest Arabic newspapers in the world "Al-Sharq al-Ausat" for warning Europe (in Islamic opinion – besmirching Islam) of the Islamic threat.

Some of these Moslems said to my wife in Arabic: "The Europeans colonized us for centuries. Now it is Islam's turn to colonize Europe."

Getting back to Pope Benedict XVI, in response to these recent protests, the Vatican appeared to offer apologies of sorts -- ranging from claims that the Pope's statement had been misunderstood to a declaration that the quotation did not indicate the Pope's own view of Islam. It may take some time for the confusion to clear.

In Nostra Aetate, also known as the "Declaration on the Relation of the Church to Non-Christian Religions," proclaimed by Pope Paul VI on October 28, 1965, the church declared:

The Church regards with esteem also the Moslems. They adore the one
God, living and subsisting in Himself; merciful and all- powerful, the Creator of heaven and earth,(5) who has spoken to men; they take pains to submit wholeheartedly to even His inscrutable decrees, just as Abraham, with whom the faith of Islam takes pleasure in linking itself, submitted to God. Though they do not acknowledge Jesus as God, they revere Him as a prophet. They also honor Mary, His virgin Mother; at times they even call on her with devotion. In addition, they await the Day of Judgment when God will render their desserts to all those who have been raised up from the dead. Finally, they value the moral life and worship God especially through prayer, almsgiving and fasting.

Since in the course of centuries not a few quarrels and hostilities
have arisen between Christians and Moslems, this sacred synod urges all to forget the past and to work sincerely for mutual understanding and to preserve as well as to promote together for the benefit of all
mankind social justice and moral welfare, as well as peace and freedom.

Similarly, in Lumen Gentium, another major document from the Second
Vatican Council, the church defined its understanding of Islam in these words:

But the plan of salvation also includes those who acknowledge the
Creator. In the first place amongst these there are the Mohammedans,
who, professing to hold the faith of Abraham, along with us adore the
one and merciful God, who on the last day will judge mankind.

In other words, the Catholic Church teaches that Muslims are included
in the economy of salvation by virtue of the fact that they worship the one true God. We do not claim or worship the same God.

What about the Pope's comments in Germany?

The use of specific words and the citation of an ancient authority
do not obscure the fact that the Pope's comments were largely
accurate, and most accurate at the point of the greatest outrage.
Islam and Christianity are locked in a spiritual and theological
conflict. The logic of Islam -- based in the goal of universal Qur'anic rule -- ensures that this will be one of the defining conflicts of the present age.

Pope Benedict XVI is right to see Islam as a threat to secular Europe, a continent that is determined to undermine the very foundation that gave it birth. The Pope's concerns about secularism and encroaching Islam are based in reality. If these trends are unchecked, Europe will become the new territory of Islam. As author Melanie Phillips warns, London is fast becoming Londonistan.

Thanks for input from Al Mohler, Joel Griffith and Robert Spencer.