Who Are We, Who Are Our Enemies - The Cost of Historical Amnesia

A new essay from the superbly insightful Fjordman:

"The Jihad, the Islamic so-called Holy War, has been a fact of life in Europe, Asia, Africa and the Near and Middle East for more than 1300 years, but this is the first history of the Muslim wars in Europe ever to be published. Hundreds of books, however, have appeared on its Christian counterpart, the Crusades, to which the Jihad is often compared, although they lasted less than two hundred years and unlike the Jihad, which is universal, were largely but not completely confined to the Holy Land. Moreover, the Crusades have been over for more than 700 years, while a Jihad is still going on in the world. The Jihad has been the most unrecorded and disregarded major event of history. It has, in fact, been largely ignored. For instance, the Encyclopaedia Britannica gives the Crusades eighty times more space than the Jihad."

The quote is from Paul Fregosi's book Jihad in the West from 1998. Mr. Fregosi found that his book about the history of Islamic Holy War in Europe from the 7th to the 20th centuries was difficult to get published in the mid-1990s, when publishers had the Salman Rushdie case in fresh memory.

A few years later, an even more comprehensive book, The Legacy of Jihad, was published by Andrew G. Bostom. Bostom has written about what he calls "America's First War on Terror."

Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, then serving as American ambassadors to France and Britain, respectively, met in 1786 in London with the Tripolitan Ambassador to Britain, Sidi Haji Abdul Rahman Adja. These future American presidents were attempting to negotiate a peace treaty which would spare the United States the ravages of Jihad piracy – murder and enslavement emanating from the so-called Barbary States of North Africa, corresponding to modern Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya.

Andrew Bostom notes that "an aggressive jihad was already being waged against the United States almost 200 years prior to America becoming a dominant international power in the Middle East." Israel has thus nothing to do with it.

The Barbary Jihad piracy had been going on since the earliest Arab-Islamic expansion in the 7th and 8th centuries. Francisco Gabrieli states that:

"According to present-day concepts of international relations, such activities amounted to piracy, but they correspond perfectly to jihad, an Islamic religious duty. The conquest of Crete, in the east, and a good portion of the corsair warfare along the Provencal and Italian coasts, in the West, are among the most conspicuous instances of such "private initiative" which contributed to Arab domination in the Mediterranean."

A proto-typical Muslim naval razzia occurred in 846 when a fleet of Arab Jihadists arrived at the mouth of the Tiber, made their way to Rome, sacked the city, and carried away from the basilica of St. Peter all of the gold and silver it contained.

During the 16th and 17th centuries, as many Europeans were captured, sold, and enslaved by the Barbary corsairs as were West Africans made captive and shipped for plantation labor in the Americas by European slave traders. Robert Davis' methodical enumeration indicates that between one, and one and one-quarter million white European Christians were enslaved by the Barbary Muslims from 1530 through 1780.

White Gold, Giles Milton's remarkable account of Cornish cabin boy Thomas Pellow, captured by Barbary corsairs in 1716, documents how Jihad razzias had extended to England [p. 13, "By the end of the dreadful summer of 1625, the mayor of Plymouth reckoned that 1,000 skiffs had been destroyed, and a similar number of villagers carried off into slavery"], Wales, southern Ireland [p.16, "In 1631…200 Islamic soldiers…sailed to the village of Baltimore, storming ashore with swords drawn and catching the villagers totally by surprise. (They) carried off 237 men, women, and children and took them to Algiers…The French padre Pierre Dan was in the city (Algiers) at the time…He witnessed the sale of the captives in the slave auction. 'It was a pitiful sight to see them exposed in the market…Women were separated from their husbands and the children from their fathers…on one side a husband was sold; on the other his wife; and her daughter was torn from her arms without the hope that they'd ever see each other again'."], and even Reykjavik, Iceland!

Bostom notes that "By June/July 1815 the ably commanded U.S. naval forces had dealt their Barbary jihadist adversaries a quick series of crushing defeats. This success ignited the imagination of the Old World powers to rise up against the Barbary pirates."

Yet some Arabs seem to miss the good, old days when they could extract Jizya payments from the West. Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi has stated that he thinks that European nations should pay 10 billion euros ($12.7 billion dollars) a year to Africa to help it stop migrants seeking a better life flooding northwards into Europe. He added without elaborating: "Earth belongs to everybody. Why they (young Africans) emigrated to Europe -- this should be answered by Europeans."

Apart from being a clear-cut example of how migration, or rather population dumping by Third World countries, has become a tool for blackmail in the 21st century, this is a throwback to the age when Tripoli could extract payments from Europe.

Sadly, Americans seem to have forgotten the lessons from this proud chapter in their history, when they refused to pay ransom to Muslims like the Europeans did and instead sent warships to the Mediterranean under the slogan "Millions for defense, not one penny for tribute!" Since WW2, we've had three major conflicts in the Balkans: In Cyprus, in Bosnia and in Kosovo. On all three occasions, the United States have interfered on behalf of Muslims. Yet despite this fact, two of the 9/11 hijackers said that their actions were inspired by an urge to avenge the suffering of Muslims in Bosnia.

As Efraim Karsh, author of the book Islamic Imperialism: A History points out, America is reviled in the Muslim world not because of its specific policies "but because, as the pre-eminent world power, it blocks the final realization of this same age-old dream of a universal Islamic empire (or umma)."

According to Hugh Fitzgerald, "One must keep in mind both the way in which some atrocities ascribed to Serbs were exaggerated, while the atrocities inflicted on them were minimized or ignored altogether. But what was most disturbing was that there was no context to anything: nothing about the centuries of Muslim rule.

Had such a history been discussed early on, Western governments might have understood and attempted to assuage the deep fears evoked by the Bosnian Muslim leader, Izetbegovic, when he wrote that he intended to create a Muslim state in Bosnia and impose the Sharia not merely there, but everywhere that Muslims had once ruled in the Balkans. Had the Western world shown the slightest intelligent sympathy or understanding of what that set off in the imagination of many Serbs (and elsewhere, among the Christians in the Balkans and in Greece), there might never have been such a violent Serbian reaction, and someone like [Slobodan] Milosevic might never have obtained power."

In 1809, after the battle on Cegar Hill, by order of Turkish pasha Hurshid the skulls of the killed Serbian soldiers were built in a tower, Skull Tower, on the way to Constantinople. 3 meters high, Skull Tower was built out of 952 skulls as a warning to the Serbian people not to oppose their Muslim rulers. Some years later, a chapel was built over the skulls.

Similar Jihad massacres were committed not only against the Serbs, but against the Greeks, the Bulgarians and other non-Muslims who slowly rebelled against the Ottoman Empire throughout the 19th century. Professor Vahakn Dadrian and others have clearly identified Jihad as a critical factor in the Armenian genocide in the early 20th century. This genocide by the Turks allegedly inspired Adolf Hitler in his Holocaust against the Jews later: "Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?"

As Efraim Karsh notes, "The Ottomans embarked on an orgy of bloodletting in response to the nationalist aspirations of their European subjects. The Greek war of independence of the 1820's, the Danubian uprisings of 1848 and the attendant Crimean war, the Balkan explosion of the 1870's, the Greco-Ottoman war of 1897--all were painful reminders of the costs of resisting Islamic imperial rule."

In his book Onward Muslim Soldiers, Robert Spencer quotes a letter from Bosnia, written in 1860 by the acting British Consul in Sarajevo, James Zohrab:

"The hatred of the Christians toward the Bosniak Mussulmans is intense. During a period of nearly 300 years they were subjected to much oppression and cruelty. For them no other law but the caprice of their masters existed....Oppression cannot now be carried on as openly as formerly, but it must not be supposed that, because the Government employés do not generally appear as the oppressors, the Christians are well treated and protected."

Bosnia's wartime president Alija Izetbegovic died in 2003, hailed worldwide as a moderate Muslim leader. Little was said in Western media about the fact that in his 1970 Islamic Declaration, which got him jailed by the Communists in Yugoslavia, he advocated "a struggle for creating a great Islamic federation from Morocco to Indonesia, from the tropical Africa to the Central Asia. The Islamic movement should and must start taking over the power as soon as it is morally and numerically strong enough to not only overthrow the existing non-Islamic, but also to build up a new Islamic authority."

Alija Izetbegovic also received money from a Saudi businessman, Yassin al-Kadi, who has been designated by the United States, the United Nations, and the European Union as a financier of al-Qaeda terrorists. Evan F. Kohlmann, author of Al-Qaeda's Jihad in Europe: The Afghan-Bosnian Network, argues that the "key to understanding Al Qaida's European cells lies in the Bosnian war of the 1990s." In 1992, the Bosnian Muslim government of Alija Izetbegovic issued a passport in the Vienna embassy to Osama bin Laden. The Wall Street Journal reported in 2001 that "for the past 10 years, the most senior leaders of al Qaeda have visited the Balkans, including bin Laden himself on three occasions between 1994 and 1996. The Egyptian surgeon turned terrorist leader Ayman Al-Zawahiri has operated terrorist training camps, weapons of mass destruction factories and money-laundering and drug-trading networks throughout Albania, Kosovo, Macedonia, Bulgaria, Turkey and Bosnia."

Samuel Huntington mentioned already in 1993 in his famous article "The Clash of Civilizations" in the journal Foreign Affairs that both the Shi'a Muslims of Iran and the Sunni Muslims of Saudi Arabia supplied substantial funding, weapons and men to the Bosnians. Thousands of foreign fighters or 'Mujahadeen' from Islamic countries came to Bosnia to fight on the side of local Muslims in the bloody 1992-1995 civil war. Many of these Mujahadeen remained in Bosnia after the war, and some have been operating terrorist training camps and indoctrinating local youths.

Terrorists have been working, not just in Bosnia but in Albania and all over the Balkans, to recruit non-Arab sympathizers — so-called "white Muslims" with Western features who theoretically could more easily blend into European cities and execute attacks.

Saudi Arabia is said to have invested more than $1 billion in the Sarajevo region alone, for projects that include the construction of 158 mosques. The Islamic world is thus using the Balkans as a launching pad for Jihad against the rest of Europe and the West. "There are religious centres in Bulgaria that belong to Islamic groups financed mostly by Saudi Arabian groups," the head of Bulgarian military intelligence warned. According to him, the centres were in southern and southeastern Bulgaria, where the country's Muslims, mainly of Turkish origin, are concentrated, and "had links with similar organisations in Kosovo, Bosnia and Macedonia. For them Bulgaria seems to be a transit point to Western Europe." He said the steps were taken to prevent terrorist groups gaining a foothold in Bulgaria, which shares a border with Turkey. Bulgaria's Turkish minority accounts for 10 percent of the country's population.

The Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia passed a law allowing ethnic Albanians to display the Albanian national flag in areas where they form the majority. The decision came as a result of seven months of heavy fighting in 2001 involving Albanian separatists, and following pressure from the European Union, always ready to please Muslims.

Ethnic Albanians make up about 25 per cent of Macedonia's population. If the demographic trends are anything like in Kosovo, where the predominantly Muslim Albanians have been out-breeding their non-Muslim neighbors, the Macedonians could be facing serious trouble in the near future. In Kosovo, dozens of churches and monasteries have been destroyed or seriously damaged following ethnic cleansing of Christian Serbs, all under the auspices of NATO soldiers.

In a commentary, "We bombed the wrong side?" former Canadian UNPROFOR Commander Lewis MacKenzie wrote, "The Kosovo-Albanians have played us like a Stradivarius. We have subsidized and indirectly supported their violent campaign for an ethnically pure and independent Kosovo. We have never blamed them for being the perpetrators of the violence in the early '90s and we continue to portray them as the designated victim today in spite of evidence to the contrary. When they achieve independence with the help of our tax dollars combined with those of bin Laden and al-Qaeda, just consider the message of encouragement this sends to other terrorist-supported independence movements around the world."

Martti Ahtisaari, former President of Finland and now Chief United Nations negotiator for Kosovo, caused anger in Serbia when he stated that "Serbs are guilty as people," implying that they would have to pay for it, possibly by losing the province of Kosovo which is seeking independence.

I disagree with Mr. Ahtisaari. It is one thing to criticize the brutality of the Milosevic regime. It is quite another thing to claim that "Serbs are guilty as a people." If anybody in the Balkans can be called guilty as a people, it is the Turks, not the Serbs. The Turks have left a trail of blood across much of Europe and the Mediterranean for centuries, culminating in the Armenian genocide in the 20th century, which Turkey still refuses to acknowledge, let alone apologize for.

Dimitar Angelov elucidates the impact of the Ottoman Jihad on the vanquished Balkan populations:

"…the conquest of the Balkan Peninsula accomplished by the Turks over the course of about two centuries caused the incalculable ruin of material goods, countless massacres, the enslavement and exile of a great part of the population – in a word, a general and protracted decline of productivity, as was the case with Asia Minor after it was occupied by the same invaders. This decline in productivity is all the more striking when one recalls that in the mid-fourteenth century, as the Ottomans were gaining a foothold on the peninsula, the States that existed there – Byzantium, Bulgaria and Serbia – had already reached a rather high level of economic and cultural development….The campaigns of Mourad II (1421-1451) and especially those of his successor, Mahomet II (1451-1481) in Serbia, Bosnia, Albania and in the Byzantine princedom of the Peloponnesus, were of a particularly devastating character."

This Ottoman Jihad tradition is still continued by "secular" Turkey to this day. Michael J. Totten visited Varosha, the Ghost City of Cyprus, in 2005. The city was deserted during the Turkish invasion of Cyprus in 1974 and is now fenced off and patrolled by the Turkish occupiers. The Turks carved up the island. Greek Cypriot citizens in Varosha expected to return to their homes within days. Instead, the Turks seized the empty city and wrapped it in fencing and wire.

In March 2006, Italian Luigi Geninazzi made a report from the same area. 180,000 persons live in the northern part of the island, 100,000 of whom are colonists originally from mainland Turkey.

According to Geninazzi, the Islamization of the north of Cyprus has been concretized in the destruction of all that was Christian. Yannis Eliades, director of the Byzantine Museum of Nicosia, calculates that 25,000 icons have disappeared from the churches in the zone occupied by the Turks. Stupendous Byzantine and Romanesque churches, imposing monasteries, mosaics and frescoes have been sacked, violated, and destroyed. Many have been turned into restaurants, bars, and nightclubs.

Geninazzi confronted Huseyn Ozel, a government spokesman for the self-proclaimed Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, with this. Most
of the mosques in Greek Cypriot territory have been restored. So why are churches still today being turned into mosques? The Turkish Cypriot functionary spreads his arms wide: "It is an Ottoman custom..."

A person from Finland, one of the northernmost countries in Europe which has had very little direct experience with Jihad, can perhaps be excused for understanding so little of it. But people from Russia, a country which was once under the Tartar Yoke, should know better. So why are the Russians helping The Islamic Republic of Iran with missile and nuclear technology that will eventually be used to intimidate the West? Are the Russians so naive that they believe this beast won't eventually come back to bite them, too? Iran is secretly training Chechen rebels in sophisticated terror techniques to enable them to carry out more effective attacks against Russian forces, the Sunday Telegraph has revealed.

Islam was controlled in the Soviet Union but has had a renaissance since its downfall in 1991, helped by funds from the Middle East. This re-Islamization of Central Asia should really worry the Russians. They are spending hundreds of millions of dollars on a border security project in the region, partly to avoid being demographically overwhelmed by Muslims. But the problem exists within Russia itself, too.

Russia's non-Muslim population is declining, but numbers are rising in Muslim regions. Will the country called Russia still exist in the future? And if so, will it be the Russia of Pushkin or of Abdullah? It is understandable that the Russians have Great Power ambitions of their own. However, one would hope that they will wake up, remember their history and realize that there are worse threats out there than American power.

Paul Fregosi has pointed out that "Western colonization of nearby Muslim lands lasted 130 years, from the 1830s to the 1960s. Muslim colonization of nearby European lands lasted 1300 years, from the 600s to the mid-1960s. Yet, strangely, it is the Muslims, the Arabs and the Moors to be precise, who are the most bitter about colonialism and the humiliations to which they have been subjected; and it is the Europeans who harbor the shame and the guilt. It should be the other way around."

Janos (John) Hunyadi, Hungarian warrior and captain-general, is today virtually unknown outside Hungary, but he probably did more than any other individual in stemming the Turkish invasion in the fifteenth century. His actions spanned all the countries of the Balkans, leading international armies, negotiating with kings and popes. Hunyadi died of plague after having destroyed an Ottoman fleet outside Belgrade in1456. His work slowed the Muslim advance, and may thus have saved Western Europe from falling to Islam. By extension, he may have helped save Western civilization in North America and Australia, too. Yet hardly anybody in West knows who he is. Our children don't learn his name, they are only taught about the evils of Western colonialism and the dangers of Islamophobia.

Western Europe today is a strange and very dangerous mix of arrogance and self-loathing. Muslims are creating havoc and attacking their non-Muslim neighbors from Thailand to India. It is extremely arrogant to believe that the result will be any different in the Netherlands, Britain or Italy, or for that matter in the United States or Canada, than it has been everywhere else. It won't. If we had the humility to listen to the advice of the Hindus of India or even our Christian cousins in south-eastern Europe, we wouldn't be in as much trouble as we are now.

On the other hand, if we didn't have such a culture of self-loathing, where our own cultural traditions are ridiculed in favor of a meaningless Multicultural cocktail, we probably wouldn't have allowed massive Muslim immigration, either. There doesn't have to be a contradiction between being proud of your own cultural heritage and knowing that there may still be lessons you can learn from others. A wise man can do both. Westerners of or our age do neither. Sun Tzu, a contemporary of the great Chinese thinker Confucius, wrote The Art of War, the influential book on military strategy, 2500 years ago. It is a book that deserves to be read in full, but perhaps the most famous quotation from it is this one:

"So it is said that if you know your enemies and know yourself, you will not be imperiled in a hundred battles; if you do not know your enemies but do know yourself, you will win one and lose one; if you do not know your enemies nor yourself, you will be imperiled in every single battle."

The West has forgotten who our enemies are, but worse, we have also forgotten who we are. We are going to pay a heavy price for this historical amnesia.

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Another excellent account of the Barbary Coast during the early part of the 1800's is the book "Skeletons of the Zarhara." Great read, and chronicles the utter contempt muslims have for Christians. It just drives muslims nuts when they can't convert Christians...they'll never understsand why Christians don't convert because they themselves are so filled with hate and ignorance.

Historical amnesia is certainly a problem in the US-after all, most kids say history is a boring subject since it talks about what a bunch of dead people did a million years ago. This kind of thinking is one of the reasons why this menace is so misunderstood by our leadership. If (Heaven forbid) some sort of terrorist act were to happen in the US prior to the elections we'll probably hear how this was unprecendented in the US. In fact, there would be a precendent-RFK's assasination by Palestinian Sirhan Sirhan in 1968.

Oustanding essay, Mr. Spencer. One of your very finest. Three cheers.

Fjordman great work, how do we hit the tip jar?

Oops! I Just saw that the essay was, in fact, by Fjordman! OK, three cheers to Mr. Spencer for posting it here, then.

Well that makes me feel hopeful.

For those that are not avid readers of highly detailed historic events, this compression of an array of events coupled with references over the past 1,300 years is certainly an eye opener to what should be required reading in the world that the west is facing today.

The last paragraph and sentence are extremely important in today's almost seemingly apathetic climate if we are going to be able to defend the values of the western world.

As General Douglas Macarthur also made the same quote probably from Confucious over 60 years ago. He said "know your enemy and know him well, and you must be able to define yourself to defend youself".

Historical perspective was clearly lacking in Clinton's bombing of Serbia, but Fjordman you are to be congratulated for putting the issue in wider perspective. T The western will to resist and reverse islam's encroachments need to be reinforced. The historical thrust of the orientals needs to be permanently checked. Though we must act in the present, this essay and the others you mentioned in writing it, should allow western governments, whose basic reason for existence, is to protect its citizenry, to put the situation they face today in a proper perspective. History shows there is only one way. Steel yourselves!

"Since WW2, we've had three major conflicts in the Balkans: In Cyprus, in Bosnia and in Kosovo. On all three occasions, the United States have interfered on behalf of Muslims. Yet despite this fact, two of the 9/11 hijackers said that their actions were inspired by an urge to avenge the suffering of Muslims in Bosnia."

This is the real shame

Since WW2, we've had three major conflicts in the Balkans: In Cyprus, in Bosnia and in Kosovo. On all three occasions, the United States have interfered on behalf of Muslims. Yet despite this fact, two of the 9/11 hijackers said that their actions were inspired by an urge to avenge the suffering of Muslims in Bosnia."

This is the real shame

Posted by: FedUp at October 2, 2006 12:33 PM

A fine example of Islamaniac gratitude. Perhaps they were waiting for us to nuke the Serbs and since that didn't happen they felt they had to get revenge some other way. Maybe it's time for us to quit doing these losers any favors.

This was a great article.

Robert that was one of the best articles I've read in a long time. That's saying something as there have been a lot of great articles on this site.

I have to say on one note about Russia, I totally agree with you, but the same criticism must be extended to the United States. It is just as guilty of enabling her enemies as the Russians are, and the US has also a serious case of amnesia.

I'm sorry I haven't done my homework on this one, but off the top of my head, I believe the first war that the US fought as an independent country was in North Africa. The people who fought beside the Americans in their first war were Greeks. I say that with pride as a Greek, but I also am disappointed as the American amnesia has made Greece an afterthought as Turkey has been and still is a huge beneficiary of the US.

I can only hope that one day we in the free world will wake up and see who our enemies have always been, and that we regain our compass and find ourselves before it's too late.

By the way I'm half way through "The Truth about Mohammed". I am enjoying it, and it has been very informative. Keep up the great work, you, Hugh and all of your colleagues are very important people in this cause, and I do think one day you will be given credit for an awakening in the consciousness of the west.

Niv

Another excellent essay....but we are awash in excellent essays. Everyone writes, but nobody does anything.

What is needed are autonomous WARRIORS who will take the fight to the enemy. E.g., where are the West's self-actualized, cell-structered "freedom fighters"?

Regretably -- or perhaps not regretably at all -- the West's socialist governments must necessarily collapse before any possible *successful* overturning of the Islamic totalitarian tide can begin.

"Everyone writes, but nobody does anything.

What is needed are autonomous WARRIORS who will take the fight to the enemy. E.g., where are the West's self-actualized, cell-structered "freedom fighters"?"

do you know that if just collectively we stopped buying muslim goods (or going holidays in muslim places) those countries would COLLAPSE.

Do you know if we all just collectively stopped hiring muslims in our shops/offices/factories those people would be starving?

do you know if we all collectively stopped giving rented homes to those people they'd be on the streets?

without armies, without fights, without loss of lives and no chance to be proven WRONG by PC crowds.

Just with the wise use of our money we can DESTROY those people.

If you stopped hiring them, you'd be destroyed by the EEOC for religious discrimination.

Housing, ditto.

And do you think that you don't pay them with every gallon of petroleum you buy?

Refusing to buy petroleum is the one thing you can legally do to fight Islamism (until Islam is legally re-classified as a political movement and its adherents acknowledged as swearing allegiance to a foreign power, that is - don't hold your breath).  In other words, if you drive a gas-guzzler or adopt a long commute, you are choosing to finance jihad.

So buy a beater Corolla and park the land yacht.  Drydock the power boat - get a sailboat or a kayak to play on the water, and don't drive to far-away lakes.  If you have no alternative to an oil furnace, insulate the dickens out of your house.  Ride your bike to work if you can, demand that the government allocate bike paths if it's not safe.  Ride the bus if there is one.  Think about electric streetcars - we did them a century ago, why not now?

Destroy your demand for the one thing those bastards have to sell.  Tell your Congresscritter that you're going to vote for the candidate who promises to get the US off of oil - even if that candidate is a yellow dog, and you're going to vote him out again at the next election if he doesn't make good on it.

THAT'S how you can starve the jihad.  You can't starve it any other way.

Janos (John) Hunyadi, Hungarian warrior and captain-general, is today virtually unknown outside Hungary, but he probably did more than any other individual in stemming the Turkish invasion in the fifteenth century


Actually, Hunjadi was very famous in folk songs in serbia (partiali because he killed muslims, and partialy cos he was serbian origin), and in today Belgrade fortres there is one stone commemorating his grate victory over turks. Personaly, I like to go deep in the history to the time which reflects the present at best and said that there was 100 years before him a serb emperor Dushan who wish to beat the turks in asia minor rather than wait for them in Europe. He offer aliance to pope and venetians to launch the crusade. But pope have his own problems (avignon captivity), and venetians (just like modern US and europe) have many lucrative trade busines relations with muslims so they politely refused. Aftermath: Dushan alredy streaches serbia to the limit and thus fail to gain additional forces to beat the turks. Soon he died (probably poisoned by greeks who was woried for their own already weak and doomed bizantine empire), and serbia fell apart too. Muslim conquer everything in next 100 years.

Yo, EngineerPoet and FedUp: Do you really, really, really think there are options available outside of *fighting* back?

When there's a war on with a totalitarian psycho death-cult, the side that desperately grovels and slithers and bellycrawls through every last single option EXCEPT blowing up the temples and killing the priests -- will LOSE.

Those morons are dumber than a box of rocks -- but they're still smarter than the average westerner living in *fantasyland*.

"If you stopped hiring them, you'd be destroyed by the EEOC for religious discrimination.

Housing, ditto."

cmon, I know a lot of owners of factories and offices that get away with ANYTHING.

If you reject someone, how can she hint that you are doing it for religious reasons?

I read work ads everyday, it is stated "looking for a female secretary", why males don't scream for discrimination?

cmon, we all know that where there's a will there's a way.

"And do you think that you don't pay them with every gallon of petroleum you buy?"

that is NECESSARY, however it's not necessary to travel to maldives.

"Refusing to buy petroleum is the one thing you can legally do to fight Islamism "

I don't have licence to drive and my family (3 ppl) have just one car. Am I ok?

I live in europe. we all use OIL not only for cars but for heat, factories and other commodities.

"You can't starve it any other way."

places like maldives are 90% turism based.

"Do you really, really, really think there are options available outside of *fighting* back?"

Are you aware that if you go shooting some random arabs on the streets you are convicted for murder?

I personally walk around with a knife to protect myself, but it's not you can go around shooting people.

Great summary, Fjordman.

"Who are our enemies...

Yesterday G.W. Bush re-endorsed Turkey's entry into the EU.

I get the impression from Mr. Bush that you do not have to study history at Yale to graduate.

History was not Rhodes' scholar Clinton's strong fort either.

Both of them blindsided by the Balkan Muslims and the Turks and their own utopian liberal views of the world.

Kosavo reminds me of that smerky faced Patton on the TV every night, announcing how much damage Clinton's NATO did to our WWII Balkan allies. He made me want to puke. I can't believe he is still in power. I hope the Serbs realize the American people never supported Clinton's fiasco.

Amnesia implies our leaders forgot something. I question whether they ever knew, or even know now.

As regards the Russian alliance with Iran, this follows from the concept that each regards the other as useful idiots in their separate quests for world power. After the West is subdued they each would then each attack and wipe out the other to impose their final world view - communism or sharia. As an extension of Hugh's idea of letting the Muslims go at it among themselves, it might be a good move for the West to encourage the the Russo-Muslim fight to start sooner rather than later.

Mike Schneider writes:

Do you really, really, really think there are options available outside of *fighting* back?
Do you really think you're fighting if you're helping the enemy buy ammunition?

The KSA knows this.  A US push for efficiency and oil independence is their worst nightmare.  That's why they fund cornucopian "oil will never run out" think tanks in addition to their madrassas and dawa campaigns, so you'll pay ever-more to fill that SUV and make the rest possible.

Cut it off at the knees.

FedUp writes:

that is NECESSARY
Getting around is necessary, oil is not.  Looked at the state of battery technology lately?  The Tesla roadster is as fast as anything and goes 250 miles on a charge.  A123Systems Li-ion batteries are going into DeWalt tools; they can charge 0-100% in 5 minutes.  Plug-in hybrid cars don't need much in the way of batteries (relatively low cost) but they can get effective fuel economy of over 150 MPG.  There are even two companies re-tooling the ancient lead-acid cell of Planté; they have radically improved the lifespan and slashed the weight.

You need to DEMAND these things.  Not hydrogen cars that might be ready by 2020; we need every new powertrain to be hybrid, and every car capable of running entirely on electricity and with the ability to take more batteries.  Demand the cars from industry, the research, tax and infrastructure support from your pols, the petroleum taxes as a personal sacrifice in YOUR war against Islamic imperialism.

We really need to aim at oil independence.

As a second generation American of Serbian decent, I can say that we did have someone fighting to stop them...the Serbs. We stopped THEM.

Additionally, I would like to say that while I was growing up in a small northern industrial town, in a nice neighborhood, decent school,attending my small church, etc, etc,---I was raised to be a tolerant observant Orthodox Christian. I was also taught what every generation of my family from the 15th century on was taught...never,and I mean never, trust a muslim.

An excellent essay Fjordman, thank you.

What does become apparent through this essay is the damage done by nations who act in accordance with their own short term goals without any consideration of the historical perspective. For example, the Venetians refusal to side with the Serbians (Svemirko's note) through to the present pressure from the USA on the EU to admit Turkey.

Where there should be agreement and joint action by diverse nations facing a common problem, namely Jihad, there is nothing. Zilch.

Where there should be joint anti-Jihad action by the affected nations, for example India, the Phillipines, Serbia, Israel, Thailand, Russia, and elsewhere - there is no action, no consultation, no planning, just short term, self interest.

Daniel Pipes wrote on this topic yesterday and he argued for an expanded role for an expanded NATO to fight Jihad. While in agreement with Mr. Pipes that the UN is utterly useless in this area, I can't see a repackaged, revamped NATO making any headway either.

Yo: How many petrobucks does it take to ride a motorcycle around Paris with Molotov cocktails torching everything in sight? How many petrobucks does it take to attach a fatwa to some schlep's chest with a butcher-knife? How many petrobucks does it take to pump out litters like Saruman's orcs until you've enough population to win elections in Malaysia and Indonesia, then destroy all the churches?

Grow a clue, fools: whatever the Saudis spend on Wahabbi mosques around the world amounts to less than 1% of their oil revenues.

-- War is CHEAP if your enemy doesn't resist.

It takes petrobucks to buy off the academics to claim that the criminals are "misunderstood and oppressed", the pols to pander to them, the executives to argue for their "inclusion" instead of their expulsion as being bad for business, the newspapers to suppress the information of just how much they cost.

Sooner or later it'll either be legal to shoot the miscreants who haven't yet been deported, or things will be so bad there will effectively be no law.  That time has not come.  The law does not yet recognize the threat, and the PC contingents (including many in government and our police forces) claim that anyone who says there's a threat IS the threat.  That needs to change first, and the actions of the terrorists themselves will do most of that work for us.

With a little assistance from folks like Robert Spencer in getting the news out, of course.

Robert, I would like to retract my criticism of not putting any blame on the US in your article. I've read this article a few times now, and you just flat out nailed it.

Thanks,

Niv