Our Enemy, Islam

                           by John Bottorff                          

Islam has always been a conquering religion. From the Arabian Peninsula the Arabs went out and conquered Mesopotamia, the Anatolian Peninsula and Constantinople, Judea and Lebanon, then Persia. Continuing they took all of north Africa and Spain, the Indian subcontinent, the Malay peninsula and Indonesia. They forced the conquered people to become Muslims or die. In some places some of the population were allowed to keep their religion but only if subordinate to Islam; they paid extra taxes and were second class citizens. The Koran does not promote peace, only war. There have been periods when the Muslims were quiescent, not out making war, but those were exceptions.

                                      

There is no moral equivalence between this religion and Christianity, Buddhism or others. Christianity was spread by word, not by arms. It was spread by this evangelism throughout the Roman Empire and finally turned that empire into a Christian one. After the whole of the Mideast had been conquered by the Muslims the Christians of Europe launched several Crusades attempting to regain control of their Holy Land, Jerusalem and the surrounding area. They achieved this for only a brief period, and Muslim control returned.

 

Around the 1100s and 1200s there were Muslim fanatics called Assassins who sent out suicide killers of officials they didn't like. There were two mountainous stronghold castles of the Assassins, one in present day Syria and one in present day Iran. The surrounding states could not conquer them. In 1276 the Mongols conquered Iran and did destroy the Assassins there. Sixteen years later the Mamluks from Egypt took Syria and finally destroyed the remaining Assassins. 

     

          In Europe Muslims had invaded and seized most of Spain and the Balkans (Greece, Bulgaria, Albania, etc.). They were finally stopped and the tide began to turn. By the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries many European nations had become more and more powerful through inventions and capitalism. Then they began to colonize.  English to America, Dutch to South Africa, Spanish to South and Central America, for instance.  And they began to set up Empires, seizing control of places like Indonesia, India, Mesopotamia, Shantung or Manchuria. These were not Christians conquering a country or region and imposing their religion on the inhabitants (except for some of the Spanish colonies). It was strictly political. Later the Japanese emulated the Europeans, taking Korea and Formosa at first.

 

Down to the present: A new variety of the Assassins has appeared, the Al Quaeda and their comrade organizations such as Hamas, Hezbollah etc. They are at war with the United States, with us. They began to attack us not on 9/11 but years earlier: 1976. It was only the enormity of 9/11 which awoke us to the danger. Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya and Iran were strong supporters of these terrorists. Libya now has bowed out; Afghanistan and Iraq have been knocked out as supporters.

 

Who is responsible? For many years Saudi Arabia has spent millions of dollars to set up and subsidize schools and mosques around the world to teach the Wahabist Islam doctrines in the belief that the Saud dynasty would be immune from attack by these Wahabists, which are a Saudi Arabian sect which has returned to the original virulent conquer-all doctrine of Mohammed. Now the Saud dynasty has been attacked and sees the light.

 

Therefore, I highly approve of our conquering Iraq and believe it will soon be subdued and on its way to be a democracy of some type, as will Afghanistan. Next to deal with are Iran and Syria, both suppressive dictator states. With much of our armed forces now necessarily in Iraq, we cannot invade them, but we can subvert them, support revolutions there.