PIG DICTATOR ERDOGAN IS MIDDLE MAN FOR DRUGS MOVED FROM VENEZUELA THROUGH TURKEY HEADED FOR EUROPE. PIG EROGAN IS TAKING HIS PERCENTAGE AND EAGER TO COMPLETE THE MUSLIM CONQUEST OF EUROPE.
THE CATHEDRAL OF HAGIA SOPHIA WAS BUILT BY CHRISTIAN SOVEREIGNS JUSTIN AND THEODORA.
The Hagia Sophia: A 'Center of Knowledge about Islam'?
Last summer, Turkish authorities transformed Hagia Sophia ("Holy Wisdom") — which was originally built, and for a millennium functioned, as one of Christendom's greatest cathedrals — into a mosque (again). On that Friday, July 24, 2020 (which for millions of Eastern Christians is now deemed a "day of mourning"), Muslims met inside the desecrated church, where they were led in prayer by a sword-waving imam, to spasmodic cries of "Allahu akbar."
The Turks, beginning with their president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, have been presenting this bit of cultural appropriation as their "right." Imam Ali Erbas, Turkey's president of religious affairs, has gone one farther, claiming that "the goal is for all our mosques and especially Hagia Sophia to become centers of knowledge about Islam."
So be it. As the anniversary of the Turkish conquest of Constantinople and its Hagia Sophia recently passed (May 29, 1453), let us revisit what happened on that day — a day that truly does impart much "knowledge about Islam," not least because we have primary source documents describing exactly what the Turks did, particularly in and around Hagia Sophia. (All quoted text in the following narrative was derived from contemporary sources, mostly eyewitnesses; exact references can be found in chapter 7 of Sword and Scimitar.)
Once they had penetrated inside Constantinople, the "enraged Turkish soldiers ... gave no quarter":
When they had massacred and there was no longer any resistance, they were intent on pillage and roamed through the town stealing, disrobing, pillaging, killing, raping, taking captive men, women, children, old men, young men, monks, priests, people of all sorts and conditions[.] ... There were virgins who awoke from troubled sleep to find those brigands standing over them with bloody hands and faces full of abject fury[.] ... [The Turks] dragged them, tore them, forced them, dishonored them, raped them at the cross-roads and made them submit to the most terrible outrages[.] ... Tender children were brutally snatched from their mothers' breasts and girls were pitilessly given up to strange and horrible unions, and a thousand other terrible things happened[.]
Because thousands of citizens had fled to and were holed up in Hagia Sophia, the ancient basilica offered an excellent harvest of slaves once its doors were axed down:
One Turk would look for the captive who seemed the wealthiest, a second would prefer a pretty face among the nuns. ... Each rapacious Turk was eager to lead his captive to a safe place, and then return to secure a second and a third prize. ... Then long chains of captives could be seen leaving the church and its shrines, being herded along like cattle or flocks of sheep.
The slavers sometimes fought each other to the death over "any well-formed girl," even as many of the latter "preferred to cast themselves into the wells and drown rather than fall into the hands of the Turks."
Having taken possession of the Hagia Sophia — which at the time of its capture had served as a cathedral for a thousand years — the invaders "engaged in every kind of vileness within it, making of it a public brothel." On "its holy altars" they enacted "perversions with our women, virgins, and children," including "the Grand Duke's daughter who was quite beautiful." She was forced to "lie on the great altar of Hagia Sophia with a crucifix under her head and then raped."
Next "they paraded the [Hagia Sophia's main] Crucifix in mocking procession through their camp, beating drums before it, crucifying the Christ again with spitting and blasphemies and curses. They placed a Turkish cap ... upon His head, and jeeringly cried, 'Behold the god of the Christians!'"
Practically all other churches in the ancient city suffered the same fate. "The crosses which had been placed on the roofs or the walls of churches were torn down and trampled." The Eucharist was "thrown to the ground and kicked." Bibles were stripped of their gold or silver illuminations before being burned. "Icons were without exception given to the flames." Patriarchal vestments were placed on the haunches of dogs; priestly garments were placed on horses.
"Everywhere there was misfortune, everyone was touched by pain" when Sultan Muhammad finally made his grand entry into the city. "There were lamentations and weeping in every house, screaming in the crossroads, and sorrow in all churches; the groaning of grown men and the shrieking of women accompanied looting, enslavement, separation, and rape."
The sultan rode to Hagia Sophia, dismounted, and went in, "marveling at the sight" of the grand basilica. After having it cleansed of its crosses, statues, and icons — Muhammad himself knocked over and trampled on its main altar — he ordered a muezzin to ascend the pulpit and sound "their detestable prayers," wrote a disgruntled Christian. "Then this son of iniquity, this forerunner of Antichrist, mounted upon the Holy Table to utter forth his own prayers," thereby "turning the Great Church into a heathen shrine for his god and his Mahomet."
To cap off his triumph, Muhammad had the "wretched citizens of Constantinople" dragged before his men during evening festivities and "ordered many of them to be hacked to pieces, for the sake of entertainment." The rest of the city's population — as many as forty-five thousand — were hauled off in chains to be sold into Easter captivity.
Such is the "knowledge about Islam" that the Hagia Sophia's experiences truly impart.
Setting the record straight concerning the conquest of Constantinople, as this article has done, is doubly important now that Google and Big Tech are, like the Turks, devoted to hiding the truth of this day. Before Turkey violently transformed the Hagia Sophia into a mosque, googling the date "May 29" — a day that for centuries before Pearl Harbor "lived in infamy" — produced numerous search results on the Muslim conquest of Constantinople; today, very few do.
Note: Quoted excerpts in the above narrative were taken from and are sourced in Sword and Scimitar: Fourteen Centuries of War between Islam and the West.
Raymond Ibrahim is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center, a Judith Rosen Friedman Fellow at the Middle East Forum, and a Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Gatestone Institute.
The Jerusalem Jihad, Same as It Ever Was
"If we searched the entire world for a person, more cowardly, despicable, weak and feeble in psyche, mind, ideology and religion, we would not find anyone like the Jew. Notice, I do not say the Israeli." —Hassan Nasrallah
Israel finds itself in a cycle of endless small wars due to four political illusions — strategic errors, really.
THE TEMPLE MOUNT
Starting in 1948, the struggle against Israel was about religion — and imprudent tolerance. When the IDF recovered Jerusalem, twice, in fact, Israel should have done what any Muslim, Arab, Persian, or Ottoman victor would have done: remove or relocate adversarial symbols of religious submission. The Al Aqsa Mosque, built over the ruins of the Jewish temple by Umayyad Calif Abd al-Malik, is a permanent beacon, a signature of Islamic privilege. Yet the Jewish temple on the same spot in Jerusalem has a pedigree that precedes Islam by millennia.
After serial defeats, Islam still has its mosque and its "Dome of the Rock" fictions — centrifugal symbols that motivate local and global jihad terror at the expense, to be sure, of Jewish culture, security, safety, peace, and sovereignty.
Wars with, and within, Islam are underwritten by the fusion of realpolitik and toxic religion. For Islamists, separation of church and state is a sacrilege cultivated by Jews, like-minded infidels, heretics, and apostates.
A case on point might be the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul: originally built as a Christian cathedral by Justinian in 537 A.D.; seized by the Ottomans in 1453 A.D. and converted to a mosque; rebranded as a museum by Atatürk in 1933; and now reopened as a mosque by a modern neo-Ottoman, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.
Symbol and significance matter.
Over time, the Christian Church in Turkey, once the majority religion, was systematically extinguished by political atrocity and Islamic intolerance. Today, Sunni and Shia zealots are united in their quest to see that Jews and Judaism suffer a similar fate in the Levant.
THE TROJAN HORSE
From the start, the modern state of Israel has been beset by enemies from without. Indeed, the Mideast has been a bad neighborhood for non-Muslims since Mohamed's time. Israel now has to deal with an internal Arab-Muslim citizen demographic that may hold the balance of domestic secular power.
If Al Aqsa is a brick-and-mortar Trojan Horse in the heart of the Jewish state, the real threat is the Jerusalem jihad, those 1.5 million so-called "Palestinian" Arab-Israelis, a Sunni demographic that would never tolerate a like number of Jews in their midst should they have the upper hand.
Ironically, as Islamofascists like Hezb'allah and Hamas assume more local control, a second Holocaust is as near as any certainty can be. Talk of wiping Israel and Jews off the face of the map is not empty rhetoric; it is the lynchpin, the objective, for Palestinian, Shia, and Sunni zealots worldwide.
No subject, at home and abroad, unites Muslims so well as Jew-hate.
GAZA GOATS
In spite of formidable military prowess and exceptional national courage, Israel has always tried to temper victory with justice. Modern Israel, in part a nation of immigrants, is always sensitive to charges of "imperialism," a slander more appropriate for historical and modern Islam than Judaism. Conquest, proselytizing, forced conversions, and related atrocities are Islamic, not Judaic values.
From 1948 to 1967, the Gaza strip was occupied and administered by Egypt, yet Cairo never granted Palestinians Egyptian citizenship. After the 1967 Arab attack against Israel, the IDF took the Sinai and Gaza from Egypt. Under Israeli control, between 1967 and 1982, the Gaza Strip had a growth rate that averaged 10% per annum.
In the interests of peace with Egypt, the Sinai was returned to Egyptian control, but Cairo never had any illusions about the Muslim Brotherhood or the Palestinian tar baby. After the Oslo accords of 1993, Israel ceded administrative control of the West Bank and Gaza to the Palestinian Authority (née PLO), again in the interests of a permanent peace.
In short order, a rift developed between the P.A. on the West Bank and Hamas in Gaza. The PLO and Hamas are joined only by terror and virulent religious bigotry. Hamas, now allied with Shia Hezb'allah, is poised to take complete control in Arab Palestine, another certainty if de jure Palestine ever holds another election.
By granting measured political autonomy to Gaza, Israel enabled the "two state" fiction, an Arab fantasy where Israel would be flanked on two sides by fratricidal attack dogs dedicated to the demise of Israel.
Hamas does not recognize Israel's right to exist.
Withal, Arab Palestine has never been able to take yes for an answer, and now politics has been hijacked by religious jihad and political terror – again at Israel's expense.
Palestinian autonomy, once a peace offering, is now the dagger pointed at the heart of Zion.
THE TWO-STATE FICTION
Reality is a bitter pill even on a good day.
Unlike the Arabs, many Israelis could never accept the facts of modern Palestinian culture, a Petri dish of discontent and sedition. Religious jihad today is as much a threat to Arab tribal totalitarians as it is to the state of Israel. While keeping Palestinians at arm's length, Arab neighbors use the West Bank and Gaza Arabs as confrontation proxies. Palestinians are in every sense sacrificial goats — permanent Muslim patsies at best, front-line cannon fodder at worst.
Every janissary, dictator, or Muslim autocrat is, alas, hostage to a persistent mujahedeen threat. Keeping the Israeli-Palestinian conflict alive serves several Muslim interests, inclinations, and prejudices — and policy worldwide. Israel was always naïve to think that it could cut a deal with local jihad proxies while the Jerusalem trophy and the Temple Mount were in play.
Any thought of legitimizing a nation, like Palestine, on two Israeli borders is a triumph of hope over experience. "Two states" has never been the solution — only a toxic problem. A Palestinian state is a recipe for national suicide and another Jewish holocaust.
GRIM HORIZONS
Over time, there are few silver linings in the clouds over Israel. Today is no exception. Clearly, Muslim zealots see the 2021 sea change in Washington politics as a golden opportunity to roll back the Abraham Accords and related progress in Arab-Israeli relations. The Biden/Harris administration is likely to minimize or ignore the Trump initiatives and return to the recidivist apologetics of the Obama era. The smoke hardly cleared from the latest Jerusalem jihad when the Biden White House assured Palestinians, and Hamas, that America would rebuild anything that Israel's Defense Force had destroyed. Thus, Muslim attacks from without and within Israel are now motivated or incentivized, in part, by post-conflict American support and largesse. Any idea that humanitarian aid can go to Palestinians without Hamas taking a butcher's cut is just another fantasy.
In the West Bank and Gaza, we now have a perfect storm where terror, corruption, and jihad meet at the merge. Islamic terror and Palestinian corruption are subsidized by the United States again — self-fulfilling prophecies underwritten by American tax monies.
Over time, the Palestinian question was so central to Arab politics that the P.A. or Hamas had the power to kill any initiative that improved relations with Israel. The Abraham Accords were a benchmark of sorts to the extent that they canceled the Palestinian "veto."
Feckless, if not reckless, American policy now gives veto power back to Hamas, a neo-national terror state. The Jerusalem jihad has new life in 2021, again at Israel's expense.
G. Murphy Donovan writes about the politics of national security.
Image: Walkerssk via Pixabay, Pixabay License.
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