Turkey Praises—and Seeks to Emulate?—a Mass-Murdering, Pedophilic, Slave-Trader
What a people’s “hero” says about them.
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Raymond Ibrahim is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center.
Turning churches into mosques is very much on Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s mind these days. Last Friday, June 4, he “spoke of the Turkish legacy of conquest and the conversion of the Hagia Sophia [into a mosque] during a mosque opening in the city of Zonguldak on Friday.” In his own words, “the re-opening of the Hagia Sophia as a mosque is important, as it is a legacy of conquest.”
Thus, while the West falls all over itself to disavow any “conquest” its ancestors may have engaged in—for example, the “conquest of the Americas” at the hands of the “genocidal” Columbus—here is the president of Turkey praising the violent conquests committed by his Muslim ancestors. The significance of this dichotomy, and what it portends for the future, is in need of acknowledgement.
As a case study, take Erdoğan’s stance towards Turkey’s greatest jihadis of history—men whose atrocious deeds would shame ISIS. Last summer, while celebrating his decree to transform the Hagia Sophia—which for a millennium had functioned as Eastern Christendom’s greatest basilica—into a mosque, Erdoğan repeatedly saluted Sultan Muhammad al-Fatah (“the Conqueror,” 1432-1481) for violently transforming Christian Constantinople into Islamic Istanbul.
And yet consider: Sultan Muhammad’s sole justification for conquering Constantinople was that Islam demands the subjugation of “infidels,” in this case, Christians. He had no other “grievance” than that. In fact, when he first became sultan, he “swore by the god of their false prophet, by the prophet whose name he bore,” a bitter Christian contemporary retrospectively wrote, that “he was their [the Christians’] friend, and would remain for the whole of his life a friend and ally of Constantinople.” Although they believed him, Muhammad was taking advantage of “the basest arts of dissimulation and deceit,” wrote Edward Gibbon. “Peace was on his lips while war was in his heart.”
During his siege of Constantinople, he regularly exhorted his Muslim army with jihadi ideology, including by unleashing throngs of preachers crying,
Children of Muhammad, be of good heart, for tomorrow we shall have so many Christians in our hands that we will sell them, two slaves for a ducat, and will have such riches that we will all be of gold, and from the beards of the Greeks we will make leads for our dogs, and their families will be our slaves. So be of good heart and be ready to die cheerfully for the love of our [past and present] Muhammad.
“Recall the promises of our Prophet concerning fallen warriors in the Koran,” the sultan himself exhorted: “the man who dies in combat shall be transported bodily to paradise and shall dine with Muhammad in the presence of women, handsome boys, and virgins.”
The mention of “handsome boys” was not just an accurate reference to the Koran’s promise (e.g., 52:24, 56:17, and 76:19); Muhammad was a notorious pedophile. His enslavement and rape of Jacob Notaras—a handsome 14-year-old nobleman’s son in Constantinople, whom Muhammad forced into becoming his personal catamite until he escaped—was only one of the most infamous. The sultan stabbed to death another Christian boy who “preferred death to infamy.”
After his conquest and desecration of the Hagia Sophia, 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 45,000—was hauled off in chains to be sold as slaves.
This is the man whom Turkey and its president honor—including by rededicating one of Christendom’s greatest and oldest churches as a victory mosque to him last year. Nor is Muhammad al-Fatah the only terrorist to be honored; as Erdoğan explained in one of his speeches:
The conquest of Istanbul [Constantinople] and the conversion of the Hagia Sophia into a mosque are among the most glorious chapters of Turkish history.….The resurrection of the Hagia Sophia represents our memory full of heydays in our history, from [the battles of] Badr to Manzikert, from Nicopolis, to Gallipoli [all jihadi victories] … The resurrection of the Hagia Sophia is required by our respect and commitment to all of our ancestors, from Alp Arslan [Islamic victor of Manzikert who opened the way to the conquest of Asia Minor, and massacred or enslaved tens of thousands of Christians], to Muhammad al-Fatah, to Abdulhamid [who massacred as many as 300,000 Armenians in the name of jihad between 1894-1896]. The resurrection of the Hagia Sophia … honors Muhammad al-Fatah’s spirit of conquest… Allah willing, we will continue to walk on this sacred path without pause or hesitation, until we reach our ultimate destination [emphasis added].
The message could not be clearer: jihadi ideology dominates Turkey, at least its leadership. Invading and conquering neighboring peoples—not due to any grievances but because they are non-Muslim—with all the attending atrocities, rapes, destruction, and mass slavery is apparently the ideal, to resume once the sunset of Western power is complete.
Meanwhile, because Americans are used to seeing statues of their own nation’s heroes toppled—for no other reason than that they were white and/or Christian, and therefore inherently evil—the significance of Erdoğan’s words and praise of Muhammad the Conqueror—who as an Asian Muslim is further immune from Western criticism, as that would be “racist”—will remain lost on them.
THE HAGIA SOPHIA WAS BUILT BY BYZINTINE CHRISTIAN SOVEREIGNS EMPEROR JUSTIN AND EMPRESS THEODORA.
MUSLIM INVASION OF SPAIN
https://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2021/06/the-muslim-invasion-of-spain-and-europe.html
The Hagia Sophia: A True 'Center of Knowledge about Islam'
A look at how delusional Turkish leadership has become.
Raymond Ibrahim is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center.
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. 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 further, 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 the author’s Sword and Scimitar: Fourteen Centuries of War between Islam and the West.
Radical Islamist Group Hizb ut-Tahrir Resurgent in Britain Amid Israel-Palestine Conflict: Report
A radical pan-Islamist organisation, which calls for the reinstatement of the caliphate and the global imposition of sharia law, has resurfaced in Britain amid the tension between Israel and Palestine.
Hizb ut-Tahrir Britain, which was both David Cameron and Tony Blair tried to have banned in the UK, is reportedly behind a campaign to encourage Muslim armies of the world to “liberate” the Palestinian people in Gaza and the al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem.
The Islamist group organised anti-Israel protests in London and Birmingham last month, according to the Sunday Telegraph, though the paper noted that they tend to downplay their involvement in organising the demonstrations.
While placards in London and Birmingham were seen bearing the name of Hizb ut-Tahrir, a similar protest held in Luton saw activists cover up the name with black tape.
The head of government relations for the Community Security Trust, which monitors anti-Semitism in the UK, Jonny Newton said that Hizb ut-Tahrir has become “more visible in recent weeks”.
For example, at a protest in Birmingham a man was filmed calling on the “Muslim armies” of the world to wage jihad to “wipe out that Zionist entity” of Israel.
“There is little doubt that they have continued to organise and recruit under the radar and without significant scrutiny since the organisation was exposed as anti-Semitic and homophobic in the 1990’s” Mr Newton said.
He continued: “Hizb ut-Tahrir is a global Islamist group, the leadership of which states explicitly anti-Jewish hatred regarding Israel.
“It was inevitable that its British supporters would echo some of that sentiment on our streets, because that is what they have been doing for decades: despite repeat complaints from the UK Jewish community about the danger posed by the group, both in its own right and as a potential gateway to more violent Jihadi actions.”
Despite the Tory party manifesto of 2010 pledging that a Conservative government would “ban any organisations which advocate hate or the violent overthrow of our society, such as Hizb ut-Tahrir,” Prime Minister David Cameron failed to follow through, claiming that a ban on the radical organisation would not be “workable”.
A 2009 report by the Centre for Social Cohesion found that the ideology of Hizb ut-Tahrir is in direct opposition to the values of Western society.
“Inherent to HT’s worldview is a clash between “Western” and “Islamic” civilisations. The party believes the United Kingdom and United States of America are leading a campaign against Islam and Muslims worldwide,” the report said.
“HT actively seeks mass support for its Islamist revolution among Western Muslims. Party ideology commands them to oppose Western civilisation and to subvert their societies. All Western states are considered “enemies” of Islam and potential land for HT’s expansionist Islamist state via jihad.”
In a statement issued on Saturday, Hizb ut-Tahrir said: “We distinguish between Jewish people as a faith and an ethnicity, and the Zionist military occupation that calls itself a ‘Jewish state’ … In Britain we use the term Zionist entity as we do not recognise the name that it gives itself.
“The demonstration in Luton was a community initiative and not a Hizb ut-Tahrir rally, unlike the simultaneous demonstrations in London and Birmingham on 16th May. The chairman of the executive committee of Hizb ut-Tahrir Britain was invited to speak, along with speakers from other organisations, so the party’s presence was open. However it would be inappropriate to have the party’s name on banners at an event that was not its own.
“Hizb ut-Tahrir does not promote fear, criminality or terrorism. No honest person has ever said this nor does any evidence exist to support this. Hizb ut-Tahrir does not encourage violence against civilians.”
Follow Kurt Zindulka on Twitter here @KurtZindulka
THE MUSLIMS WILL DESTROY EUROPE AS THE MEXICANS ARE MEXIFORNIA AND THE REST OF AMERICA. IT IS WHAT HAPPENS WHEN THERE IS A QUEST FOR 'CHEAP' FOREIGN LABOR.
PUSH 2 FOR ENGLISH.
The Islamification of large parts of England
In 1981–1982, for my junior year abroad, I attended Leeds University in Leeds, a city in Yorkshire, up in the north of England. At the time, being there was tremendously satisfying because, while southern England was then a very international (and tourist-ridden) region, Leeds was still extremely British, as was the surrounding countryside. By 2004, though, while in Florida, I met a woman from Leeds who told me that large parts of Yorkshire had come under Muslim control. A new book reveals that, in the ensuing 17 years, it's only become worse.
Ed Husain, a former Muslim radical who is now a professor at Georgetown University, traveled across England to find out just how much Islamification has occurred in the country that provided the template for American liberties. What Husain found is disheartening, especially in the north of England, where Islam took root while London ignored it.
Bradford, for example, is a former industrial hub about 25 minutes east of Leeds. It was a quintessentially English manufacturing city during the Industrial Revolution. Now, though, as Husain described to the Daily Mail, it's becoming a hard-line Islamic city:
In nearby Bradford, Ed was amazed by the lack of white English people in the city, and asked a Muslim taxi driver 'where they are'.
He was told they had all 'gone with the wind.'
According to the author, there were mosques 'on almost every corner', with Ed writing: 'Then there are houses that also serve as mosques and madrasas , banners affixed to their façades.'
[snip]
After visiting an Islamic bookstore he discovered works glorifying violent jihad by Sayyid Qutb, the Egyptian godfather of Islamist terror and an acknowledged influence on Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda.
He spoke to the director of a local theatre company dedicated to helping disabled children and those with special educational needs, Louise Denham, about how the communities could come together.
But she was pessimistic, and warned that Bradford could become 'an apartheid city' within 30 years.
She predicted: 'There'll be more pushback against diversity. We'll have parties like Nazi Germany organising against the immigrant and Muslim populations.'
Ed concluded that while the community was physically in Britain, they are mentally living elsewhere.
And so it goes, according to Husain, in one formerly very British community after another. Just as the French have ceded the banlieues around Paris to Muslims who fail to assimilate, and Sweden is struggling with the unassimilated Muslim community in Malmö, England has allowed large swaths of the country to become entirely Islamic.
England is a country that could once boast that it was last invaded in 1066. After that, it repulsed the Spanish in 1588, Napoleon in the early 19th century, and Hitler during WWII. Beginning in the 1990s, though, it willingly invited in a community that will soon overtake it in demographics and in fanatic vigor. Ironically, the only other faith group that has some life in it in England is Catholicism, thanks to the central European immigrants who also came in the 1990s. Henry VIII and Cromwell are rolling in their graves, but Mary Tudor is doing fist pumps in Heaven.
This story matters to me because it saddens me to see the country that was the cradle of American liberties (the Founders got their ideas from England, although they created a better system via the Constitution), and that had a rich and beautiful culture, slowly turn into a Pakistani backwater. It also saddens me because my British friends are frightened. Their communities are dangerous, and they are targets.
This should also frighten you because we are following in England's wake. Biden's illegal and unconstitutional actions to erase the southern border and flood America, not just with illegal aliens from Latin America, but from a variety of countries, many of them Muslim, when combined with the Democrat party's aggressive efforts to create racial schisms in America, means we are also starting down the path to becoming a third-world apartheid country rather than a tolerant, pluralist, constitutional nation.
Image: Bradford Muslims holding a vigil for Qasem Soleimani. YouTube screen grab.
To comment, you can find the MeWe post for this article here.
UK: Over Half of Pakistani-Heritage Women Being in Cousin Marriages Raising Birth Defects, Deaths
A majority of marriages in Britain’s Pakistani community being between first cousins is wreaking a terrible toll on public health, with stillbirths, birth defects, and disabilities far higher than they would otherwise be.
In an article published by the Daily Mail, journalist Sue Reid described how an estimated 55 per cent of Pakistani-heritage couples are first cousins in so-called consanguineous marriages.
Not coincidentally, British Pakistanis account for an astonishing 33 per cent of birth defects in the country — far, far in excess of the proportion of births they account for overall, according to Reid.
Indeed, places in England with very large South Asian heritage populations, such as multicultural Bradford, appear to be paying a heavy price for the practice, with doctors in one study identifying some 140 different gene disorders among local youngsters, against only 20-30 among the general population.
Reid also highlighted the fact that stillbirths and infant deaths in the city are approaching double the national average, and many case studies of people with debilitating — and presumably costly, for Britain’s taxpayer-funded National Health Service — illnesses resulting from their parentage.
Breitbart London reported back in 2017 that in Redbridge, a multicultural borough in Britain’s hyper-diverse capital, almost one-in-five child deaths since 2008 were attributable to their parents being close relatives, with “chromosomal, genetic or congenital abnormalities” being a leading cause of death.
“The first duty of a Government is to protect its citizens from harm. There is a strong argument, down the road, for it to consider whether first-cousin unions should be outlawed in the same way as incest is,” suggested Nazir Afzal, a prosecutor turned pundit who the media has often turned to for comment on the topic of now-rarely covered majority-Muslim rape gangs in the past.
“We are tired of burying our babies,” suggested Afzal, whose own parents hail from Pakistan, adding that it is time “to follow the science and act to save lives” — although in truth it appears as though the problem is one of the Pakistani community’s own making, with the British government only culpable insofar as it has done nothing to prevent the Pakistani community from indulging its collective penchant for first cousin marriages, which are in modern times well outside the norm for the native population and socially discouraged.
Afzal, a practising Muslim, said that in his view the popularity of first cousin marriages among Pakistanis in Britain is down to greed, not religion.
‘They are arranged for material reasons, not because of religion. Families don’t want to risk their gold by allowing their child to marry an outsider,” he said.
“Some brothers betroth their boy or girl at birth to each other. Where is the choice of partner for their adult child?” he demanded.
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