Strange Bedfellows: American Blacks and Arab Slavers
Politics make strange bedfellows and none could be more oddly paired than the present coordination of Black and Arab sympathizers, as is evinced in this photo of a mural of George Floyd on the Palestinian side of Israel’s security wall.
For some time now, black American and Palestinian sympathizers have tried to make common cause with each other. The most famous example would be that of Marc Lamont Hill, a former CNN commentator, and the words he delivered to the United Nations:
"We have an opportunity to not just offer solidarity in words but to commit to political action, grass-roots action, local action and international action that will give us what justice requires and that is a free Palestine from the river to the sea," -- YouTube
The phrase, “from the [Jordan] river to the [Mediterranean] sea,” are not-so-coded words which call for the destruction of Israel.
Unfortunately, many American blacks have fallen for this halcyon view of Arab-black solidarity.
What is rarely addressed is that the Arabic root for slave and black is the same: A-B-D. The word, Abeed is considered equivalent to the American vulgarity used for blacks.
The Arab community knows this word all too well; “Abeed” is a derogatory Arabic slang term that is used to refer to Black people. This word is almost synonymous with the N- word. -- Muslim Girl
The sad fact is that the traffic in blacks as slaves is almost certainly traceable to Islam.
[H]ow many recall that Arab slavers were the first, and last, in modern times to ship millions of Africans out of the continent as slaves? And that Arab slavers preferred more African women to men? -- New African
It can be argued that the transatlantic slave trade started with Islam. Prior to 1492, it had often been the practice of Europeans to enslave other whites.
The most important source of slaves in medieval Europe... was the coast of Bosnia on the eastern shores of the Adriatic Sea. The word ‘slave’ and its cognates in most modern European languages is itself derived from ‘sclavus’ meaning ‘slav’, the ethnic name for the inhabitants of this region… -- New African
When the open fields of the Americas required cheap labor, the Arabs introduced Europeans to black slavery. This slave trade continued long after the Western World outlawed slavery.
After abolishing their own trade in African slaves, [Europeans would highlight] the wickedness of the Arab slavers who continued to enslave Africans well into the first decades of the 20th century. Even to this day, Arab slavers are still at work in Sudan and Mauritania, buying and selling black Africans. -- New African
So what can we say about this Arabic slave trade? Was it worse or better than the Western variety?
[A]t least, 80 percent of those captured by Muslim slave traders were calculated to have died before reaching the slave market, it is believed that the death toll from 1400 years of Arab and Muslim slave raids into Africa could have been as high as 112 Millions. When added to the number of those sold in the slave markets, the total number of African victims of the trans-Saharan and East African slave trade could be significantly higher than 140 Million people. -- John Allembillah Azumah, author of The Legacy of Arab-Islam in Africa: A Quest for Inter-religious Dialogue
Notice that 1400 years is given for the length of Muslim slave raids into Africa. That is the whole of Islamic history. Almost certainly, Arabs were enslaving blacks before Islam, and the numbers are therefore much higher. The transatlantic slave trade did not start until after Columbus discovered the New World, and so we find that Islam’s enslavement of blacks is far greater -- and worse yet, ongoing -- than any guilt borne by the West.
The Arab slave trade often had a preference for women, for their harems. Men were often castrated, with high fatality rates.
The castration of male slaves soon became a habit among slave traders due to the fact that castrated boys were in higher demand. They were noted to work faster and more efficient and stronger and were not a threat to slave masters and owners who feared that their wives, concubines and female slaves would have affairs with them. Face 2 Face Africa
Be aware that this is still ongoing.
[S]lavery was not eliminated. Mauritania continues the practice, failing to enforce a 2007 law designed to end the practice. Anti-Slavery International reports that slavery is still to be found in Mauritania, Niger, Mali, Chad and Sudan. “People born into descent-based slavery face a lifetime of exploitation and are treated as property by their so-called ‘masters’. -- New Statesman
Mauritania, Niger, and Mali are overwhelmingly Muslim. While Chad is about 44% Christian, the Arabs/Berbers [ie: Muslims] still purchase child slaves from among the darker Christians to the south.
Samson was sold by his black African parents in southern Chad to Arab herdsman for the price of a calf…
Away from his parents and his playmates, life was tough for Samson. He was forced to abandon his native Sara language and Christian religion in order to learn Arabic and practice Islam. -- The New Humanitarian
While not excusing Christians who sell their children, one has to wonder if the poverty which forced the Christians to do so was created by Islamic predations. And, it was well known that the wars in Sudan were fueled by partly-Arab Islamic Sudanese in the north feeling they had a right to enslave the Christian/animist Sudanese in the south.
Libya has become famous for its slave markets.
The open sale of human slaves -- migrants, refugees and Libyans -- shocked the world when it came to light in 2017. But without a capable government in the country, the practice has continued unabated while media interest ebbed. -- Newsweek
What no one dares say is that such enslavement of blacks is central to Islam… and not only does Islam enslave blacks. Islam will enslave anyone.
A new study suggests that a million or more European Christians were enslaved by Muslims in North Africa between 1530 and 1780 – a far greater number than had ever been estimated before. -- Ohio State News
In 1931, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA) reported:
The Fellah [an Arab peasant] sometimes has to sell his sons as slaves at the cheapest price in order to use the money to keep body and soul together, and to keep his wife alive, el Dajani writes. I have been with my own eyes a thing of which I will tell you. A man stopped us as we were motoring to Haifa and said to the driver, “I have a little girl with me; we want to travel to Bireh (near Ramallah). Have you any room?” The driver said he had room, and the man brought back a young peasant child, not more than eight years of age. Her clothes were ragged and she was weeping. I asked the man where he had got the child, and he told me he had “hired” her and was sending her to his brother in Bireh. “Her parents”, he explained, “have let me take her for 25 years for the sum of £25. There is nothing to be surprised about, for there are persons who make worse bargains and buy girls outright -- for ever”. -- Slavery in Palestine
Oddly, there are Afro-Palestinians in the Holy Land. Almost assuredly, they were brought there as slaves by the Arabs, eventually being freed under the British mandate, when Arabs could no longer enforce their mastery. They still face social prejudice.
For any African-American to cut a deal with any Islamic cause is sheer insanity. Those who make apologies for Islamic slavery, or try to diminish its brutality, are liars. Whatever the sins of Western Christianity, they do not even begin to approach that of Islam.
Islam Crawls Atop a Mountain of Dead European Bodies.
Politics make strange bedfellows and none could be more oddly paired than the present coordination of Black and Arab sympathizers, as is evinced in this photo of a mural of George Floyd on the Palestinian side of Israel’s security wall.
For some time now, black American and Palestinian sympathizers have tried to make common cause with each other. The most famous example would be that of Marc Lamont Hill, a former CNN commentator, and the words he delivered to the United Nations:
"We have an opportunity to not just offer solidarity in words but to commit to political action, grass-roots action, local action and international action that will give us what justice requires and that is a free Palestine from the river to the sea," -- YouTube
The phrase, “from the [Jordan] river to the [Mediterranean] sea,” are not-so-coded words which call for the destruction of Israel.
Unfortunately, many American blacks have fallen for this halcyon view of Arab-black solidarity.
What is rarely addressed is that the Arabic root for slave and black is the same: A-B-D. The word, Abeed is considered equivalent to the American vulgarity used for blacks.
The Arab community knows this word all too well; “Abeed” is a derogatory Arabic slang term that is used to refer to Black people. This word is almost synonymous with the N- word. -- Muslim Girl
The sad fact is that the traffic in blacks as slaves is almost certainly traceable to Islam.
[H]ow many recall that Arab slavers were the first, and last, in modern times to ship millions of Africans out of the continent as slaves? And that Arab slavers preferred more African women to men? -- New African
It can be argued that the transatlantic slave trade started with Islam. Prior to 1492, it had often been the practice of Europeans to enslave other whites.
The most important source of slaves in medieval Europe... was the coast of Bosnia on the eastern shores of the Adriatic Sea. The word ‘slave’ and its cognates in most modern European languages is itself derived from ‘sclavus’ meaning ‘slav’, the ethnic name for the inhabitants of this region… -- New African
When the open fields of the Americas required cheap labor, the Arabs introduced Europeans to black slavery. This slave trade continued long after the Western World outlawed slavery.
After abolishing their own trade in African slaves, [Europeans would highlight] the wickedness of the Arab slavers who continued to enslave Africans well into the first decades of the 20th century. Even to this day, Arab slavers are still at work in Sudan and Mauritania, buying and selling black Africans. -- New African
So what can we say about this Arabic slave trade? Was it worse or better than the Western variety?
[A]t least, 80 percent of those captured by Muslim slave traders were calculated to have died before reaching the slave market, it is believed that the death toll from 1400 years of Arab and Muslim slave raids into Africa could have been as high as 112 Millions. When added to the number of those sold in the slave markets, the total number of African victims of the trans-Saharan and East African slave trade could be significantly higher than 140 Million people. -- John Allembillah Azumah, author of The Legacy of Arab-Islam in Africa: A Quest for Inter-religious Dialogue
Notice that 1400 years is given for the length of Muslim slave raids into Africa. That is the whole of Islamic history. Almost certainly, Arabs were enslaving blacks before Islam, and the numbers are therefore much higher. The transatlantic slave trade did not start until after Columbus discovered the New World, and so we find that Islam’s enslavement of blacks is far greater -- and worse yet, ongoing -- than any guilt borne by the West.
The Arab slave trade often had a preference for women, for their harems. Men were often castrated, with high fatality rates.
The castration of male slaves soon became a habit among slave traders due to the fact that castrated boys were in higher demand. They were noted to work faster and more efficient and stronger and were not a threat to slave masters and owners who feared that their wives, concubines and female slaves would have affairs with them. Face 2 Face Africa
Be aware that this is still ongoing.
[S]lavery was not eliminated. Mauritania continues the practice, failing to enforce a 2007 law designed to end the practice. Anti-Slavery International reports that slavery is still to be found in Mauritania, Niger, Mali, Chad and Sudan. “People born into descent-based slavery face a lifetime of exploitation and are treated as property by their so-called ‘masters’. -- New Statesman
Mauritania, Niger, and Mali are overwhelmingly Muslim. While Chad is about 44% Christian, the Arabs/Berbers [ie: Muslims] still purchase child slaves from among the darker Christians to the south.
Samson was sold by his black African parents in southern Chad to Arab herdsman for the price of a calf…Away from his parents and his playmates, life was tough for Samson. He was forced to abandon his native Sara language and Christian religion in order to learn Arabic and practice Islam. -- The New Humanitarian
While not excusing Christians who sell their children, one has to wonder if the poverty which forced the Christians to do so was created by Islamic predations. And, it was well known that the wars in Sudan were fueled by partly-Arab Islamic Sudanese in the north feeling they had a right to enslave the Christian/animist Sudanese in the south.
Libya has become famous for its slave markets.
The open sale of human slaves -- migrants, refugees and Libyans -- shocked the world when it came to light in 2017. But without a capable government in the country, the practice has continued unabated while media interest ebbed. -- Newsweek
What no one dares say is that such enslavement of blacks is central to Islam… and not only does Islam enslave blacks. Islam will enslave anyone.
A new study suggests that a million or more European Christians were enslaved by Muslims in North Africa between 1530 and 1780 – a far greater number than had ever been estimated before. -- Ohio State News
In 1931, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA) reported:
The Fellah [an Arab peasant] sometimes has to sell his sons as slaves at the cheapest price in order to use the money to keep body and soul together, and to keep his wife alive, el Dajani writes. I have been with my own eyes a thing of which I will tell you. A man stopped us as we were motoring to Haifa and said to the driver, “I have a little girl with me; we want to travel to Bireh (near Ramallah). Have you any room?” The driver said he had room, and the man brought back a young peasant child, not more than eight years of age. Her clothes were ragged and she was weeping. I asked the man where he had got the child, and he told me he had “hired” her and was sending her to his brother in Bireh. “Her parents”, he explained, “have let me take her for 25 years for the sum of £25. There is nothing to be surprised about, for there are persons who make worse bargains and buy girls outright -- for ever”. -- Slavery in Palestine
Oddly, there are Afro-Palestinians in the Holy Land. Almost assuredly, they were brought there as slaves by the Arabs, eventually being freed under the British mandate, when Arabs could no longer enforce their mastery. They still face social prejudice.
For any African-American to cut a deal with any Islamic cause is sheer insanity. Those who make apologies for Islamic slavery, or try to diminish its brutality, are liars. Whatever the sins of Western Christianity, they do not even begin to approach that of Islam.
Islam Crawls Atop a Mountain of Dead European Bodies.
Another important moment in history.
Raymond Ibrahim is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center.
Earlier this week, on June 15, 1389, a pivotal military encounter between Islam and the West took place: the battle of Kosovo. In its wake, Islam became a dominant force in Eastern Europe—subjugating much of the Balkans till the early twentieth century. The story of that battle—and why Eastern Europe’s modern day descendants remain wary of the religion of Muhammad—follows:
As he lay dying in 1323, the Turkic founder of the Ottoman empire, Osman Bey—whose then small emirate was centered in westernmost Anatolia (or Asia Minor)—told his son and successor, Orhan, “to propagate Islam by yours arms” into Eastern Europe.
This his son zealously did; the traveler Ibn Batutua, who once met Orhan in Bursa, observed that, although the jihadi had captured some one hundred Byzantine fortresses, “he had never stayed for a whole month in any one town,” because he “fights with the infidels continually and keeps them under siege.” Christian cities fell like dominos: Smyrna in 1329, Nicaea in 1331, and Nicomedia in 1337. By 1340, the whole of northwest Anatolia was under Turkic control. By now and to quote a European contemporary, “the foes of the cross, and the killers of the Christian people, that is, the Turks, [were] separated from Constantinople by a channel of three or four miles.”
By 1354, the Ottoman Turks, under Orhan’s son, Suleiman, managed to cross over the Dardanelles and into the abandoned fortress town of Gallipoli, thereby establishing their first foothold in Europe: “Where there were churches he destroyed them or converted them to mosques,” writes an Ottoman chronicler: “Where there were bells, Suleiman broke them up and cast them into fires. Thus, in place of bells there were now muezzins.”
Cleansed of all Christian “filth,” Gallipoli became, as a later Ottoman bey boasted, “the Muslim throat that gulps down every Christian nation—that chokes and destroys the Christians.” From this dilapidated but strategically situated fortress town, the Ottomans launched a campaign of terror throughout the countryside, always convinced they were doing God’s work. “They live by the bow, the sword, and debauchery, finding pleasure in taking slaves, devoting themselves to murder, pillage, spoil,” explained Gregory Palamas, an Orthodox metropolitan who was taken captive in Gallipoli, adding, “and not only do they commit these crimes, but even—what an aberration—they believe that God approves them!”
After Orhan’s death in 1360 and under his son Murad I—the first of his line to adopt the title “Sultan”—the westward jihad into the Balkans began in earnest and was unstoppable. By 1371 he had annexed portions of Bulgaria and Macedonia to his sultanate, which now so engulfed Constantinople that “a citizen could leave the empire simply by walking outside the city gates.”
Unsurprisingly, then, when Prince Lazar of Serbia (b. 1330) defeated Murad’s invading forces in 1387, “there was wild rejoicing among the Slavs of the Balkans. Serbians, Bosnians, Albanians, Bulgarians, Wallachians, and Hungarians from the frontier provinces all rallied around Lazar as never before, in a determination to drive the Turks out of Europe.”
Murad responded to this effrontery on June 15, 1389, in Kosovo. There, a Serbian-majority coalition augmented by Hungarian, Polish, and Romanian contingents—twelve thousand men under the leadership of Lazar—fought thirty thousand Ottomans under the leadership of the sultan himself. Despite the initial downpour of Turkic arrows, the Serbian heavy cavalry plummeted through the Ottoman frontlines and broke the left wing; the Ottoman right, under Murad’s elder son Bayezid, reeled around and engulfed the Christians. The chaotic clash continued for hours.
On the night before battle, Murad had beseeched Allah “for the favour of dying for the true faith, the martyr’s death.” Sometime near the end of battle, his prayer was granted. According to tradition, Miloš Obilić, a Serbian knight, offered to defect to the Ottomans on condition that, in view of his own high rank, he be permitted to submit before the sultan himself. They brought him before Murad and, after Milos knelt in false submission, he lunged at and plunged a dagger deep into the Muslim warlord’s stomach (other sources say “with two thrusts which came out at his back”). The sultan’s otherwise slow guards responded by hacking the Serb to pieces. Drenched in and spluttering out blood, Murad lived long enough to see his archenemy, the by now captured Lazar, brought before him, tortured, and beheaded. A small conciliation, it may have put a smile on the dying martyr’s face.
Murad’s son Bayezid instantly took charge: “His first act as Sultan, over his father’s dead body, was to order the death, by strangulation with a bowstring, of his brother. This was Yaqub, his fellow-commander in the battle, who had won distinction in the field and popularity with his troops.” Next Bayezid brought the battle to a decisive end; he threw everything he had at the enemy, leading to the slaughter of every last Christian—but even more of his own men in the process.
So many birds flocked to and feasted on the vast field of carrion that posterity remembered Kosovo as the “Field of Blackbirds.” Though essentially a draw—or at best a Pyrrhic victory for the Ottomans—the Serbs, with less men and resources to start with in comparison to the ascendant Muslim empire, felt the sting more.
In the years following the battle of Kosovo, the Ottoman war machine became unstoppable: the nations of the Balkans were conquered by the Muslims—after withstanding a millennium of jihads, Constantinople itself permanently fell to Islam in 1453—and they remained under Ottoman rule for centuries.
The collective memory of Eastern Europeans’ not too distant experiences with and under Islam should never be underestimated when considering why they are significantly more wary of—if not downright hostile to—Islam and its migrants compared to their Western, liberal counterparts.
As Hungarian Prime Minister Victor Orbán once explained:
We don’t want to criticize France, Belgium, any other country, but we think all countries have a right to decide whether they want to have a large number of Muslims in their countries. If they want to live together with them, they can. We don’t want to and I think we have a right to decide that we do not want a large number of Muslim people in our country. We do not like the consequences of having a large number of Muslim communities that we see in other countries, and I do not see any reason for anyone else to force us to create ways of living together in Hungary that we do not want to see…. I have to say that when it comes to living together with Muslim communities, we are the only ones who have experience because we had the possibility to go through that experience for 150 years.
And those years—1541 to 1699, when the Islamic Ottoman Empire occupied Hungary—are replete with the massacre, enslavement, and rape of Hungarians.
(Note: The above account was excerpted from the author’s recent book, Sword and Scimitar: Fourteen Centuries of War between Islam and the West.)
'You Are Finished!' Turkey’s
Growing War on Christians
'You Are Finished!' Turkey’s
Growing War on Christians
Once secular, Turks are
now born and bred on hating infidels.
June 15, 2020
Raymond Ibrahim
Raymond Ibrahim is a
Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article was
first published by the Gatestone Institute.
Islamic terror attacks that
target Christians in Turkey are not uncommon. Around Christmas of 2011, a
large-scale al-Qaeda plot to bomb “all the churches in Ankara” was
exposed.Right before Christmas 2015, ISIS issued death threats, including
“upsetting videos and pictures,” to at least 20 Protestant churches, and warned
that “Koranic commandments… urge us to slay the apostate like you.”
More spectacularly, a
gunman dressed as Santa Claus entered
a nightclub in Istanbul during New Year celebrations, 2017, and massacred 39
people. A “heroic soldier of the caliphate,” the Islamic State (“ISIS”)
later claimed, “attacked the most
famous nightclub where Christians were celebrating their pagan feast.”
The statement further characterized the government of Turkey as being the “servant of the cross.”
What to make of this? Are
attacks on Christians limited to clandestine terrorist organizations operating
in Turkey, a nation which otherwise behaves as a “servant of the cross”?
In fact, hate for Christians in
once secular Turkey has come to permeate every segment of society—from the
average Muslim citizen to the highest levels of government. The examples
are many; a few follow.
In late 2019, a Muslim boy,
aged 16, stabbed a Korean Christian
evangelist in the heart several times; the 41-year-old husband and father died
shortly thereafter. Months earlier, an “86-year-old Greek man was
found murdered in his home with his
hands and feet tied”; he was reportedly “tortured.”
Before that, an 85-year-old
Armenian woman was stabbed to death in her Istanbul
apartment. Lest anyone mistake the motive, her murderer carved a crucifix
on her naked corpse. According to the report, that “attack marks the fifth
in the past two months against elderly Armenian women (one has lost an eye).”
Perhaps most notoriously, in
2009, a group of young Turks—including the son of a mayor—broke into a
Bible publishing house in Malatya. They bound, sadistically tortured for
hours, and eventually slaughtered its three Christian employees. “We didn’t do
this for ourselves, but for our religion,” one of the accused later said. “Let this be a lesson to
enemies of our religion.” They were all later released from prison on
a technicality.
Much more common than the
targeted killing of Christians—but no less representative of the hate—are
church related attacks. Most recently, on May 8, 2020, a man tried
to torch a church in Istanbul; the
church had been repeatedly attacked previously, including with hate-filled
graffiti.
Similarly, when a man opened fire on the Saint Maria
Catholic Church in Trabzon in 2018, it was just the latest in several attacks
on that church. Weeks earlier, a makeshift bomb was thrown at its garden; in 2016
Muslims crying “Allahu Akbar” (Allah is greater)
vandalized the church, including with sledgehammers; in 2011 the church
was targeted and threatened for its visible
cross; and in 2006 its priest, Andrea Santoro, was shot dead while conducting
church service.
Also while shouting
“Allahu Akbar” and “Revenge will be taken for Al-Aqsa Mosque,”
another Muslim man hurled a Molotov cocktail at
another church, Istanbul’s Aya Triada Orthodox Church, partially setting it on
fire. In another incident, four Turks banged and kicked at the door of
Agape Church in the Black Sea region—again while shouting “Allahu Akbar!”
According to the holed up pastor, they wanted “to go inside and hit someone or
attack in some other way.”
The growing brazenness of such
attacks was on full display when a random gang of Muslims disrupted a baptismal church
service in Istanbul. They pushed their way into the church, yelling
obscenities; one menacingly waved a knife at those in attendance.
“It’s not the first, and it won’t be the last,” a local Christian responded.
Threatening and/or defacing
churches is especially common. In late 2019, while shouting abuses and physical threats against
Christians gathered at the Church of St. Paul in Antalya, a man said he “would take great
pleasure in destroying the Christians, as he viewed them as a type of
parasitism on Turkey.”
In early 2019, hate-filled and
threatening graffiti—including “You Are Finished!”—was found on the Armenian Church of
the Holy Mother of God in Istanbul. Commenting on it, an Armenian
activist tweeted, “Every year, scores of
hate attacks are being carried out against churches and synagogues.”
One of the most alarming
instances occurred in 2015: as many as 15 churches received death threats for “denying Allah.” “Perverted
infidels,” one threat read, “the time that we
will strike your necks is soon. May Allah receive the glory and the praise.” “Threats
are not anything new for the Protestant community who live in this country and
want to raise their children here,” church leaders commented.
Rather than threaten or attack
churches, Turkish authorities have the power to simply confiscate or close them
(here, here, and here, for examples). In one
instance, police, not unlike the aforementioned thugs, interrupted a
baptismal ceremony while raiding and subsequently shutting down an unauthorized church. “Turkey does not have a pathway for legalization of churches,”
the report explained.
Other tactics are resorted to
when no pretexts can be found. For example, in an apparent attempt to
conceal the online presence of at least one church, authorities labeled
it “pornographic,” and blocked it.
The ban was “horrible,” responded a church
representative. “It’s a shame. It really pains us at having this
kind of accusation when we have a high moral standard.”
Even ancient churches that predate Islam by
centuries—including Stoudios monastery, the oldest Christian place of worship in Asia Minor, founded a millennium before its Islamic
conquest in the fourteenth century—are being transformed into mosques. After
explaining how the Turkish government built nearly 9,000 mosques over one
decade, while banning liturgy in the Sumela monastery—another historic site
inaugurated in 386, about a 1,000 years before Asia Minor became “Turkey”—a
report adds, “This arbitrary ban seems to
be yet another demonstration of the ‘unofficial’ second-class status of
Christians in Turkey.”
Hate for Christians in Turkey
has reached the point that it pursues these “infidels” beyond the grave:
attacks on Christian cemeteries are on the rise, prompting one frustrated
Christian to ask: “Is it now the turn of our
deceased?” According to a March, 2020 report, 20 of 72 gravestones in just
one Christian cemetery in Ankara were found destroyed. In another recent
instance, the desecraters broke a cross off a
deceased women’s grave; days earlier, her church burial service was interrupted
by cries of “Allahu Akbar!”
What is behind all these
attacks on anything and everything Christian—people, buildings, even
graves? An “environment of hate” was the recent response of a journalist in
Turkey:
But this hateful environment
did not emerge out of nowhere. The seeds of this hatred are spread,
beginning at primary schools, through books printed by the Ministry of National
Education portraying Christians as enemies and traitors. The indoctrination
continues through newspapers and television channels in line with state
policies. And of course, the sermons at mosques and talk at coffee houses
further stir up this hatred.
In other words, once “secular,”
Turks are now born and bred on hating Christians.
Interestingly, even this is not enough
to prevent ISIS from accusing Turkey of being a “servant of the cross,” which
prompts an important question: Just what, exactly, do so-called “radical”
Muslims—between 63 and 287 million Muslims in just eleven polled nations support ISIS—deem as the “proper”
treatment of Christians?
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