Fifth Column Crusades
April 2007
Fifth Column Crusades
Recent information that a number of schools are dropping the teaching of the history of the Crusades from their curricula, is very disturbing.
The ostensible reason for doing so has been given as the need to avoid offending pupils, and their families one must presume, who are Muslims. The cause for this decision ostensibly is based on the infamous idea of Political Correctness as are so many other self-destructive decisions and behavior patterns.
To me this kind of decision is very wrong and counter-productive for several fundamental reasons.
1 Teaching history is essential to humanity's future existence because it allows us to avoid committing the same mistakes made in the past that led to murder and mayhem, instead of to a better world.
2 If omitting the teaching of a distinct part of history is decided upon because it may offend a given group, it is then bound to offend another group or groups in consequence.
3 Such selective teaching very likely will create a new animus between the people involved rather than a better understanding of humanity's common interests in promoting a civilized, educated world, where real tolerance is practiced routinely and not dogmatically.
In my view, Islam's inherent lack of tolerance goes back to a socio/religious concept of life and community that prevents the male individual from having to struggle while growing up, in our sense of that concept and as a result fails to become a really mature and civilized person. This process also fails to teach them how to conduct oneself confidently and respectfully towards others. Instead, Islam imposes a group concept of behavior and thought that allows no individual variants. The results, predictably turn out to be more Spartan than Greek in their historic consequences.
There have always been people who tried, and often succeeded, to take charge of their human environment and while achieving political control, making themselves dictators and despots in the process. By and large, that kind of arrangement discourages the development of honorable and mature individuals because to survive, the intelligent and enterprising citizens need to follow the "leader". To do otherwise would lead to very unhappy results. We have seen too many instances of this all through history.
Whereas Christianity developed as a mission and a religion of peace and forgiveness 2000 years ago, Islam was promulgated by the sword allowing its followers no choices at all. It required total submission and no doubts permitted. A very poignant companion of this arrangement was the automatic political control it conferred on its leadership.
Even though tolerance is mentioned in the Quran, it is always qualified and practiced conditionally, if at all. More distinctly, it did not foster open minded intellectual growth by raising questions, by reviewing the real world together with the history of its own religious origins. Sadly, this uncritical approach has thus far failed, in some parts of the world, to develop Muslim communities of mature, tolerant, wise and inquisitive people.
We all know, that Christians, notwithstanding their illuminatingly poignant New Testamental religious base, have committed horrible things during the past 2000 years, but by and large this very painful struggle with itself and its history has created a well understood, practical and admirable mode of civilized life for those who are interested in that, which in turn has led to great prosperity for more people than ever before in history.
Unfortunately, the very prosperity of Western civilization also developed some significant moral decay in its own ranks, which together with an undesirable tendency toward living the so-called "good life", has made many people lose sight of the sacrifices that created this human paradise in the first place. There are also many people who see the need to take a step back realizing that this selfishness on the part of many "modern" people is undermining the very structure that allows us to have our differences without reverting to "fisticuffs". Contrary to those who claim that religiosity is completely passé, mankind will fail to become more civilized by ignoring our Biblical admonishments. We are not wise, nor humble enough, to steer our own course to paradise.
But against this background of the modern western world's condition and status, modern Islam is mostly at war with itself. A growing number of its own people are chafing under the narrow minded, dogmatic, intolerant, religious blanket they must accommodate. In many areas education is limited to Quranic indoctrination by a well financed "clergy" interested only in their own political power and the destruction of anyone and anything they consider an enemy, which is basically the rest of the non-Muslim world. Tolerance is not at all in their daily vocabulary when dealing with infidels.
The current international confrontation between militant Islam, Jihadism, and the tempting West in particular, is not just a sudden reaction of disgust, intolerance or envy, but is the final explosion of super intolerant behavior instigated as long ago as the 13th and 14th century by the Islamic intellectual Ahmad ibn Abd al-Halim Ibn Taymiyya (1263-1328). This strain of barbaric and fanatic pseudo-religious behavior finally has come into its own in the late 20th century because of lavish financing of such single-minded Islamic adherents as the Wahhabis in Saudi Arabia. They have embarked on what they believe to be the right thing for them to do, namely to subjugate the whole world to the dictates of their Allah. They now have the financial wherewithal which, coupled with their "death cult" may achieve this result having absolved themselves from any compunction about killing, murdering or maiming as many infidels, men, women and children as they can during the pursuit of this "holy" objective.
For us Westerners, not to take this effort seriously would be pure folly and guarantee the end of our civilization.
Western civilization, anchored as it is in Christian principles of ethics and morality, provides strong incentives for individual and community growth and tolerates dissent about anything. This often creates conflicts of various kinds but more fundamentally it encourages an enormous societal dynamism where individuals can reach for their own stars. In contrast with this Western way of life, many in the Muslim world hate us because they are torn between their desire to adopt many of our best societal features but cannot, for fear of physical, social and/or economic reprisals in their own communities. One is just not allowed to experiment with anything that conflicts with the letter as well as the spirit of increasingly archaic Quranic teachings.
Male and female psychological frustrations, as a result of severely restrained opportunities to grow up in a more natural coed world, have led to an utterly chauvinistic male dominated society where men do not really trust themselves in their relations with the other sex, resulting among other things, in the female part of their society hiding in head to toe garments showing eyes only together with denying their women education, travel and participation in their own society, outside the home.
Because they do not know how to ease up on their religious strictures and dogmas, a growing number of young Muslims try to compensate for this by opting for Jihad in order to remove the intolerable temptations posed by the West and the rest of the world.
The bottom line is, that because they cannot make themselves change, they will try to make everybody else become as intolerant and dogmatic as they are. They are very serious about this and if we consider this ridiculous and irrational we are right, because it fundamentally is. But the Jihadis consider themselves the real believers in their dogmas and if we cannot regain enough confidence in our own vastly superior civilization to realize that we must bring ourselves to the point where we will take effective action to eradicate this threat and accept whatever sacrifice it will require to survive as a civilization, the Islamists will subjugate us. No question about that because it is their one and only objective in life. And they are more than ready to sacrifice themselves for this purpose whenever they are told to do so.
By the way, contrary to what many younger Muslim people are told to believe, the Western, American civilization has done more good in the world than any other.
Therefore, everyone in the West must become familiar with this Islamic threat to our society and that means studying history, all of it.
2 Right now our children are being taught that Christians were the invaders of Muslim lands during the Crusades. It is true that at that time the former Christian Holy Lands were occupied by Muslims. But it must also be understood that it was the sword wielding Muslims who, under the banner of a militant Islam, ravaged and conquered the lands around the Mediterranean all the way to northern India from the 7th through the 11th century.
Large segments of this area had been Christian for hundreds of years, including the area we now know as Turkey, Syria, Lebanon and Palestine and even parts of Arabia.
Because Christians have a much older, by more than 600 years, claim on the area from a religious point of view, and because of the many early Christian historic sites and monuments in that part of the world, Pope Urban II, in 1095 urged the West to mount a retaliatory campaign in an effort to regain control over the region, restoring Greek-Orthodox control over Asia Minor (Turkey) and Catholic Christian control over the Holy Land. This effort succeeded for almost 100 years until Saladin, a Kurdish Muslim ruler defeated the Christians in 1187. A number of additional crusades were launched in succeeding years till 1291, but the area was never returned to Christian control.
Hence, to call the Crusaders invaders is factually incorrect and no excuses need to be made to the Muslim world about it. They were the invaders, not the Christians.
Only when we do not know the facts of our own history can someone else gain an unfair advantage.
As things are, unfortunately, most of us really do not adequately understand the issues, so our current attitude towards Muslim complainers is to let them have their way rather than to tell them that since they desired to immigrate into the USA and we accepted them on that basis, we expect them to learn the language, to learn the rules of daily life and as long as they are guests in our country, they must abide by those rules and not complain. But if, after 5 years they do not succeed to qualify for citizenship, their visas should be cancelled and told to leave promptly. Under no condition should we allow Muslim guests or immigrants to pose demands on their US social environments that would in effect set them apart as a non-American group of outsiders, uninterested in American society as such. In that case they would have borne false witness to the immigration authorities about their intentions for coming here. In the latter case they should be expelled immediately.
Hence, we should not allow those people to set up their own schools unless they teach a curriculum of which we approve. But in reality these people do not wish to assimilate. They wish to ignore our society and only use the social and political benefits it bestows on immigrants for purposes quite contrary to our national benefit. In effect they are creating the beginning of 5th-column activities right under our own noses.
So when you ask me, am I offended by these shortsighted decisions made by school boards??
You bet I am.
Fifth Column Crusades
Recent information that a number of schools are dropping the teaching of the history of the Crusades from their curricula, is very disturbing.
The ostensible reason for doing so has been given as the need to avoid offending pupils, and their families one must presume, who are Muslims. The cause for this decision ostensibly is based on the infamous idea of Political Correctness as are so many other self-destructive decisions and behavior patterns.
To me this kind of decision is very wrong and counter-productive for several fundamental reasons.
1 Teaching history is essential to humanity's future existence because it allows us to avoid committing the same mistakes made in the past that led to murder and mayhem, instead of to a better world.
2 If omitting the teaching of a distinct part of history is decided upon because it may offend a given group, it is then bound to offend another group or groups in consequence.
3 Such selective teaching very likely will create a new animus between the people involved rather than a better understanding of humanity's common interests in promoting a civilized, educated world, where real tolerance is practiced routinely and not dogmatically.
In my view, Islam's inherent lack of tolerance goes back to a socio/religious concept of life and community that prevents the male individual from having to struggle while growing up, in our sense of that concept and as a result fails to become a really mature and civilized person. This process also fails to teach them how to conduct oneself confidently and respectfully towards others. Instead, Islam imposes a group concept of behavior and thought that allows no individual variants. The results, predictably turn out to be more Spartan than Greek in their historic consequences.
There have always been people who tried, and often succeeded, to take charge of their human environment and while achieving political control, making themselves dictators and despots in the process. By and large, that kind of arrangement discourages the development of honorable and mature individuals because to survive, the intelligent and enterprising citizens need to follow the "leader". To do otherwise would lead to very unhappy results. We have seen too many instances of this all through history.
Whereas Christianity developed as a mission and a religion of peace and forgiveness 2000 years ago, Islam was promulgated by the sword allowing its followers no choices at all. It required total submission and no doubts permitted. A very poignant companion of this arrangement was the automatic political control it conferred on its leadership.
Even though tolerance is mentioned in the Quran, it is always qualified and practiced conditionally, if at all. More distinctly, it did not foster open minded intellectual growth by raising questions, by reviewing the real world together with the history of its own religious origins. Sadly, this uncritical approach has thus far failed, in some parts of the world, to develop Muslim communities of mature, tolerant, wise and inquisitive people.
We all know, that Christians, notwithstanding their illuminatingly poignant New Testamental religious base, have committed horrible things during the past 2000 years, but by and large this very painful struggle with itself and its history has created a well understood, practical and admirable mode of civilized life for those who are interested in that, which in turn has led to great prosperity for more people than ever before in history.
Unfortunately, the very prosperity of Western civilization also developed some significant moral decay in its own ranks, which together with an undesirable tendency toward living the so-called "good life", has made many people lose sight of the sacrifices that created this human paradise in the first place. There are also many people who see the need to take a step back realizing that this selfishness on the part of many "modern" people is undermining the very structure that allows us to have our differences without reverting to "fisticuffs". Contrary to those who claim that religiosity is completely passé, mankind will fail to become more civilized by ignoring our Biblical admonishments. We are not wise, nor humble enough, to steer our own course to paradise.
But against this background of the modern western world's condition and status, modern Islam is mostly at war with itself. A growing number of its own people are chafing under the narrow minded, dogmatic, intolerant, religious blanket they must accommodate. In many areas education is limited to Quranic indoctrination by a well financed "clergy" interested only in their own political power and the destruction of anyone and anything they consider an enemy, which is basically the rest of the non-Muslim world. Tolerance is not at all in their daily vocabulary when dealing with infidels.
The current international confrontation between militant Islam, Jihadism, and the tempting West in particular, is not just a sudden reaction of disgust, intolerance or envy, but is the final explosion of super intolerant behavior instigated as long ago as the 13th and 14th century by the Islamic intellectual Ahmad ibn Abd al-Halim Ibn Taymiyya (1263-1328). This strain of barbaric and fanatic pseudo-religious behavior finally has come into its own in the late 20th century because of lavish financing of such single-minded Islamic adherents as the Wahhabis in Saudi Arabia. They have embarked on what they believe to be the right thing for them to do, namely to subjugate the whole world to the dictates of their Allah. They now have the financial wherewithal which, coupled with their "death cult" may achieve this result having absolved themselves from any compunction about killing, murdering or maiming as many infidels, men, women and children as they can during the pursuit of this "holy" objective.
For us Westerners, not to take this effort seriously would be pure folly and guarantee the end of our civilization.
Western civilization, anchored as it is in Christian principles of ethics and morality, provides strong incentives for individual and community growth and tolerates dissent about anything. This often creates conflicts of various kinds but more fundamentally it encourages an enormous societal dynamism where individuals can reach for their own stars. In contrast with this Western way of life, many in the Muslim world hate us because they are torn between their desire to adopt many of our best societal features but cannot, for fear of physical, social and/or economic reprisals in their own communities. One is just not allowed to experiment with anything that conflicts with the letter as well as the spirit of increasingly archaic Quranic teachings.
Male and female psychological frustrations, as a result of severely restrained opportunities to grow up in a more natural coed world, have led to an utterly chauvinistic male dominated society where men do not really trust themselves in their relations with the other sex, resulting among other things, in the female part of their society hiding in head to toe garments showing eyes only together with denying their women education, travel and participation in their own society, outside the home.
Because they do not know how to ease up on their religious strictures and dogmas, a growing number of young Muslims try to compensate for this by opting for Jihad in order to remove the intolerable temptations posed by the West and the rest of the world.
The bottom line is, that because they cannot make themselves change, they will try to make everybody else become as intolerant and dogmatic as they are. They are very serious about this and if we consider this ridiculous and irrational we are right, because it fundamentally is. But the Jihadis consider themselves the real believers in their dogmas and if we cannot regain enough confidence in our own vastly superior civilization to realize that we must bring ourselves to the point where we will take effective action to eradicate this threat and accept whatever sacrifice it will require to survive as a civilization, the Islamists will subjugate us. No question about that because it is their one and only objective in life. And they are more than ready to sacrifice themselves for this purpose whenever they are told to do so.
By the way, contrary to what many younger Muslim people are told to believe, the Western, American civilization has done more good in the world than any other.
Therefore, everyone in the West must become familiar with this Islamic threat to our society and that means studying history, all of it.
2 Right now our children are being taught that Christians were the invaders of Muslim lands during the Crusades. It is true that at that time the former Christian Holy Lands were occupied by Muslims. But it must also be understood that it was the sword wielding Muslims who, under the banner of a militant Islam, ravaged and conquered the lands around the Mediterranean all the way to northern India from the 7th through the 11th century.
Large segments of this area had been Christian for hundreds of years, including the area we now know as Turkey, Syria, Lebanon and Palestine and even parts of Arabia.
Because Christians have a much older, by more than 600 years, claim on the area from a religious point of view, and because of the many early Christian historic sites and monuments in that part of the world, Pope Urban II, in 1095 urged the West to mount a retaliatory campaign in an effort to regain control over the region, restoring Greek-Orthodox control over Asia Minor (Turkey) and Catholic Christian control over the Holy Land. This effort succeeded for almost 100 years until Saladin, a Kurdish Muslim ruler defeated the Christians in 1187. A number of additional crusades were launched in succeeding years till 1291, but the area was never returned to Christian control.
Hence, to call the Crusaders invaders is factually incorrect and no excuses need to be made to the Muslim world about it. They were the invaders, not the Christians.
Only when we do not know the facts of our own history can someone else gain an unfair advantage.
As things are, unfortunately, most of us really do not adequately understand the issues, so our current attitude towards Muslim complainers is to let them have their way rather than to tell them that since they desired to immigrate into the USA and we accepted them on that basis, we expect them to learn the language, to learn the rules of daily life and as long as they are guests in our country, they must abide by those rules and not complain. But if, after 5 years they do not succeed to qualify for citizenship, their visas should be cancelled and told to leave promptly. Under no condition should we allow Muslim guests or immigrants to pose demands on their US social environments that would in effect set them apart as a non-American group of outsiders, uninterested in American society as such. In that case they would have borne false witness to the immigration authorities about their intentions for coming here. In the latter case they should be expelled immediately.
Hence, we should not allow those people to set up their own schools unless they teach a curriculum of which we approve. But in reality these people do not wish to assimilate. They wish to ignore our society and only use the social and political benefits it bestows on immigrants for purposes quite contrary to our national benefit. In effect they are creating the beginning of 5th-column activities right under our own noses.
So when you ask me, am I offended by these shortsighted decisions made by school boards??
You bet I am.
posted by Schaesberg at 6:35 PM
