Ask one hundred people in the United States what a dhimmi
is and perhaps two or three might know. In Western Europe the number
would be slightly higher because of latent memories of battles fought
against invading Moslem armies over hundreds of years.
In 732,
Charles Martel led his Frankish forces at Tours to victory against an
Islamic invasion of France, which nearly destroyed Christian Europe.
Similarly, Islam was ousted from Spain in 1492 after an occupation of
the Iberian Peninsula by the Moslems for hundreds of years. Sadly, the
Spanish Christian monarchs, Isabella and Ferdinand, and the Portuguese
a few years later, also expelled the Jewish community although the Jews
had lived in Spain and Portugal for many centuries and had never posed
a threat to either Moslem or Christian sovereignty.
In Italy,
Islamic power was brought to an end when the heavy Turkish galleys were
defeated by Venetian galleasses at the great naval battle of Lepanto in
1571. And the Moslem Ottoman power, which at its height again
threatened all of Western Europe, was barely turned back at the gates
of Vienna on 11 September 1683 by a coalition of European armies.
Incidentally, could there be a connection between 9.11.1683 and
9.11.2001, or is it just coincidence?
These were four major
defeats by Europe of Islamic attempts of conquest and subjugation set
against a history of victorious Moslem invasions and conquests that had
been the hallmark of Islam since its founding in the seventh century.
But
what of the peoples and nations that fell under Islamic occupation? For
them the story was one of forced conversions to Islam, slavery, death
and the Islamic institution of dhimmitude.
This is the
word that describes the parlous state of those who refused to convert
to Islam and became the subjugated, non-Muslims who were forced to
accept a restrictive and humiliating subordination to a superior
Islamic power and live as second class citizens in order to avoid
enslavement or death. These peoples and populations were known as dhimmis, and if such a status was not humiliating enough, a special tax or tribute, called the jizya, was imposed upon them and upon all dhimmis.
Dhimmitude
is the direct outcome of jihad, which is the military conquest of
non-Islamic territory mandated by Allah as a spiritual obligation for
every individual Moslem and Moslem nation.
From its beginnings
in the seventh century, Islam spread through violent conquest of
non-Moslem lands. In the eighth century, a formal set of rules to
govern relationships between Moslems and non-Moslems was created based
upon Moslem conquests of non-Moslem peoples. These rules were based
upon jihad, which established how the Moslems would treat the conquered non-Moslems in terms of their submission to Islam.
Jihad
can be pursued through force or other means such as propaganda,
writing, or subversion against the perceived enemy. The so-called
enemies are those who oppose the establishment of Islamic law or its
spread, mission, or sovereignty over them and their land.
Propaganda
and subversion are the very means now being employed against the West
and Judeo-Christian civilization, and Islamists have shown themselves
to be brilliantly adept at manipulating the gullible and uninformed
western media in pursuit of their aims of world domination.
As I have written in previous articles, non-Islamic lands are considered the dar al-harb, the "house of war," until they submit to Islamic rule and enter the dar al-Islam.
The ‘infidel’ falls into three categories: those who resist Islam with
force, those living in a country that has a temporary truce with Islam,
and those who have surrendered to Islam by exchanging land for peace.
Since
the Oslo Accords, successive Israeli governments have been guilty of
the now thoroughly discredited notion of “land for peace” in which
Israel gives away land but never receives peace. Even the peace
treaties with Egypt and Jordan are cold at best and the lands given
away to Lebanon and the Arab Palestinians has been a calamitous error.
The belief that Moslem Arab powers respond to overtures of peace by
ending their aggression is but a mirage in the desert. This is proven
time and again to be a delusion and is, in fact, a classic example of
the mindset and behavior of the dhimmi.
A non-Moslem community forced to accept dhimmitude is condemned to live in a system that will only protect it from jihad
if it is subservient to the Moslem master. In return, it is guaranteed
limited rights under a system of discriminations that it must accept,
or face forced conversion, slavery, or death.
In the early years of the Islamic conquests, the "tribute" or jizya was paid as a yearly poll tax, which symbolized the subordination of the dhimmi.
Later, the inferior status of Jews and Christians was reinforced
through a series of regulations that governed the behavior of the dhimmi.
Jews and Christians were awarded a different status than other faiths.
They were considered to be under protection as “people of the book.”
People of non-monotheistic faiths, pagans, or atheists were simply to
be exterminated.
According to Mitchell G. Bard, who has
written extensively on the subject and produced the excellent rebuttal
to Arab and pro-Arab propaganda in his book, Myths and Facts, “... dhimmis,
on pain of death, were forbidden to mock or criticize the Koran, Islam
or Muhammad, to proselytize among Moslems or to touch a Moslem woman
(though a Moslem man could take a non-Moslem as a wife).
“Dhimmis
were excluded from public office and armed service, and were forbidden
to bear arms. They were not allowed to ride horses or camels, to build
synagogues or churches taller than mosques, to construct houses higher
than those of Muslims or to drink wine in public. They were not allowed
to pray or mourn in loud voices as that might offend the Moslems.
“The dhimmi had to show public deference toward Moslems, always yielding them the center of the road. The dhimmi
was not allowed to give evidence in court against a Moslem, and his
oath was unacceptable in an Islamic court. To defend himself the dhimmi would have to purchase Moslem witnesses at great expense. This left the dhimmi with little legal recourse when harmed by a Moslem.
“Dhimmis
were also forced to wear distinctive clothing. In the ninth century,
for example, Baghdad's Caliph al-Mutawakkil designated a yellow badge
for Jews, setting a precedent that would be followed centuries later.”
By the twentieth century, the status of the dhimmi in Moslem lands had not significantly improved. H.E.W. Young, British Vice-Consul in Mosul, wrote in 1909:
“The
attitude of the Muslims toward the Christians and the Jews is that of a
master towards slaves, whom he treats with a certain lordly tolerance
so long as they keep their place. Any sign of pretension to equality is
promptly repressed.”
The concept of jihad is not
something now discarded by Islam as a quaint belief appropriate to the
distant past. On the contrary, it is a cardinal belief in the 21st
century for Moslems based upon Koranic injunctions. It is believed in
by millions of Moslems around the Third world, as much as by Moslems
living in America, Britain, Europe, Australia, New Zealand and Canada.
It is a belief, passionately held, that one day the entire world will
become Islamic and accept completely the will of Allah.
It is
vital, therefore, that the general public in every non-Moslem country
be made aware that Moslems consider themselves in a perpetual state of
war with their non-Moslem neighbors. If Islamic armies are unable to
defeat what they consider the “infidels,” (that’s you and me), then a
period of "truce" exists, which has several conditions. These include
allowing Islam to be propagated, and if a non-Moslem nation forbids it
or rejects mass proselytizing to Islam, then that nation will be
considered as subject to holy jihad.
Sheikh Zayman
al-Zawahiri, Al Qaida’s second in command, recently invited America to
embrace Islam. The invitation is always given, according to some
experts, prior to a major assault upon the “infidel nation,” because
any rejection is considered by Moslems as an empirical reason to wage
war upon the non-Moslem state; in this case the United States of
America.
It is nearly impossible for sophisticated and secularized Western
and European elites to understand or accept such medieval concepts, let
alone the idea that a religious war is being waged against them. But
their dismissal and amused disregard of what is taking place is as
calamitous as that exemplified by the myopic politicians in Britain and
America before the Second World War.
The lone voice in the
wilderness at that time, Winston Churchill, appealed in vain to the
political leaders who had not the ears to hear or the eyes to see the
growing fascist menace during the 1930s posed by Germany and Italy. He
called one such British politician an “epileptic corpse,” and reached back through his prodigious memory to find a poem, which characterized the failure of the Baldwin government in 1935 to re-arm. The apt poem was, The Clattering Train, which could equally be applied to the later appeasement of Hitler by Neville Chamberlain and Lord Halifax.
“Those in charge of the clattering train, the axles creak and the couplings strain.
The pace is hot and the points are near and sleep has deadened the driver’s air.
The signals flash in the night in vain, for death is in charge of the clattering train.”
Western
notions of peaceful co-existence between states, human rights and
liberal democracy are all alien to the bin-Ladens and Zawahiris of the
Islamic world. Hizbullah, Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Hamas,
Al Qaida, ad nauseum, all reject Judeo-Christian civilization as being
in theological error. For them, the entire human race must embrace
Allah’s pre-eminence and the Moslem believer is the divine instrument
to bring about the "Umma" (worldwide Moslem community) in whatever way possible, including warfare and terror.
Jihad
has reappeared as a way of wiping out the humiliation the Arab and
Moslem world has felt as Western power became ascendant, especially
after the defeat of the Ottoman Turkish Empire at the end of the First
World War.
With a fabulous and never ending flow of petrodollars
pouring into Arab and Moslem coffers, the belief among Moslems is that
the time is now right for Islam to reassert itself in dominating the
world and bringing it to Allah through all out war, including nuclear
war, if necessary.
The corollary to jihad is dhimmitude.
This is what appeasement by non-Moslems to Islamist threats and terror
leads to. Winston Churchill would have been shocked but not surprised
at the craven appeasement displayed by today’s elitists in the European
political echelons.
It is in marked contrast to the manner in
which their ancestors confronted an earlier existential Islamic threat
when they defeated decisively the Moslems at Tours, Iberia (Spain and
Portugal), Lepanto and Vienna.
But without a similarly decisive
defeat of present day Islamist aggression and Islamo-fascism we may all
be faced, sooner than we think, with the choice of forced conversion to
Islam or subservience and wretchedness as dhimmis.
Better, therefore, for us all to be aware of the facts and not also be dummies.
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