Dare to Speak: Islam vs Free Democracy and Free Enterprise (I)
Section 5.
The House of Islam’s Relationships with non-Islamic Nations
Russia
The primary conflict between Russia and Islamic militants today stems from Chechnya’s war for independence. This conflict was born in Russia’s imperial past, following its conquest of the Caucasus during the mid-1800s. These conquests encountered little resistance at the time because, in large part, they filled a political void in a chaotic land. [1] However, as Richard Pipes wrote in The Formation of the Soviet Union:[2]
The Chechens and Ingush presented a special problem…Inassimilable and warlike, they created so much difficulty for the Russian forces trying to subdue the North Caucasus that, after conquering the area, the government felt compelled to…expel them from the valleys and lowlands into the bare mountain regions. There…they lived in abject poverty, tending sheep and waiting for the day when they could wreak revenge on the newcomers and regain their lost lands.
The time between then and now has been marked by frequent revolts, harsh repressions, mass deportations, and occasional independent states. In 1944, Stalin commanded virtually the entire Chechen population to resettle in Kazakhstan, to avenge Chechen collaboration with the Nazis against the Soviet Union.
But exile did not chasten the Chechens. In fact, it only intensified their rebellious behavior. As Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn described in The Gulag Archipelago,
…there was one nation that would not give in, would not acquire the mental habits of submission – and not just individual rebels among them, but the whole nation to a man. These were the Chechens. They were capable of rustling cattle, robbing a house, or sometimes simply taking what they wanted by force. They respected only rebels. And here is an extraordinary thing – everyone was afraid of them. No one could stop them from living as they did. The regime which had ruled the land for thirty years could not force them to respect its laws.
In 1957, Nikolai Khrushchev took a series of actions meant to undo many of Stalin’s worst offenses. In this effort, Khrushchev allowed the Chechens to return to their homeland and establish the Chechen-Ingush Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic. This arrangement brought relative peace for many years, but this peace unravelled when the Chechens became outraged over a 1988 Soviet attempt to rewrite history and claim that the Chechens had willingly joined the USSR. This outrage soon turned into a demand for Chechen independence. Under the leadership of Jokhar Dudaev, they briefly achieved this goal, but were crushed by Russia in 1994. [3]
Today, with its rebellion strangled by brute force, Chechnya’s rebels have redirected their mission from independence to vengeance. They have channeled their malice into a string of terrorist attacks on civilian targets by sending suicide bombers to commuter trains, hospitals, a rock music festival, a Moscow theater, a Moscow apartment complex, and a ferry boat. [4] In May 9, 2004, the elected Chechen President, Akhmad Kadyrov, was assassinated by an explosion as he watched an outdoor holiday concert. [5] The most heinous terrorist act to date occurred in the town of Beslan, just outside Chechnya, where 32 Chechen suicide-terrorists captured a middle school and then bombed it on its opening day in 2004. [6] Some 330 people died, more than half of them children. [7]
The sentiment of these suicide attackers can be summed up in a quote from a recording made by one of the Moscow theater terrorists:
It does not matter where we will die…we will take with us the souls of the infidels…Every one of us is ready for self-sacrifice for the sake of Allah and independence of Chechnya. We want to die more than you want to live. [8]
Yugoslavia (Serbia and Montenegro)
The region formerly known as Yugoslavia has been so unstable for so long that it is difficult to discuss its history without discussing the history of the entire Balkan Peninsula:
The Balkans have been the battlegrounds of cultural wars for thousands of years, with territories frequently changing hands between tribes even in the days of the ancient Illyrians, Thracians, and Dardanians. Its confusion of cultures and religions is so tangled that, today, when people want to say a country is hopelessly fragmented and hostile, they say it is “Balkanized.” Balkanization is similar to tribalization, but more complex. To understand both the Balkans and the meaning of Balkanization, we need some background on Balkan history:
In 300 AD, the Balkan Peninsula had been a part of Rome for hundreds of years. At about this time, the first northern invasions by Serbian tribes began, which continued throughout the first millennium. [9] As these tribes pressed further south, Orthodox and Catholic churches competed for the hearts and tithes of these potential converts, creating a religious crazy-quilt that added new religious components to the tensions that already existed between tribes. During the final years of the Byzantine Empire, Ottoman Turks conquered the area and began a repressive program designed to convert the inhabitants to Islam. The Ottoman outrages are described in “Bulgaria: Illustrated History” : [10]
The place allotted to the Bulgarian people in the Ottoman feudal political system entitled it to no legal, religious, national, even biological rights as Bulgarian Christians. They had all been reduced to the category of the so called rayah (meaning “a flock,” attributed to the non-Muslim subjects of the empire).
The peasants who represented the better half of the Bulgarian population were dispossessed of their land. According to the Ottoman feudal system, which remained effective until 1834, all of [the land] belonged to the central power in the person of the Turkish sultan. The Bulgarians were allowed to cultivate only some plots.
Groups of rural Christian families, varying in number, were put under an obligation to give part of their income to representatives of the Muslim military, administrative and religious upper crust, as well as to fulfill various state duties…
The establishment of that kind of intercourse in agriculture – the fundamental pillar of the economy at that time,…led to the total loss of motivation for any real farming and production improvements, both among the peasants and the fief-holders. The complex and incredibly burdensome tax system forced the farmers to produce as much as needed for their families’ subsistence, while the feudalists preferred to earn…more from looting and from the incessantly successful wars waged by the Ottoman Empire in all directions until the end of the 17th century.
…
The Bulgarian people were subjected to national and religious discrimination unheard of in the annals of all European history. During court proceedings, for example, a single Muslim’s testimony was more than enough to confute the evidence of dozens of Christian witnesses. The Bulgarians were not entitled to build churches, set up their offices, or even wear bright colors.
Of the numerous taxes (about 80 in number) the so called ‘fresh blood tax’[11] (a levy of Christian youths) was particularly heavy and humiliating. At regular intervals, the authorities had the healthiest male children taken away from their parents, sent to the capital, converted to Islam, and then trained in combat skills. Raised and trained in the spirit of Islamic fanaticism, the young men were conscripted into the so-called janissary corps, [which] caused so much trouble and suffering to both the Bulgarians and Christian Europe.
The Turkish authorities exerted unabating pressure on parts of the Bulgarian people to make them convert their faith and become Muslims…according to…medieval standards…, the [political] affiliation of a given people was determined by the religion it followed.
This treatment was not limited to Bulgaria, but was common throughout the Balkan Peninsula. It converted populations to Islam with varying degrees of success, creating a complex and hostile mix of faiths as well as peoples.
As the repressive boot of the Ottoman Empire was lifted during the 1800s and early 1900s, this fragmented patchwork of people and faiths was exposed. Due to longstanding rivalries and animosities, born of both heritage and religion, the entire region has been, and remains, politically chaotic and unstable.
A brief respite from turmoil was provided by WWII hero Josip Tito, an independently-minded communist who went on to lead the newly formed Yugoslavia for 35 years. This unity succeeded in part because Yugoslavia’s communism repressed all religions. However, upon Tito’s death in 1980, the nation entered a period of economic and ethnic turmoil which, in many ways, paralleled the Soviet Union. With the Soviet Union’s collapse, and the popular rejection of Communism, Yugoslavia quickly disintegrated in 1991 and 1992 under the misrule of Slobodan Milosevic, a Serb nationalist. [12] The shards of fractured Yugoslavia became Catholic Slovenia, Catholic Croatia, Orthodox Macedonia, Orthodox Serbia and Montenegro, and Islamic/Orthodox/Catholic (Croat) Bosnia-Herzegovina.
While most of these nations had a preponderance of one religion over the others, Bosnia-Herzegovina was especially tangled. Ultimately, a Serbian territory called Republika Srpska was carved out of Bosnia-Herzegovina, which left the Muslim/Orthodox/Croat “Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina.” A peaceful settlement came about only through UN intervention. [13] Its stability is fragile, even today, and is entirely dependent on UN Peacekeepers.
Another place where religious-ethnic groups continue to compete for power is Kosovo, which has changed hands between Muslim Albania and Orthodox Serbia several times over the centuries, and is currently a part of Serbia, even though its people are 90% Muslim Albanian. The reason that Kosovo is a part of Serbia is its emotional and historical importance to the Serbs. Kosovo was the location of an epic battle with the Ottoman Turks in 1389, which, while indecisive itself, resulted in the death of Serbia’s heroic leader, Prince Lazar. After the death of Lazar, the leaderless Serbs soon succumbed to the Ottomans. Centuries later, as the Ottoman Empire crumbled, Serbia’s annexation of Kosovo was a deeply emotional victory for the Serbs, who had used Prince Lazar and Kosovo as unifying icons throughout the years of Ottoman repression. [14]
Unfortunately, this emotional gain by the Serbs represented an equally emotional loss by the Muslim Albanians, who have waged battles of various sorts ever since to regain it. This included an alliance with Axis forces during World War II, rallied by Grand Mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini, to battle against the Ally nation of Yugoslavia. [15] Albania conquered Kosovo and scattered the Serbs living there to other lands. After the Axis defeat, Yugoslavia regained Kosovo, but the Albanians living there responded by embarking on an effort to regain power through both immigration from Albania and high Albanian birth rates. The Albanian population of Kosovo climbed rapidly during the years following World War II. In the ten-year period of 1961 to 1971 alone, the Albanian percentage of Kosovo’s population increased from 67% to 74%.[16]
The most recent flag-carrier of this battle is the KLA (Kosovo Liberation Army), which began making terrorist attacks on Serbs in Kosovo as Yugoslavia disintegrated after Tito’s death. In the late 1980s, Yugoslavia’s elected leader, Slobodan Milosevic, responded to these attacks with repressive measures against all Albanians, which he called “ethnic cleansing.” These attacks were so severe that the rest of the world called them “genocide.” Interestingly, the term “ethnic cleansing” originated with the KLA, in their effort to “cleanse” Kosovo of non-Albanians. [17]
This conflict was contained only by the direct intervention of NATO forces under the auspices of the UN, which made Kosovo a UN Mission in 1999. Despite this intervention, the KLA continues to commit intermittent terrorist attacks against Orthodox churches and Serbs. NATO’s presence does not solve Kosovo’s problems, but only keeps a lid on them. [18]
Armenia
Armenia’s ancient and tortured history is one of a nation stranded on the shoals between Christian and Islamic cultures. There were times when it was an island of Christendom. There were also times when it was swept under waves of Islamic subjugation.
One of the greatest sources of Armenian national pride is that it was the first officially Christian nation in the world, due to the conversion of King Trdat in 301AD. However, this honor was short lived because the Persian Empire conquered Armenia just a few years later. Then, in 387, part of Armenia was captured by Christianized Rome. In the centuries that followed, its status tottered between independence and subjugation, and it was ultimately partitioned between the Islamic Persians and the Islamic Ottomans. Through policies similar to those in the Balkans, the Armenian nation became a crazy-quilt of populations spread throughout its traditional lands.
This series has already touched on what might be called the tribalizing effect of Islam, and its version of tolerance, which allows other religions to exist, but only in subjugation to an Islamic state. The Ottoman version of Islamic “tolerance” used enslavement, forced conversions, land confiscation, special taxes, and forced migrations to maintain Ottoman power.
Islamic “tolerance” is unique in its declaration that each religious sect should govern its own people with its own unique set of laws. As The Koran for Dummies explains: [19]
Non-Muslims [in an Islamic nation] have the right to set up their own communal laws according to the principles of their religion, as long as their laws don’t violate any major state law…Critics of Islam feel that this creates a barrier between the Muslim and non-Muslim communities that could lead to ill feelings through a lack of communication. Islamic scholars and activists argue that giving non-Muslims jurisdiction over their own communal laws is the only way to truly protect the freedom of worship.
This tactfully worded explanation neglects to mention that the “major state laws” of Shari’ah institutionalize Muslim supremacy over non-Muslims, allow Muslims to kill non-Muslims who offend them, and prohibit conversions from Islam, on pain of death. It does, however, unveil two other characteristics of Islamic political theory:
Islamic political theory binds church and state together so profoundly that Muslims cannot conceive of law outside of the context of religion. Within Islam’s framework, the concept of secular law does not exist. Even laws that one would normally consider incontrovertibly secular, such as traffic laws, are subsumed under Shari’ah through extrapolation from the Koran and the Sunnah.
Islamic political theory gives “freedom of worship” a completely different meaning from what Westerners presume. According to Shari’ah, “freedom of worship” does not apply to Muslims at all because they are not free to leave the fold of Islam. “Freedom of Worship” is more about preserving the internal laws of non-Muslim ethnic groups (or tribes) than it is about one’s religious beliefs or the ability to freely change them. In fact, there were even times when the Ottoman Empire discouraged conversions to Islam, because the conversions reduced tax revenues from non-Muslims. [20]
Muslims themselves recognize the tribalizing effect of Islam and its incompatibility with Western concepts of nationhood, but choose to view this in a positive light. For example, in his book, Good Muslim, Bad Muslim, Mahmood Mamdani manages to dress tribalization in the clothes of political philosophy when referring to the cultural conflicts within Afghan society. Instead of calling it anarchic, he says that Afghan society is “historically adapted to a highly decentralized and localized mode of life” [21] – an example of Political Correctness that verges on comedy. He also says that: [22]
Historically, Afghan society managed its cultural diversity through a highly decentralized polity and society. A centralizing state project was likely to exacerbate rather than contain these differences.
A more honest picture of Afghan society appears in an anecdote told by Dr. Craig Davis in The Middle East for Dummies:[23]
A great tension exists between different ethnic groups in the Middle East. In South Asia, for example, Pashtuns, Punjabis, Sindhis, Hazaras, Tajiks, and other groups are in constant conflict.
In 1988, I went to a small Afghan hospital in Peshawar to visit one of my Afghan students who’d developed typhoid fever. I was wearing Pakistani clothes, including a tope, a Pakistani hat. When I announced to the Pashtun chokidar (gatekeeper) in my flawed Urdu of my intentions to visit a patient, he abruptly informed me in his equally flawed Urdu that visiting hours were three hours off…
After I finally succeeded in getting the…gatekeeper to talk about his family…and other small talk, he asked me where I was from. When I told him the United States, he leaped up, shook my hand, expressed his pleasure in meeting me, and informed me that I was free to enter the hospital. He added that he was sorry for the delay, but said, “I thought you were Punjabi.”
While America’s version of tolerance, a product of Free Democracy, has tended to produce a “melting pot,” the House of Islam’s version of tolerance, seasoned with contempt, has tended to produce hard lines of mutual hostility between its sub-groups. These hostilities have created a long history of rebellions, suppressions, and bloody purges. The effect of this history is visible throughout the Islamic world, from India to Afghanistan and the Sudan, but it is particularly evident in the Balkan Peninsula and Armenia.
The history of the Ottoman Empire’s Armenian genocide, which climaxed in 1915, is again so tangled and complex that there is no way to encapsulate it adequately in these pages. As a substitute, this series will excerpt two other sources: an article from the AZT Armenian Daily, and a book review by Professor James R. Russell of The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America’s Response, which depicts the genocide and its aftermath. [24] Russell is a professor of Armenian Studies at Harvard University.
AZG Armenian Daily #076, April 24, 2002, provides a brief historical recap of the genocides committed by the Ottoman Empire and Turkey against the Armenians, along with a summary of the long-term effects of those genocides:
Strategic Consequences of Armenian Genocide
By Armen Ayvazian
…
Up to 1915, the territory where ethnic Armenians lived occupied the whole Armenian plateau, that is, the historical Armenia…this territory totaled 350,000 square km, each region of the territory being kind of a separate ‘castle’, which had a protective role for Armenians living in that region. Thus [during] Iranian, Turkish, or Mongolian invasions, [if] one region was captured, the people could easily [go] to another region that was as hard to capture as the previous one…after some time, when a region of [the] Armenian plateau was captured by foreign invaders, [the] Armenian population, which escaped to neighboring regions, ‘repatriated’ back to their region. And…the number of Armenians in each region always outnumbered the foreign population. Being the majority in a region, Armenians could easily rebel and recover both their land and independence.
The first terrible consequence of the Armenian Genocide, which was carried out by Ottoman Turkey, was that Armenians were estranged from the land where they lived for centuries. As regards [the] strategic factor, the loss of the land deprived Armenians from most of their ‘castles’, leaving only 1/10th of the previous protective space. At present, Armenia does not have any place to run to or cede. Directly speaking, Armenia does not have a right to lose a war; otherwise, the Armenian nation will be eliminated.
…
…All [of] the Western Armenian leading intellectuals, political and public figures, as well as common people, were executed during the 1915 events. Having lost their…leaders [the] Armenian nation was thereafter helpless, and bound to scatter from country to country…
…
The genocide of [the] Armenian nation actually falls into 4 stages: 1894-96, when around 300,000 Armenians were massacred; 30,000 were killed in 1900; 1.5 million -during the 1915-16 genocide, and about 300,000 from 1918 to 1922. The number of victims, totaling more than 2 million…are justly described as an attempt by…Ottoman Turkey to exterminate the Armenian nation…
When the Tigris Burned and the Euphrates Ran Red describes an on-going complicity of the United States (and many other nations) in this genocide, for the sake of good relations with a Muslim ally nation. The end of this section reveals how this complicity gave tyrants the green light for other genocides in the 20th century. In the 21st century, Islamic tyrants may turn that green light on us:
Imagine it is the present day in an alternate universe. A historically progressive American paper publishes a front-page article declaring that the Jews of Europe were killed in World War II because they were agents of a foreign power that did not yet exist. A prestigious literary journal sneeringly dismisses the Holocaust as having been the massacre of a few thousand Jews “who had rioted against their Christian fellow citizens” of Germany.
Now let us imagine that the same Nazi Germany had been fought not to defeat, but to a draw. The modern state acknowledges that regrettable atrocities were committed on both sides during the Second World War, but venerates the architects of the Final Solution as national heroes. Tourists can visit the ruins of synagogues and the cultural relics of Eastern European Jews who lived in the region, even as the government destroys the few remaining monuments — the more artistic of which are attributed in guidebooks to the ancestors of the Germans themselves.
One U.S. presidential candidate after another promises to sign a Congressional bill acknowledging that what happened to the Jews was genocide but nobody ever does, for good relations with Germany come at the price of a courteous silence. There is an Israel, but it is isolated by a Nazi blockade, a third of its population dead of disease and starvation or in emigration in search of work. The Jews themselves have tried in vain to advance recognition of their cause…Some [wrote] books, and…managed to rouse the conscience of the best and the brightest across America, only for everything…to be consigned to oblivion soon thereafter.
Substitution of Armenians for Jews in the paragraph above returns us to this universe. It was a front-page article in the Forward[25] in 1995 that claimed that Armenians, about 1.5 million of whom were exterminated by the Ottoman Turkish state in 1915, were “assisting the Soviet effort to overtake Turkey” — even though it was not until 1920 that the Russian Armenian province, the guberniya of Erevan, was conquered by the Bolsheviks, and two years more until a state called the Soviet Union came into being. The majority of the Armenians who were killed were farmers and craftsmen who knew no foreign language, lived in villages a fortnight from the nearest port or railhead, and rarely traveled even half as far. The second article, by Christopher de Bellaigue, which reduced the whole business to a few thousand Armenians “killed while rioting against their Muslim fellow citizens,” was published in the New York Review of Books. The latter is not only an untruth, it is the opposite of the truth. There were two waves of the extermination of the Armenians in Ottoman Turkey, and de Bellaigue’s remark seems to refer to the first: In 1895-96, members of the Armenian community of the capital, Constantinople, demonstrated peacefully against the systematic murder and extortion of their compatriots in the Anatolian interior (historical Armenia) by government tax-collectors and Kurdish marauders in the pay of the Ottoman authorities. The protest was suppressed with extreme violence; it was followed by a wave of state-sponsored massacres, called a jihad and led by Muslim mullahs and…theological students, in which some 200,000 Armenians were slaughtered…
Today’s Armenia, a tiny state in the Transcaucasus, exists only because it was part of Tsarist Russia and then the Soviet Union. In Soviet times, it flourished: The country was cherished and supported by the Diaspora much as Israel was to be by Jews; there was even a kind of “law of return,” of which many thousands took advantage. The region today is now independent, and has been under Turkish blockade for over a decade. As a result of severe conditions, many of my colleagues there have died young.
The Ottoman leaders who planned and carried out the Armenian genocide are officially celebrated as heroes of the present successor state, which…denies the genocide took place. Throughout eastern Anatolia, the names of Armenian towns have been changed and priceless monuments of medieval Armenian Christian art had been systematically destroyed by 1997.
The official Turkish line is that the Armenians are not there now because they never were; and if there were any, well, then it was they who did the massacring — of their Turkish neighbors. But the Armenians were also dangerous foreign elements, a fifth column, so the genocide was justified. Though it didn’t happen. So all the testimony of the survivors, those unlettered, gentle grandmothers who never served a foreign state, who never struck a fellow creature in anger, but who worked and cooked and raised children and forged a new life in the factory towns and working-class neighborhoods of New England, is all a carefully corroborated fraud, a conspiracy.
…
…During World War I, eyewitness reports of the arrests, death marches and mass killings poured in from American diplomats and missionaries, journalists and physicians. When the war ended, President Wilson declared, “Armenia is to be redeemed.”
But…no amount of agitation or mass of fact could ever materially affect American policy. The White House did not condemn the Ottomans in 1896. The United States did not go to war against Turkey in 1917. After the October Revolution, Russia withdrew from the war and Turkey invaded the Transcaucasus, continuing to massacre the Armenians even after its own capitulation.
The surviving sliver of Armenia controlled by Russia was incorporated into the Soviet Union, and President Wilson’s postwar plan for an American mandate in Armenia was eventually voted down by an isolationist Senate. Despite continuing public pressure on behalf of the Armenians, American policy in the 1920s was more concerned with achieving a foothold in the Muslim Middle East, and access to oil, than in a nation of which a third were refugees, another third under Soviet rule, and the rest extinct.
…
…the insistence of the government in Ankara that America and Israel deny the Armenian genocide as the price of continued friendship is too high to pay and in the end probably need not be paid for the alliance to continue. It is, besides, misguided. Denial warps Turkish society itself, as the Turkish scholar Taner Akcam has pointed out: Falsification of history leads to other kinds of repression.
…in 1997 France recognized the Armenian genocide as such. Turkey protested loudly, but soon life went back to normal. The United States, he suggests, is too fearful…
…The Armenians…dehumanized as infidels over a millennium of Muslim oppression and misrule, survived in the end only because the Russian army’s nuclear umbrella sheltered (and shelters) Erevan[26].
The Armenians of Karabagh averted a new massacre in the early 1990s because they got arms and learned how to use them. As a Zionist leader told an assembly full of yeshiva[27] kids in Lithuania on the eve of the Holocaust: “Children! I want you to learn. I want you to learn to shoot.”
Beyond a deeper understanding of Islam’s relationship with Infidel peoples, the Armenian experience casts an ominous shadow on the consequences of Western inaction. Through a combination of complacency, self-interest, and ignorance, Western nations did more than simply permit the Armenian genocide; they set the stage for Nazi atrocities decades later. As Adolph Hitler remarked on the eve of his Final Solution: [28]
Our strength consists in our speed and in our brutality. Genghis Khan led millions of women and children to slaughter – with premeditation and a happy heart. History sees in him solely the founder of a state. It’s a matter of indifference to me what a weak western European civilization will say about me.
I have issued the command – and I’ll have anybody who utters but one word of criticism executed by a firing squad – that our war aim does not consist in reaching certain lines, but in the physical destruction of the enemy.
Accordingly, I have placed my death-head formations in readiness…with orders to them to send to death mercilessly and without compassion, men, women, and children of Polish derivation and language. Only thus shall we gain the living space (Lebensraum) which we need. [29] Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?
The degree to which Muslims live in a state of denial about Islam’s history of violence is mind-boggling. Unfortunately, Westerners who have not studied history are susceptible to Islamic propaganda, which often turns history on its head. For example, consider these words from The Complete Idiot’s Guide to the Koran:[30]
…negative and wholly inaccurate stereotypes about Islam are common in the United States. Some analysts imply or say openly…that Islam is an inherently violent and intolerant system of thought – conveniently ignoring the fact that Muslim nations are remarkably free of racial strife and violent crime and that the Islamic faith’s history of religious tolerance over the centuries is well documented. It is a strange brand of intolerance that yields racial harmony!
The native Africans of Darfur and southern Sudan may have a slightly different opinion.
The question we face today is this: Will Osama bin Laden and his followers, like Genghis Khan and his horde, one day be considered the founders of a vast and mighty state, despite their murderous deeds? Will our grandchildren only remember him through the accolades of Islamic propagandists?
Maybe we should be more careful about the precedents we set through inaction and complicity, and maybe we should be more careful about the truths we sacrifice for the sake of political alliance.
REFERENCES FOR SECTION 5:
[1] Philip’s Atlas of World History General Editor: Patrick K. O’Brian, The Institute of Historical Research, University of London, 1999, page 180.
[2] The Formation of the Soviet Union, by Richard Pipes, Harvard University Press, 1996.
[3] Chechen History by Edward Kline, President of the Andrei Sakharov Foundation, 1995.
[4] A Long History of Chechen Terror Attacks, Deutsche Welle, December 6, 2003.
[5] Chechen president killed in stadium bombing, by Mark McDonald, Knight Ridder Newspapers, May 9, 2004.
[6] Over 300 killed in school carnage, by Simon Ostrovsky, The Moscow Times, September 6, 2004.
[7] How did it come to this? , by Andrew Meier, National Geographic, July 2005.
[8] We want to Die More than You want to Live, Pravda, October 25, 2002.
[9] Philip’s Atlas of World History General Editor: Patrick K. O’Brian, Copyright 1999, Published by the Institute of historical Research, University of London, pages 70, 71.
[10] Bulgaria: Illustrated History by B. Dimitrov, Published 2002 by Boriana Publishing House, Sofia, Bulgaria, sections extracted from www.bulgaria.com/history/bulgaria/under.html.
[11] This tax was also known as the devshirme, or devsirme.
[12] Background Note: Serbia and Montenegro, U.S. Dept. of State. See http://www.state.gov/r/pa/ei/bgn/5388.htm.
[13] Background Note: Croatia, U.S. Department of State. See http://www.state.gov/r/pa/ei/bgn/3166.htm.
[14] Between Serb and Albanian: A History of Kosovo, by Miranda Vickers, Columbia University Press, 1998.
[15] Islam and Dhimmitude: Where Civilizations Collide, by Bat Ye’or, Fairleigh Dickenson University Press, Madison NJ, 2002.
[16] Albanian and Serbs in Kosovo: An Abbreviated History, by G. Richard Jansen, Colorado State University, April 25, 1999, updated November 12, 2002.
[17] Ibid.
[18] Background Note: Serbia and Montenegro, U.S. Department of State, http://www.state.gov/r/pa/ei/bgn/5388.htm.
[19] The Koran for Dummies, by Sohaib Sultan, Wiley Publishing, Inc., 2004, Chapter 16, section entitled
Rights of non-Muslims under Islamic rule, page 251.
[20] The Greek Church of Constantinople and the Ottoman Empire, by Arnakis, G. Georgiades, Journal of Modern History, v. 24, n. 3 (September 1952), pages 235-251.
[21] Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror, by Mahmood Mamdani, Three Leaves Press, Doubleday, New York, 2004, Chapter 3, entitled Afghanistan: The High Point in the Cold War, page 163.
[22] Ibid, Chapter 3, entitled Afghanistan: The High Point in the Cold War, page 153.
[23] The Middle East for Dummies, by Craig S. Davis, PhD, Wiley Publishing, Inc., 2003, Chapter 22, entitled Language and Literature, page 322.
[24] The Burning Tigris : The Armenian Genocide and America’s Response, by Peter Balakian, published by Harper Perennial, October 1, 2004.
[25] The Forward is the name of the Yiddish language newspaper in which this book review appeared, in the January 23, 2004 edition. Prof. Russell’s article was written as an indignant response to the apparent apathy of Jews to the plight of the Armenians.
[26] Capital of Armenia. Also spelled Yerevan.
[27] A kind of Jewish school.
[28] Exhibit USA-28 of the Nuremburg Tribunal. Quote also appeared in What about Germany? , by Louis Lochner, published by Dodd, Mead & Co., 1942.
[29] To make room for the growth of his Aryan “master race,” Hitler planned to conquer foreign lands and enslave the people, who would be exterminated progressively as the Aryan need for land expanded.
[30] The Complete Idiot’s Guide to the Koran, by Shaykh Muhammad Sarwar and Brandon Toropov, Alpha Books, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., Chapter 3, section entitled An Example from History, page 27.
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