Dare to Speak: Islam vs Free Democracy and Free Enterprise (I)
Section 6.
The House of Islam’s Relationships with non-Islamic Nations
Cyprus[1]
Cyprus, one of the most famously beautiful islands in the Mediterranean, was a Christian land from the earliest days of Christendom, as well as a part of the Byzantine Empire. With Constantinople’s fall to the Ottomans in 1453, however, Cyprus became an outpost of Christianity’s shrunken frontier.
Cyprus, under constant pressure from various Muslim empires, paid annual tributes for its “protection.” By the early 1500s, Cyprus had become a quasi-vassal state of the Ottoman Empire. Unfortunately, its tributes did not dissuade the Ottomans from their intended conquest, but only persuaded them to focus their attentions elsewhere for the time-being. After a few decades, Cyprus came back into the Ottoman cross-hairs and quickly succumbed in 1570.
Throughout the former lands of Byzantium, the Greek identity remained strong despite Ottoman subjugation and Turkification programs that planted Turkish settlers in conquered lands. After hundreds of years, Greek pride, together with Ottoman persecutions, prompted a general revolt in the 1820s. The end result of this revolt was Greek independence and a tottering Ottoman Empire.
At this time, Britain was allied with the Ottomans against the rising power of Russia, which had supported Greek independence and humbled the Ottomans in the 1820s during the Russo-Turkish war. Because of the Ottoman Empire’s internal divisions and weaknesses, European nations came to view the Ottoman Empire as a buffer state, to limit Russia’s expansion, rather than as a threat in itself. However, as the “sick old man of Europe,” the Ottoman Empire could not adequately protect itself, and it grew dependent on European reinforcements. In the wake of the Crimean War of the 1850s, when Britain joined with the Ottoman Empire to thwart Russian encroachment, the Ottoman Empire went so far as to invite the British to make Cyprus a protectorate in 1878. The idea was to let Britain administer Cyprus on behalf of the Ottomans, so that the Ottomans could focus on combating the Russians. This arrangement worked to the benefit of both nations for several decades.
In World War I, however, alliances were reversed in a mirror-maze of circumstances:
It began with the 1914 assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir apparent to the Austro-Hungarian throne, by a member of a Serbian nationalist movement known as “The Black Hand.” The Serbs, who had recently thrown off the Ottomans with Russian support, carried out this assassination to oppose Austria-Hungary’s plans to annex their lands. Austria-Hungary used this provocation to assert their control over Serbia and squash its independence movement.
Russia had been an arch-enemy of the Ottomans for centuries, and had taken vast portions of formerly Ottoman land north and east of the Black Sea. Russia had also supported rebellions that liberated Serbia, Greece, Romania, Bulgaria, and Albania from Ottoman control. Therefore, the sympathy that Russians felt for Serbia was very strong. When Austria attacked Serbia, Russia responded by entering the conflict to defend the Serbs.
Meanwhile, the Ottoman Empire, humiliated by its multitude of losses to Russian-supported rebellions, and hoping to regain lost land, decided to enter the battle against its current foes (the Serbs and Russians) by joining forces with its previous foe, Austria-Hungary.
By this time, Germany, the fast-rising economic and military powerhouse of Europe, which had recently defeated the French in the Franco-Prussian War of 1871, had entered the war on the side of its long-time ally, Austria-Hungary. Britain, on the other hand, had entered into an alliance with France and Russia in 1907, called the Triple Entente, because it feared Germany’s rising power. This alliance pulled Britain into the burgeoning war on the side of Russia.
And so, through a twisted chain of alliances, the British and Ottomans found themselves on opposite sides of “The Great War.” This unintended circumstance placed Britain in the easy position of taking Cyprus from its Ottoman opponent, and it did so by annexation in 1914.
After the war, Cyprus was relatively prosperous under British administration. However, this period was marred by violent agitation from Greek Cypriots, who wanted Cyprus joined to Greece, as well as Turkish Cypriots, who wanted it joined to Turkey. The only thing these antagonists had in common was that they both wanted Britain out.
While Britain’s empire had brought it wealth and power for many years, World War II strained its imperial system to the breaking point. At an ideological level, the brutality of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan stimulated a healthy dose of introspection, and imperialism lost its allure. More pragmatically, the strain of World War II had exhausted Britain and forced it to promise independence to many of its colonies in exchange for military support. Thus, after the war, Britain transformed its colonies into a “Commonwealth” of independent nations that were linked through mutually advantageous economic and political ties.
To further this transition, Britain entered into the 1959 Zurich Agreement with Greece and Turkey, with the intent of establishing an independent Cyprus. However, the Cypriots themselves were excluded from the agreement’s discussions, and they resented their lack of representation.
By 1960, Britain, Greece, and Turkey had agreed to a constitution for Cyprus. In this constitution, Greeks held the highest power, but Turks, who represented about one-fifth of the population, could veto legislation. Unfortunately, but understandably, the Greek and Turkish Cypriots both rejected it.
But it was not simply that Greek and Turkish Cypriots did not buy into this constitution. The sad truth was that they could not work together to produce one, and would not accept one created by anyone else. Furthermore, they were adamantly opposed to living together as a single nation. In the ensuing years, Greeks and Turks made polarizing migrations to build political power in specific areas.
In 1974, Greece orchestrated a coup d’etat of the unified government. This coup provoked a retaliatory invasion by Turkey, which led to a formal partition of the island into the Turkish North and Greek South. In 1975, a UN-brokered agreement was established that further encouraged northern migrations by Turks and southern migrations by Greeks. [2] In 1983, the Turkish legislative assembly administering the northern region proclaimed itself to be the independent Turkish Republic in North Cyprus.
Today, for all practical purposes, the north and south of Cyprus are two separate countries, even though the UN has rejected the Turkish North’s declaration of independence and has encouraged its member nations to not recognize it. Since the Turkish invasion, the northern republic has seen a massive influx of Turkish nationals, who reinforce and solidify Turkish claims to the land. Meanwhile, the southern Republic of Cyprus, which still claims sovereignty over the entire island, has joined the European Community.
Today, Cyprus is divided by a “fence” called “the green line.” While deep wounds remain, this separation has given both sides economic and political stability.
Because of the ties many Greeks have in the north, and Turks have in the south, as well as Turkey’s desire to follow Cyprus into the European Union, there have been on-going talks of a Cypriot reunification. In discussing this topic, the following article reveals something else: the decline of North Cyprus after the Muslim Turkish takeover:
Green Light: Border Opening in Cyprus
By Andrea Talas, HVG (independent weekly), Budapest, Hungary, April 29, 2003
A spontaneous unification process may have been started on the island of Cyprus, now divided for 29 years, since Rauf Denktas, the president of the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus…opened the Green Line separating the island’s two sections.
…Marula Mihaili…, after 29 years of exile…visited her childhood home in the town of Yerolakos…in the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, an entity recognized solely by Ankara. The widow…found almost everything as it had been left on July 20, 1974, when she was forced to leave it a few hours after the Turkish takeover.
The Turkish family that occupied the house still uses the silver set that Mihaili received as a wedding gift, [as well as the] now somewhat worn furniture…Other Greek Cypriots told the same story…it was a bitter experience for many Greek Cypriots to see how impoverished the Turkish-occupied northern half of the island has become…The seaside resorts, once counted as tourist attractions, were now lifeless, abandoned, in a state of decay…the Greek Orthodox churches have been transformed into mosques. There is now nothing to suggest that the buildings were once Christian churches…
Germany
Germany has a unique history among European nations with regard to Islam. Its historically cordial relations with the House of Submission stem from two sources:
Germany’s alliance with the Ottoman Empire during the World War I.
Germany’s belligerence, during World War II, toward France, England, the Soviet Union (formerly Russia), and the Netherlands. These nations were despised in the Islamic world because of their histories as colonizers of Islamic lands, spanning the globe from Algeria to Persia, and from Chechnya to Indonesia.
By chastising the French, British, Russians, and Dutch, Germany won a special place in the hearts of many Muslims around the world (though not all – many Arabs also considered Britain an ally for liberating them from the Ottoman Empire). This affinity was personally strengthened by Adolph Hitler, whose hatred of Jews resonated so well in the Islamic world that, when Persia liberated itself from British occupation in 1935, it changed its official name from Persia to Iran in order to trumpet the fact that Iran was the theoretical source of Hitler’s Aryan race. Later, during WWII, Iraq actually called on Axis nations for help to fight against the British. [3]
Many Muslims also remember the close collaborative relationship Hitler established with Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem from 1921 to 1936, who also served as President of the (Palestinian) Supreme Muslim Council during that time. Al-Husseini collaborated tirelessly with Hitler to recruit and train Muslim soldiers for the Nazi war effort.
Despite this collaboration, al-Husseini escaped prosecution as a war criminal after the war, largely because of European fears of outrage in the Arab lands they still administered. This immunity allowed him to enjoy his final years as an icon of Arab nationalism, and his collaboration with Hitler was never condemned by his supporters. His nephew, Yasser Arafat, considered him a hero and mentor, and boasted of their special relationship. [4]
Germany has changed considerably since the bad old days of The Third Reich, but one of Hitler’s lasting legacies is a large Muslim population in Germany. In large part, these Muslims descend from World War II Soviet defectors, who rejected the U.S.S.R. as an atheist occupier of Muslim lands. These Muslims now represent an axis of Muslim extremism in the heart of Europe, as described in the following Wall Street Journal article:
The Beachhead: How a Mosque for Ex-Nazis Became [a] Center of Radical Islam
By Ian Johnson, The Wall Street Journal, July 12, 2005; Page A1
MUNICH, Germany – …Buried in…archives are hundreds of documents that trace [a] battle to control the Islamic Center of Munich…the material shows how radical Islam established one of its first and most important beachheads in the West when a group of ex-Nazi soldiers decided to build a mosque.
The soldiers’ presence in Munich was part of a nearly forgotten subplot to World War II: the decision by tens of thousands of Muslims in the Soviet Red Army to switch sides and fight for Hitler. After the war, thousands sought refuge in West Germany, building one of the largest Muslim communities in 1950s Europe. When the Cold War heated up, they were a coveted prize for their language skills and contacts back in the Soviet Union…U.S., West German, Soviet and British intelligence agencies vied for…them in the new battle of democracy vs. communism.
Yet the victor wasn’t any of these Cold War combatants. Instead, it was a movement with an equally powerful ideology: the Muslim Brotherhood. Founded in 1920s Egypt as a social-reform movement, the Brotherhood became the fountainhead of political Islam, which calls for the Muslim religion to dominate all aspects of life. A powerful force for political change throughout the Muslim world, the Brotherhood also inspired some of the deadliest terrorist movements of the past quarter century, including Hamas and al Qaeda.
The story of how the Brotherhood exported its creed to the heart of Europe highlights a recurring error by Western democracies. For decades, countries have tried to cut deals with political Islam – backing it in order to defeat another enemy, especially communism. Most famously, the U.S. and its allies built up [the] mujahadeen…in 1980s Afghanistan to fight the Soviet Union – paving the way for the rise of Osama bin Laden, who quickly turned on his U.S. allies in the 1990s.
…
Political and social groups affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood now dominate organized Islamic life across a broad swath of Western Europe…
While these groups renounce terrorism and officially advocate assimilation, the upshot of their message is that Europe’s Muslims – now representing between 5% and 10% of the continent’s population – need to be walled off from Western culture. This in turn has helped create fertile ground for violent ideas. Islamic terrorists have increasingly used Europe as a launching pad for their attacks, from the Sept. 11 assault on the U.S. to last year’s bombing of trains in Madrid.
…Postwar Munich was a ruined city packed with Muslim émigrés fleeing persecution…Most favored some sort of accommodation with the West. But the victor had a bolder vision: a global Islam opposed to the ideals of secular democracy…
Fortunately, in the aftermath of numerous terrorist attacks that could be traced back to organizations in Germany, the German government realized that it not only had a problem, but also had to do something about it:
In Germany, Harder Line Looms
By Ian Johnson, The Wall Street Journal, September 12, 2005; Page A14
MUNICH, Germany – Local officials have started taking steps against one of the historic centers of Islamism in the West, after years of tolerating and even supporting it.
…
Now, attorneys in the state of Bavaria have launched two separate investigations. One is aimed at determining whether the Islamic Community of Germany misappropriated state funds, a move that could force the group to pay back more than €700,000 ($868,070) to the state. Prosecutors also are investigating an allegedly related organization that runs a nearby school. Officials denied an education license to the school…, a move confirmed by courts last week.
The actions in Bavaria could signal that Germany will take a harder line nationally against Islamist organizations. One of the driving figures behind the moves is Günther Beckstein, the Bavarian interior minister…Mr. Beckstein believes that the Islamic Community of Germany’s allegedly ideological links with the Muslim Brotherhood make it an undemocratic force.
“The Islamic Community of Germany is a group that is against the constitution,” Mr. Beckstein said…“It is justified that the state not support such organizations.”
For decades, the Munich mosque and its related organizations have been cornerstones of the Muslim Brotherhood network that gradually spanned Europe…
For almost a decade, domestic intelligence had…published warnings about the group’s allegedly radical ideology. Public officials, however, continued to deal with [it], financing its private school with €340,000 a year. The organization maintained nonprofit status, which allowed donors to write off their contributions.
…
In the late 1990s, the Islamic Community of Germany began to attract unwanted attention: A man sentenced for the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center had been a regular at the Munich mosque and, later, a high-ranking al Qaeda suspect who had contact with mosque members was arrested nearby. In 1998, the group was put on the domestic intelligence agency’s watch list. The next year, the Islamic Community of Germany lost its nonprofit status because of sloppy bookkeeping…donations to the group are no longer tax-deductible.
…
The Islamic Community of Germany’s direct involvement with the school ended in 2003, when a group called the German-Islamic Educational Enterprise was founded…It obtained nonprofit status and received roughly the same…state support to run the school, officials say.
Now, state prosecutors are investigating whether the new group may have forged the signatures of members who weren’t present at its founding…Local officials denied the school a license for the current school year because they say it is a dummy organization set up to disguise links to the Islamic Community of Germany.
“We are afraid that the group running the school, which belongs to the Islamic Community of Germany, is using the school to spread Islamist ideology,” said Thomas Huber, spokesman for the district government of Upper Bavaria…
India
India has a long history of contention between indigenous Hindus and Muslims who arrived on the wings of the Ghurid Empire’s Islamic invasion in the 12th century. This Islamic presence grew throughout the 13th and 14th centuries, through the Sultanate of Delhi, and culminated in the Mughal Empire, which ruled virtually all of India during the 16th and 17th centuries.
By the time traders from Europe began to arrive, India was in the process of succumbing to the Mughals. The European traders, pursuing their own interests, allied themselves with the Hindu populations to gain political power as protectors, and secured lucrative trade arrangements in the process. In the 1600s and 1700s, Britain displaced the other European nations and strengthened its role as protector until all of India was its client and Britain ruled large portions outright.
The trade and technical innovations that accompanied Britain made its presence welcome at first. However, by the early 1900s, after a number of atrocities, and after the insult of denying Indians full rights as British citizens, [5] the relationship soured, and India began a decades-long battle for self-determination. During World War II, the British promised independence to India in exchange for its military support. After the war, Britain made good on its promise, but this only brought back the ancient war for religious dominance. One of the leading forces in this conflict was the Muslim League, whose mission was to form a separate Muslim state ruled by Shari’ah.
Ultimately, colonial India was divided into two nations: India and Pakistan (which later split into modern Pakistan and Bangladesh). The conflicts and mass migrations associated with Pakistan’s founding caused more than one million deaths. [6] Since that time, India and Pakistan have fought four wars over the disputed Indian state of Kashmir. Today they periodically threaten each other with annihilation through nuclear war.
Despite the mass migrations, there remains a substantial number of Muslims in India, especially in Kashmir. Muslims represent about 13% of India’s population. Feeling oppressed, they have lashed out many times against the Indian government. There have been many bombings[7] and, in December of 2001, a murderous attack on India’s National Parliament by a Kashmiri/Pakistani militia, resulting in 14 deaths. [8] Muslim terrorist attacks that are less politically devastating, but more deadly, occur on a regular basis, such as the bombing of two crowded markets on October 22, 2005, which killed 59 people. [9] Hindus have frequently responded to Muslim terrorism with attacks of their own, leaving ample blood on everyone’s hands.
Nigeria
Islam announced its ascendancy in Nigeria when Nigeria’s northern provinces adopted Shari’ah in 2000 and 2001. It then flaunted its victory by quickly condemning a pregnant divorcee to death by stoning. Since that time, northern Nigeria has proceeded to alienate itself from the West on multiple fronts. Beyond its public displays of harsh Islamic Law, northern Nigeria has turned away from modern innovations in other ways, and sent itself on a journey back toward Islamic traditions.
A stand-out example of this regression comes from the case of a pregnant divorcee: the court resolved the case’s question of paternity with the aid of a traditional Islamic method, namely, the testimony of three men, rather than a modern and scientific paternity test (the accused man himself was the fourth male witness). Even though Western minds cannot imagine how witnesses could prove that a man did not impregnate a woman, the male witnesses were all that Shari’ah needed to absolve the father. As a side note, this again demonstrates how Shari’ah is stacked in favor of men, because, while both men and women may be sentenced to death for adultery, it is virtually impossible for a man to be convicted:
Woman sentenced to stoning freed
From Jeff Koinange, CNN, Monday, February 23, 2004
KATSINA, Nigeria (CNN) – An appeals court has freed a Nigerian mother sentenced to death by stoning for adultery.
The Shari’ahh Court of Appeal ruled…that Amina Lawal’s conviction was invalid because she was already pregnant when…Islamic Shari’ahh law was implemented in her home province…Shari’ahh law…is practiced in 12 of Nigeria’s 36 states.
…human rights groups…were outraged at the sentence that Lawal should be buried up to her neck and then have stones thrown at her head until she was dead.
…not all the spectators who attended the hearing were pleased by the result. One man who had come to hear the court’s ruling said: “I would have preferred Amina to be stoned to death. She deserves it.”
…
Lawal was convicted and sentenced in March 2002 after giving birth to a baby girl more than nine months after divorcing. Under the strict Shari’ahh law, pregnancy outside marriage constitutes sufficient evidence for a woman to be convicted of adultery.
…
She insists she did nothing wrong and that the man who fathered her child made a promise to marry her. He did not, leaving her pregnant and with no support.
The man said he was not the father, and three male witnesses testified he did not have a sexual relationship with Lawal. The witnesses constituted adequate corroboration of his story under Shari’ahh law, and he was freed.
…
The adoption of Shari’ahh, which includes amputation as a possible punishment for convicted thieves, has stoked violence between Muslims and Christians in Africa’s most populous state. More than 3,000 people have been killed.
Islam’s ascendancy is also poisoning northern Nigeria’s relations with the West. Consider the recent outbreak of polio that started in northern Nigeria and spread to its neighbors. Although Nigeria finally allowed Western aid-workers to bring polio vaccinations to its northern provinces, this decision was delayed for 11-months by vicious rumors spread by Islamic leaders hostile to the West. The articles below summarize the story:
Nigeria Boycotts Polio Vaccination Drive
By Glenn McKenzie, Associated Press Writer, USA Today, February 22, 2004
KADUNA, Nigeria (AP) – Sticking to its position that the polio vaccine is a U.S. plot against Muslims, an overwhelmingly Islamic northern Nigerian state declared Sunday it would boycott an emergency immunization campaign being launched to stop the crippling outbreak that is spreading across west and central Africa.
The announcement from Kano state came on the eve of a World Health Organization campaign to immunize 63 million children in 10 African nations as the polio outbreak spreads from northern Nigeria into countries where the disease had been eradicated.
…Islamic leaders there say the vaccine is part of a U.S. plot to kill off Nigeria’s Muslims, by spreading the AIDS virus or agents that cause sterility.
…
Nigerian state again allowing polio vaccinations
By Oloche Samuel, Associated Press, August 1, 2004
TAKAI, Nigeria –…Nigeria’s Kano state, where a recent epidemic of the crippling disease started and spread to 10 other African nations, allowed vaccinations to resume Saturday after an 11-month boycott.
…
Since the boycott began in August 2003, polio has spread from Nigeria across West and Central Africa, infecting polio-free countries and threatening a UN backed drive to eradicate the disease worldwide by next year…
REFERENCES FOR SECTION 6:
[1] This history was compiled through a review of both the history given by the official website of the President of “The Turkish Republic of North Cyprus” (www.trncpresidency.org) and that given by the official website of the Republic of Cyprus ( www.moi.gov.cy/moi/pio/pio.nsf/index_en/index_en?opendocument – for version in English) .
[2] United Nations Document S/11789, referred to as the Population Exchange Agreement. A web-based summary of this document can be found at http://www.cypnet.com/.ncyprus/history/republic/agmt-popexch.html.
[3] Resurrecting Empire, by Rashid Khalidi, Beacon Press, Boston, 2004, Chapter 1, entitled The Legacy of the Western Encounter with the Middle East, page 24.
[4] The Mufti of Jerusalem, by Philip Mattar, Columbia University Press revised edition, 1988.
[5] This may sound familiar to readers of the U.S. Declaration of Independence.
[6] 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 88, 89,118, 119, 194, 195, 248, 249.
[7] India’s Great Divide, by Alex Perry, TimeAsia, August 4, 2003.
[8] Indian Muslim leader is slain at memorial service, by Rama Lakshmi (Washington Post), International Herald-Tribune, May 22, 2002.
[9] Claim of responsibility for deadly India blasts, Associated Press, MSNBC News, October 30, 2005.
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