Muslim Leaders denounce Paris massacre

Observe;

Ridiculous mental gymnastics at work!

Rural electrification was a social movement.

How many people did Jesus command be beheaded?

Feb 10, 2015 - 06:20pm PT

The Rural Electrification Project started in a church?

Feb 10, 2015 - 07:29pm PT
Pretty bad behavior, but the Spanish inquisition went on for 350 years with an average body count of eight to twenty one per year depending on who's counting.

And so began the greatest slave-taking venture in history. Politically correct campus commissars would have us believe that the only men ever enslaved were black and the only slavers were white. Not quite. The first slave-labor plantations on an industrial scale were in not the Mississippi Delta but the Mesopotamian Delta, around Basra during the Arab “Golden Age.” For centuries, millions of blacks from Africa and brown-skinned captives from the subcontinent were put to work in conditions that led, in the late ninth century, to the greatest slave revolt known to historians, the 15-year Revolt of the Zanj (East African blacks), the scale of which eclipsed the better-known Spartacus uprising against Rome or the Haitian struggle for freedom. At its peak, perhaps a half-million slaves, impoverished Arabs and Bedouins, repeatedly defeated the sultan’s armies. At the climax of the uprising, Basra was obliterated amid a regional apocalypse.

Slaves thereafter were more strictly disciplined and dispersed, but the institution boomed throughout Islam’s realms. Compared to the mega-mall slave markets of Damascus and Baghdad, of Cairo, Tunis, and Bakhchisaray, and, later, of Timbuktu and Istanbul, the slave pens of Charleston and New Orleans were country stores.

As the Ottoman claw choked one third of Europe, the enslavement of Africans continued unabated, but the real prizes now had white skins (blonde females and pretty boys were especially prized). Each of the literally hundreds of Ottoman and Tartar invasions and slave-taking raids into the Balkans, Hungary, Romania, southern Poland, Ukraine, the Caucasus, and even Russia herded thousands and tens of thousands of prisoners southward in vast drives of human cattle. The Eurasian steppes and the Balkan mountain passes shone white with the bones of millions of captives who did not survive the journey.

Muslim pirates plagued the Mediterranean, raiding the lands not occupied by Muslims, to fill their slave markets and man the oars of their galleys — the latter a fate worse than that of plantation hands. Adventurous corsairs even raided coastal England and Ireland, kidnapping the populations of entire towns.

Apologists for Islam — and they are legion — claim that Muslim rule over conquered peoples was enlightened, that conquered Christians and Jews had only to pay the dhimmi tax and everything was fine. Tell that tale over the graves of the Balkan and Greek families forced to send their fittest, finest sons to the Sublime Porte of the sultan to be brought up as Muslims. The strongest young boys trained as janissaries, Ottoman shock troops, to make war on the frontiers against Christians and take more slaves. Others were trained for administrative duties. Indeed, some slaves rose high under both Arabs and Ottomans. But as the soldier-scholar Peter G. Tsouras reminded me, millions of males were castrated to suit the warped values of societies dysfunctional beyond Freud’s darkest dreams.

To be fair, the eunuchs who survived the procedure were valued as harem guards and for other positions of trust. A few became viziers. Nonetheless, one suspects that there was never an abundance of volunteers.