How the Greeks manfully resisted and rolled back the Turkish Jihadi onslaught on Greece

The stubborn Greek resistance to the Muslim menace, prevented that from happening and saved Europe.
The Turkish Heritage of Anti-Semitism
The jihad is an institution, and not an event, that is to say it is a part of the normal functioning of the Muslim world. The conquered... populations change status (they become dhimmis), and the sharia tends to be put into effect integrally, overthrowing the former law of the country. The conquered territories do not simply change owners, they change character. Greece was the cradle of Western civilization. The Persians were the only non-Europeans to have set their foot on Greece as invaders. But they never succeeded. They were checked at Marathon and were repulsed at Salamis. Alexander the great son of Greece, reversed the Persian invasion and led the Greek armies right across the sprawling inter-continental Achamenian (Hakkamanishiya) Empire of the Persians.
While it is true that the Romans did overrun, Greece, but then they came from the same Greco-Roman ethos and they extended the influence of Greco-Roman culture across all of Europe and into large parts of Asia and Africa. The Roman period was the pinnacle of ancient European culture and the age was known as Pax Romana.
The Greeks who carried on the Greco-Roman empire in the name of Byzantine, held off all invaders for nearly two thousand years since the 4th century B.C.E. (320 B.C.E.) when Alexander the Great of Macedon unified it under his empire, till it was overrun by the Ottoman Turkish Muslim hordes in 1453. This long innings of 2000 years was a Greek achievement.
But the goddess of fortune no longer smiled on Greece and the Greeks lost their sovereignty to a foreign power – the Muslims for the first time in their history in 1453.
But had not the Greeks held back the Muslim hordes from the first attacks in 734 up to 1453, the future of Europe would have been in peril and had the Greek bastion of Byzantium fallen, then Europe could have been Islamized, condemning the whole of European civilization to a perennial dark age. Imagine if today’s Britons, Spaniards, Italians, Frenchmen, Germans had been all Muslims, then we would be no different from the Iranians or the Arabs! The stubborn Greek resistance to the Muslim menace, prevented that from happening and saved Europe.
But after eight centuries of warfare with the Muslims, the European resistance had begun to crumble. In the 14th century Turkey conquered Bulgaria, Macedonia, Romania, Hungary and parts of Poland and Russia. Turkey was stopped only as it lay siege to Vienna.
For a time it seemed that Europe would fall prey to the Muslim barbarians who were baying for the blood of all Christians. But that was not to happen. And the Greeks played a stellar role in preventing this calamity, along with the Serbs, Croats, Romanians, Hungarians, Austrians, Poles, Russians and Bulgars, to stem and finally reverse the tide of the Muslim invasion of Europe.
The First Turkish Invasion of Greece
Constantinople, the capital of the Byzantine Empire, fell to Ottoman sultan Mehmet on a Tuesday in 1453. Ever since then, that day of the week has been considered of ill omen in the Greek world.
Those few Greek areas that had not already fallen to the Ottomans, principally the Peloponnesus and the Aegean Islands, were invaded and occupied by the Ottoman Turks over the next two centuries.
The Parthenon in Athens was converted into a Mosque, as an ultimate humiliation of the Greeks. The last major conquest was the island of Crete, which the Ottomans captured in 1669 from the Venetians. The Ionian Islands remained under the rule of Venice and were only briefly part of the Ottoman Empire.
Ottoman rule was arbitrary and cruel. Muslim perfidy was seen in 1571, the Island of Cyprus was threatened by the Ottomans, who cruelly massacred the garrisons of Famagusta and Nicosia, in spite of these towns having surrendered on stipulated terms. At the end an exasperated Christian population appealed to Pope Pius V to intervene and save them from the Turks.
The Pope succeeded in forming a league of maritime powers against Sultan Selim, and secured the co-operation of Philip II by granting him the right to tithes for this crusade, while he himself equipped some galleys. On 7 October, 1571, a Christian fleet of 200 galleys, carrying 50,000 men under the command of Don Juan of Austria, met the Ottoman fleet in the Straits of Lepanto, destroyed it completely, and liberated thousands of Christians, living in the islands off the Greek mainland
But the Greek mainland remained chained to the Ottoman tyranny. As the population groaned under this repressive rule, the Greek Orthodox population began to increasingly look for their emancipation towards the only remaining Orthodox power – Russia. There were numerous revolts in which the Greeks rose up against Turkish tyranny with Russian help.
In 1770 Ottoman authorities brutally crushed a Greek revolt aided by a small Russian force led by count Alexey Grigoryevich Orlov.
Towards the end of the 18th century, a small group of Greek nationalists, inspired by the French Revolution and the ideas of the Enlightenment, came into being. Rich Greek merchants endowed schools and libraries, provided scholarships, and subsidized the printing of books.
Greek students studying in European universities became aware of the reverence with which the language and civilization of ancient Greece were looked upon in the West. This raised their self-confidence to fight for the liberation of their homeland.
These students returned to Greek lands and sought to instill a consciousness of their heroic Greek ancestry in their fellow Greeks. Some gave themselves or their children the names of the heroes of ancient Greece. The most important of these early nationalists was Rigas Velestinlis (Rigas Pheraios), who was executed by the Ottomans in 1798 after vainly attempting to launch a Balkan-wide revolt against Ottoman rule.
In 1814 a secret revolutionary society, the Philiki Etairia (Friendly Society), formed in the Russian city of Odesa (Odessa; in present-day Ukraine) to prepare for an armed revolt. The group enrolled members and collected funds and weapons in the Greek communities of the eastern Mediterranean and the Balkans. Alexandros Ypsilantis, a Greek general in the service of Russian emperor Alexander I, accepted leadership of the society.
Early in 1821 Ypsilantis launched an attack from Russian territory into Moldavia, then part of the Ottoman Empire. But the hoped for Russian assistance failed to materialize, and the attempt at liberation was defeated. Another uprising at about the same time in the Peloponnesus, led by Archbishop Germanos of Patrai, met with greater success. All these revolts signaled that the Greek War of Independence had begun.
In the early stages of the war, the Greek insurgents led by Theodoros Kolokotronis, Markos Botzaris, Alexandros Mavrokordatos, and others achieved some striking successes. The Greeks had a strong nautical tradition, and their navy, under the command of Andreas Miaoulis, launched effective attacks on the Ottoman fleet. But the Great Powers of the time (Britain, France, Austria, Prussia, and Russia) were fearful of any threat to the established order and offered no help. So the Greeks had to rely on their own resources and the support of volunteer philhellenes (admirers of Greek culture and traditions) from Europe and the United States who raised money for the embattled Greeks.
But the wily Sultan Mahmud II enlisted the support of Egyptian viceroy Muhammad Ali, promising him the island of Crete. After this opportunistic alliance the military situation turned against the Greek freedom fighters, who were caught between two forces. Egyptian forces reoccupied the Peloponnesus, and the military outlook for the Greek revolutionaries was grim.
By this stage of the war, the Great Powers, alarmed by the continuing instability in the strategically important eastern Mediterranean and by the disruption of trade, decided to intervene. France joined Britain and Russia in sending a fleet, commanded by a British admiral, to mediate in the conflict.
In 1827 the powers destroyed the Ottoman-Egyptian fleet at the Battle of Navarino, the last great battle of the age of sailing ships. That year saw the birth of independent Greece. Count Ioannis Kapodistrias, a Greek who had served as the joint foreign minister for Emperor Alexander I, was elected president of Greece, and a new constitution, the third drafted for the still unofficial state, was proclaimed.
The Ottomans defeat at Navarino and in a separate war with Russia in the late 1820s forced the sultan to accept the creation of an independent Greece in 1829. In 1830 Britain, France, and Russia issued the London Protocol, which proclaimed the new kingdom of Greece and placed it under their protection. The Great Powers also acknowledged Greece’s independence in the London Protocol issued in 1828 and in the Treaty of Adrianople signed in 1829.
In 1832 the three powers decreed that Greece would be ruled by a monarch chosen from a European royal dynasty other than one of theirs. The new state consisted of the Peloponnesus, a southern portion of mainland Greece, and a few of the islands. Its frontier extended from Arta in the west to Volos in the east, and it included only one-third of the Greeks who had been under Ottoman rule.
Kapodistrias sought with some success to equip Greece with the basic structures of a state following a decade of intermittent fighting. However after ruling for a brief period of four years, he passed away in 1831. In 1832 the Great Powers chose Otto of the Bavarian Wittelsbach dynasty to be king of Greece. He was crowned Otto I the following year. Athens was little more than a village at that time, but it contained the Parthenon and other associations with the glories of ancient times and so was chosen to be the capital of the new state. Handsome neoclassical buildings were erected in the city.
In 1864 Britain granted to Greece the rule of the Ionian Islands, over which the British had exercised a protectorate since 1815. These islands had earlier been under the Venetians. This marked the first addition of territory since Greece had become independent. Greek politicians and common people alike aspired to the Megali Idea (Great Idea) of uniting as many as possible of the Greeks of the Near and Middle East within the bounds of a single state, which would have as its capital Constantinople (Istanbul) rather than Athens. They cherished this aspiration even though it was bound to bring the small and weak Greek kingdom into confrontation with the Ottoman Empire.
After the Ottoman Empire lost the Russo-Turkish War of 1877 to 1878, the Ottomans were obliged by the Congress of Berlin to cede the rich agricultural province of Thessaly and part of Epirus to Greece in 1881. As part of the Berlin settlement, Britain acquired the right to administer the predominantly Greek-inhabited island of Cyprus.
In 1885 Greece sought to exploit the problems of the Ottoman Empire for more territorial gains, but the Great Powers blockaded the country.
By the end of the 19th century, Greece’s nationalist ambitions were focused on the Ottoman territories of Macedonia (located to the north of Thessaly) and Crete. The Greeks founded, the Ethniki Hetairia (National Society), 1894, directed propaganda and the armed struggle.
In 1896 a revolt against Ottoman rule began in Crete, where the majority of the population fervently sought union with the Greek kingdom. Volunteer forces arrived from Greece the following year. But Greece suffered a crushing defeat in a short-lived war with the Ottomans, and the Great Powers forced it to pay compensation to the Ottomans and to accept small modifications to the Greek-Ottoman frontier.
The Cretans determination to join Greece was undiminished, and in 1908 the Cretan assembly proclaimed the union of Crete with Greece. Only Cyprus was lost to the Greeks and remains divided till today, with the Northern half occupied by the Turks. Still one day the Greeks hope to achieve Enosis (Unity) of Cyprus with Greece.
But all through the long struggle to win independence, the Greeks had to pay a very heavy price with blood and tears to make this possible.
In his history of Islam, The Sword and The Prophet, Serge Trifkovic wrote about the history of the Turkish oppression of the Greek Orthodox Christians as follows: The burning of the Greek city of Smyrna and the massacre and scattering of its three hundred thousand Christian inhabitants is one of the most poignant among the vast outrages of the Muslim oppression of a subject Christian population.
It is the bloodiest of other Muslim crimes in all history of Muslim oppression. It marked the end of the Greek community in Asia Minor. On the eve of its destruction, Smyrna was a bustling port and commercial center. It was a genuinely civilized place, in the old-world sense.
An American consul-general later remembered a busy social life that included dances, musical afternoons, games of tennis and bridge, and soirees given in the salons of the highly cultured Armenian and Greek bourgeoisie.
Turkish Muslims actually enjoyed massacring the Christians
When the Turks attacked, the Greek Orthodox Bishop Chrysostomos remained with his flock. «It is the tradition of the Greek Church and the duty of the priest to stay with his congregation,» he replied to those begging him to flee. The Moslem mob fell upon him, uprooted his eyes and, as he was bleeding, dragged him by his beard through the streets of the Turkish quarter, beating and kicking him.
Every now and then, when he had the strength to do so, he would raise his right hand and blessed his persecutors. A Turk got so furious at this gesture that he cut off his hand with his sword. He fell to the ground, and was hacked to pieces by the savage mob. The carnage culminated in the burning of Smyrna, which started on September 13 when the Turks put the Christian quarter to torch and the conflagration engulfed the city.
The remaining inhabitants were trapped at the seafront, from which there was no escaping the flames on one side, or Turkish bayonets on the other. This was the end of Christianity in Asia Minor, whose history goes back to events recorded in the New Testament itself.»
Marjorie Housepian in her book The Smyrna Affair, quoted a missionary eyewitness who said the Turkish Muslims actually enjoyed massacring the Christians. He said:
«The slaughter of the Christians was a joy to the Turks, a massacre was heralded by the blowing of trumpets and concluded by a procession. Accompanied by the prayers of the mullahs and muezzins, who from the minarets implored the blessings of Allah, the slaughter was accomplished in admirable order according to a well arranged plan.
The crowd, supplied with arms by the authorities, joined most amicably with the soldiers and the Kurdish Hamidieh on these festive occasions. The Turkish women stimulated their heroes by raising a gutteral shriek of their war cry, the Zilghit, and deafening the hopeless despair of their victims by singing their nuptial songs. A kind of wild cannibal humour seized the crowd…the savage crew did not even spare the children.»
The Turks have committed atrocities against other minorities as well, The Tower of skulls of Chele Kula, is a monument to the Turkish savagery against the Serbs in the early 1800s.
Lest we think «Well that was ancient history», as recently as 1974 Turkey invaded Cyprus. The Turks have renamed all the cities and towns in Turkish occupied Cyprus.
They have also destroyed concrete evidence of the Christian and Greek history of the area of Cyprus under their control. According to an article in the Guardian (‘The Rape of northern Cyprus’, 5.6.1976)
«…The vandalism and desecration are so methodical and so widespread that they amount to institutionalized obliteration of everything sacred to a Greek […] in some instances, an entire graveyard of 50 or more tombs had been reduced to pieces or rubble no larger than a matchbox…
We found the chapel of Ayios Demetrios at Ardhana empty but for the remains of the altar plinth, and that was fouled with human excrement[…] At Syngrasis […] the broken crucifix was drenched in urine.. At Lefkoniko […the interior of Gaidhouras church…] was overlooked by an armless Christ on a smashed crucifix.. Tombs gaped open wherever we went… crosses bearing the pictures of those buried beneath […] had been flattened and destroyed.»
Even today, Cypriots who oppose the Turks are treated savagely; in 1996 the Greek Cypriot demonstrator, Anastasios (Tasos) Isaak, was beaten to death by the Turkish occupation forces. According to the Greek Cypriot Magazine Selides. August, 1996, one thousand six hundred and nineteen Greek Cypriots and Greeks who were taken as prisoners of war during the Turkish invasion of Cyprus are still missing.
.The Turkish Heritage of Anti-Semitism
Like their Christian fellow subjects, the Jews were inferior citizens in the Muslim-Ottoman state which was based on the principle of Muslim superiority. They were regarded as state prot�g�s (dhimmis) and had to pay a special poll tax (jizya) for that protection and as a sign of their inferior status.
Jewish testimony was not accepted in the courts of justice, and in cases of the murder of a Jew or Christian by a Muslim, the latter was usually not condemned to death. In addition, Jews as well as Christians were normally not acceptable for appointments to the highest administrative posts; they were forbidden to carry arms (thus, to serve in the army), to ride horses in towns or to wear Muslim dress. They were also not usually allowed to build or repair places of worship and were often subjected to oppression, extortion and violence by both the local authorities and the Muslim population.»
Maltreatment of Jews and Christians by the Ottomans
Professor Tudor Parfitt in his comprehensive study of the Jews of Palestine during the 19th century wrote about the Turkish oppression of the Jews of Palestine as follows: «Inside the towns, Jews and other dhimmis were frequently attacked, wounded, and even killed by local Muslims and Turkish soldiers.
Muslim attacks on Jews and Christians were frequently for trivial reasons: Wilson [in British Foreign Office correspondence] recalled having met a Jew who had been badly wounded by a Turkish soldier for not having instantly dismounted when ordered to give up his donkey to a soldier of the Sultan. Many Jews were killed for less.
On occasions the Turkish authorities themselves were sometimes responsible for beating Jews to death for some unproven charge. After one such occasion Young [the British Consul] remarked: I must say I am sorry and surprised that the Governor could have acted so savage a part- for certainly what I have seen of him I should have thought him superior to such wanton inhumanity- but it was a Jew- without friends or protection- it serves to show well that it is not without reason that the poor Jew, even in the nineteenth century, lives from day to day in terror of his life.»
During World War I in Palestine, the embattled Young Turk government actually began deporting the Jews of Tel Aviv in the spring of 1917 – an ominous parallel to the genocidal deportations of the Armenian dhimmi communities throughout Anatolia.
With the track record of persecution should Turkey be Admitted into the European Union?
There is one overriding reason to be concerned about admitting Turkey into the European Union, and that is the potential effect of Turkish membership on the Muslim population of European countries which are already having serious problems as a result of their large Islamic populations. If Turkey joins the EU, a significant percentage of Turkey’s over 60 million Muslims will migrate into Europe, as has happened on a lesser scale so far with Germany.
Turkey inside the EU will be a Trojan Horse that will Islamize Europe
Furthermore, many millions of Muslims from other Islamic countries are likely to use Turkey as their gateway to Europe. Once they attain legal status in Turkey, these Muslims from other Islamic countries will be free to go anywhere inside Europe, terrorize Europeans and finally make Europe a Muslim sphere. This is the declared aim of the Muslims to wage Jihad by the womb.
Is an Ideological war enough to ensure the decimation of Islam?
Some liberals in the West advocate that the conflict with Islam be limited to an ideological and information war only. A kind of Cold war to drill into the Muslim masses the advantages of democracy, liberalism and the separation of the Church (Mosque) from the state. This is similar to the tactics followed by the Western Democracies in the opening days of World War 2, when they air-dropped leaflets urging the German people to overthrow the Nazis. This did not happen, and the Nazis had to be annihilated through six years of ceaseless warfare. The Israelis are doing the same mistake today (July 2006) when they air-drop leaflets over Sidon asking the Lebanese to resist the Hezbollah. The Hezbollah are blood-thirsty maniacs who can be neutralized with neurons and nukes alone. After all the Muslims only understand the language of blood and death, the only way to a Muslim heart is to put a bullet into it after all the only good Muslim is a dead Muslim (this is stated in all seriousness).
But in spite of this harsh reality, the dyed in the wool communist fifth-columnists amongst us scream for the war to be stopped, while the wide eyed liberals pontificate that we need to strength moderate Muslims – as if there can ever be one like partially pregnant woman!
The dangers to civilization from the communist fifth-columnists amongst us
While to most innocent bystanders, their contrived rhetoric appears quite logical on the face of it, we fail to realize that all this is an eyewash meant to save our enemies, before these enemies develop the nuclear capability to do in the West. By raising the fiction of there being moderate Muslims, these communist fifth-columnists traitors amongst us deliberately confuse us about the dangers from Islam arising from the paranoid emotional clasp that Islam has on the minds of each and every Muslim across the length and breadth of our globe.
For the sake of our own survival we need to wake up to the fact that the clasp of the murderous injunctions of the Quran cannot be broken by ideological warfare alone. The non-Muslim ancestors of the Muslims became Muslims in the first place due to physical coercion, at the point of the sword. Howsoever vehemently the Muslims of today may deny this, we can safely ignore their frothy fits of rage to make us swallow the canard that Islam was spread voluntarily amongst the ancestors of today’s Muslims.
At its core, Islam is a murder cult organized in a paranoid way to ensure that no one ever leaves Islam.
A person leaving Islam is a Murtad (apostate) and has to be punished with death. For its followers, Islam makes compulsory congregational prayer five times a day. So a Muslim is never allowed to leave the flock, a membership that is enforced by constant brainwashing and a penalty of death for those risking to leave Islam openly.
With this kind of a paranoid system that traps Muslims into Islam, the only way to break the lock, is to inflict a crushing defeat on Islam at a global level. A defeat so utterly crushing that it would mangle the self-confidence and arrogance of the Muslims in the capacity of the Ummah to save them.
Muslims have to be saved from Islam on the pain of death, in the same way they were led into the trap called Islam, in the first place.
So while an ideological war to weaken the legitimacy of Islam in the minds of those trapped inside Islam is fine, it is hardly sufficient by itself to defeat Islam. For that we only need to show the Muslims the beauty of Mushroom clouds forming over most cities and towns across the Islamic crescent, and give them a taste of their own medicine of mindless violence.
Only after the Muslims see the determination of the World to destroy Islam to its last man, can the surviving Muslims see sense in giving up Islam. The destroyer of Islam will have to pose himself/herself as a killer of all Muslims who if need be will do so till the last Muslim on earth. Are we ready to save ourselves and the civilized way of life by doing precisely this?
* For those uninitiated, PBUH expands to Perpetual Battle Upon Hagarism (Islam) founded by the mass-murderer and pedophile pretender prophet Mohammed-ibn-Abdallah (Yimach Shmo May his name and memory be obliterated).
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Select Bibliography
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o What the Koran Really Says: Language, Text, and Commentary by Ibn Warraq
o Islam and Terrorism: What the Quran Really Teaches About Christianity, Violence and the Goals of the Islamic Jihad by Mark A. Gabriel, Mark A. Gabriel
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o The Origins of the Koran: Classic Essays on Islam’s Holy Book by Ibn Warraq