Reposting the comment I made there, because you've reposted this ridiculous article.
Bluntly put, this is historically illiterate bilge. I wrote extensively on my blog about the many problems with Obama's Cairo speech shortly after he delivered it, including but not limited to how he attributed basically all the inventions of the Greeks, Chinese, and pre-Islamic Persians and Egyptians to 'Islam,' but this attempted correction you have here is no more historically accurate. The assertions that the Arabs invented ethnic cleansing and that the Turks invented genocide are particularly egregious errors. This is not to say that both groups have not participated in these activities, but to say that they invented them is ludicrous. Genocide and ethnic cleansing have a long and extensively-documented history in human civilisation that pre-dates the appearance of Arabs or the Turks on the world stage by over a millennium, and is certain to have occurred in the many thousands of years of human civilisation before we have such a wealth of documentary evidence. Behaviour that could reasonably be termed genocidal has even been observed in chimpanzees. If you want to see just a fraction of the evidence for yourself, pop down to the British Museum and you can see the Assyrian bas-reliefs—long pre-dating the rise of the Arabs—that are in large part basically the Assyrian king bragging about all the different peoples he exterminated.
As if that weren’t enough, this article makes the particular claim that 'the Arabs' "implemented [ethnic cleansing] over 2000 years ago in Israel when they occupied Israel and disseminated Jews around the world.” Even the most cursory glance at the history will tell you that this was the Babylonians (I’m it's referring to the Babylonian conquest, because that was the one that ended the first Jewish kingdoms there and was famous for beginning the first Diaspora). The Arabs did not even appear on the world stage as a conquering power until after the rise of Islam in the 7th Century AD, considerably less than 2000 years ago.
It comes closest to the truth when it discusses Grand Mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini. He did of course have a strong relationship with Hitler, recruited two Waffen SS Divisions from Bosnian Muslims (who subsequently mutinied, but over pay, not ideology), and begged Hitler to bring the holocaust to Palestine. But the fact that it includes such a wealth of outrageously false claims serves only to obscure and discredit any facts that might appear alongside such fantastic assertions. By posting this, you therefore sabotage any serious discussion of genocidal actions taken in the name of Islam, (some of which are cited here correctly, but again, in the context of a blatantly false overarching claim,) the genuine and well-documented link between Palestinian Arabs and Nazism, the esteem in which Hiter is held by many Islamists today, and other, similar things.
Reposting the comment I made there, because you've reposted this ridiculous article.
ReplyDeleteBluntly put, this is historically illiterate bilge. I wrote extensively on my blog about the many problems with Obama's Cairo speech shortly after he delivered it, including but not limited to how he attributed basically all the inventions of the Greeks, Chinese, and pre-Islamic Persians and Egyptians to 'Islam,' but this attempted correction you have here is no more historically accurate. The assertions that the Arabs invented ethnic cleansing and that the Turks invented genocide are particularly egregious errors. This is not to say that both groups have not participated in these activities, but to say that they invented them is ludicrous. Genocide and ethnic cleansing have a long and extensively-documented history in human civilisation that pre-dates the appearance of Arabs or the Turks on the world stage by over a millennium, and is certain to have occurred in the many thousands of years of human civilisation before we have such a wealth of documentary evidence. Behaviour that could reasonably be termed genocidal has even been observed in chimpanzees. If you want to see just a fraction of the evidence for yourself, pop down to the British Museum and you can see the Assyrian bas-reliefs—long pre-dating the rise of the Arabs—that are in large part basically the Assyrian king bragging about all the different peoples he exterminated.
As if that weren’t enough, this article makes the particular claim that 'the Arabs' "implemented [ethnic cleansing] over 2000 years ago in Israel when they occupied Israel and disseminated Jews around the world.” Even the most cursory glance at the history will tell you that this was the Babylonians (I’m it's referring to the Babylonian conquest, because that was the one that ended the first Jewish kingdoms there and was famous for beginning the first Diaspora). The Arabs did not even appear on the world stage as a conquering power until after the rise of Islam in the 7th Century AD, considerably less than 2000 years ago.
It comes closest to the truth when it discusses Grand Mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini. He did of course have a strong relationship with Hitler, recruited two Waffen SS Divisions from Bosnian Muslims (who subsequently mutinied, but over pay, not ideology), and begged Hitler to bring the holocaust to Palestine. But the fact that it includes such a wealth of outrageously false claims serves only to obscure and discredit any facts that might appear alongside such fantastic assertions. By posting this, you therefore sabotage any serious discussion of genocidal actions taken in the name of Islam, (some of which are cited here correctly, but again, in the context of a blatantly false overarching claim,) the genuine and well-documented link between Palestinian Arabs and Nazism, the esteem in which Hiter is held by many Islamists today, and other, similar things.
You are correct. I am withdrawing the article.
ReplyDelete