Comments

1. On October 27, 2022 at 8:42 pm, Georgiaboy61 said:

   Re: “Militant herdsmen is such an odd moniker. Who actually are they?”

   Possibly, they are affiliated with Boko Haram, a jihadist group known to be active in Nigeria. Or, perhaps an offshoot of the Janjaweed (in Arabic, “mounted gunmen”) tribesmen normally found in Sudan and parts of Chad. Both groups are known for conducting horse and vehicle mounted raids upon vulnerable rural areas in order to take young women and girls as captives – either to be ransomed off or auctioned at the slave market – and also for looting and pillaging whatever wealth is to be found.

   Such cavalry-like raids – whether on land or sea – have long been a part of Islam throughout its 1,400 year history.

   The predations of the Janjaweed (Arabic Sudanese) against their fellow Sudanese who were non-Muslims became so severe that the victims eventually formed the new nation of the South Sudan in order to gain some measure of security and safety. It is also now routine for exposed settlements in outlaying areas to have small arms and other weapons as a defense against such raids.

   As for Boko Haram and the Janjaweed, the media propagandists and apologists for Islam often say that these groups are not “real Muslims,” but on the contrary, they are merely doing as their prophet did 1,400 years ago when Mohammed and his followers raided infidel (non-Muslim) settlements for the purpose of slave-taking, raiding and pillaging.

   Any believer who perishes while engaged in such jihad is promised by Islamic doctrine a place in paradise upon his death. And if he survives, whatever his “right hand takes” from the infidels is his to keep, whether loot or those taken as slaves.

   As for the men of those settlements which are conquered by the raiders, it is usually their practice to kill all of the men of age to fight or older. Children and women may be taken as slaves or put to the sword as well. This is the fate of the infidel under the rule of Muslims.

2. On October 27, 2022 at 11:50 pm, Georgiaboy61 said:

   Re: “For history and context, see this short post by Herschel on gun control in Nigeria and the rise of Boko Haram Muslim mass murderers.”

   Herschel is correct insofar as the Muslims are opportunists, par excellence. If resisted strongly, they often retreat to fight or raid another day, but if they are met with weak resistance or none at all, they press some their attack all the more.
   Osama Bin Laden famously said in one of his video messages to the West, that “Islam respects the strong horse…” In this, he was telling the truth.

   Gun control – wherever it may be found – always makes the work of the predator easier, regardless of who he may be, and the Muslims are no different. It is germane to note, however, that in many Islamic societies which harbor dhimmis, or non-Muslims living as second-class citizens and de facto slaves of Muslims, non-Muslims are prohibited from owning weapons.

   The first modern genocide, the Armenian genocide of 1915-1921, carried out by the Sunni Muslim Ottoman Empire of the Turks against Greek, Armenian and other Christians, left an estimated 1.5 million dead. Not many years prior to undertaking that wanton act of murder, the Ottoman government enacted against their intended victims a number of strict controls on the ownership/possession of firearms.

   However, Herschel errs perhaps in identifying the actions of Boko Haram and similar groups as being in any way new. They are not. Muslims have been steadily killing infidels (non-Muslims) in large numbers for the last 1,400 years.

   Indeed, according to the historians Will and Ariel Durant, in their epic multi-volume history “The Story of Civilization,” identify Muslims as the most-prolific mass murderers in human history, having put an estimated 280 million victims to the sword.

   And not only are Muslims the greatest killers in aggregate, they are also responsible for the single largest act of genocide ever committed, the mass murder of Hindus, Buddhists, and other non-Muslims in what is now the Indian subcontinent during the 1500s under the Mughal Empire. During one particularly bloody multiyear span, an estimated fifty million innocents were slain.

   Of course, according to Islamic doctrine and sharia law, the killing of non-Muslims isn’t murder, but a valid act of jihad or holy war, as commanded by the foundational sources of Islam, including Mohammed himself.

   The Islamic tide which threatened Europe was checked at Tours in 732, and again at Lepanto in 1571, and again at the Gates of Vienna in 1683. It was finally rolled back after dozens upon dozens of attempts to conquer Europe – Christendom as it was then called – only because of the faith and skill at arms of European civilization.

   In the present-day, Old Europe is imperiled thanks to the loss of her faith and the self-belief and confidence necessary to sustain a civilization. The rough men of whom Orwell spoke who once stood guard upon the walls of her civilization were taken down and told they were no longer needed, and now the Saracens are in the act of conquering Europe not with weapons but with the wombs of their women.

3. On October 28, 2022 at 12:29 pm, =TW= said:

   ^^^ Agree. “Demographics is destiny.”
   Until recently Muslims were concentrated in fairly well-defined areas.

   Not anymore.

4. On October 29, 2022 at 12:57 am, Georgiaboy61 said:

   @ TW

   Re: “Demographics is destiny.”

   Indeed it is, and as Mark Steyn quipped in his book, “America Alone,” the ‘future belongs to those who show up,’ and the Muslims are showing up. Even at the time of that book’s publication in 2008, the most-common names in many nurseries and birthing centers in the hospitals of European cities like Rotterdam and London were not names native to those lands, but Islamic names like Osama, Mohammed, and the like.

   By the usual suspects and mouthpieces, much has been made of the fact that not all Muslims engage in jihad of the sword and commit acts of violence. They ask upon what rational basis should anyone fear these people?

   The answer lies in the fecundity of Islamic families, of Islamic women, in foreign infidel lands. Whereas native Europeans are not even reproducing to replacement rates, when they have children at all, the newcomers from the Islamic world are siring children at a rate much higher than replacement. It does not take a math major or a statistician to see the implications in one, two or three generations time. If these trends are not halted and reversed, many nations and cities in Europe will be majority Muslim within a few decades, if not sooner.

   Re: “Until recently Muslims were concentrated in fairly well-defined areas. Not anymore.”

   Yes, quite right and here are some of the reasons why.

   The Ottoman Empire fell in 1921-1922, according to most historians. Later that decade, an Egyptian school-teacher named Hassan al-Banna founded the organization known in Arabic as al-Ikhwān al-Muslimūn, better known in the West as the Muslim Brotherhood.

   The Ikhwan as they are known, served to keep alive the dream of the caliphate which was lost when the Ottoman Empire fell after many centuries of existence.
   From its humble beginnings in Egypt, the organization spread around the world to Islamic peoples wherever they were found.

   During the colonial era and its aftermath leading into the First and Second World Wars, the Islamic world in much of Africa, the Middle East and Asia was bottled up by the various nation-state empires and overall strength and vitality of European civilization around the world. In this manner, the British, French, Germans, Spanish, Portuguese, Belgians and Dutch kept the lid on Islamic uprisings and independence movements in their various colonial possessions.

   However, after the Second World War ended, an era of anti-colonial wars of independence began, including in parts of the world with large Islamic populations. The new bipolar system of the Cold War – Russia and her allies on one side and the U.S. & NATO on the other – somewhat replaced the old imperial order, but not completely.

   Significantly, both sides in the Cold War began trying to use the Islamic world as a weapon against the other side. The Russians and East Germans armed and trained many of the nations of Africa and the Middle East, supplying their military forces with surplus aircraft, tanks, small arms and much else. The U.S. & her allies did the same elsewhere. In the various Indo-Pakistani Wars, for example, after the partition of India, the communists took the side of India, and the West of Pakistan… a strange arrangement, but that’s how it went down.

   The Muslim Brotherhood gained a foothold in Europe by the mid-1960s thanks to CIA efforts to weaponize them against the Soviets.

   But what really swung the balance of power in favor of the Islamic world was oil.
   As the U.S. and other nations of the West drew down domestic petroleum reserves, the Arabs found themselves in the driver’s seat, in a manner that they had not in a very long time… and soon, they were awash in billions in petroleum-related profits.

   By the 1960s, the Sunni Arab oil kingdoms were using those riches to modernize their nations, but also they began to funnel vast sums to the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamist causes. Such funding was done on a sub-rosa basis, difficult to pin down and diffuse.

   Although the governments of nations like Saudi Arabia could not, for business reasons, be seen as open and enthusiastic supporters of such groups as the POL-Fatah, or the Black September, to name two such jihadist terror groups, it was a simple matter for the various billionaire princes of the royal house to channel monies to them via indirect means. Cutouts, intermediaries, and so on.
   The House of Saud and others also began a vast project of spreading Islam throughout the world, including in the non-Muslim nations… funding Islamic schools (madrasas), community centers, non-profits, mosques, and the like.

   The Petrodollar Agreement with the United States by the mid-1970s gave the Arab oil kingdoms a hand on the tiller steering U.S. foreign policy, one reason why the U.S. and her allies fought so many wars in the Middle East over the fifty years since that time. Why? The agreement mandated that the U.S.government protect from all enemies, foreign and domestic, the members of OPEC in particular Saudi Arabia.

   This gave rise to a peculiar situation whereby the U.S. government and banking/finance industries were on good terms and “friends” with the Arabs, while behind their backs, the Sunni oil kingdoms funded Islamic supremacism, jihadist groups and Muslim terrorism around the world.

   Gives a new meaning to the words “two-faced,” doesn’t it? But then that has always been the true face of Islam: As noted scholar Dr. Paul Warner notes, the essential shape-shifting or two-faced nature of Islam is one of the reasons why it has been so difficult to defeat comprehensively. When is the smile genuine, and when does it hide a dagger to be plunged into one’s back once one turns away?

   Using the power of oil and the ocean of profits generated from it, the Islamic world has gone on the offensive again, over the last half-century, arguably since the late 1950s which is when Yasser Arafat formed Fatah, the paramilitary arm of the Palestinian Liberation Army or PLO.

   The U.S. and those parts of the West with at least some domestic reserves of oil and fossil fuels have been more-resistant to the Islamic counter-attack and waves of Islamic migrants flooding into the infidel world, but Europe is quite far gone.

5. On October 29, 2022 at 3:19 pm, =TW= said:

   It seems every Gov’t that ventures into that area gets its fingers burned.
   Brits, Russians, most recently USA.

   https://winstonchurchill.org/resources/in-the-media/churchill-in-the-news/churchill-an-unlikely-adviser-in-the-afghan-conflict/
   (See also: Kipling, Michener, Somerset Maugham)

   Winston understood India is not, and never really was a Country as we know the term.
   The subcontinent was an aggregation of local potentates, multiple belief systems and some five hundred dialects. It was overrun at various times by Persians, Greeks and Moguls (= Moslem Mongols.) Each of these incursions left a social and religious residue.

   The Portuguese and (I think) the Venetians had some trading ports. Britain “eased” out those competitors, established the Raj, and imposed a measure of order and progress.

   Upon gaining independence from England, India exploded, resulting in millions of deaths, countless refugees and the formation of Pakistan (97% Muslim.)

   Like Churchill, I’m not convinced this is an improvement.

6. On October 29, 2022 at 10:11 pm, Georgiaboy61 said:

   @ TW

   Re: “It seems every Gov’t that ventures into that area gets its fingers burned.
   Brits, Russians, most recently USA.”

   Yes, quite so. The British have been in Afghanistan on three separate occasions since the mid-19th century, in 1832-42, 1878-1880, and in 1919. One might imagine that they’d have learned not to meddle around in that part of the world, but they – being good UN members and all – jumped in again with both feet 2001 and beyond. Do you suppose they have burned fingers yet??

   Do the diplomats and foreign policy wonks in the swamp of Washington, D.C. have singed fingers yet? You’d think so after a twenty year lesson in blow-back and the law of unintended consequences 2001-2021, right? If we count intervening in the Afghan-Soviet War of the late 1970s-1980s, this is the second incursion into the ‘Stan by the American imperium in less than a half century and with time to spare. Not sure whether to count that one or not, since it was only a war by proxy and not a direct, boots-on-the-ground “adventure”…

   Churchill’s observations were astute, which is no surprise. He was a gifted analyst and interpreter of geopolitics and world events, without question. He had a real sense of history, too, which is always a plus in someone who aspired to be a statesman, as he did.

   Speaking of nations which are nation-states in name only, Afghanistan certainly fills the bill on that score. The much-ballyhooed national government in Kabul may run things in the capitol city and one or two other large urban areas, but the real power in that country are the tribal chieftains in the hinterlands.

   The U.S.-led coalition tried to impose western-style democracy and way of life on the Iraqis, but failed for same reason a similar effort failed in Afghanistan. Tribal cultures divide power and influence along clan lines, and not those lines set by elections or political agreements agreed to by westerners in some treaty the natives don’t recognize.

   Western-style democratic institutions sprang from and took root in the soil of European civilization, and grow best there. After the expensive twenty-plus year failure to transplant them into the arid soils of the Middle East and SW Asia, it remains an open question whether this is even possible. They didn’t want what we were selling, and all of the pie-in-the-sky wishful thinking in the world to the contrary by the interventionists and schemers in Washington and Brussels won’t change that fact.

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