"The situation
has gotten so dire that Ibrahim
Eissa, a popular Egyptian journalist and TV personality, apparently unable
to keep silent over the plight of the Copts, recently said on live TV: “The
Christians have suffered in Egypt, over the course of 2 ½ years. Their
churches have been burned, their children killed. The Maspero
Massacre occurred, where several Copts were slain. Catastrophic
fatwas appeared, calling them infidels and inciting against them…. No one
has suffered as much as they.
"Today, if any Christian attempts to join a protest, he does so at the
risk of defying dozens of fatwas calling for his death and decapitation and the
burning of churches, especially in Upper Egypt.”With the ouster of Muhammad
Morsi, Egypt’s Islamists have finally gotten the pretext they need to cleanse
the nation of its Christian minority, the Copt’s—ironically, Egypt’s most
native sons.
"The unprecedented hate currently being visited on them is fueled by
Islam’s “How
Dare You?” phenomenon: As conquered non-Muslims, Christians must live as
dhimmis, that is, according to traditional Islamic teaching, barely tolerated
“infidels” who must be humble and submissive—to the point that they are not
permitted to raise their hands to Muslims even when attacked.Far from assuming
their “proper place,” Egypt’s Christians supported the June 30 Revolution
against the will
and threats of the Brotherhood. Thus, to Egypt’s disenfranchised and
bitter Brotherhood and its supporters, Egypt’s Christians, beginning with their
pope, are all now free game."
http://victorhanson.com/wordpress/?p=6324#more-6324
Here is a nice summary of events starting with Mohammed in 650.
"WAR/HISTORY: A Timeline of Islamic Expansion In The Dark Ages
Let me put down here some facts that are worth returning to from time to time,
as arguments over the history of Islam and Islamism are back in the news with
today's beheading in London. In debates over the history of tension between
Muslims and Christians, the Crusades are often cited, out of their historical
context, as the original cause of such clashes, as if both sides were peaceably
minding their own business before imperialist Westerners decided to go launch a
religious war in Muslim lands.
This is not what actually happened, and indeed it is wrong to suggest that the
fragmented feudal states of the West in the Eleventh Century were capable of
any such thing as imperialism or colonialism (although, as Victor Davis Hanson
has noted, even in the centuries after the fall of Rome, Western civilization retained
a superior logistical ability to project force overseas due to the scientific,
economic and military legacies of ancient Greece and Rome). Moreover, when
Islam first arose, much of what we think of today as Islamic 'territory' around
the Black Sea, the Middle East and North Africa was Christian. Islam conquered
Christians under Muhammad. The conquest contimued to the present
day. That entire Middle East and North Africa was part of the Roman and
later Byzantine empires, and was culturally part of the West until it was
conquered by Muslim arms.
All that said, it's worth remembering that the Crusades arose in the late
Eleventh Century only after four centuries of relentless Islamic efforts to
conquer Europe, and the Christians of the Crusading era cannot be evaluated
without that crucial context.
COLD
It's somewhat hazy to identify the genesis of the first battle between the
Byzantines and Islamic forces, which probably took place around 629 at the
Battle of Mu'tah, before Muhammad had even completed the conquest of Mecca; the
first sea battle between Muslim and Byzantine forces took place a few years
later. The fall of Mecca in 630 solidified Muhammad's control of the western
side of the Arabian peninsula, and Muhammad died in 632. A decisive Muslim
victory at the Battle of Ajnadayn in 634 spread Muslim control into modern
Israel. Between 634 and 689, Muslim forces conquered Christian, Byzantine-held
Syria and North Africa.
Starting in the middle of the Seventh Century, when Islam was still mostly united
under a single political entity, you begin to see Islamic incursions into
Europe (including Constantinople, which was effectively one of the leading
European cities at the time) - and from there, the conquests and attempted
conquests marched on. If you look on a map over this period, you see an almost
continuous line of advance on Europe from all sides but the north - from Spain
and France in the west to Italy in the center to Constantinople in the east to
the frontiers of Georgia in the Caucasus, with the islands of the Mediterranean
on the front lines:
650-54: Muslim conquest of Cyprus.
652: Muslim Invasion of Sicily begins.
674-78: First Muslim Siege of Constantinople, repelled with the invention and
deployment of "Greek Fire."
WARM
711-18: Muslim Conquest of Spain, which would not be reconquered completely by
the Christians until 1492.
717-18: Second Muslim Siege of Constantinople.
719: Muslim invasion of France begins, establishing Muslim control of the
Septimania region of southwestern France.
732: Battle of Poitiers (Tours); Charles Martel halts Muslim northward march
into central France.
736: Muslim Conquest of Georgia, where the Emirate of Tbilisi would hold sway
until 1122.
820: Muslim Conquest of Crete, which would be held until 961.
827: Muslim Conquest of Syracuse in Sicily.
846: The Muslim Sack of Rome by troops landing at the port of Ostia, including
the sack of St. Peter's Basilica while Pope Leo III and the helpless Roman
garrison retreated behind the city walls.
847: Muslim Conquest of Bari in southern Italy; the Muslim presence on the
Italian peninsula proper lasted 25 years. In 915, at the Battle of Garigliano,
Pope John X personally led an army against Islamic forces in southern Italy
863: In a rare break from the pattern of this era, the Byzantines go back on
offensive, with mixed results over the next 200-300 years of warfare.
902: Muslim Conquest of all Sicily. In 965, an independent Emirate of Sicily
would be established lasting until 1091.
COLD TO 1200. THEN WARM
1048-1308: The Byzantine-Seljuk Wars, yet another continuation of the mutual,
longstanding efforts by the Byzantines and their Islamic neighbors to conquer
each other's territory. In 1071, the Battle of Manzikert would prove the first
of a series of decisive engagements (followed by the 1176 Battle of
Myriokephalon) that gradually wrested Asia Minor from the Byzantines,
converting it from a Christian land to a Muslim one and isolating the remaining
Byzantine presence to the immediate surroundings of their historic capital of
Constantinople.
And, of course, Islamic efforts against Europe and the West would continue well
after the Crusades, from the Fall of Constantinople in 1453 to the naval
incursions finally stopped at Lepanto in 1571 to the epic Seige of Vienna in
1683 (which in turn was followed by another century of bloody wars between the
Ottomans and Hapsburgs).
As has often been noted, the early history of Muhammad as a military leader and
Islam as the driving force of conquest is quite different from the early history
of Christianity as the persecuted faith founded by a non-violent martyr, and
these differing foundations have presented different challenges for Christian
and Muslim thinkers dealing with questions of war, peace, and the defense of
self and others. That said, none of this is intended to demonize Muslims as
uniquely violent in the Dark Ages. Aggressive wars of conquest were the rule
throughout the world in those centuries, and have become only fitfully less so
into our own age.
But the Crusades did not originate in a vacuum; they were launched in a world
where the Roman Empire, the guardian of Western Civilization, had fallen to
outside invaders 600 years earlier and European Christians had been on the
defensive ever since. The Europe that would stand astride the non-Western world
into the middle of the Twentieth Century was still distant in the future. The
fearful and divided Christian principalities of 1095 had grown up in a world
where Islam, not Christianity, had been the engine of imperial expansion for
long before living memory.
Virtually nobody in the West and/or what passes for Christendom today argues
that violence can or should be justified on the basis of things that happened a
thousand years ago. The insistence of Islamist propagandists on revisiting such
ancient history for present-day propaganda purposes should be resisted - but it
should also be subjected to the corrective of accurate history. And that
history is one in which Muslims carried the sword to Europe for centuries
before Christian armies took the Crusade to them."
sorce: baseball crank may 22, 2013
Tuesday, August 13, 2013
Monday, October 11, 2010
Warren Buffet on Gold
“Gold gets dug out of the ground in Africa, or someplace. Then we melt it down, dig another hole, bury it again and pay people to stand around guarding it. It has no utility. Anyone watching from Mars would be scratching their head.”
Wednesday, October 6, 2010
Why GM IPO is vastly overpriced at $1/share
"Workers lived a lot longer than they were expected to. Those factors mean that the ratio between retirees and workforce became extremely lopsided; at the moment, GM has a little over 50,000 hourly employees--and about a half a million retirees.
That left the pension badly underfunded...Meanwhile, soaring health care costs were making the health care benefits even more of a problem than the pensions."
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2010/10/new-gm-same-old-union/64088/
Tuesday, October 5, 2010
New Ice Age?
I expect it to last 200 years and start in next 50 years
http://rt.com/prime-time/2010-10-04/coldest-winter-emergency-measures.html
http://rt.com/prime-time/2010-10-04/coldest-winter-emergency-measures.html
Cuba Fires 500,000 workers
When everybody works for the state then there is no one left to pay taxes needed to pay government salaries. Russia and China used to support Cuba and the Cuban government sold cigars. Then Chavez supported Cuba. Now he has no more money.
Now the plan is to fire 500,000 government workers who have orders to get a job. Because all jobs are government jobs they have been ordered (on pain of death) to start private businesses that will hire lots of people, pay lots of taxes and save the Revolution. Excessive profits will be frowned upon. This is a trial run for Obama's recovery plan.
Viva Obama!
http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=CNG.649318c517e989a6cb277015a7fa72dd.1301&show_article=1
Now the plan is to fire 500,000 government workers who have orders to get a job. Because all jobs are government jobs they have been ordered (on pain of death) to start private businesses that will hire lots of people, pay lots of taxes and save the Revolution. Excessive profits will be frowned upon. This is a trial run for Obama's recovery plan.
Viva Obama!
http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=CNG.649318c517e989a6cb277015a7fa72dd.1301&show_article=1
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