Jews Legally Purchased ‘Palestinian’ Land Before The Holocaust. Rashida Lied.

By Marina Medvin
https://townhall.com/columnists/marinamedvin/2019/05/15/jews-legally-purchased-palestinian-land-before-the-holocaust-rashida-lied-n2546349
May 15, 2019


Rashida Tlaib 

The history behind the rebirth of Israel is so deeply intertwined with Palestinian propaganda that it is difficult for most Americans to answer a simple question: how did Jews come to possess the land now known as Israel? Palestinian-first Rashida Tlaib has elucidated this propaganda plague through her recently publicized statements of  Jew-hatred, letting us know how calm and cozy she feels when she thinks about the Holocaust extermination of 6 million Jews. Leftists came to her defense, justifying her Jew-hatred as entitlement because her poor Palestinian predecessors allegedly helped the post-Holocaust Jews take their land, but now find themselves victims of these Jews. Rashida plainly lied and regurgitated Palestinian propaganda — she retold revisionist history. 

Jews didn’t “take” land. 

Jews Purchased The Land Before The Holocaust

In the 1800s, Jewish zionists, which are diaspora Jews who wanted to return to their biblical homeland, started buying land in the region of Palestine, which belonged to the Ottoman Empire (the Turks). The Empire made these land purchases very difficult, discriminatorily restricting Jews’ ability to purchase land in the region as much as they could through legislation. By the 1900s, land purchase became easier and Zionists accelerated their land purchases of the Turk-controlled land.

According to the Ottoman census of 1875, Jews constituted a majority of the population of Jerusalem. By 1905, they comprised two-thirds of Jerusalem. The Encyclopedia Britannica of 1910 stated Jerusalem’s population as 60,000, of which 40,000 were Jews. The population of both Jews and Christians surpassed that of Muslims in Jerusalem by the start of the twentieth century. 

After WWI, the Ottoman Empire was no more, and the British took control of the land known as Palestine. The 1917 Balfour Declaration had declared Great Britain’s support for the establishment of Jewish sovereignty in Palestine, in recognition of the ancient Jewish claim and connection to the land of Israel, describing this land as the “national home for the Jewish people.” The League of Nations (predecessor the the UN) unanimously adopted the British Mandate in 1922, overturning Ottoman-era restrictions and creating a legal right for Jewish people to settle anywhere between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.

Meanwhile in the early 1900’s in Europe, pogroms began. These were public lynchings of Jews and burnings of Jewish homes, businesses, schools, and places of worship. The Holocaust followed after WWII began in 1939. By 1945, six million Jewish people were murdered. The scale of the eradication was unprecedented. Consider a single weekend in Ukraine in 1941, in which 33,771 children, women, men, and elders were shot dead because they were born of “Jewish blood.”

The lucky European Jews who escaped or survived the brutalities had no more home in Europe. They needed to cement a Jewish nation where they can live safely, they need a permanent home. They went back to their historic homeland where many of their Jewish brethren were already established. These Zionists asked the League of Nations to formally recognize Israel as their own country, as their homeland. 

Israel was recognized as a country in 1948. The Arabs responded immediately by declaring war, vehemently opposing the establishment of a Jewish state. Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia attacked Israel. The tiny, infantile country of Israel stood strong over its older, established Arab neighbors. Israel won the battle, but an Arab-world war against Israel had but begun. 

Palestinian Arabs Fought Jews Since The 1800’s

“Palestinians” are not a distinct ethnic group and are instead a collection of impoverished Arabs who lived in the Palestinian region under the Ottoman Empire. Most were not landowners but were instead laborers who rented land from wealthy Turks that owned the land in the Palestinian region. The Palestinian identity was born when the Jewish state of Israel was internationally recognized. The majority of those identifying as Palestinian today are in fact Jordanian. 

From the beginning of the Zionist migration, Palestinian Arabs hated the Jews. This stemmed from centuries of living under an Islamic empire which categorized Jews as a diminutive class of people to the Muslim ruling class. Palestinians aligned with the Nazis during WWII and planned to exterminate their Jewish neighbors. 

Palestinian Arabs have fought Jews on land and religion since the 1800’s and their descendants continue to do so today. There is nothing novel about the “Great Return March” that plagued Israel for the past year; it is but a continuation of status quo. 

Knowing their opponents well, the Israelis kept all of the land purchase records. 

Palestinian Propaganda

Rashida Tlaib, who identifies as a Palestinian first and foremost, is on a propaganda spree against Israel. This has been her primary goal after being elected into office. Her first course of action was to put a stickie over Israel on her office map with the word “Palestine” written on it. She has made it clear that she supports the eradication of Israel and replacement of the world’s only Jewish country with an Islamic Palestine. 

“There’s always kind of a calming feeling, I tell folks, when I think of the Holocaust, and the tragedy of the Holocaust, and the fact that it was my ancestors — Palestinians — who lost their land and some lost their lives, their livelihood, their human dignity, their existence in many ways, have been wiped out, and some people's passports,” Tlaib said in an anti-Trump podcast. 

“And, just all of it was in the name of trying to create a safe haven for Jews, post-the Holocaust, post-the tragedy and the horrific persecution of Jews across the world at that time. And, I love the fact that it was my ancestors that provided that, right, in many ways, but they did it in a way that took their human dignity away and it was forced on them.”

History is thus revised, from land purchased from Ottoman Turk landowners, to land taken from Palestinians and redistributed to the Jews. And, in the revisionist version, that this was done post WWII, not something that started in the 1800’s. 

This type of history revisionism is part of the Palestinian propaganda movement. Palestinian propaganda includes revisionist history, brainwashing children, “pallywood” distortions, manipulation of leftist politics, calls to Jihad, and manipulation of the media, amongst other similarly disturbing techniques. And of course there’s the outlandish anti-semitic Jew-blaming for anything and everything, like earth quakes. 

A staple of the Palestinian propaganda ideology, as parroted by Tlaib, is the concept that Jews took their land. Luckily, those Jews kept the receipts from the land purchases.

Astonishingly, the usually pro-Palestinian CNN has changed their tune and done their part to counteract Tlaib’s propaganda. But they appear to be in the minority on the left.

For as long as leftists and their bowing media continue to act as an echo chamber for Palestinian propaganda, Tlaib and others like her will continue to thrive and brainwash our unassuming liberal youth. 

Forcing Congenital Females to Compete Against 'Trans-Women' Will Destroy Women's Sports and Everyone Knows It

BY MARK RIPPETOE
https://pjmedia.com/trending/forcing-congenital-females-to-compete-against-trans-women-will-destroy-womens-sports-and-everyone-knows-it/
May 13, 2019


Transgender powerlifter Mary Gregory (Instagram)

This topic has gotten a lot of attention recently. My recent podcast dealt with this, but nobody watches my podcast, and I seem to be the only one discussing it to my satisfaction, so I shall do it here. This time, the short version.

First, let's look at some facts. These are not my facts, they are the facts, and that means they are your facts too.

1. Humans are born either congenitally male or congenitally female, with a very small incidence of an intersex condition present at the rate of from 0.05% to 1.7% of live births, depending on who you talk to. The overwhelming majority of the human race is either congenitally male or congenitally female. This discussion does not involve intersex individuals like Castor Semenya, but rather congenital men who "identify" as women and wish to compete in the Women's division.
2. The differences between males and females are caused by the presence of testosterone in the developing fetus, the result of the chromosomal configuration of the fetus, starting at about 8 weeks after conception. In utero testosterone is powerful enough to cause the obvious primary sexual characteristics that differentiate males and females, as well as other very profound physiological and psychological characteristics of the two sexes. Among these differences are neuromuscular efficiency – the ability to quickly recruit muscle into contraction.
3. The Standing Vertical Jump (SVJ) test is a measure of the difference in height of the upraised hand between a standing position and at the top of a single countermovement jump with no foot movement and no step. It is regarded as the best indicator of the inherent capacity for power and explosive capacity. The men's record is 46” while the women's record is 31”. The averages, 22” for men and 14” for women, represent essentially the same ratio as the records. SVJ increases with age, from 10 years until it stabilizes from 21 to 30 and begins to degrade. It is a direct measurement of the ability to recruit muscle into contraction quickly – neuromuscular efficiency – and the differences between women and men have profound implications for both the performances and the training of women and men.
4. Puberty presents a new hormonal milieu to the landscape already primed for it in the womb. Testosterone surges to very high levels, and finishes the job already started in the male. Differences in skeletal proportion and density, pelvic shape, lung capacity, muscle size and strength, and the now-obvious secondary sexual characteristics are overwhelming in their remaking of the organism, from hands to feet, from jawbone to kneecaps. These changes are essentially permanent, and they are significant for physical performance, just like the in utero priming of the system.
5. Since performance (and every other physical characteristic) displays a range, with the averages and the records at the middle and the right-hand tails of the bell curves respectively, men's and women's performances will overlap to an extent. Record women's performances will overlap well into men's average performances, but women's average and record performances will never equal men's average and record performances in competitive athletics.
6. Testosterone administration does not significantly improve neuromuscular efficiency (power), and thus does not significantly improve the SVJ in either men or women. This means that SVJ performance and power is related to the pre-adolescent effects of testosterone on the fetus, and not to exogenous administration of testosterone for purposes of either performance enhancement or sexual transition. However, exogenous testosterone improves strength, as well as muscular endurance, a derivative of strength, and females given testosterone respond with increased strength, as do men.
7.  Globally, men and women have an average height difference ratio of about 1.08: for example, men's average height is 5'9.5” and women's average height is 5'4.5” in the USA. This ratio is pretty constant worldwide, with the closest ratio being 1.04 in a handful of African countries. Nowhere on earth is it 1.00.
8. Body composition of sedentary populations varies with sex, with men carrying an average of 4-6% lower bodyfat than women. For athletic populations, the total body fat is lower for both men and women, but the average differences remain 4-6% between the sexes.
9. Virtually all organized sports on earth that allow both sexes to compete have a Men's and a Women's division. Some sports allow mixed teams to compete, and if they do the teams are composed of both men and women. This is due to the obvious disparity in the performances of men and women. The data here are quite clear, and everyone on earth knows this whether they are prepared to admit it or not.
10. I looked very hard for this data recently, and I only found one instance of a female-to-male (FTM) transsexual athlete who entered the men's division, a boxer competing in a very light weight class. It appears that the vast majority of transsexual athletes who wish to participate in a division other than that of their congenital sex are MTF. I may have missed one – that does not alter the point here.

The point is that the International Olympic Committee and the International Association of Athletic Federations are wrong. Sometimes even large powerful organizations are wrong too – you've heard of that happening, I'm sure. Lowering the testosterone level of a congenital male to 5 nmol/l or any other arbitrary low number for one year does not remove the congenital advantage of having been born male. Neither does “sexual reassignment/affirmation” surgery. These organizations are participating in a lie for political purposes, to the detriment of women who want to compete in a separate Women's division. Proceeding as though congenital men are no different from women if their testosterone has been artificially lowered is merely agreeing upon the lie.

To my knowledge, the only organization that has this situation adequately covered is the US Strengthlifting Federation, with an Open and a Women's division. The Women's division is restricted to congenital females, while the Open division is available to anyone else under any circumstances. No one is excluded from competition, and congenital women compete against each other.

Sports competition has always been about a lack of “fairness,” if by that you mean an equality of outcome. Winners are always outliers, and this is especially true at the elite levels of all sports. Women have their own outliers, and women's competition finds these people – if it is allowed to do so.

Again, I am not concerned with Castor Semenya. I am concerned with our sisters and daughters and wives, and the women I train who just want to compete on the weekend to give their training a concrete purpose, or maybe even a scholarship to go to college. The Women's divisions of competitive sports are a rather recent phenomenon, one that I think has been an extremely positive development for the species as a whole. I'd hate to see it destroyed in the name of “Social Justice,” because justice will not have been served.

TLAIB'S MORBID FANTASIES OF A PALESTINIAN “SAFE HAVEN” FOR JEWS

By Joseph Klein
https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/273766/tlaibs-morbid-fantasies-palestinian-safe-haven-joseph-klein
May 14, 2019

Palestinian-American Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., is standing by her latest hate-filled statement, which is based on a monstrous falsehood. She said that she has a "kind of calming feeling" when she thinks about the Holocaust because her Palestinian "ancestors" tried "to create a safe haven for Jews, post-the Holocaust, post-the tragedy and the horrific persecution of Jews across the world at that time." In the same interview by hosts Michael Isikoff and Daniel Klaidman, Rep. Tlaib complained, according to her one-sided Palestinian victimhood narrative, “that it was my ancestors, Palestinians, who lost their land and some lost their lives, their livelihood, their human dignity, their existence in many ways…”

Rep. Tlaib's Palestinian "ancestors" were in fact amongst the enthusiastic boosters of the Nazi genocide machine during World War II. Palestinian leaders sought to carry on the plan to exterminate as many of the Jews as possible who had managed to escape the Holocaust and reach the Holy Land following the war. Instead of accepting the original two-state solution proposed by the United Nations more than seven decades ago under which the Palestinians could have been living in their own independent state all this time, their leadership rejected the idea of a Jewish state existing side by side in peace with a Palestinian state.

President Trump correctly admonished Rep. Tlaib, tweeting “Democrat Rep. Tlaib is being slammed for her horrible and highly insensitive statement on the Holocaust. She obviously has tremendous hatred of Israel and the Jewish people.” Bernie Sanders rushed to her defense. Senator Sanders tweeted that President Trump should apologize for “taking Rep. @RashidaTlaib's comments out of context.” This is the same man who said the Boston Marathon terrorist bomber should have the “right” to vote from jail.

Meanwhile, Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her Democratic leadership in the House are running for cover. They are allowing the recurrent trashing of the Jewish state by the newly elected Muslim members of their caucus to go unpunished. Falsifying history to serve the Palestinian propaganda narrative is yet another display of anti-Semitism. Here are some facts that Pelosi and her colleagues are choosing to ignore by their failure to act decisively against the anti-Semites in their midst.

Adolf Hitler talking to Grand Mufti Haj Amin el Husseini

Haj Amin al-Husseini, the former Grand Mufti of Jerusalem who was considered the father of Palestinian nationalism, sought an alliance with Adolf Hitler from the time of Hitler's early days in power, and continued his collaboration after the British exiled him to Iraq in 1938.  Haj Amin al-Husseini visited Hitler and his henchmen, including Heinrich Himmler, the architect of the Final Solution, in Berlin in 1941. Hitler himself assured his guest that Germany wanted “the destruction of the Jewish element residing in the Arab sphere.”  Al-Husseini spread Nazi propaganda and recruited Islamic youth to serve in the Germany military. He also sought to block the transport of Jewish children to the Holy Land. Himmler sent al-Husseini a letter in 1943 declaring that the "National-Socialist movement of greater Germany has made its fight against world Jewry a guiding principle since its very beginning." Himmler added, "For that reason it has been closely following the battle of freedom-seeking Arabs—and especially in Palestine—against the Jewish invaders" and sent the Palestinian leader his "warm wishes for the continuation of your battle until the big victory."

In his memoir, Haj Amin al-Husseini noted how the Nazis during the latter stages of the war “had put at our disposal four light, four-engine airplanes for the transportation of war materiel to Palestine, to be stored in secret shelters, for the training of Palestinian fighters and for their preparation for the battles to follow.” The “war materiel” included “tens of thousands of rifles, machine guns and light weapons and great quantities of equipment and ammunition.”

After the end of World War II, there was no Palestinian offer of “safe haven for Jews” in the Holy Land as Rep. Tlaib falsely claimed. The British authorities, while they were still in charge of the “Mandate for Palestine,” sided with Arab demands and placed significant restrictions on Jewish emigration from post-War Europe to the Holy Land. Refugee ships were turned back. Some Jews trying to enter the historic Jewish homeland were placed in internment camps. Haj Amin al-Husseini was anointed by the Arab League as the leader of the Palestinian Arabs, although he remained outside of the territory to avoid capture. Al-Husseini brooked no dissent from his extreme anti-Jewish position. On November 23, 1946, Fauzi Darwish el-Husseini, a relative of Haj Amin al-Husseini but an opponent of his who had sought reconciliation with Jews in the Holy Land, was assassinated.

Meanwhile, following years spent in exile in neighboring countries after participating in armed rebellions during the 1930’s against the British in the Palestinian territory then under British control, a leading militant by the name of Abd al-Qadir al-Husseini began working to smuggle arms into the Palestinian territory. He snuck back into the territory himself in December 1947. Abd al-Qadir al-Husseini soon took command of the Army of Holy War, which launched several military operations against Jewish forces in Jerusalem. These attacks included blowing up the Jewish Agency headquarters in Jerusalem, killing 12 and injuring 86 Jewish civilians. They occurred after the United Nations General Assembly had recommended in November 1947 a partition of the land inhabited by Jews and Palestinian Arabs. Jews accepted the UN proposal. The Palestinians and their supporters in neighboring Arab nations rejected it. In April 1948, Abd al-Qadir al-Husseini was killed during a battle and was lionized as a hero by many in the Arab world. When Israel declared its independence in May 1948, Palestinians, joined by armies of their neighboring Arab countries, launched a war against the Jews. This apparently is Rep. Tlaib's perverted notion of her ancestors' efforts "to create a safe haven for Jews, post-the Holocaust."

Rep. Tlaib whined that her latest words regarding the Holocaust and its aftermath were being twisted in order “to ignite vile attacks” on her and “silence” her. No, Rep. Tlaib, your words were quoted in context. Your own words show how you have inherited from your Palestinian “ancestors” the hatred for Jews living in their historic homeland that animated your ancestors’ alliance with the Nazis. With very few exceptions, your ancestors, like the Palestinian terrorists today, sought to create a graveyard for Jews before, during and after World War II, not a “safe haven.”

Joseph Klein is a Harvard-trained lawyer and the author of Global Deception: The UN’s Stealth Assault on America’s Freedom and Lethal Engagement: Barack Hussein Obama, the United Nations & Radical Islam.

The Case for Being Born

By Kevin D. Williamson

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/05/case-for-being-born/

May 12, 2019


(ISTOCKPHOTO)

Why are pro-abortion activists such as Brian Sims so angry? Because they abhor the alternative.

Sims, a Democratic member of the Pennsylvania state legislature, filmed himself berating an old woman and a few children who were praying outside of an abortion clinic in Philadelphia — a city that, as the home town of that ghastly butcher Kermit Gosnell, knows something about the horror of abortion. Sims even went so far as to share photos of the children on social media with requests that his followers help him “dox” them, meaning to track down private information about them for the purpose of harassment.

Children, these were.

And that is what this is really all about.

The Left’s war on children is by no means restricted to the project of maximizing the scope of opportunity to surgically dismember them prior to birth, preferably at public expense. From radical feminists to radical environmentalists to academics and such mainstream figures such as Bill Nye, the word has come down: Children are not the future, but the future’s enemies.

An interesting fact about our political discourse is that Population Bomb author Paul Ehrlich is still a part of it, commanding some attention in spite of his having been spectacularly wrong about every single major claim of his long public career. Erhlich has been delivering homilies on overpopulation since before I was born. Population Bomb, published in 1968, garnered a great deal of attention (and brisk sales!) for its claims that overpopulation made it inevitable that hundreds of millions of people would die of starvation in the 1970s. He was awfully sure of himself, as progressives so often are — “science says!” and all that — writing: “The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s, hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date, nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate.”

What happened, of course, was the opposite. Extreme poverty worldwide has been reduced by more than half in the past few decades; to the extent that famine exists at all in the world today, it exists almost exclusively as a political phenomenon, the product of failed states rather than failed crops.

But the cult of overpopulation takes no notice of the facts. Abortion advocates such as Representative Sims habitually present their case in Malthusian terms: He demanded of the elderly woman he was bullying whether she herself would provide for the material needs of the unwanted children who were being chopped to bits and stuffed into medical-waste containers inside the Planned Parenthood facility. Never mind, for the moment, the fact that there are far more American families looking to adopt children than there are abortions performed or children eligible to be adopted — the imbalance is so great that Americans go all over the world looking for children to adopt — and just consider the implicit argument there on its own merits, which is this: “If we think that there might be some inconvenience involved in seeing to the needs of these children, then it would be better to put them to death.”

But this line of argument does not end with the unwanted children who are killed by abortionists. Figures such as Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.) have suggested that having children may be immoral, and many of her progressive allies have gone much further than that. Utilizing the familiar “Science says!” rhetorical formulation, Travis Rieder of the Berman Institute of Bioethics insisted that people should forgo having children because of the impact those children might have on climate change. “Science proves kids are bad for Earth,” NBC headlined the essay, “Morality suggests we stop having them.” Writing in the New York Times under the headline “Would Human Extinction Be a Tragedy?” Clemson philosophy professor Todd May concludes that the disappearance of Homo sapiens “might just be a good thing.” The cultivated folksiness of the expression adds a special horror to the display of moral illiteracy. (And ordinary illiteracy: He writes that “nature itself is hardly a Valhalla of peace and harmony,” apparently unaware of the martial character of Valhalla or that the heroes there spent their time preparing for the great climactic battle of Ragnarök.) Professor May asks:

How much suffering and death of nonhuman life would we be willing to countenance to save Shakespeare, our sciences and so forth? Unless we believe there is such a profound moral gap between the status of human and nonhuman animals, whatever reasonable answer we come up with will be well surpassed by the harm and suffering we inflict upon animals.

Unless . . .

Chelsea Follett, writing at Human Progress, briefly taxonomizes the partisans of “anti-natalism,” the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement (“vehement,” they pronounce it; at least the end of the human race would spare us these dopey acronyms), etc. “Some anti-natalists are not content with promoting the voluntary reduction of birth rates,” she writes, “and would prefer to hurry the process along with government intervention. Various prominent environmentalists, from Johns Hopkins University bioethicist Travis Rieder to science popularizer and entertainer Bill Nye, support the introduction of special taxes or other state-imposed penalties for having ‘too many’ children. In 2015, Bowdoin College’s Sarah Conly published a book advocating a ‘one-child’ policy, like the one China abandoned. . . . Even after that policy’s collapse, she maintains it was ‘a good thing.’”

One of the fundamental differences in our public life is between those who see human beings as liabilities — as mouths to be fed and souls to be policed — and those of us who see human beings as assets. The economist Julian Simon ran the numbers and made the case for human beings as assets. His “Simon Abundance Index” measures the availability of resources relative to population and finds that with more people there are more resources. The Malthusians always forget to count the most dynamic and productive of all human resources: humanity.

One might be forgiven for seeing something providential in Representative Sims’s decision to attack a woman praying the Rosary, which points us toward a radically different understanding of childbirth and motherhood and fatherhood, one in which human beings participate in the creative work of the universe. It seems that none of Herod’s men ever thought to demand of Joseph or the Magi: “Are you going to pay for feeding that child? Huh? Huh?” It was understood. One need not be a Christian, or even religious, to grasp the moral philosophy illustrated there — or to be repulsed by the grotesque and vicious alternative to it personified by Representative Sims et al.

Turkey Venerates Its Violent Conquest of Christian Territory with Conversion of Hagia Sophia to a Mosque

BY RAYMOND IBRAHIM

https://pjmedia.com/homeland-security/turkey-venerates-its-violent-conquest-of-christian-territory-with-conversion-of-hagia-sophia-to-a-mosque/

May 8, 2019

It’s official: Turkey plans on converting the Hagia Sophia museum—for centuries, one of Christendom’s grandest basilicas—into a mosque.

Although President Erdoğan often tells Western/secular media that his decision is a sort of tit for tat—now a response to Israel’s treatment of Jerusalem’s Al Aqsa mosque, now a response to European resistance to more Muslim migrants—the true significance behind his desire to transform Hagia Sophia came out in March 31, 2019.

After reporting that “Turkey's president has recited an Islamic prayer in the Hagia Sophia, a historic Istanbul landmark that has become a symbol of interfaith and diplomatic tensions,” AP added that Erdoğan also dedicated his prayer to the “souls of all who left us this work as inheritance, especially Istanbul's conqueror.”

He is not alone in his desire to turn Hagia Sophia into a mosque as a way of venerating its jihadi conquerors; more than 97 percent of Turks surveyed said they want to see Hagia Sophia turned into a mosque, not because there is a dearth of places to pray—as of 2010, there were 3,000 active mosques in Istanbul alone—but to revel in the glory (that is, gory) days of jihad, and honor its practitioners.

To quote Salih Turhan, head of the Anatolian Youth Association, a group that annually organizes mass demonstrations around Hagia Sophia: “As the grandchildren of Mehmet the Conqueror, seeking the re-opening Hagia Sophia as a mosque is our legitimate right.”

In what follows, we revisit exactly what Mehmet (the Turkish pronunciation of “Muhammad”) did to prompt so many modern Turks, including their president, to honor him, including by transforming Hagia Sophia into a mosque. (All quotes in the following narrative are from primary sources, mostly eyewitnesses, and are documented in my recent book, Sword and Scimitar: Fourteen Centuries of War between Islam and the West).

Hagia Sophia—Greek for “Holy Wisdom”—was built around 537 AD in Constantinople, the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire, which for nearly a millennium was a stalwart symbol of defiance against an ever encroaching Islam from the east.

After parrying centuries of jihadi thrusts, Mehmet sacked Constantinople on May 29, 1453, and turned Hagia Sophia into a mosque (until a then secularizing Turkey turned it into a museum in 1935).

Once inside the city, “The enraged Turkish soldiers . . . gave no quarter,” wrote an eyewitness:

When they had massacred and there was no longer any resistance, they were intent on pillage and roamed through the town stealing, disrobing, pillaging, killing, raping, taking captive men, women, children, old men, young men, monks, priests, people of all sorts and conditions…  There were virgins who awoke from troubled sleep to find those brigands standing over them with bloody hands and faces full of abject fury…  [The Turkish jihadis] dragged them, tore them, forced them, dishonored them, raped them at the cross-roads and made them submit to the most terrible outrages… Tender children were brutally snatched from their mothers’ breasts and girls were pitilessly given up to strange and horrible unions, and a thousand other terrible things happened. . .

Because thousands of citizens had fled to and were holed up in Hagia Sophia, it offered an excellent harvest of slaves once its doors were axed down.

“One Turk would look for the captive who seemed the wealthiest, a second would prefer a pretty face among the nuns. . . . Each rapacious Turk was eager to lead his captive to a safe place, and then return to secure a second and a third prize. . . . Then long chains of captives could be seen leaving the church and its shrines, being herded along like cattle or flocks of sheep.”

The slavers sometimes fought each other to the death over “any well-formed girl,” even as many of the latter “preferred to cast themselves into the wells and drown rather than fall into the hands of the Turks.”

Having taken possession of one of Christendom’s greatest and oldest basilicas—nearly a thousand years old at the time of its capture—the invaders “engaged in every kind of vileness within it, making of it a public brothel.” On “its holy altars” they enacted “perversions with our women, virgins, and children,” including “the Grand Duke’s daughter who was quite beautiful.” She was forced to “lie on the great altar of Hagia Sophia with a crucifix under her head and then raped.”

Next “they paraded the [Hagia Sophia’s main] Crucifix in mocking procession through their camp, beating drums before it, crucifying the Christ again with spitting and blasphemies and curses. They placed a Turkish cap . . . upon His head, and jeeringly cried, ‘Behold the god of the Christians!’” They “gouged the eyes from the [embalmed] saints” and dumped their corpses “in the middle of the streets for swine and dogs to trample on . . . and the images of our Lord Jesus Christ and His Saints were burned or hacked to pieces.”

Many other churches in the ancient city suffered the same fate. “The crosses which had been placed on the roofs or the walls of churches were torn down and trampled.” The Eucharist was hurled to the ground; holy icons were stripped of gold, “thrown to the ground and kicked.” Bibles were stripped of their gold or silver illuminations before being burned. “Icons were without exception given to the flames.” Patriarchal vestments were placed on the haunches of dogs; priestly garments were placed on horses.

“Everywhere there was misfortune, everyone was touched by pain” when Sultan Mehmet finally made his grand entry into the city. “There were lamentations and weeping in every house, screaming in the crossroads, and sorrow in all churches; the groaning of grown men and the shrieking of women accompanied looting, enslavement, separation, and rape.”

The sultan rode to Hagia Sophia, dismounted, and went in, “marveling at the sight” of the grand basilica. Like other churches that came under Muslim control—such as John the Baptist’s basilica, now the Great Mosque of Damascus—Hagia Sophia’s lot was not destruction but transformation into a mosque. After having it cleansed of its crosses, statues, and icons—the sultan himself knocked over and trampled on its altar—Mehmet ordered a muezzin to ascend the pulpit and sound “their detestable prayers. Then this son of iniquity [the sultan], this forerunner of Antichrist, mounted upon the Holy Table to utter forth his own prayers,” thereby “turning the Great Church into a heathen shrine for his god and his Mahomet.”

This, then, is what Turkey’s Muslims and president are proud of: the violent conquest of ancient Christian territory, and the atrocity-laden transformation of its greatest cathedral into a mosque; this is what they are eager to honor by turning Hagia Sophia into a mosque again. For make no mistake: if the average Westerner is clueless concerning the history of Hagia Sophia, every Turk is taught it in youth.

Openly idolizing Mehmet and doing what he did in his honor—retransforming Hagia Sophia into a mosque—as Erdoğan has decreed to the joy of many Turks, is tantamount to their saying, “We are proud of our ancestors who slaughtered, beheaded, enslaved and raped people and stole their lands simply because they were Christian infidels.”

Note: For more details on the siege and subsequent rape of Constantinople, see Chapter 7 of Sword and Scimitar.