The Rise of the Russian Empire: Russo-Armenian Relations

[Armenian]

Re: The Rise of the Russian Empire: Russo-Armenian Relations

Don't forget about our Hayrenik enker.

I haven't forgotten, it's just that I don't think you can compare the two. When I said "bastion of Christianity" I meant it in the sense that Russia today is a massive superpower that clearly identifies itself (at least culturally) as Orthodox Christian. This alone will have great sociopolitical implications and will prove to have a massive impact upon Christian identity in Eurasia. Based on what I have been able to observe, in some respects, Christian/Orthodox culture is making a much faster comeback in Russia than in Armenia. There is even a relatively large society of militant Orthodox Christians emerging in Russia. There are various sociological reasons for this. Nevertheless, Orthodox Christianity in Russia (historically the scourge of Islam and Judaism in Eurasia and the foundation Russian identity) is gradually getting stronger throughout the Russian Federation. This is because the central authorities in Moscow have realized that the best defense against the incessant attacks against Russian society by globalism, western secularism, Judaism and Islam is to rekindle the flames of Russian Orthodoxy, which as I said earlier is integral to Russian identity. Incidentally, Vladimir Putin has been at the very forefront of promoting Christian Orthodoxy and the strengthening of the Russian Orthodox Church throughout the world. One of the great longterm consequences of this may be seen in the eventual union of various Orthodox societies in the region.

[crusader1492]

Re: The Rise of the Russian Empire: Russo-Armenian Relations

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Are these the "militant Orthodox Christians" you are talking about? If so, how do they express their militency?

[Armanen]

Re: The Rise of the Russian Empire: Russo-Armenian Relations

I hope Russia can get its act together socially. However it will be tough. I was in Russia a few years ago and have family there, and from what I have seen and heard, it in many was is easily and quickly succumbing to uber materialism and the mtv culture that comes with it. Drug use, alcohol abuse, teen sex, abortions, etc. are all on the rise or very high. I hope to see the forces of Orthodoxy triumph in Russia.

With that said, I want to see more people and groups in Armenia work toward preventing the above sins from infecting our own society to the degree it has in the so called west and Russia. Already there are signs that things are getting worse, and I think this is as big a threat to our nationhood as war with azerbaijan.

[Armenian]

Re: The Rise of the Russian Empire: Russo-Armenian Relations

Are these the "militant Orthodox Christians" you are talking about? If so, how do they express their militency?

Yes they are. The men in the picture are from one of the larger/more powerful Orthodox groups in Russia called the Orthodox Gonfalon Holders Union. They are like a grassroots public advocacy group we are familiar with in the West - but with a Russian/Orthodox twist. They engage in demonstrations/protests against western secularism, materialism, immorality, drug/alcohol addiction, communism, spread of Islam in Russia... They have held pro-Serbian demonstrations. They held protests against Madonna performing in Russia. They had a public burnings of Harry Potter books. They also protest, sometimes violently, against European Union sponsored Gay rights parades in Moscow. They have contacts with various other Orthodox unions throughout the former Soviet Bloc. They are like skinheads for Jesus. In short, they are the kind of people I would love to hang out with...

[yerazhishda]

Re: The Rise of the Russian Empire: Russo-Armenian Relations

What is the purpose in wearing all black?

[Armenian]

Re: The Rise of the Russian Empire: Russo-Armenian Relations

Time for a gold rouble?

There used to be a habit of framing old Tsarist bonds and putting them on the wall. Lenin's decision to renege on the Russian imperial debt meant that it became mere paper, interesting only as a historical relic. In the light of the recent financial crisis in the USA, could the same thing happen now to the bonds issued by the American government, and could the country which has dominated the world for the last half century now enter history as a bankrupt state? And what can Russia do in the circumstances?

The decision by the US government to inject $700 billion into the financial system means that the already gigantic annual budget deficit of the American state (previously some $450 billion a year) will now rise by a factor of three. The total state debt of the USA will rise to well over $11 trillion. It is obvious that such a colossal debt can never be repaid. Instead, it will be serviced by more debt in the future. The contrast with Russia, which has painstakingly sanitised its state finances to the point that it now has more money to lend than the IMF, could hardly be greater. The recent financial crisis itself grew out of this American culture of debt. To some extent, all countries share it: since 1914, all countries use paper currencies, i.e. debt instruments which are never redeemed. Whereas before the First World War, bank notes were essentially vouchers for specific amounts of gold cash, now the "promise to pay the bearer" (which remains inscribed on British bank notes) is in fact hollow.

In America, this basic culture of debt is aggravated by the fact that other countries use the dollar itself as a reserve. This means that the United States can export dollars in order to pay for its imports without the dollar losing value. Other states also need dollars to buy key commodities like oil. The USA can therefore export paper currency almost indefinitely - the famous "deficit without tears" analysed by the great French economist, Jacques Rueff. Naturally, if the state itself encourages such a culture of debt by issuing unredeemable paper currency to pay for imports, and by accumulating such mountains of debt, then it is no surprise if the American financial markets themselves operate on the same basis. But the collapse of those markets is only a symptom of a much deeper problem, the basic insolvency of the American state itself.

What can Russia do about this? At first sight, Russia's role in the international financial system does not seem very large. However, as a major exporter of hydrocarbons, her role in the world economy is actually very important. As the age of the dollar draws to a close, Russia will have to consider selling her oil and gas not in the devalued American currency, but instead in the euro used by most of her customers. It is surely unnatural for two geographical neighbours to do such large volumes of business using the currency of a distant and now ailing nation. Second, the Russian leaders might also consider making their own currency, the rouble, convertible into gold. The idea of gold convertible currencies is extremely unpopular among most economists: they dismiss gold as a "barbarous relic" (to use the famous phrase of John Maynard Keynes) and suggest either the present regime of paper currencies or, at best, a link to a basket of commodities.

Both these solutions are highly artificial and based on the same level of state control which has now just so spectacularly failed. Indeed, which is more "barbarous" - the reintroduction of gold as an instrument of payment, or the practice of amassing huge quantities of the precious metal to keep it locked underground in the vaults of central banks? The contempt of the Keynesians notwithstanding, it is an indisputable fact that gold does remain the ultimate store of value, which is precisely why states own so much of it. Russia has less to fear than other countries from the introduction of a currency convertible into gold. Governments are typically hostile to gold because it reduces their discretionary power over the currency and the economy: they say that the money supply cannot be made dependent on the production of gold mines. In reality, this argument is bogus because the amount of mined gold already in existence vastly exceeds the yearly production, so mining does not in fact have an appreciable impact on supply. But, as it happens, Russia is a major producer of gold anyway and therefore to some extent controls production.

Secondly, Russia is vulnerable to her status as an exporter of primary materials - and as an exporter generally - especially in the age of inflation which is about to dawn. The more the Russian economy exports, the more her national paper currency will rise, making those exports more expensive. This is bad for an export-oriented economy. By contrast, the value of a gold rouble would depend not on the trade balance of the Russian economy at all, but instead simply on the price of gold itself which generally remains stable with relation to other commodities. Russia has shown surprising success in putting an end to the unipolar world of which American strategists have dreamed now for over a decade. There are no permanent victories in diplomacy, however, but a shift in the structure of the world financial system would help to entrench recent gains.

John Laughland is a British historian and political analyst, and Director of Studies at the Institute of Democracy and Cooperation in Paris.

Source: http://en.rian.ru/analysis/20080924/117072937.html

[Armenian]

Re: The Rise of the Russian Empire: Russo-Armenian Relations

Similar to the Russian anti-ship missile Onyx (Yakhont), the Russian-Indian manufactured cruise missile Brahmos can reach out to enemy warships approximately 300 kilometers away at supersonic speeds flying virtually at wave top height. No know defenses against this powerful missile system exists today.

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Russia, India to develop new BrahMos cruise missile

The Brahmos Supersonic Cruise Missile (Part 1): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dCqxI...eature=related

Russia and India will jointly develop a new BrahMos-2 hypersonic cruise missile, the head of the BrahMos company said on Monday. "Today, at a meeting of the Russian-Indian intergovernmental commission on military-technical cooperation, we decided to set up a working group on the development of the BrahMos-2 missile," the company's CEO, Sivathanu Pillai said. "The new hypersonic missile will have a top speed of over Mach 5, which would make it impossible to intercept," he added. Established in 1998, BrahMos Aerospace, a joint Indian-Russian venture, produces and markets BrahMos supersonic missiles, whose sea-based and land-based versions have been successfully tested and put into service with the Indian army and navy. Pillai said that the company had finished the development of the airborne version of the BrahMos missile and the Indian air force had chosen the SU-30 MKI Flanker-H multirole fighter as a trial platform for the missile. The BrahMos missile has a range of 290 km (180 miles) and can carry a conventional warhead of up to 300 kg (660 pounds). It can hit ground targets flying at an altitude as low as 10 meters (30 feet) and has a top speed of Mach 2.8, which is about three times faster than the U.S.-made subsonic Tomahawk cruise missile. The head of BrahMos Aerospace earlier said that the recent acquisition of an assembly plant in the state of Kerala from Kerala Hightech Industries Ltd, in addition to the main plant in Hyderabad, would allow the company to increase production to 50 BrahMos missiles a year and fulfill orders from the army on schedule. Analysts estimate that India could purchase up to 1,000 BrahMos missiles for its armed forces in the next decade, and export 2,000 to other countries during the same period.

Source: http://en.rian.ru/world/20080929/117254958.html

In other news:

Russian warships to hold drills in northern Atlantic

Russia's warships currently on a long-range sortie to the Caribbean will conduct a number of exercises in the Atlantic Ocean, a Northern Fleet spokesman said on Monday. A naval task group from the Northern Fleet, comprising the nuclear-powered missile cruiser Pyotr Velikiy (Peter the Great), the large ASW ship Admiral Chabanenko, and support ships, left a naval base in northern Russia on September 22 and is currently in the northern Atlantic, having covered a distance of 1,000 nautical miles (2,000 km) in a week. "The ships from the task group will hold a number of air defense and ASW exercises, and also various communications and maneuvering drills," Capt. 1st Rank Igor Babenko said. During the current tour of duty the Russian warships will also participate in joint naval exercises with the Venezuelan navy in the Caribbean on November 10-14, in line with the 2008 training program, and in order to expand military cooperation with foreign navies. During the entire mission, the task group is expected to cover a distance of 15,000 nautical miles (30,000 km). According to the Russian Navy, the movements of the convoy are closely monitored by the U.K. HMS Argyll frigate and NATO aircraft. Russia announced last year that its Navy had resumed and would build up a constant presence in different regions of the world's oceans.

Source: http://en.rian.ru/russia/20080929/117265522.html

[Armenian]

Re: The Rise of the Russian Empire: Russo-Armenian Relations

Unipolar world unacceptable – Russian FM

'Unipolar world is over': http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U_dqIoMc4BU

Russia's Foreign Minister has used an appearance at the UN General Assembly to lash out at the world's unipolar security system controlled by the U.S. Referring to the recent conflict in South Ossetia, Sergey Lavrov said efforts to resolve conflicts are hampered by what he called a distortion of reality. He also said all talk about the territorial integrity of Georgia after its aggression against South Ossetia has become senseless. "The bombings of sleeping Tskhinval and the killing of peaceful citizens and peacekeepers put an end to the territorial integrity of Georgia," said Lavrov. "Now this issue is closed. The future of the peoples of Abkhazia and South Ossetia is effectively protected by the agreements between Moscow and Sukhum and Tskhinval," he added. Lavrov also called for an analyse of the Caucasus crisis in terms of its consequences not only for the region but for the whole world. "The existing security architecture in Europe did not pass the test of the latest events. Attempts to adjust this architecture to the laws of unipolarity made it unable to curb the aggressor and prevent supplies of offensive weapons to it despite the existing codes of conduct," he said. Sergey Lavrov urged the international community to confirm their commitment to the United Nations as the only legitimate international body. "The Cold War distorted the nature of international relations and turned them into an arena for ideological confrontation," said Lavrov. "Only now that it is over the UN, created on the basis of a polycentric vision of the world, can use its potential in full," he said.

‘Tired of playing a static role’

Lavrov also criticised the unipolar security system in the world. He said U.S. missile defence ambitions, as well as NATO expansion, are America's attempts to be the boss: "The inertia of unipolar world ideology also revealed itself in other spheres of international life, including unilateral steps on AMD and militarization of outer space, attempts to bypass the parity in arms control regimes, enlargement of political and military blocs, and politicization of the issues of access to energy resources and their transit”. The United States is involved in two wars that are killing millions. It has been hit hard by a financial crisis resulting from bad choices within the country. However, few would argue that America still considers itself to be the messenger of truth. The U.S. always has a harsh word or two up its sleeve and is never reluctant to lash out, especially when it comes to Russia. And one has to wonder - how long until one voice continues to attempt to influence the rest of the world. Russia says "enough is enough" - the United States has to work with other countries. "In order to control a totally new situation as it evolved after 9/11, instead of required genuine co-operative effort, including joint analysis and co-ordination of practical steps, the mechanisms intended for a unipolar world started to be used, meaning that all decisions were to be taken in a single centre while the rest just had to follow," Lavrov said. Saturday’s speech of Russia’s Foreign Minister follows addresses by U.S. President George Bush and French President Nicolas Sarkozy earlier in the week. George Bush spoke for the last time as U.S. President. He criticised Russia for its actions during the conflict in South Ossetia, adding that Washington will continue to support Georgia. As for Sarkozy, speaking on the recent violence in South Ossetia, he stressed the EU can't compromise when it comes to the sovereignty of states.

No sanctions against Iran

Meanwhile, the Russian message was not the only spotlight at the UN on Saturday. The Security Council has adopted a new resolution on Iran. The text is sanction-free, it calls upon Iran to follow the three previous resolutions passed by the Security Council. The goal of the resolution is to show that the Security Council is united in one stance when it comes to Iran's nuclear programme. The President of Iran spoke at the UN General Assembly on Tuesday. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said his country had a right to peaceful nuclear energy and was being bullied through political and economic pressure.

Source: http://www.russiatoday.com/news/news/31060

[Hye_Psycho]

Re: The Rise of the Russian Empire: Russo-Armenian Relations

Religion - islam - Russia -the West
it wont let me post the whole thing in one post..to long

http://www.orthodoxinfo.com/general/muslimadvance.aspx

The Muslim Advance and American Collaboration
by James George Jatras

In addressing the cultural schism between the western and eastern halves of European, Christian civilization, marked principally by their respective religious traditions, Roman Catholic/Protestant in the West and Orthodox in the East, one issue stands above all others in determining whether that millennium-old division shall eventually prove fatal: the Islamic resurgence that has rapidly come to mark the post-Cold War era. For the East, which borders on the Muslim world, the problem continues to be, as it has been since Islam first appeared in the 7th century, primarily one of direct, violent confrontation, which today stretches from the Balkans to the Caucasus and through Central Asia. For the West, on the other hand, the problem today is primarily internal, both in terms of ideological confusion (which in many instances leads to active collaboration), coupled with demographic infiltration.

The latter factor, largely a consequence of the West's policy of more-or-less open immigration, is typified in the following example. A few months ago, the county board of Loudoun County, Virginia, just a few miles down the road from the federal capital, granted a zoning variance to facilitate construction of a new Islamic academy over vigorous local opposition. The institution, one of a number being constructed nationwide, will cover some 100 acres, will include elementary, middle, and high schools, will feature an 800-bed dormitory, and will grace the rolling hills of the Virginia horse country with a 65-foot mosque dome and an 85-foot minaret.

County residents opposed the academy on a variety of grounds, notably the loss of tax revenue on land that was otherwise zoned for business uses and the security threat posed by the school, either from Muslims that would be attracted to the county or from the possibility that anti-Saudi Islamic groups might see the academy as a tempting target. But the critics' central issue and the one that highlights western incomprehension of the phenomenon in question was the character of the Saudi regime which, according to the school's bylaws (specifying even that the Saudi ambassador is ex officio chairman), exercises total control, to the extent that it is part of the structure of the Saudi Ministry of Education: an establishment of a foreign sovereign on American soil.

Predictably, as soon as Saudi Arabia and Islam became the issues, the only response from progressive opinion had to be that rejection of the school would be intolerance of "diversity." Characteristic of this viewpoint is one county resident who symbolically displayed a crescent and star in the window of her home to show that "Islam is welcome here." The ever-vigilant Washington Post weighed in with an editorial blasting opposition to the school as "religious intolerance" and "the worst kind of bigotry" on the part of retrograde denizens of the Old Dominion. "Ugly statements that have been made in public meetings on the issue have run the range of mean-spiritedness," sniffed the Post , "with some residents asserting that the school should be rejected because 'the Saudis execute their own people who convert from Islam.'"

In point of correction to the Post's sarcastic quotation marks, the 1997 U.S. Department of State Report on Human Rights Practices states the following about Saudi Arabia: "Freedom of religion does not exist. Islam is the official religion and all [Saudi] citizens must be Muslims. Conversion by a Muslim to another religion is considered apostasy. Public apostasy is considered a crime under Shari'a law and punishable by death." So which is more "ugly" and "mean-spirited"—the fact that the Saudis do indeed behead those who abandon Islam or that Loudoun citizens had been so tactless to take note of that fact? One witness before the county board testified to the fact that her daughters, who are U.S. citizens, have been kept from leaving Saudi Arabia for over thirteen years because, as women, they may not travel, even though the elder one is now an adult, without their Saudi father's permission. The girls have been forcibly converted to Islam and can only look forward to their eventual marriage, for which their consent is at best a formality.

Fawning by county authorities extended even to a blatant disregard of the county's own laws. A Loudoun ordinance defines a private institution as one that is neither funded nor controlled by any government, on both of which counts the Loudoun Islamic academy fails. Yet the county board even rejected testimony to that effect by a former board member, who himself was the author of the relevant ordinance, that the academy was not a private institution. No matter. Today, neither Loudoun County, nor the Commonwealth of Virginia, nor the United States would be able to create and run an educational institution based on any religious doctrine. But a foreign government, a government that is every bit as bigoted, intolerant, and ugly as the Post wrongly tagged the school's critics not only may do so but is seen as having a positive right to do so.

Especially illuminating in the Loudoun controversy was the position of local Christian social conservatives, who stayed neutral or even supported the academy. In the dimmer recesses of the American Christian mind, the only circuits activated were those questioning what precedent denying the variance might set for private Christian schools, the availability of public voucher funds, and so forth. The importation of Shari'a into a once-Christian commonwealth seemingly registered not at all in evangelical minds blissfully unaware of Islamic aims:

"The Islamist movement makes no secret of its intentions to convert the West. Its propaganda, published in booklets sold in all European Islamic centers for the last thirty years, sets out its aim and the methods to achieve them. They include proselytism, conversion, marriage with local women, and, above all, immigration. Remembering that Muslims always began as a minority in the conquered countries ('liberated,' in Islamic terminology) before becoming a majority, the ideologists of this movement regard Islamic settlement in Europe, the United States, and elsewhere as a chance for Islam." [ Bat Ye'or, The Decline of Eastern Christianity under Islam, p. 217, emphasis added]
The element of willful blindness in western perspectives on Islam cannot be overestimated. So deeply imbedded is the notion that all religions are in their fundamentals the same, evidence to the contrary is simply wished out of existence. When the Ayatollah Khomeini states that -

"...Muslims have no alternative...to armed holy war against profane governments,...the conquest of all non-Muslim territories...It will be the duty of every able-bodied adult male to volunteer for this war of conquest, the final aim of which is to put Koranic law in power from one end of the earth to the other..."
...and so on in the same vein, such utterances are as little heeded as were similar statements by Lenin during the Cold War. After all, Khomeini is a known "fundamentalist." Surely, his statements can't be held against the moderates, the "mainstream," who represent " real Islam," whose beliefs and values are not so different from ours, right? The contention that Khomeini and his ilk are in fact Islam's historical "mainstream" not only is dismissed but is itself considered evidence of a dangerous "Christian fundamentalism," which is every bit as bad as the Muslim variety, probably worse. Together with the growing number of Muslims in America (who, according to some claims, already have overtaken Judaism as the nation's largest non-Christian religion), the irrebuttable presumption of Muslim peaceableness has set the stage for Islam to become both a social and political force. Particularly under the Clinton Administration, Islam has made major strides to join denatured, humanized Protestantism, Catholicism, and Judaism in their semi-established status as kindred denominations of a single American civic creed, symbolized by Hillary Rodham Clinton's recent sponsorship of the Eid al-Fitr end-of-Ramadan celebration at the White House.

Likewise, the idea that Islam shares with Christianity and Judaism an Abrahamic pedigree, that we are all, in the Islamic phrase, "peoples of the book," is now almost universally accepted. To see how flimsy this idea is, suppose that during the early Christian era a pagan philosopher from Athens had claimed to have received a vision from a divine messenger ( angelos ) to the effect that Zeus/Jupiter ( diu pater), the Greco-Roman "father god," was the one and only God and in fact was the same God the Father preached by the Christians; that the Christians had corrupted their own Scriptures to hide the fact that Jupiter had been worshiped by Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, and Jesus, while only the self-proclaimed prophet's recitation of his own vision was authoritative; that the rites and sacred places of the Olympian gods (the Eleusinian Mysteries, the Delphic Oracle) had always pertained to Jupiter alone and indeed had been established by earlier Abrahamic prophets; and that those who had surrendered their will to Jupiter were commanded to wage holy war under his thunderbolt symbol on "infidels" who resisted the divine will. Is there any doubt that Christians then would have rejected the supposed kinship of the new teaching to their own faith as unanimously as today's Christians rush to accommodate Islam?

There is little doubt that Islam's "God" is none other than the former chief deity of the polytheistic Arab pantheon - a variation on the moon god common throughout the ancient Middle East, among the Babylonians known as Sin (the Sinai peninsula is probably named after him) and among the Sumerians as Nanna - stripped of his consorts and offspring. Among the pagan Arabs he was usually called simply "the god," al-ilah: Allah. The moon god Allah, whose crescent symbol today caps mosques the world over, headed a pantheon of over 300 lesser divinities, including three daughters called Lat, Uzza, and Manat; in fact, the controversy over The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie centers upon an embarrassing (and historically documented) episode during Muhammad's evolving "revelation" (after his death collected as his Qur'an, "recitation") in which he admitted the possibility of retaining under his new dispensation the three daughter-goddesses but later rescinded it as having been of false, "satanic," inspiration. Muhammad (the son of Abdallah, "slave of Allah," a further attestation of the god's pre-Islamic origin) was of the Quraysh tribe, the custodians of the Meccan shrine to the pantheon known as the Ka'bah ("cube"), which then as now houses a black stone, probably a meteorite, which Muslim pilgrims today continue to venerate, along with performance of other pre-Islamic pagan rites such as stoning the devil at Wadi Mina and partaking of the waters of the Zamzam well.

In short, Islam is a self-evident outgrowth not of the Old and New Covenants but of the darkness of heathen Araby. Beside ludicrous historical suggestions to the contrary (such as the idea that the Ka'bah was built by Abraham, which would have been big news to him), Muslim apologists have strained to find in the Bible evidence that a new prophet would arise after Jesus, seeing Muhammad in obvious prophecies of the Holy Spirit (that were fulfilled on Pentecost) or of the Second Coming of Christ. One could find no better refutation of Islam's efforts to appropriate Christian Scriptures (here, Matthew 24:27) than that of the 14th-century Byzantine saint, Gregory Palamas, to his Turkish captors:

"It is true that Muhammad started from the east and came to the west, as the sun travels from east to west. Nevertheless he came with war, knives, pillaging, forced enslavement, murders, and acts that are not from the good God but instigated by the chief manslayer, the devil."
St. Gregory's answer is no less devastating to Islam's fraudulent self-depiction as a pacific creed. Islam was born in violence, from Muhammad's sanction of raids of pillage and plunder (starting with attacks against his own Quraysh tribe, which initially rejected his revelation) to his savage execution of hundreds of men of the Qurayzah clan (which professed Judaism) and the enslavement and forced concubinage of their women and children. (Muhammad himself took as his unwilling consort the xxxish 17-year-old Safiya on the very day of the murder of her menfolk.) From its inception, first within Arabia and then against all unbelievers, Islam has been unthinkable without its mandate for violence, war, terror - in a word, jihad - itself codified in Muhammad's Qur'an (notably Sura 9:29). Today, Islamic apologists in America have been quick to latch onto the vocabulary of grievance, denouncing as "stereotyping," "bigotry," and "ignorance" association of Islam with its violent past and present. Even American elementary school texts have been rewritten to suggest that once-Christian Egypt, Syria, and Palestine became Muslim because their conquerors were "invited" in; Muslims are quick to remind Christians of the Crusaders' later "aggression," but they don't consider as aggression their own unprovoked seizure of the Christian Middle East.

In the application of jihad, as documented by Bat Ye'or and others, Islam understands the world in terms of two domains, or "houses": the House of Islam ( Dar al-Islam ), where Islam rules and Shari'a , the law of Allah, has been realized; and the House of War (Dar al-Harb), where the rebellious unbelievers persist in their (or rather, our) lawlessness. (The parallels are unavoidable to the similarly Manichaean communist concepts of the "socialist camp" as the zone of peace and the "capitalist camp" as the zone of war. I will leave it to the specialists to calculate which - Islam or communism - can claim the greater achievement as gigantic Christian-killing machines.) In Islamic terms, we unsubdued Christians are harbi , and as such we have no legitimate right to our lands, our property, or even our lives, which by right belong not to us but to the Muslims; that which we now have we enjoy only as long as Islam has not (yet) become strong enough to impose Shari'a . As the highly respected and influential 14th century authority Ibn Taymiyya explained:

[Hye_Psycho]

Re: The Rise of the Russian Empire: Russo-Armenian Relations

In the application of jihad, as documented by Bat Ye'or and others, Islam understands the world in terms of two domains, or "houses": the House of Islam ( Dar al-Islam ), where Islam rules and Shari'a , the law of Allah, has been realized; and the House of War (Dar al-Harb), where the rebellious unbelievers persist in their (or rather, our) lawlessness. (The parallels are unavoidable to the similarly Manichaean communist concepts of the "socialist camp" as the zone of peace and the "capitalist camp" as the zone of war. I will leave it to the specialists to calculate which - Islam or communism - can claim the greater achievement as gigantic Christian-killing machines.) In Islamic terms, we unsubdued Christians are harbi , and as such we have no legitimate right to our lands, our property, or even our lives, which by right belong not to us but to the Muslims; that which we now have we enjoy only as long as Islam has not (yet) become strong enough to impose Shari'a . As the highly respected and influential 14th century authority Ibn Taymiyya explained:

"These possessions [i.e., the things taken away from the non-Muslims upon their conquest] received the name of fay [war booty] since Allah had taken them away from the infidels in order to restore (afa'a, radda) them to the Muslims. In principle, Allah has created the things of this world only in order that they may contribute to serving Him, since He created man only in order to be ministered to. Consequently, the infidels forfeit their persons and their belongings which they do not use in Allah's service to the faithful believers who serve Allah and unto whom Allah restitutes what is theirs; thus is restored to a man the inheritance of which he was deprived, even if he had never before gained possession."

It is worthy of note that this Ibn Taymiyya is particularly revered by the Wahabi sect, which is the ruling doctrine of Saudi Arabia; students at the Saudi-controlled Loudoun Islamic Academy will no doubt receive benefit of such wisdom. But it should not be thought that Ibn Taymiyya's sentiments are unique to him. On the contrary, Bat Ye'or multiplies comparable passages from Islamic sages of many times and locales, from the time of Muhammad to the present day.

In the sweep of the long history of the Islamic assault on the Christian world, it is sobering to consider how close the latter has come to annihilation on more than one occasion. In the initial offensive during the first decade after Muhammad's demise, Christendom lost its birthplace in the Levant, with the front of the East Roman Empire only being stabilized at the approaches to Asia Minor. Meanwhile, the Arab armies swept west from conquered Egypt, subduing the whole north coast of Africa and crossing into Visigothic Spain in 711. They were finally stopped by the Franks under Karl the Hammer at Poitiers in 732, the centenary of the pseudo-Prophet's death. The conversion of the Turkish tribes to Islam in the 9th century lent jihad renewed impetus; the erosion and final collapse of East Roman power opened the eastern door to Europe in the 14th century, and the Ottomans were turned back only at the gates of Vienna in 1683. The site of the first high water mark at Poitiers and the later one at Vienna are only some 700 miles apart - so narrow has been Christendom's brush with extinction!

The Turkish defeat at Vienna marked the beginning of two centuries of remission during which European technology, particularly military technology, seemed to have resolved the contest between the Cross and Crescent decisively in favor of the former. During the 19th century, the Christian nations of the Balkans - the only conquered Christian lands since the Spanish reconquista in which the Muslims had not yet reduced the indigenous population to a minority, as they had in Egypt and Syria, or eliminated them utterly, as in the Maghreb - cast off their Muslim masters, and by the end of the First World War, most of the Muslim world (with the exceptions of the Arabian heartland itself and of a truncated Turkey which had assumed the guise of the modernizing, secular ideology of Kemalism) was subject to European rule. But at the same time as Europe achieved its military and geopolitical advantage, the moral and religious decline that culminated in the autogenocides of 1914 and 1939 had become evident. Having found in their grasp places their Crusader predecessors had only dreamed of reclaiming - Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Antioch, Alexandria, Constantinople - effete and demoralized European governments made no effort to reChristianize them and within a few decades meekly abandoned them.

The moral disarmament of contemporary post-Christian Europe in its relations with Islam that began in the late 19th century has now become near-universal. If in the more remote past Bourbon France had made common cause with the Sublime Porte (the scandalous "union of the Lily and the Crescent") against Habsburg Austria, the arrangement at least had the virtue of cynical self-interest: Catholic France was hardly expected to praise the sultan's benevolence as part of the bargain. But by the 1870s, Disraeli's obsession with thwarting Russian ambitions in the Balkans prompted the Tories' unprecedented depiction of Turkey as tolerant and humane even in the face of the Bulgarian atrocities; even so, Britain's Christian conscience, prodded by Gladstone's passionate words, was still sufficient to bring down Lord Beaconsfield's government in 1880.

After World War I, with the installation of nominally "pro-Western" governments in many Muslim countries fashioned from the wreckage of the Ottoman Empire, the West seems to have definitively convinced itself of the existence of benign Islam. Indeed, the promotion of "moderate" Muslim regimes, especially those willing to make peace with Israel, and, even better, those that have a lot of petroleum, has become a linchpin of U.S. global policy. Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Turkey, Pakistan, Morocco, the Gulf States, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Nigeria, Indonesia and a few others have become the darlings of U.S. policy, valued as supposed bulwarks against "fundamentalism" of the Iranian variety (Iran itself having lately been a member of the favored assembly).

Operationally, this means not only overlooking the radical activities of the supposedly "moderate" Muslim states, for example, Saudi Arabia's and Pakistan's support for the Taliban regime in Afghanistan (whom even the Iranians denounce as dangerous fanatics), and assistance by virtually the entire club to the thinly-disguised radical regime in Sarajevo, but a consistent American bias in favor of the Muslim party in virtually every conflict with a Christian nation. The most prominent exception to date has been a pro-Armenian tilt in the Nagorno-Karabakh question, a function of Armenian-Americans' early cultivation of Congress, but it can be expected that this anomaly will soon shift to Azerbaijan's favor under the combined pressure of the Turkey/Israel lobby, of residual Cold War antipathy for Russia (seen as Armenia's main protector), and of American oil companies fixated on an energy El Dorado in the Caspian Basin.

It is hardly a surprise that business executives who would sell their grandmothers to Abdul Abulbul Amir for oil drilling rights would see the world as a reflection of their balance sheets. Neither is the parallel inclination of secular, socially progressive opinion, which is viscerally anti-Christian. What is not so expected is that so many western Christians, Americans in particular, are willing to believe the worst about their eastern Christian cousins, who, only lately freed from Islamic (and later, in most cases, communist) servitude, are desperately attempting to avoid a repeat of the experience. Today, when all of the Russian North Caucasus is subject to plunder and hostage-taking razzias staged from Shari'a-ruled Chechnya, when not just Nagorno-Karabakh but Armenia proper is in danger of a repeat of 1915, when Cyprus and Greece receive unvarnished threats to their territorial integrity on a weekly basis for the offense of purchasing defensive weapons, and when the borders of Serbia are rapidly approaching those of the pashaluk of Belgrade to suit America's new-found friends in Bosnia and Kosovo, organized Roman Catholic and Protestant sentiment in America overwhelmingly sides with non- and anti-Christian elite opinion in its pro-Muslim, anti-Orthodox tendency.

For example, in 1993 statements were issued by a number of Roman Catholic, Protestant, and Anglican spokesmen in the United States urging military intervention on behalf of the Islamic regime in Sarajevo. "We are convinced that there is just cause to use force to defend largely helpless people in Bosnia against aggression and barbarism that are destroying the very foundations of society and threaten large numbers of people," wrote the chairman of the U.S. Catholic Conference, at a time when the Muslim beneficiaries of the called-for intervention were not only roasting alive Serb POWs impaled on spits but were slaughtering Roman Catholic Croats by the hundreds in an offensive in central Bosnia. "What is going on in Bosnia is genocide by any other name," observed a prominent Baptist spokesman: "The ghosts of Auschwitz and Dachau have come back to haunt us. If we do nothing we are morally culpable." "Those of us who opposed the Gulf War believed that war was not the answer," opined the presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church, "but today we find ourselves confronted with an evil war, the sure elimination of which may be possible only by means of armed intervention." Thus did high-minded guardians of the West's Christian integrity give their blessing for NATO to assist the resumption of jihad in Europe. Granted, they were themselves to some extent victims of the melodramatic media coverage that has characterized the Balkan war, but that's not much of an excuse. Who told them to believe everything dished up by CNN?

On a previous occasion, I have noted that western anti-Orthodox bias, which I have dubbed Pravoslavophobia, rarely means antipathy for Orthodoxy as such. Most serious Protestants and Roman Catholic often have a fairly positive attitude toward Orthodox Christianity as a morally conservative and, especially, liturgically traditional bulwark within the spectrum of Christian opinion. (In fact, one leading Roman Catholic moral conservative who has called for Christianity to unite with not only Judaism but Islam in an "ecumenical jihad" against secularism, a common front in "spiritual warfare," is explicit in his favorable attitude toward Orthodoxy. But it is beyond me what spiritual values any Christian has in common with someone whose idea of beatific bliss is boinking an endless parade of the well-rounded houris said to inhabit the Muslim paradise.) Perhaps it has been so long since western Christians have had to physically defend themselves as Christians (as opposed to Americans, Englishmen, Germans, etc.) that they just don't understand those for whom it is a current concern.

On the other hand, there are Westerners for whom antipathy is based precisely on the traditional Orthodox character of the front-line states bordering on Islam. Indeed, from this viewpoint, the desire of these countries to not only avoid Islamization but Westernization as well is a major count against them. For example, one columnist, who has made something of a specialty of painting the Orthodox as the villains in the conflicts with Islam (and who has even made the bizarre accusation that poor, helpless Islamic Turkey is threatened in Cyprus by the "burgeoning expansion" of an "Orthodox Axis"!), has cast it as follows:

"The purposes of the Orthodox Church in Russia today reflect most of its history. It wants to keep total power and exclude from its midst any other belief systems or reflections of conscience that might in any way threaten it. 'Through the Vatican Council, the Roman Catholic Church came to terms with the modern world,' the Denver-born Archbishop J. Francis Stafford, president of the Pontifical Council for the Laity, mused with me. 'We finally came to a willingness to test the waters of the Enlightenment culture against the ancient traditions of faith. The pope today is preoccupied with the relationship between freedom and truth, which is one of the primary issues raised by the Enlightenment.' That noble preoccupation unfortunately has not yet traveled eastward and, indeed, there are no indicators that it will do so. Meanwhile, it would be good for other Westerners who still dream of rapid change in Russia to study the Catholic-Orthodox case. It might instill in their hope a touch of reality and also remind them that the historical Russian propensity to protect power by remaining isolated and to keep out all those 'foreigners' is hardly a thing of the past."
I defer to others as to what extent today's Roman Catholic Church, as well as modern Protestantism, has indeed made its peace with the Enlightenment's standard of what constitutes "freedom," which has largely translated into freedom from Christianity altogether. (Indeed, the fruits of that kind of freedom will be evident when the muezzin's call to prayer is heard five times a day across Loudoun County.) But what is amazing about this passage is that it is evidently "remaining isolated" that constitutes the offense: Russia (and the same could be said for Greece, Serbia, etc.) is wrong not because she wants to force her faith on the West but because she does not want to adopt the West's "enlightened" version of Christianity.