History lesson
Taki
The Spectator, 17 March 2007 – www.spectator.co.uk

‘One of the least edifying sights in Britain today is that of Douglas Hurd expressing his righteous anger over the war in Iraq …’ So begins one Roger Cohen’s rant in the International Herald Tribune under the heading ‘Globalist’. Some globalist. What I find much less edifying is Roger Cohen presumably an American, giving us lessons on how to treat the Muslim threat to our Christian and enlightened way of life. Let me explain.

Cohen’s beef with Douglas Hurd is that he, as foreign secretary, was gutless while the Serbs were committing genocide against the Bosnian Muslims between 1992 and 1995. Hurd I do not know and the little I met of him I didn’t like. It was during a Speccie dinner at Christopher’s following our summer party. The sainted Frank Johnson was editor. I had just gotten into trouble with the Puerto Rican community in New York, and Rudi Giuliani was after me. Conrad Black had courageously rebuffed Giuliani, who had threatened a boycott of all Black newspapers unless Taki was fired, as had Frank. I was placed one away from Hurd at the dinner table and he gruffly asked me who I was. ‘Who are you?’ was my response. He did not like it, so Frank Johnson stepped in and introduced me as the Puerto Rican ambassador. End of story.

Here at last is Taki’s definitive history of Muslim penetration of Christian Europe these past 1,300 years, and I advise Cohen to read it carefully because the drivel he learnt sitting on Neocon knees back home is diametrically opposite to the truth. Before I begin, remember, dear readers, that we Westerners have for the past 500 years learnt to think of ourselves as anything but Christian. Pick up most history books or watch any history channel on TV and all you will read and hear about is European aggression against the Middle East and the crimes committed by Crusaders. There is nothing on the Muslim terrorism that preceded and provoked the Crusades, and the non-stop attacks of Islam against Christendom.

Mehmed II took Constantinople in 1453, then tuned against Belgrade in 1456. In the 15th century, only the Pope, a few brave Hungarians, Wallachians and the Serbs were willing to stand up to the Turks. The grotesque Venetians were supporting the Muslims with ships and moolah in order to safeguard their republic, not unlike the Saudis today. Mehmed attacked Belgrade with 150,000 troops. His guns were manned by Westerners – Germans, Northern Italians and other Europeans, as his own men were too primitive to handle them. But Serbian archers wiped out the rabble, and after a very close and bloody fight the invaders were chased out and massacred. While Serbia, Constantinople and Hungary were under attack, England and France were fighting the Hundred Years War and the French Francis I even joined the Sultan Suleyman against Charles V in the infamous alliance of the Crescent and the Lily.

So far so bad. This French-Ottoman alliance not only prevented the Habsburgs from recovering the Balkans in 1683, it also aided Suleyman’s campaign to take Vienna and also receive Northern Italy as payment. Only the great Pole king Jan Sobieski put the kibosh on those plans by wiping out the Turks in front of the Vienna gates. Throughout all this, the intellectuals of the time were trying to re-establish paganism. Cosimo de’ Medici was among the leaders of that movement. Some of those dummkopfs even wrote to Mehmed advising him that as the conqueror of Constantinople he was the heir to Caesar and deserved the right to claim the Western Empire. The descendants of these dummkopfs are the ones who today use political correctness to stop the great ancient Greek historian Taki from denouncing the Fifth Columnists among the Muslim population of Europe.

Charles Martel in Tours in 732, Don John in Lepanto in 1571, Jan Sobieski in Vienna in 1683 and Djuradj Brankovic, the Serbian Despot, in 1456 are the true European heroes who have saved Western civilisation. And, of course, Tamurlane, in 1402. The baddies are not the various sultans and Ottoman strongmen, but people like Bill Clinton, Madelaine Albright, who bombed a Christian country for 75 days in order to establish an Albanian Muslim corridor in the middle of the Christian heartland of the Balkans in 1999.

Hurd was right when he blamed ancient hatreds and warring factions for keeping cool and detached in the Balkans. If anything, Blair and Bush should have attacked the Muslim infiltrators in Kosovo. Instead, they went and attacked the only secular state in the Middle East. We armed and trained bin Laden in Afghanistan. He was given Bosnian citizenship soon after, and when his gang went down to Kosovo and began to blow up 500-year-old churches, we bombed a European city in the gang’s behalf. Cohen should shut up.
 

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Call that humiliation?
No hoods. No electric shocks. No beatings. These Iranians clearly are a very uncivilised bunch
Terry Jones
Saturday March 31, 2007, The Guardian

I share the outrage expressed in the British press over the treatment of our naval personnel accused by Iran of illegally entering their waters. It is a disgrace. We would never dream of treating captives like this - allowing them to smoke cigarettes, for example, even though it has been proven that smoking kills. And as for compelling poor servicewoman Faye Turney to wear a black headscarf, and then allowing the picture to be posted around the world - have the Iranians no concept of civilised behaviour? For God's sake, what's wrong with putting a bag over her head? That's what we do with the Muslims we capture: we put bags over their heads, so it's hard to breathe. Then it's perfectly acceptable to take photographs of them and circulate them to the press because the captives can't be recognised and humiliated in the way these unfortunate British service people are.

It is also unacceptable that these British captives should be made to talk on television and say things that they may regret later. If the Iranians put duct tape over their mouths, like we do to our captives, they wouldn't be able to talk at all. Of course they'd probably find it even harder to breathe - especially with a bag over their head - but at least they wouldn't be humiliated.

And what's all this about allowing the captives to write letters home saying they are all right? It's time the Iranians fell into line with the rest of the civilised world: they should allow their captives the privacy of solitary confinement. That's one of the many privileges the US grants to its captives in Guantánamo Bay.

The true mark of a civilised country is that it doesn't rush into charging people whom it has arbitrarily arrested in places it's just invaded. The inmates of Guantánamo, for example, have been enjoying all the privacy they want for almost five years, and the first inmate has only just been charged. What a contrast to the disgraceful Iranian rush to parade their captives before the cameras!

What's more, it is clear that the Iranians are not giving their British prisoners any decent physical exercise. The US military make sure that their Iraqi captives enjoy PT. This takes the form of exciting "stress positions", which the captives are expected to hold for hours on end so as to improve their stomach and calf muscles. A common exercise is where they are made to stand on the balls of their feet and then squat so that their thighs are parallel to the ground. This creates intense pain and, finally, muscle failure. It's all good healthy fun and has the bonus that the captives will confess to anything to get out of it.

And this brings me to my final point. It is clear from her TV appearance that servicewoman Turney has been put under pressure. The newspapers have persuaded behavioural psychologists to examine the footage and they all conclude that she is "unhappy and stressed".

What is so appalling is the underhand way in which the Iranians have got her "unhappy and stressed". She shows no signs of electrocution or burn marks and there are no signs of beating on her face. This is unacceptable. If captives are to be put under duress, such as by forcing them into compromising sexual positions, or having electric shocks to their genitals, they should be photographed, as they were in Abu Ghraib. The photographs should then be circulated around the civilised world so that everyone can see exactly what has been going on.

As Stephen Glover pointed out in the Daily Mail, perhaps it would not be right to bomb Iran in retaliation for the humiliation of our servicemen, but clearly the Iranian people must be made to suffer - whether by beefing up sanctions, as the Mail suggests, or simply by getting President Bush to hurry up and invade, as he intends to anyway, and bring democracy and western values to the country, as he has in Iraq.
• Terry Jones is a film director, actor and Python
www.terry-jones.net

www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,2046991,00.html#article_continue

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