The latest Islamic attack conducted by Hamas was not about the politics surrounding the Gaza Strip. It wasn’t even about Israel; those are just the two most recent excuses for a bloodletting that, in.
The latest Islamic attack conducted by Hamas was not about the politics surrounding the Gaza Strip. It wasn’t even about Israel; those are just the two most recent excuses for a bloodletting that, in the eyes of extremists, is not only justified but obligatory.
Islam was established in Anatolia, but, between the 14th and 16th centuries, the religion spread via Ottoman conquest to the Balkan Peninsula and central Hungary. The Ottoman state based its authority on religion. The first warrior-sultans expanded the empire in the name of Islam. Sultans claimed the title of caliph, or successor to the Islamic Prophet Muhammad. Alongside the sultans, religious scholars, called ulama, played a significant role in running the state.
The Siege of Vienna in 1529 was the first attempt by the Ottoman Empire to capture the capital city of Vienna, Austria. Suleiman the Magnificent, sultan of the Ottomans, attacked the city with over 100,000 men while the defenders, led by Niklas Graf Salm, numbered no more than 21,000. Nevertheless, Vienna was able to survive the siege, which ultimately lasted just over two weeks from September 27 to October 15, 1529.
During that first siege of Vienna in 1529, the invading Muslim horde decided that “children were to be cut out of their mother’s wombs and stuck on pikes.” Are we to believe that was just a protest against colonialism or capitalism? When a Muslim chronicle boasted that, during the genocide against the Sikhs in the 18th century, “the shrieks of the women captives who were being raped deafened the ears of the people,” was this a response to globalism or Zionism? Perhaps was this simply Islam.
In 1929, a Muslim mob attacked the Jewish city of Safed. The attackers burst into an orphanage and “smashed the children’s heads and cut off their hands.” Later that same year, another attack known as the Hebron massacre killed 69 Jews. The event also left scores seriously wounded or maimed. Jewish homes were pillaged, and synagogues were ransacked. Some of the 435 Jews who survived were hidden by local Arab families. The attackers were supposedly triggered to violence by rumors that Jews were planning to seize control of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem.
The massacre, together with that of Jews in Safed, sent shockwaves through Jewish communities in Palestine and around the world. It led to the re-organization and development of the Jewish paramilitary organization, the Hagenah, which later became the nucleus of the Israel Defense Forces.
On November 17thm 1997, the Luxor massacre took place at Dayr al-Bahri, an archaeological site located across the Nile from the city of Luxor. In a mid-morning attack, six gunmen killed 58 foreign nationals and four Egyptians. The assailants were armed with automatic firearms and knives, and disguised as members of the security forces. They descended on the Mortuary Temple of Hatshepsut at around 8:45 in the morning. They killed two armed guards at the site. With the tourists trapped inside the temple, the killing went on systematically for 45 minutes, during which many bodies, especially of women, were mutilated with machetes. The body of an elderly Japanese man was also found mutilated. A leaflet was discovered stuffed into his body that read “no to tourists in Egypt” and was signed “Omar Abdul Rahman‘s Squadron of Havoc and Destruction the Gama’ a al-Islamiyya, the Islamic Group.”
One or more al-Jema’ah al-Islamiyya leaflets were found calling for the release of Omar Abdel-Rahman from a U.S. prison, stating that the attack had been carried out as a gesture to exiled leader Mustafa Hamza, declaring: “We shall take revenge for our brothers who have died on the gallows. The depths of the earth are better for us than the surface since we have seen our brothers squatting in their prisons, and our brothers and families tortured in their jails.
