The Dark Side of Lincoln and his Generals: 

 The Fight to Make Men Free

In November 1862, General Grant was convinced that the black market of cotton was organized by Jews. Grant ordered that "no Jews are to be permitted to travel on the railroad southward from any point." Nor were they to be granted trade licenses.

Now all wars have "contraband", black market", "illegal traders". This will include all people and there were just a handful of Jews that were "illegal traders". The majority of Jews were not. The terms "Jew", "profiteer", "speculator", "trader", were employed interchangeably.

Union General Henry W. Hallack linked "traitors and Jew peddlers" as one. General Grant shared Hallack's mentality, describing "the Israelites" as "an intolerable nuisance".

Gen. Grant's order in November 1862 was carried out immediately and with enthusiasm by the Army of the Tennessee. In Holley Springs, Mississippi, Jewish traders had to walk 40 miles to evacuate the area. In Paducah, Kentucky, the Union military gave 30 Jewish families, all long term residents, with 2 of Jewish inhabitants being Union Army Veterans, 24 hours to leave.

The exodus of the Jews was not happening fast enough for Gen. Grant. He wanted more and he showed exactly the type of man he was, the man Lincoln wanted for his Commander of the Armies of the United States.

In December of 1862, General Grant initiated an official order of anti-Semitism. It was one of the worst in 19^th century America. One could argue this was a test to be used on the Indians in the future. We know that tactics used in the burning of Missouri and of Atlanta was later employed on the Indians.

General Grant issued his "General Order Number 11". This order expelled all Jews from Kentucky, Tennessee and Mississippi. The order said:

The Jews, as a class violating every regulation of trade established by the Treasury Department and also department orders, are hereby expelled from the department ('Department of the Tennessee,' an administrative district of the Union Army of occupation composed of Kentucky, Tennessee and Mississippi) within twenty-four hours from the receipt of this order.

Post commanders will see to it that all of this class of people be furnished passes and required to leave, and any on returning after such notification will be arrested and held in confinement until an opportunity occurs of sending them out as prisoners, unless furnished with permit from headquarters. No passes will be given these people to visit headquarters for the purpose of making personal application of trade permits.

A few months earlier, on 11 August 1862, General William Tecumseh Sherman had warned in a letter to the Adjutant General of the Union Army that "the country will swarm with dishonest Jews" if continued trade in cotton is encouraged. (Sherman, in a letter written in 1858, had described Jews as "…without pity, soul, heart, or bowels of compassion…").

And Grant also issued orders on 9 and 10 November 1862 banning southward travel in general, stating that "the Israelites especially should be kept out… no Jews are to be permitted to travel on the railroad southward from any point. They may go north and be encouraged in it; but they are such an intolerable nuisance, that the department must be purged of them".

As a result of Grant's expulsion order, Jewish families were forced out of their homes in Paducah, Kentucky, Holly Springs and Oxford Mississippi, and a few were sent to prison. When some Jewish victims protested to President Lincoln, the Attorney General Edward Bates advised the President that he was indifferent to such objections, "myself feeling no particular interest in the subject."

Nevertheless, on 4 January, 1863, Lincoln had Grant's odious order rescinded, but by then, some Jewish families in the area had been expelled, humiliated, terrified, and jailed, and others stripped of their possessions. As Bertram W. Korn writes in his classic work, "American Jewry and the Civil War" (1951):

They still tell stories of the expulsion in Paducah, Ky.: of the hurried departure by riverboat up the Ohio to Cincinnati; of a baby almost left behind in the haste and confusion and tossed bodily into the boat; of two dying women permitted to remain behind in neighbors' care. Thirty men and their families were expelled from Paducah, and according to affidavits by some of "the most respectable Union citizens of the city," the deportees "had at no time been engaged in trade within the active lines of General Grant…" Two had already served brief enlistments in the Union army.

On 21 January, Union General-in-Chief Henry W. Halleck wrote to Grant to explain the rescission of the order, stating that "The President has no objection to your expelling traitors and Jew peddlers, which, I suppose was the object of your order; but as it in terms proscribed an entire religious class, some of whom are fighting in our ranks, the President deemed it necessary to revoke it."

Captain Philip Trounstine of the Ohio Volunteer Cavalry, being unable in good conscience to round up and expel his fellow Jews, resigned his army commission, saying he could "no longer bear the Taunts and malice of his fellow officers… brought on by … that order."

The officials responsible for the United States government's most vicious anti-Jewish actions ever were never dismissed, admonished or, apparently, even officially criticized for the religious persecution they inflicted on innocent citizens.

What caused Grant to take these draconian steps against the Jews?  Military historian Mel Young points out in his book "Where They Lie,"  that Grant's own family were slave owners and  involved in cotton so he perhaps considered Jewish traders as competition.

Bertram Korn asserts that many "suspected that the expulsion of the Jews had been foisted upon Grant and Sherman by influential cotton buyers and their [Union Army] officer-partners, to pave the way for higher profits for themselves."

As Korn observes:

But only Jews, and not all traders were banished; cotton traders as a group were never expelled. The question therefore….was… "who stood to profit most from the departure of Jews?"…And the answer, "The other traders and speculators, civilian and military," was in itself the only possible explanation of The Order….The Jews were the natural scapegoat…because they had already been the scapegoat for almost two millennia.

Other instances of this widespread Yankee bigotry are described in detail by Korn and by Robert Rosen, in his work "The Jewish Confederates", as well as by other historians of the era. They recount how Jews in Union-occupied areas, such as New Orleans and Memphis, were singled out by Union forces for vicious abuse and vilification.

In New Orleans, the ruling general, Benjamin "Beast" Butler, harshly vilified Jews, and was quoted by a Jewish newspaper as saying that he could:

 "suck the blood of every Jew, and …will detain every Jew as long as he can."

An Associated Press reporter from the North wrote that:

 "The Jews in New Orleans and all the South ought to be exterminated. ..They run the blockade, and are always to be found at the bottom of every new villainy."

Of Memphis, whose Mississippi River port was a center of illegal cotton trading, "The Chicago Tribune" reported in July, 1862:

 "The Israelites have come down upon the city like locusts…Every boat brings in a load of the hooked-nose fraternity."

Rosen writes at length about the blatant and widespread anti-Semitism throughout the North, with even The New York Times castigating the anti-war Democratic Party for having a chairman who was:

 "the agent of foreign jew bankers."

New Englanders were especially hateful, and one leading abolitionist minister, Theodore Parker, called Jews:

 "lecherous," and said that their intellects were "sadly pinched in those narrow foreheads" and that they "did sometimes kill a Christian baby at the Passover."

Yes, there was enough backlash from residents for Lincoln to make a decision to order General Grant to revoke the "Order". Only after an uproar, however, and not because the order per se offended President Lincoln.

From the forthcoming novel:  The Chosen Few: Renaissance  by Professor Marshall Onellion, Professor of Physics and R. David Ramati

THE MURDER OF THE ROSENBERGS

"Ethel was murdered, you can't put it any other way." --Walter Schneir.

 "We didn't want them to die, we wanted them to talk.” --Robert J. Lamphere, FBI, Espionage Section.

Interesting quotes; and now, decades later, after the McCarthy witch hunts (which were given credibility in the eyes of a stunned America by the execution of the “spies”), and after the end of the cold war, let us look at the facts.  To quote Sargent Joe Friday, of the television series Dragnet:  “Only the facts, ma’am.”

Julius Rosenberg, an electrical engineer, and his wife Ethel, the mother of two young children, were executed at Sing Sing in upstate New York on the evening of 19 June 1953.

Other than having been born Jewish and living in an era when Jews were generally linked with Communism as a result of their contribution to the Spanish Civil war and the struggle for organized Labor, were they really guilty of anything else, or were they a convenient scapegoat used to throw the blame on people other than the real traitors, who to this day are protected by a grateful Government; people too trusted and famous ever to be revealed for what they were?

The Rosenberg lawyer, Emmanuel Bloch was unable to persuade a single atomic scientist to testify to the limited significance of Julius's atomic espionage. The sketches that allegedly held the bomb secrets Julius allegedly received from his brother-in-law David Greenglass and delivered to his Soviet controller were never made public. Not once during the trial nor afterward was the prosecution required to show the actual connection between that information and the Soviet bomb.

Among the most useful of Stalin's nuclear recruits was Theodore Hall, an American biophysicist who gave away the bomb. Hall, who worked at Los Alamos with Klaus Fuchs, provided the Soviets with information vital to the success of their bomb program. Hall justified his deed by claiming he'd been troubled by the prospect of an American atomic weapon monopoly, that at the time the Americans and the Soviets were allies in the war against Hitler, and that the Soviets had saved the West from defeat.

Hall, strangely enough, was questioned but never put on trial or sent to prison!

Joan Hall, Theodore Hall's wife, remembered the evening of the Rosenberg executions: "We followed the case, but we weren't in a position to do anything at that time. Ted still had his links with the network. There was no question of our participating in any of the clemency movement or whatever was going on. So we watched from the sidelines in horror... That evening we had been invited to an evening gathering at the home of a colleague of Ted's in Westchester. We were driving up from Queens where we lived. The road took us parallel to the Hudson River past Ossining, the town where Sing-Sing Prison is. It was eight o'clock, and as we drove by the sun was setting. It was red, and it was large over the river going down. I absent-mindedly switched on the radio and, believe it or not, they were broadcasting the last movement of Mahler's Ninth Symphony, a farewell symphony, which is some of the most sad, heartbreaking music that exists. It was a symphony that Ted and I were both very familiar with... So we rode along listening to Mahler and watching the sun go down and feeling indescribable. We didn't say anything, not a word. We got to our colleague's house and did what people have to do in gatherings like that, then went home...Of course, we were thinking, God, that could have been us..."

Shiner asserts  that Ethel Rosenberg was not a Soviet spy, and also that her husband Julius did not receive bomb lens mold sketches from David Greenglass, who'd been employed while in the army at Los Alamos.  He further asserts that if anyone was guilty of stealing atom bomb secrets it was David Greenglass, Ethel's brother.

Invitation to an Inquest ( Schneir, Walter (1983). Invitation to an Inquest. Pantheon Books ISBN 0-394-71496-2.)

In February 1950, Klaus Fuchs was arrested in London, England. Charged with espionage he gave up his courier Harry Gold. Gold was arrested on 23 May, 1950, his FBI statement led the agency to David Greenglass who was taken into custody 16 June, 1950, Julius Rosenberg a month later, Ethel a month after that.

The key element in the prosecution's case was an alleged meeting in the Rosenberg apartment on an afternoon in September 1945. Ethel was supposed to have sat down at a Remington portable machine and typed out a twelve-page report on the bomb supplied to her by her brother. Walter Schneir maintains that the meeting never took place. Julius had lost his army-related job a few months before the alleged meeting and his Soviet spymasters had suspended his activity on their behalf.

According to Elizabeth Bentley, an American agent who turned herself in to the FBI in 1945, Julius was a key figure in a cell of engineers involved in industrial espionage. In 1944, the New York Cityrezidentura (the head agent handler for the NYC area) warned Moscow that perhaps Julius was being overworked. But this was not for his work on bomb information.

The release in Russia in the late 1990s and early 2000s of once top-secret documents pertaining to the Soviet atomic project has determined that the Greenglass-Rosenberg information was of limited value. Igor Kurchatov, a leading Soviet nuclear scientist, said the material received from David Greenglass via the Julius Rosenberg network provided at best limited corroboration of what had already been obtained from Klaus Fuchs and Ted Hall.

A book by Vladimir Lota published in 2002 with the title The GRU and the Atomic Bomb achieved best-seller status in Russia and was soon followed by a competing volume, The KGB and the Atomic Bomb In Prof. Lota's determination to ensure the GRU received maximum credit, he lumped Robert Oppenheimer with Fuchs, and the Rosenbergs.

(in 2002, Russian historian Vladimir Lota published The GRU and the Atom Bomb.)  

Read more:

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/Iowa-Born-Soviet-Trained.html#ixzz24eaaTYsZ

“Spies: The Rise and Fall of the K.G.B. in America,” is by John Earl Haynes, Harvey Klehr and Alexander Vassiliev, a former Soviet espionage agent.  In this book they maintain that: “For more than half a century, Oppenheimer has been denounced as the most damaging Soviet spy inside the Manhattan Project or defended as an honorable man undone by false and politically motivated charges. K.G.B. documents demonstrate that he was not a spy, although not for lack of K.G.B. effort.” and he added, “The news that Julius Rosenberg recruited not one atomic spy but two was a total surprise.”

Julius Rosenberg’s code name was Liberal. That his wife apparently was not given a covert identity, Mr. Haynes said, was not surprising, because she was “not active in her own right, but just as an aide to Julius,” he said.

“His wife knows about her husband’s work,” according to Mr. Vassiliev’s notes from one K.G.B. memo. “She could be used independently, but should not be overworked — poor health.”

Mr. Vassiliev’s notebooks contain no references to Ethel Rosenberg’s typing her brother’s notes — the crucial trial evidence against her — but said “this is a lack of evidence, not negative evidence, simply a lack of corroboration.”

“The notebooks show that Greenglass delivered more and richer information about Los Alamos than he later admitted,” Mr. Haynes said.

Mr. Greenglass’s information “was unqualified and far from polished,” for which agents blamed, in part, his “insufficient qualifications” — as a machinist, rather than a scientist or engineer. The authors concluded, though, that he provided “an impressive list of materials from an Army sergeant with only limited technical education.”

Mr. Greenglass, sentenced to 15 years’ imprisonment, was released in 1960. Through his lawyer, he declined to comment on the latest allegations.

 In the course of the trial Julius took the fifth when asked if he was a Party member and insisted on the couple's total innocence.

While the judge, Irving R.Kaufman and prosecutors Irving Saypol and Roy Cohn were Jews, not a single Jew was allowed on the jury. Julius Rosenberg was found guilty, sentenced to death. Ethel Rosenberg was also found guilty, sentenced to die with her husband. Morton Sobell was found guilty and sentenced to 30 years. David Greenglass was sentenced to 15 years. The U S Supreme Court refused to review the Rosenberg case. On 19 June 1953 the court reversed a last-minute stay of execution.

In a letter dated 16 June 1953, Ethel reminded President Eisenhower that Nazis had received American mercy. “Today”, she wrote, while she and her husband languished on death row, "these ghastly mass butchers, these obscene racists are graciously receiving the benefits of mercy and in many instances being reinstated in public office."

There is no record of a reply.

In his denial of a petition for Executive Clemency, Eisenhower said the Rosenbergs's crime “could very well result in the deaths of many, many thousands of innocent citizens.” On the day of the executions, the number expanded. The Rosenbergs, he said, "may have condemned to death tens of millions of innocent people all over the world."

Ike wrote, in a letter to his son David: "... to the Rosenberg case... in this instance it is the woman who is the strong and recalcitrant character, the man is the weak one. She has obviously been the leader in everything they did in the spy ring... if there would be any commuting of the woman's sentence without the man's then from here on the Soviets would simply recruit their spies from among women."

Kim Philby, the convicted KGB spy in the highest circles of the English government maintained that all Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were ever really guilty of was being small-time couriers, that they had no connection to the key KGB atomic bomb spies, and further that he never imagined they would be executed.

A week before the execution the FBI presented their lawyer Emmanuel Bloch with a list of twenty-five names. If Julius and Ethel affixed their signatures to the list, branding the men and women on it Soviet spies, the couple might have been spared. Ethel was little more than a hostage to the process and died as hostages do when the demands of their captors have been rejected.

Walter Schneir: "What if Julius and Ethel had confessed? Could they have escaped execution if they had tried to meet the government halfway?... My own conclusion is that it would have been difficult, probably impossible, for them to save themselves. The only sure-fire way would have been for both, Ethel as well as Julius, to have agreed to everything, including all the atomic espionage deeds they had never done, and then for Julius to have testified at trials and Congressional hearings against the very friends he himself had recruited."

On that Friday evening in June, 1953 with the Shabbat hour approaching, FBI agents with stenographers standing by were at the scene to hear last minute confessions. Rabbi Irving Koslowe, the Sing Sing rabbi, attended the executions. After Julius had been pronounced dead, the rabbi approached Ethel, and said: "Julius is gone. Do you have any names?" “No”, she replied, “I have no names”.

There had been was a hasty re-scheduling of the executions to beat the 8:13 p.m. Shabbat deadline. Julius who went first was pronounced dead at 8:06:45. It turned out Ethel, the executioner’s last client, was harder to kill. The first attempt at killing Ethel was at 8:11:30. But she needed a second jolt and wasn't pronounced dead until 8:16, three minutes into the Sabbath.

So were they guilty of everything they were charged with?  The Venona papers (Venona was a top-secret government operation involving cryptanalysts, linguists and mathematicians who decoded thousands of intercepted Soviet intelligence cables sent to agents in the U.S.) were not allowed to be presented at the trial, only paraphrased by the FBI to explicitly prove the extent of Rosenbergs guilt.

The papers didn’t finger Julius as an atomic spy. Rather, they identified him as someone engaged in low-level industrial espionage.

The United States government supposedly executed two people for the reason that they stole the greatest secret known to mankind. The judge said that they committed a crime worse than murder, and that they caused the Korean War. President Eisenhower said "I am denying clemency" for essentially the same reason. That’s why they were executed, and Venona is proof that neither Julius nor Ethel Rosenberg were sentenced to death for a crime they never committed.

Not long after the trial, the New York Times reported that Dr. James Beckerley, the head of the Atomic Energy Commission Classification Office was not convinced of the extent of their guilt.  “The atom bomb and hydrogen bomb were not stolen from us by spies.” He said.  He went on, “Atom bombs and hydrogen bombs are not matters that can be stolen and transmitted in the form of information.” 

Dr. Harold Urey testified in a March 3, 1946 congressional hearing that, "Detailed data on the atomic bomb would require 80 or 90 volumes of close print which only a scientist or engineer would be able to read."

 Henry Linschitz, who helped assemble the Nagasaki bomb, described Greenglass’s sketches as "garbled" and "highly incomplete." He concluded that it was "not possible in any technologically useful way to condense the results of a $2 billion development effort into a diagram, drawn by a high school graduate machinist on a single sheet of paper."

Previously there had been a major effort on the part of the government to discredit Jews who had helped so much with labor unions and scientific research yet this same government had opened the US to NAZI scientists with Jewish blood on their hands; offering them a home, prestige, and massive salaries to aid the US to become the dominant world power.   By murdering the Rosenbergs the government suppressed dissidence in the US, crippled the labor unions, and gaged Hollywood, and opened the door for the dark days of the McCarthy witch hunt to come.

The last irony in the case came in 2008, when the only surviving defendant, Morton Sobell, acknowledged that he was a Soviet spy and implicated Julius Rosenberg in industrial and military spying, but not in atomic espionage.

The Peer Gynt Syndrome 

By David Ramati

The Scandinavian fascination with the Middle East probably goes back to pre-history when Norwegian Myth placed Aasegard, the home of the gods, somewhere in the Mediterranean Basin.  In order to understand this phenomenon it is probably best to start with an understanding of how the Norwegian adventurer sees himself.
Henrik Ibsen best defines this self image in his play "Peer Gynt", when Peer replies after being asked if he is  a Norwegian: 

By birth but a
Citizen of the world by creed.
For the good fortune I've enjoyed,
I have to thank America.
I've drawn my library of books
From the latest German scholars' works.
From France, I took a taste in dress,
My manners and my turn of wit—
From England, my enterprising spirit
And an eye for my own advantages.
The Jews have taught me how to wait.
From Italy, I gained a bit
Of a flair for dolce far niente—
And once, when events were violently
Disposed, I stretched my years no small amount with the aid of Swedish steel. (1)

Our modern day Peer Gynts see themselves as latter day Vikings, plundering and absorbing the best that other, lesser cultures have to offer.  They operated military missions in Lebanon, the Sinai, and Hebron.  The Oslo Peace Process is probably the most dynamic attempt to Scandinavianize another people since the failed Trans-Scandinavian Movement of Ibsen’s' day when Denmark attempted to annex Schleswig-Holstein in the Jutland peninsula. [DR1] 

There followed a long period of isolationism in which the Scandinavians were absorbed in their own problems; a process which climaxed in an independent Norway on the 17th of May 1905. 

Two world wars and a cruel occupation re-kindled the Viking spirit and the Scandinavians became the corner stone of the U.N. throughout the world, sending observers and soldiers to almost every continent.  The modern Peer Gynts found themselves attracted to the middle east. 

The Arab world became more than a cause; the Scandinavians saw it as their burden.  In a passage which is almost like something written by Kipling, Peer Gynt speaks with his Arab lover, Anitra:

I'm taking over your education.
No soul Yes, you are rather dumb;
It's struck me, with a certain depression.
But, for a soul, there's always room.
Come here!  Let me measure your braincase—
There's room, room enough; I knew there was.
It's true—you aren't ever going to go
Very deep; a large soul isn't for you—
But, after all, what's the difference—
You'll have enough for all your wants—(2)

The Arab world is to receive a Soul; an education which will take them from savage ignorance to something approaching culture.  Unfortunately the gift is dependent on the capacity of the receiver, and in the case of Anitra, the ability to understand the superior culture is shallow.[DR2]
Anitra represents the allure of the dark Mediterranean Peoples;
emotional, childlike, and definitely the intellectual and cultural
inferiors of the Norwegians.  In order to become a Man, Peer must raise this Pygmalion to a status deserving of his love.  Not the love of equals, but rather, the paternalistic incestuous love of enlightened master and grateful slave.  This approach was used by the Norwegians during the Oslo agreements.  The Arabs were to benefit from Norwegian and European largess in financial terms on the condition that they recognize their basic inferiority and lack of self determination.  The PLO Anitra would be rewarded if only she discarded her primitive HAMAS past and clung lovingly to the new Western Culture of which Scandinavia is the example.  Peer asks Anitra:

Tell me, do you know what it is to live?
Now do you see, my little one,
Why I've graciously paid you court—
Why I singled out your heart
To be, as it were, the foundation stone
Of all my being's caliphate?
Over your longings, I'll be lord.
In passion, I'm an autocrat.
You have to live for me alone.  (3)

The price paid by Anitra for the Oslo Accords is high indeed.  In return for some babbles and the Western definition of a "soul" she is required to abandon her image of self and embrace an alien culture; the western culture which requires her to "live for me alone" is foreign to a desert tradition based on the harsh laws necessary to the self sufficient nomadic peoples.
This obedience to an outside influence cannot last for long.  Anitra takes everything that Peer offers her, but, in the end, when he requests that she change clothes with him:

Your robe wouldn't fit;
Your girdle's too big; your stockings, to tight—
Your paradise—is it much farther yet? [DR3]
Oh, a thousand miles—
Too far!
The soul I promised you, you'll get---
Thanks—I'll make it without a soul.
But you asked for sorrow.
(She cuts him sharply across the knuckles and
gallops away full tilt across the desert.) (4)

With a practicality born of the desert, she takes all that is offered, but, when the Norwegian tries to steal her birthright by changing clothes with her, she finally refuses.  And when she realizes that the Scandinavian promise of paradise is not a real thing, but merely a mirage a "thousand miles" distant, she loses interest.  The Palestinians may find that they can survive without a Norwegian Soul.  They need not betray their origins.  The parting gift is the sorrow that the Scandinavian was courting all along.  That sorrow is the final realization that the Scandinavian will never be accepted as an Arab by the Palestinians.

 Every country in the Middle East has it's Scandinavian Tourist/Soldier; white limbs jutting from his Bermuda shorts, long blond hair flowing from under a mini-kafia many times too small for his head.  The Scandinavian feels he is blending in with the locals...he has become an Arab.  The Arab cause has become his cause.  He maintains a patronizing interest in Arab affairs until, tired of promised paradises a thousand miles away,
the Arabs burn his car or take his valuables.  At that point the
Scandinavians return home for a year or two until the hurt is dulled by distance and time.

The withdrawal period lasts until fatal masochistic intoxication of thee Peer Gynt Syndrome manifests itself, and he finds himself compelled to take up the "Arab Burden" and, once again, the Vikings return to the Middle East.

_________________________________ 

(1) Henrik Ibsen, Peer Gynt, P.130 IV. i. , Translated by Rolf Fjelde
(2) Henrkik Ibsen, "Peer Gynt", P.158 IV. vii.  Translated by Rolf Fjelde
(3) (4)  Ibid. P. 160 IV. Ix

[DR1]  In 1863 the policy that advocated closer ties between Norway, Sweden, and Denmark was called Scandinavianism".  This policy resulted in the 1863 annexation of the duchies of Schleswig and Holstein on ethnic grounds by the Danish King Frederick III.  When the Prussian army invaded
Schleswig in February 1864, these internationalists, Ibsen included, called for Norway and Sweden to come to Denmark's aid and defeat the invaders.  The Danish forts at Dybbol fell, and the Swedes and Norwegians stayed home.  The  unification of ermany was inevitable, and instead of Scandinavian expansion into Europe the world saw the results of a united Germany in two world wars.  There was to be no revival of the Viking Past.

[DR2]  This generalization of the Arab world as shallow and soul-less had become stereotyped by 1915, less than fifty years after "Peer Gynt" was first published on November 14, 1867.

T.E.  Lawrence describes the Arabs in his classic work, "Seven Pillars of Wisdom" as '...a limited, narrow-minded people, whose inert intellects lay fallow in incurious resignation.  There imaginations were vivid, but not creative.'--"Seven
Pillars of Wisdom", P.38, Foundations of Revolt, T.E. Lawrence

[DR3] T. E. Lawrence writes, "In my case, the effort for these years to live in the dress of Arabs, and to imitate their mental foundation, quitted me of my English self, and let me look at the West and its conventions with new eyes:  they destroyed it all for me.  At the same time I could not sincerely take on the Arab skin:  it was an affection only."--Seven Pillars of Wisdom, chapter 1, P. 31.  The English learned quite early on that "never the twine shall meet", a wisdom that has never been grasped by the Scandinavian Tourist/Soldiers.
       

The War against Islam

By David Ramati

The truth of 9/11 is something that the American people have yet to understand.

The attack on 9/11 was not an attack of terrorists as such, but rather an expression of radical Islam's traditional attempts at destroying what it considers to be a satanic world order.  They truly see themselves as

involved in a holy war against the West and all it stands for.  In order to understand this better we should look at history without, as is usual for mankind, making any futile attempts to learn from it.

After the conquest of North Africa and the conversion of the Berbers to Islam, the Arabs were frustrated that they faced the Sea (Atlantic Ocean) with no more lands to conquer.  According to Arab chronicles, when the Arab army reached the seashore for the first time, the Arab commander Uqba-ibn-Nafe waded into the sea and swashed his sword at the water to express his frustration that there were no more lands to conquer in which to spread the glory of Islam by terrorizing the conquered people to accept Islam or death.

The Arabs now started eyeing Spain the country that lay across the Mediterranean.  They faced the legendary Pillars of Hercules (later renamed by the Arabs as Jebel-ut-Tarik or Gibraltar as we know it today).  Spain was then under the rule of the Visigoths, who had embraced Christianity.  The Visigothic king who was ruling the Visigothic Spain was Roderic, or Rodrigo (in Spanish).  King Rodrigo of Spain married the daughter of one of his noblemen, Count  Julian against the wishes of her father.  To avenge what Julian perceived as his violated honor, he opened secret parleys with the enemy and invited with the Emir (Governor) Musa ibn Nusayr, the Muslim ruler of North Africa, who was based in Tunisia to invade Spain.  The Caliph al-Walid authorized the invasion of Spain (710-711 AD), on condition that Count Julian recited the Shahada and embraced Islam.  

The two armies met on the banks of the Guadalete river on July 19, 711 in the extreme south of the Iberian peninsula.  The Muslim army was victorious and stuck the Spanish Emperor's head on a pole and paraded it before those contingents of the Spanish army that were still engaged in opposing the Muslims in crossing of the Guadalete River.

After conquering Spain, the Muslims immediately began the campaign against Europe.  Soon the Jews along with the Christians were made to pay the Jiziya poll tax was imposed on all non-Muslims (Kafirs) by the Muslims.  They were also drafted for slave labor to demolish churches and build mosques from the columns of the destroyed churches.

The Jews and Christians also could not carry weapons, ride horses, wear shoes, ring church bells, wear anything green, or resist a Muslim assault.  From these earliest times proclaiming Jesus' divinity and attempting conversion from Islam were made capital offences.  In the 9th century, Spanish Jews in Muslim areas had to wear on their shoulders a patch of white cloth that bore the image of an ape; Christians, since they ate pork, wore the image of a pig.  On the Caliph al-Mutawakkil's orders a yellow badge for

Jews was made compulsory, setting a precedent that would be followed centuries later in Nazi Germany.

Thus began the Muslim invasion of France under the leadership of Abd-ur Rahman, who was then been appointed the chieftain of the Muslim occupiers of Spain.

The Franks were a Gothic (Germanic) tribe who eventually became the French as we know it today.  It was another related Gothic clan - the Ostrogoths, who were ruling Spain when the Muslims attacked.  The tales of mindless Muslim cruelty, savage torture, subterfuge deception, and blood chilling ruthlessness that the Ostrogoths who fled Muslim occupied Spain told their Frankish clansmen, had contributed to further stiffen the Frankish resolve to defeat the Muslim invaders.

The ferocity with which Charles (Karl) Martel fought against the invading Arabs, and the personal weapon of a hammer like axe that he used, earned him the title of Karl the Hammer.  October 10, 732 AD marks the conclusion of the Battle of Tours, arguably one of the most decisive battles in all of  history.  Martel gathered his forces directly in the path of the oncoming Moslem army and prepared to defend themselves by using a phalanx style of combat.  It was one of the rare times in the Middle Ages when infantry held its ground against a mounted attack.  The exact length of the battle is undetermined; Arab sources claim that it was a two day battle whereas Christian sources hold that the fighting clamored on for seven days.  In either case, the battle ended when the French captured and killed Abd-ur Rahman.  And Europe was safe for the next 700 years until the Muslims breached the Eastern Gateway when they overran Constantinople in 1453.

Constantinople proved far more difficult to conquer than the Muslims had expected, and did not fall until 1453.  The great expansion of Islam had obviously lost steam, and the final battle would be fought by a ragtag group of defenders: Jews, Lithuanians, Hapsburgs, Saxons, Bavarians, and Poles against Grand Vizier Merzifonlu Kara Mustafa Pasha and the might of the Ottoman army.  Vienna would be the decisive battle.

The Battle of Vienna ended in defeat for the Muslims, and began the long slide by Islam into near irrelevance, as far as the Europeans cared.  The battle opened after a 2-month siege of the Holy Roman Empire's capital city on September 12, 1683 in the pre-dawn hours.  It ended that era of Islamic expansion with a defeat at the hands of Jan Ill Sobieski and Charles V of Lorraine.

When the World Trade Center was destroyed in 2001, nobody in the news media seemed to understand the choice of September 11 by al Qaeda as their attack date.  It has often been suggested that this was merely a random date chosen for convenience.  I beg to differ.  It seems clear to me that bin Laden was sending America and the West a message.  Al Qaeda had an old score to settle, and was putting us on notice that the era of expansion is resuming after the interruption of Vienna.  Night fell on September 12 for the soldiers of Allah, and so our towers fell on the preceding morning three hundred and eighteen years later.

It is important to understand this history in order to understand what we are up against; our enemy has a long memory and seeks to avenge this defeat of its ancestors.  The radical Islamists are not upset about our presence in their lands, nor are they upset about Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, nor about our "exploitation" of their oil fields, nor our invasion of Iraq.  They are taking a much longer view, a view with vengeance in mind!

Vengeance for Tours, vengeance for Granada, vengeance for Vienna.  They want to reinvigorate Islam, return to the days of pride and victory and submission by their foes.  They want to establish the Caliphate and place the entire world under Sharia law.

9/11 was the first step in this process of re-establishing Jihad as a divine force of conversion and conquest but it will not be the last.  Soon they will have atomic weapons and rest assured they will not hesitate to use them.

 If America, Europe and Israel fail  to understand this,  then they have made a classical fatal mistake in warfare; they have failed to understand their enemy.