When There Were No Moderate Muslims
Thanks to the Gates of Vienna
The latest essay by Anestos Canelides looks at the massacre and expulsion of the Greeks from Turkey as part of the larger picture of the Great Jihad.
When There Were No Moderate Muslims
by Anestos Canelides
I have never published anything in the first person, but this is the only way I can truly express my feeling about Political Islam and the actions of Muslims for the last 1400 years against the Kafir.
My grandfather or Papou, on my mother’s side, came to America in 1919. I know little about his past except that his parents were murdered by Muslim Turks about 1905. They lived in a small suburb outside of Edirne, Turkiye. At age eight, while he was in boarding school in Greece, the Turks attacked the Greeks in his village of Orestiada, leaving him an orphan.
Later on Kemal Atatürk deported over a million and half Greeks. This was due to both Islam and Turkish nationalism. The same expulsion of the indigenous Greeks would again happen in 1955 and 1961 when the Turks forced thousands of Greek out of Istanbul (Constantinople). This was also repeated on the Greek island of Tenedos and Imbros, as well as Cyprus.
Expulsion and Slaughter:
In an essay by Dr. Rich Swier entitled “Fitnah is Worse than Slaughter”, he defines two words to explain the reason why slaughter and expulsion of the native non-Muslim population occurs, unless they convert to Islam. According to Dr. Swier the two tactical verbs that that found in the Qur’an are kill/slaughter and displace/drive out/expel. According to Dr. Swier, “My three-fold reason for this is that the verbs Qital and Kharaj are not only much more violent than Jihad, but they are much more graphic and violent than the word Jihad.”
Phases of Qital and Kharaj in the conquest of Anatolia and the Balkans
After the 1071 defeat of the Byzantine military, under the leadership of Emperor Romanus IV, by the Seljuk army, the Roman territory in Anatolia was left undefended. In a short period of time hordes of Muslim Turkish migrants began to invade Roman lands. This invasion not only brought slaughter and devastation to the native Christians, but complete destruction of their towns and cities, forcing thousands of Greeks to flee to lands still under Byzantine control. In the process of Islamic conquests by the Seljuk Turks, we see Qital or as defined the slaughter of the Kafir or unbeliever. Along with this we see Kharaj, or the expulsion of thousands of Greeks — if they were lucky enough to escape death or slavery.
Continue reading The massacre and expulsion of the Greeks from Turkey