Razzia Redux

Islam’s prophet, Muhammad, found no need to explain or justify his unprovoked looting raids which suggests that the attitude of, “it’s there for the taking” and the lure of “something-for-nothing” was already well established and accepted as normal behaviour. This barbarous and predatory conduct may have, in time, changed—as it did with the Vikings— had it not been for Islam. Muhammad’s divinely sanctioned marauding of booty-laden merchant’s caravans became the imprimatur that entrenched opportunism and predation as, not only legitimate, but in fact exemplary, thereby immutably casting the die for eternity.
With Islam’s belief that all is preordained, where even the most minute detail in day to day life only happens because Allah has previously willed it, (the inshallah mentality), it doesn’t require a great stretch of the imagination to conceive that, in the Muslim mind, Allah has permitted Western society to develop, succeed and prosper so as to present the “faithful” with a ready-made “walk-in-walk-out”, “under new management” takeover, complete with a functioning infrastructure and a populace steadily retreating into an ever increasing degree of subservient “dhimmitude”. -Warner MacKenzie at Islam Watch

In most historic instances before nations have been subjugated to the muslim will, the final capitulation can be shown to have been preceded by years of marauding terror raids, "razzias", and the classic contemporary example can be found in the Darfur region of the Sudan.

This week the news in Darfur is the mass re-population by moon-watching, ethnic arabs of the now abandoned homelands of the indigenous black Africans (Dar=land; fur=the fur language). Lets put that bit of predictable news into context. This piece comes from Amnesty International and dates to 2003:

"The attack took place at dawn in September 2003 when many Janjawid arrived on camels, horses and by cars. Some Arab women, on donkeys and on camels, accompanied them. The women took part in the looting. I was sleeping when the attack took place. I was taken away by the attackers in khaki and in civilians clothes, along with dozens of other girls, and had to walk for three hours. During the day, we were beaten up and the Janjawid they told us: 'you, the black women, we will exterminate you; you have no God.' We were taken to a place in the bush were the Janjawid raped us several times at night. For three days, we did not receive food and almost no water. After three days, the Janjawid had to move to another place and set us free. They told us: 'next time we come, we will exterminate you all, we will not even leave a child alive'."

So it has been throughout the history of the non-islamic world beginning with conquest of Mecca by the first muslims. Rape, pillage, burn. Strip the boys and check for pubic hair. Those without become slaves, the others and their fathers and uncles are summarily executed. The women: raped and impregnated to make them dependent on their new masters. The razzia, repeated over and over, has always been the procedural precursor to the major push. This is how Judea went down, and Mesopotamia, Egypt, Persia, India, Anatolia, North Africa, and Spain. (Indonesia may be an exception here, but my ignorance of its history doesn't permit me to hazard a guess). Sometimes the razzias were just to extract booty, and sometimes simply to destroy the livelihood of the target peoples to soften them up for later. In Judea, Syria and Anatolia (the last Asian piece of Greco-Roman-Byzantine culture), the raiding parties would burn the crops and cut down the fruit trees, which of course led to immediate (and enduring) famine, untold suffering and eventual depopulation, not to mention de-forestation and ruination of the land. Conversion to islam under those circumstances would mean a chance at physical salvation (but also living life under Sharia law). Thus did islam move into the West at its margins.

Certainly, the razzias of al-Qaeda in the West today are meticulously planned to go after our fruit trees and crops, so to speak, but don't neglect to include as razzias the on-going car-torching campaigns in the French cities, and the marauding gang rapes in Sweden, Norway, Australia, and elsewhere.

I have been meaning to blog something on razzias through history for a while and their connections to current events, but didn't get around to it until MacKenzie's fine article gave me a bit of a kick in the pants. His piece also touches upon a related topic that really interests me: how the rich, and hugely productive Middle-eastern and North African agricultural regions of the Greco-Roman world were largely turned into deserts by the muslims, and are only now, under western influence, slowly beginning to recover.

Read it all.