June 6, 2006

Jihad in E. Timor and a crucial lesson for the West.

The concluding paragraph of this excerpt from Dr. Trifkovic's dismaying account of the Muslim massacres of Chinese and Christians in E. Timor is highly instructive. It leaves the Colonel in no doubt that the urge to kill, plunder and dominate is inherent in Islam -- although there's hardly a paucity of other evidence of this.

As Dr. Trifkovic points out, it has nothing to do with anyone's having done anything to Muslims.

The inevitable cry is raised, How can you condemn an entire religion? Because there is no such thing as a countervailing force within Islam. As the main article from which our excerpt is taken shows, the end of the killings came when the attackers had acquired the property of the Christians and the Chinese they had wanted from the start.

Similarly, the "extremists" take over mosques with ease anywhere they want. There is no opposition. Any worth a damn, anyway.

Moreover, where Muslims are the majority there are oppression, killing, extortion, and humiliation of foreigners. When they are in the minority, there are hogwash, dissembling, and threats until their numbers grow. Even when in the minority, Muslims are not shy about outrageous behavior, as the Canadians are learning from the revelations surrounding recent arrests of 17 or so home-grown jihadis.

Only in Central Asia does there appear to be any kind of a live and let live flavor of Islam, and even that is under attack from foreign zealots dispatched to radicalize:

They soon proceeded to killing people: by September 1973, over 30,000 civilians had been killed by Indonesian troops, the number rising to an estimated 100,000 by 1990.

In the motivation patterns and perceptions of the actors on the ground, killers and victims alike, East Timor was an Islamic jihad against Christian infidels, identical in form and purpose to other tragedies caused by Islam’s insatiable appetite for other people’s lands, property, bodies, and souls. . . . [The Indonesian soldiers who landed] had been told that they were fighting a jihad and whole villages, for example Remexio and Aileu, were slaughtered.

In Dili hundreds of the ethnic Chinese minority were shot and thrown off the wharf into the sea. In Maubara and Luiquica, the entire Chinese populations were wiped out. Nineteen ships were moored in Dili harbor to remove looted cars, radios, furniture, tractors and whatever else could be ransacked. Churches and the seminary were looted and their books burnt. . . . By November 1976, the death toll had reached 100,000. . . .

* * * *

Once East Timor was out of the way the next target was the Christian minority in Indonesia itself. In 1999-2000 the persecution, destruction of property, and killing of Indonesia’s Christians amounted [to] a deliberate campaign of religious cleansing, actively abetted by the Indonesian military, which is overwhelmingly Muslim. . . .

The worst atrocities were committed on the island of Ambon, where an upsurge in violence followed the arrival of 2,000 Laskar Jihad members—a militant Moslem force determined to join the ‘holy war’ against the Christians on the island . . . .

* * * *

Incidents like those that took place in East Timor seem trivial to most Americans when they read their morning newspapers. But hopefully, people are gradually learning that these incidents, which have been happening – and continue to happen – all over the world, are all pieces of the larger problem of Islam’s inability to establish benign political relations with the rest of the world. A world which includes us. And they reinforce the crucial lesson that this whole situation is not something America created or is America’s fault. Islam is unique among the civilizations of the world today in terms of its inability to get along with others.
"Islamism's Other Victims: The Tragedy of East Timor." By Serge Trifkovic, FrontPageMagazine.com, 11/25/02 (emphasis added), adapted by Robert Locke from Dr. Serge Trifkovic’s book, The Sword of the Prophet: A Politically-Incorrect Guide to Islam.

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