Ibrahim: The Day 813 Christians Were Beheaded for Refusing Islam

 

Nothing ever changes with murderous Islam. In the month of Sept ‘25 alone, according to thereligionofpeace.com, there were 110 Islamic attacks in 18 countries, in which 507 people were killed....

Transcript:

We are in an age when we’re told that ‘modern-day terrorists have hijacked Islam.’ “There’s nothing Islamic about ISIS.” Or “They’re hijacking an entire religion,” “What we see today as, if I could use President Bush’s term, and this is a term we’ve all used. Our religion has been hijacked. ‘ Obama apologized “And we are not at war with Islam. We are at war with people who have perverted Islam.”

This is nonsense.

Events that occurred today in history on a lonely hilltop in Italy force us to confront a more uncomfortable truth. Entire Sultanates and caliphates, the most legitimate expressions of Islamic authority, once all acted with the same radicalism, the same theological conviction and the same blood soaked methods as today’s so-called extremists.

Okay, first some background.

When he conquered Constantinople in 1453, Ottoman Sultan Muhammad II was only 21 years old with many decades of conquering still ahead of him. Now he had heard it prophesied that quote, “We Muslims will conquer Constantinople before we conquer Rome.” Not content with being the conqueror of Constantinople, greedy Muhammad was determined to fulfill the second half of that prophecy by conquering old Rome as well.

So he spent 27 years terrorizing and expanding into the Balkans until 1480 when his forces crossed into Italy and seized the city of Toronto. The sack was horrific. More than half of the city’s 22,000 Christian inhabitants were massacred and 5,000, the unlucky ones, mostly women and children, were enslaved.

Then came the Muslims magnanimous gesture. Freedom was offered to the remaining male Christian captives, 813 of them. But first they were ordered to renounce Christ and embrace Islam. The Christians responded in keeping with the exhortation of one of their numbers. My brothers, one of the captives had earlier said, we have fought to save our city. Now it’s time to fight to save our souls.

Outraged by their defiance, on August 14th, all 813 Christians were decapitated by the Muslims at top a barren hill that would forever after be known as Martyr’s Hill. Their families, the now enslaved women and children were forced to watch the carnage of their husbands and fathers as a reminder of the price of defiance. As for their archbishop, he was slowly sawn in half to triumphant cries of Allah Akbar. The bodies and heads of the Christians were left to rot at top the hill for over a year until the Italians managed to liberate and kick the Muslims out of Toronto.

The skulls of some of these martyrs are still displayed in the Cathedral of Toronto, silent witnesses to the horror of that day. Here is how Giovani Antonio Sumanti, an Italian contemporary, described that event. Quote, “When the city of Atrant was taken by the Ottoman forces in the year of our Lord, 1480, the invaders demanded that the Christians renounce their faith and convert to Islam, though steadfast in the Christian confession numbering over 800, refused this demand.

As a result, the Sultan’s men led them forth to the place now called the martyr’s chapel, and there, with cruel hands, executed them by the sword. Their bodies were left unburied, a grim testament to their faith and courage in the face of death. These brave souls have since been venerated by the faithful as holy martyrs who bore witness unto death rather than deny Christ.

Now, keep in mind, this was not the work of lone wolves or twisted radicals. It was the command of the most powerful Muslim ruler of his age. A man who was a virtual head of Sunni Islam and who kept around him a band of muis and other learned sheh to guide his treatment of Christian infidels. Surely today’s political refrain that modern-day jihadist terror is a distortion of otherwise peaceful Islam collapses in the face of such a history.

The slaughter at Toronto was Islam as practiced by its khalif, its jurists and its armies. Just as today’s mass atrocities and beheadings are Islam as practiced by ISIS and other terrorist or organizations and their self-declared khalifs and scholars, the difference is one of century, not of creed.

Hence why as American statues and monuments get toppled all over America, Sultan Muhammad II remains a hero in modern Turkey. President Erdogon’s conversion of the Hagya Sophia into a mosque was partly in homage to this man who was responsible for the slaughter and enslavement of possibly millions of Christians over the course of his 30-year reign!

Nor, needless to say, was a Toronto an isolated atrocity. As recorded in many Muslim and Christian chronicles over the centuries, the leaders and spokesmen of Islam, Sultans, khalifs, amirs, and shehikhs of every stripe have repeatedly spoken and acted like the Islamic State or rather the Islamic State has modeled itself on them.

The record is consistent across nearly 14 centuries as documented in this book, Sword and Scimitar, 14 centuries of war between Islam and the West.

Even more sobering is that then as now much of the west preferred to deny rather than confront reality. Pope Sixus IV appalled at Western Europe’s indifference soon after a Toronto warned in a letter that quote let them not think that they are protected against invasion those who are at a distance from the theater of war. He meant about Western Europe.

The Turks have sworn the extinction of Christianity a truce to sophistries. It is the moment not to talk but to act and fight. This was an old lament. Decades earlier, before Constantinople’s fall, Cardinal Julian had chastised Christendom’s indifference in very similar tone. Look all around you and see how the people of Christ are trotten upon and devoured by Turks, Sarris, and Tartars, Muslims, all. “Why do you not commiserate with the many thousands of your brothers who year after year are reduced to the harsh servitude of the infidel?”

But what is more pitiful is that many of those who are led into captivity and who are not able to bear such a hard servitude deny the Christian faith and are led to the abhorrent sect of Muhammad, meaning they convert to Islam. How many kingdoms, provinces, cities, towns are daily seized and depopulated. They have now cornered you in a small area in the west. Discord among Christians is the cause of all these calamities. If they would only grow wise and harbor love, this sort of persecution would soon end.

But the west remained in a stuper. Some 85 years after Otranto in 1565, as the Ottomans prepared their massive siege of Malta, Pope Pius IV complained that the king of Spain has quote “withdrawn into the woods and France, England, and Scotland are ruled by women and boys.”

That said, and like now, a few did see the pattern clear enough. Sebastian Brandt’s Ship of Fools, a poem from 1494, lamented how Christendom had lost the strongholds it once held throughout the Middle East to Islam. He wrote, quote, “Our faith was strong in the Orient, but now we perish, sleeping one and all. The wolf has come into the stall and steals the holy church’s sheep. The while the shepherd lies asleep. Four sisters of our church you find Constantinople, Alexandria, Jerusalem, Antioch. But they’ve been forfeited and sacked and soon the head Rome will be attacked. To learned Europeans, the Ottoman threat was simply the latest wave in a relentless tide. As one clergyman put it, quote, “The Arabs were the first troops of locusts. The Turks, a brood of vipers, are worse than their parent, the Sarissens, their mother.”

In short, the names always change. Omayads, Abbassad, Ottoman, Al-Qaeda, Boo Haram, Islamic State, but the creed and the methods remain the same. Each is a fresh brood of vipers hatched from the same nest, carrying forward the same jihad. The martyrs of Toronto are a reminder that the past is never really passed, and that the supposed gulf between the Islam of the caliphates and the Islam of modern-day terrorists is an illusion we impose on ourselves.