solace » Sun Mar 08, 2015 2:15 pm wrote:AlicetheKurious » Sun Mar 08, 2015 3:55 am wrote:And I've yet to seen any of the "experts" try to explain how and why all these monuments, artifacts and documents were preserved intact for nearly one and a half millenia under Muslim rule, including very turbulent periods, only to be destroyed after their sovereignty was violated by US-led forces.
Not like it hasn't happened before.
Destruction of heritage
See also: Destruction of early Islamic heritage sites in Saudi Arabia
Saudi Wahhabism is hostile to any reverence given to historical or religious places of significance for fear that it may give rise to 'shirk' (that is, idolatry). As a consequence, under Saudi rule, Medina has suffered from considerable destruction of its physical heritage including the loss of many buildings over a thousand years old.[42] Critics have described this as "Saudi vandalism" and claim that in Medina and Mecca over the last 50 years 300 historic sites linked to Muhammad, his family or companions have been lost.[43] In Medina, examples of historic sites which have been destroyed include the Salman al-Farsi Mosque, the Raj'at ash-Shams Mosque, the Jannat al-Baqi cemetery, and the house of Muhammed.[44]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medina
Yes, Virginia. Some crazy Muslims do bad shit too.
I wish solace were around for me to tell him/her that his post illustrates the truth of the saying, "A little knowledge is a dangerous thing." I know it's incredible, but sometimes you can form more valuable opinions if you take the trouble to learn something first, preferably not by spending 3 minutes on a Wikipedia page. I know, who has time to read? Let alone read entire books and stuff. So here's some background, as briefly as I can make it.
In a nutshell: Saudi Wahhabism was a very tiny, fringe movement that arose from the late 18th century alliance between an illiterate bandit, Mohamed bin Saud and his gang, and a self-styled preacher of a strange, heretic cult that was even rejected by the preacher's own family, and pretty much everybody else. In fact, it seemed this preacher, Mohamed Ibn Abdel-Wahhab, could rarely stay in a place for long, before being denounced by the local Muslim scholars and chased out by the inhabitants. But when these two hooked up, it was a marriage made in hell, because the illiterate bandit made it possible for the preacher to spread his "message" at sword-point. At the same time, the bandit got to cloak his thievery and mayhem in religious mumbo-jumbo. Within a few years, the armed gang spreading Wahhabi terrorism had allowed them to take over a few towns, but had also prompted the beleaguered Muslim scholars to unite and appeal to the Egyptian Khedive to send troops to rescue the Arabs. He did, headed by his own son, Ibrahim Pasha, and by the mid-19th century, the Wahhabists had been pretty much decimated. The tattered remnants retreated to an isolated town in Arabia, where they were set to die out.
Until...the British intervened, with advanced weapons for the time, and military training, and financial support to the defeated Wahhabists. Over the second half of the 19th century, the Wahhabists, backed by the British, rapidly advanced in Arabia, one region at a time, terrorizing the people, vandalizing and destroying everything in their path, and warring against the established Hashemite families. This time, Egypt couldn't help, itself being under British military occupation.
During WWI, the French Empire and the British Crown, in the person of another intelligence agent, "Lawrence of Arabia", had persuaded the established Hashemite families to join the Allies in defeating the Ottoman Empire in Arabia by promising that once the Ottomans were defeated, the Arabs would be granted their independence by the victorious British (the Anglo-French Declaration of 1918). Meanwhile, what the Hashemites didn't know was that the British and French empires had already divided up and distributed the Arab nation among themselves (and the Zionists) and had no intention of allowing the Arabs to achieve independence (the secret Sykes-Picot Agreement). Furthermore, the British were not interested in backing the Hashemites, who were widely respected and enjoyed widespread legitimacy as Arab leaders. They preferred the thug who was on their payroll, and never made a move without consulting his British "advisor", one St. John Philby, a British intelligence agent who reportedly converted to Islam and went by the name Sheikh "Abdullah". Interestingly, before going to Arabia, St. John Philby had been recommended for a job in the British civil administration of Palestine by none other than Chaim Weizmann in 1920. Later, he was one of the extremely select group that met in Britain in 1922 to plan the "Palestine question", along with King George, his mentor, Chaim Weizmann, the Baron Rothschild, and Winston Churchill. No Arabs were invited.
The next few years witnessed the total, extremely violent takeover of Arabia (within the borders drawn by the British) by the Saud gang, executed by the armed militias of the fanatic "Ikhwan" ("Brothers"), with the backing of the British. The Ikhwan committed many horrific atrocities, and ruthlessly destroyed ancient artifacts and monuments dating back centuries and even millenia. By 1932, the Hashemites had been totally defeated and expelled from the territories that the British had carved out of Arabia. The head of the Sauds, Abdelaziz, declared himself king and was recognized as such by the British Crown, who kept him on their payroll for years afterward, until he no longer needed their money.
Interestingly, the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, which is called in Arabic the Ikhwan Muslimeen (a more accurate translation of the Arabic is "the Muslim Brothers"), was also founded with a financial donation by Egypt's British occupiers, of 500 Egyptian pounds (a fortune at the time). Its founder, Hassan el-Banna, viewed the Wahhabi takeover of Arabia (with Saud's Ikhwan militia) as a model to be emulated. All the current "Islamist" groups, militias and gangs, including Al-Qaeda and ISIS are offshoots of the Muslim Brotherhood, or Ikhwan, and are headed by men who were trained and indoctrinated by this secretive, now global network. Among many constants over the years has been the backing of Western imperialist intelligence agencies, led, as always, by the British, with the Zionists in the shadow of their shadow.
So, you see, solace. Far from disproving my thesis, you have, in fact supported it.
