Was the West or Islam ‘Built on Blood, Tears, Massacres, and Exploitation’?
By Raymond Ibrahim Published on December 5, 2024
Raymond Ibrahim
The world was just treated to a bit of outlandish projection by Turkey’s president and self-styled sultan, Recep Tayyip Erdogan. During a recent council held in Ankara, he said, “The West’s progress, built on blood, tears, massacres, and exploitation, has temporarily overtaken the human-centered civilization of the East.”
To anyone even vaguely familiar with the history of Western/Muslim interaction, Erdogan’s assertion is the perfect antithesis of reality. Nothing is “built on blood, tears, massacres, and exploitation” more than Islam’s “progress.”
Islam, which was born in the seventh century in the Arabian Peninsula, spread to and conquered by the sword what is today called the “Muslim world.” Most of the lands it conquered, including the entire Middle East and North Africa, were previously Christian. Both Muslim and non-Muslim sources make unequivocally clear that Islam’s conquests were bloody, savage, and sadistic. Over the centuries, many millions of non-Muslims were slaughtered or enslaved; thousands of churches and non-Muslim temples were destroyed or turned into mosques.
One need only look to the nation that Erdogan rules over — Turkey (Asia Minor) — for confirmation. Once an ancient bastion of Christianity (and recipient of many of St. Paul’s epistles), Erdogan’s Turkic ancestors began conquering it in the eleventh century AD.
https://stream.org/was-the-west-or-islam-built-on-blood-tears-massacres-and-exploitation/
