Showing posts with label Islam. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Islam. Show all posts

Wednesday, September 16, 2009

Death of a Denomination Part 2


Perhaps I should explain the "pro-Muslim" comment from my last post. The preacher who visited a URC and expressed the sentiments that went down like a lead balloon, was reacting against what some have called the Islamization of Britain.


This is not the place to go into a debate about multi-culturalism, so I will confine myself to observation. I need to make sure that you do not see these comments as racist. They are nothing of the sort. They do, however, reflect a radical change in the cultural landscape of Britain.


My old high school, Billinge, no longer exists. It was, at one time, the most successful State-run secondary modern institution in Blackburn. In terms of results, it was second only to the private, Royal Grammar School. Billinge is now for Islamic students only.

St. John's school, which my grandmother attended 100 years ago, which was run by the adjacent parish church, has been replaced by a huge mosque.


Instead of flat caps and shawls, Blackburn town center is now full of asian gangs, and women in full-length chadors or burqas. Whalley Range, which I often visited as a child, has become a ghetto where white faces are rarely seen.


We visited Tesco, a large grocery store, driving past another huge mosque. Inside the front door we were greeted by a large sign proclaiming "Happy Ramadan." All of the check-out girls were Moslem. All wore Islamic clothing.






I visited Blackburn Cathedral, which was empty. A display at the rear of the church showed photographs of staff members, including one of a young Pakistani woman wearing a hijab headdress - a liaison to the Muslim community.


In church on Sunday morning, at Trinity United Reformed Church, the minister suggested that we should use Ramadan as an opportunity to pray for our Muslim neighbors.


White flight has taken those who can afford it to the suburbs, or to neighboring small town such as Clitheroe. Blackburn is, as a rsult, almost unrecognizable. One interesting thing I noticed in the indoor marketplace: most of the stalls were run by Pakistanis. Many of them were selling Islamic clothing. Of those stalls still operated by white people, the majority sported Union flags, or flags of St. George, almost as though they were asserting their nationality in the midst of an alien culture. None of the Asian-run stalls bore English flags.


Then, when we returned to Texas, I got a letter from Lloyd's Bank, where we still maintain an English account. The letter was to inform us of changes in banking charges. I noticed that there were categories for Islamic students and graduates, and that those forms of banking are based upon Sharia law.


Yesterday, booking a flight from England for my mother, I noticed that one of the choices for mid-flight meals was 'Muslim'.






How has a minority become so dominant is such a short space of time? Multi-culturalism brings many benefits. I live, happily, in a multi-cultural community. But when one culture sets out to dominate another, and is not coy about declaring its intentions, then it is suicide for the host to fail to protect its own cultural heritage. Secularism seems to have no answer for the rising tide of Islam. No wonder Europe is beginning to produce its own radical terrorists. If the current disparity in birthrate continues, and if immigration from the Indian sub-continent does not diminish, then cities like Blackburn will be bastions of Islam within a generation, and non-Moslems will be reduced to dhimmitude. This is not a prospect I relish.

Thursday, May 29, 2008

The Last Day of the World

The following is taken from the writings of Robert Spenser. It is a very timely reminder of the intentions of imperialist Islam. The fate of Constantinople should remind us all to be vigilant.



May 29 marks the anniversary of the real Nakba, or perhaps more precisely the καταστροφή -- the Catastrophe: on this day in 1453, the armies of the Ottoman Sultan Mehmet II entered Constantinople, marking the end of the Eastern Roman Empire, more commonly known as the Byzantine Empire.
If anything deserves to be called an occupation, and a nakba, it is this, although it has, like so many other bloody conquests in human history, been legitimized by time. Still, if the descendants of the Christian inhabitants of Constantinople and Anatolia were to demand, and receive, a right of return, rapidly-Islamizing Turkey would look vastly different from how it looks now.
On this day in 1453, the conquerers were extraordinarily brutal. Historian Steven Runciman notes that the Muslim soldiers "slew everyone that they met in the streets, men, women, and children without discrimination. The blood ran in rivers down the steep streets from the heights of Petra toward the Golden Horn. But soon the lust for slaughter was assuaged. The soldiers realized that captives and precious objects would bring them greater profit." (The Fall of Constantinople 1453, Cambridge University Press, 1965, p. 145.)
Some jihadists "made for the small but splendid churches by the walls, Saint George by the Charisian Gate, Saint John in Petra, and the lovely church of the monastery of the Holy Saviour in Chora, to strip them of their stores of plate and their vestments and everything else that could be torn from them. In the Chora they left the mosaics and frescoes, but they destroyed the icon of the Mother of God, the Hodigitria, the holiest picture in all Byzantium, painted, so men said, by Saint Luke himself. It had been taken there from its own church beside the Palace at the beginning of the siege, that its beneficient presence might be at hand to inspire the defenders on the walls. It was taken from its setting and hacked into four pieces." (P. 146.)
The jihadists also entered the Hagia Sophia, which for nearly a thousand years had been the grandest church in Christendom. The faithful had gathered within its hallowed walls to pray during the city’s last agony. The Muslims, according to Runciman, halted the celebration of Orthros (morning prayer); the priests, according to legend, took the sacred vessels and disappeared into the cathedral’s eastern wall, through which they shall return to complete the divine service one day. Muslim men then killed the elderly and weak and led the rest off into slavery.
Once the Muslims had thoroughly subdued Constantinople, they set out to Islamize it. According to the Muslim chronicler Hoca Sa’deddin, tutor of the sixteenth-century Sultans Murad III and Mehmed III, "churches which were within the city were emptied of their vile idols and cleansed from the filthy and idolatrous impurities and by the defacement of their images and the erection of Islamic prayer niches and pulpits many monasteries and chapels became the envy of the gardens of Paradise."
It has come to be known as Black Tuesday, the Last Day of the World.