By Theodore Shoebat
In the history of Christendom, there is this continuous fight, between the crusaders and the Turk. From the early Middle Ages onwards, this struggle between the Christians and the Turks has been taking place, and will continue to transpire until Kingdom Come. It does not matter what false religion they believe in, be it Islam or paganism, the Turk will always be a menace to civilization. Let us start with the Huns. The Huns were part of the Turkic peoples, and they invaded Europe and slaughtered the Christians with the edge of the sword. Not only this, but they specifically targeted priests and butchered them in front of their altars. St. Gregory of Tours provides us with a most graphic description of this sanguinary vanquishment when the Huns invaded France:
“The Huns migrated from Pannonia and laid waste the countryside as they advanced. They came to the town of Metz, so people say, on Easter Eve. They burned the town to the ground, slaughtered the populace with the sharp edge of their swords and killed the priests of the Lord in front of their holy altars.” (1)
This is exactly the type of violence that would be perpetrated by the later Muslim Huns, that is, the Islamic Turks (2), the Seljukians and other Central Asian Turks, and their later successors of Islamic empire, the Ottomans. The Turks who migrated to the Near East were the Oghuz, a confederation of twenty Turkic tribes from Central Asia, who arrived to the Iranian plateau, for the purpose of plunder. (2a)
When they first entered the region the Turks were not Islamic; many of the Turks were Buddhists and Shamanists, and there would also be a small minority of Nestorians in their midst. These people did not appear as those who are living in modern day Turkey. These Turks were the originals, fierce warriors who fought with devastating and formidable force on the backs of their horses, with great dexterity with the bow and arrow, cutting angles in their battle formations and instilling in all their enemies a great feeling of fear and consternation.
They were slanted eyed, Altaic peoples, and did not look like the people of modern day Turkey, who are, for the most part, Islamized Greeks and Eastern Europeans who were conquered by Turks from the Middle Ages onwards to the modern era, and brainwashed into taking the identity of their Altaic conquerers. The Turks who migrated to the Near East in the eighth century came from the Orkhon and Selenga valleys of Mongolia. Ibn al-Athir made mention of how “Some Khurasani historians have mentioned that these Oghuz came over to Transoxiana from the regions of the marches which are the remotest Turkish lands during the reign of the Caliph al-Mahdi (775-85 AD).” Transoxiana is where Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, southern Kyrgyzstan and southwest Kazakhstan are located today, and it is where much of today’s Turks live. The famous Arab traveler, Ibn Fadlan, spoke of an Oghuz presence in the Khwarezm region, which lies in Central Asia.
The Khwarezm were just as vitriolic as their Turkic predecessors, the Huns, slaughtering Christians and butchering priests in front of their altars, just as the Huns did. In the year 1244, an army of Khwarezm Muslim Turks, alongside a force of Egyptian warriors, invaded the Holy Land. They invaded Gaza and slaughtered five thousand Christians. They murdered the Master of the Templars and the Archbishop of Tyre, they took priests and stabbed them to death right in front of their altars as they screamed out, “let us pour their blood on the place where they poured out wine in commemoration of their crucified God.” The Huns were pagans, the Khwarezm Muslim, but both were Turks, and both exhibited an insatiable hatred for the Christian Faith.
Many battles were fought between the carriers of the Cross and the pagan Huns. In the early sixth century, the Persian king, Kawad, took a force of Huns to invade the Christian city of Edessa, in Syria. One reads the ancient record of the battle and feels a sense of awe as to how immense were the armies of the Persians and Huns. Kawad marched his armies from the Euphrates and arrived at Edessa, and so great were the numbers of the heathen; their camp reached from the areas of Mar Cosmas and Mar Damian, to the church of Mar Sergius and the village of Bekin, as far as the church of the Confessors, and the width of the heathen camp was said to have been as far as the descent of Serrin. The Persians and Huns surrounded the entire city of Edessa, and one could have witnessed, standing on the peaks of lofty hills, peering past the desert air, meeting the gaze of their determined Christian enemies. They were like locusts filled all places, an innumerable multitude of men (Judges 6:5). As wolves surround their prey, as hawks circle above creatures they desire to consume, the Persians and the Huns encircled the city.
Areobindus was the defender of the Christian force; he led a strong and determined army, around 12,000 warriors, veterans of previous battles, hardened by the ways of the sanguinary frays. Their hands were ready to strike, their hearts prepared for combat and death. Some of the warriors rushed outside the city walls and the fight ensued. The Christians, with unsheathed weapons struck hard upon the enemy, their blade bespattered with Hunnic blood, with silver and crimson glimmering under the light of the white moon. As the battle went on, young men launched stones upon the pagans with catapults to repulse them away from the wall, and women rushed out to provide water for the fighters. Many a heathen fell dead, but not one Christian perished in that battle. The enemy fled to the village of Kubbe, and it is quite profound the behind them, on the walls of Edessa, it was written in Greek: “Christ God, he who hopes in you is never confounded.” (3)
Here the Hun Turks allied with the Persians, in the Crusades, the Muslim Turks allied with the Persians to fight the Christians. Nothing changed from John’s proclamation in Apocalypse 13, where the feet of the bear (Persia) unites with the “body of a leopard” (Turkey). Gog and Magog simply repeats itself until Kingdom Come (Ezekiel 38).
When the Turkic pagans were in the Middle East, they did not immediately all convert to Islam. There were ongoing battles between Turks who had converted to Islam and other Turks who wanted to maintain their traditional religious beliefs. Ibn al-Athir reports on how, in the 11th century, ten thousand Turks had converted to Islam, and exclaims: “Allah thus eliminated their evil from being directed towards Muslims.” (4) The statement alludes to the violence that was being by the Turks before they converted to Islam. With or without Islam, the Turk was evil and bent on conquest and despotism. The tenth century treatise, Hudud al-alam, speaks of the violent expansionism of the Oghuz (or Ghuz) Turks, prior to their conversion to Islam:
“The Ghuz have no towns, but the people owning felt-huts are very numerous. They possess arms and implements (silah va alat) and are courageous and daring (shukh) in war. They continually make inroads (ghazw) into the lands of Islam (nawahi-yi islam), whatever place be on the way (ba har ja’i uftadh), and [then] strike (bar-kuband), plunder, and retreat as quickly as possible.”
The Oghuz Turks who converted to Islam were part of a branch of Turk called the Seljuk. These originated from a subbranch of Turkic people called the Qarakhanids, who initially were ruled by a Manichaean elite, but they also consisted of many Buddhists. The Qarakhanids conquered the area of Balasaghun in Kyrgyzstan, and it was after this, in the mid-tenth century, that they converted to Islam. From the Islamic Qarakhandids, came a fringe family who broke away from them, these were Seljuks, founded by Saljuk ibn Duqaq, and it was these Turks who would commence the first Turkish Islamic empire. (5) The reason behind Saljuk’s conversion to Islam was not sincere spiritual theological conviction, but rather it was to increase the forces of his tribe, and thus to aid his already insatiable thirst for domination and power. It is another evidence as to the way of the Turk: regardless of his religious convictions, he will be tyrant. Saljuq, according to the Syriac historian Bar Hebraeus, said:
“If we do not enter the faith of the people of the country in which we desire [to live] and make a pact with them (or conform to their customs), no man will cleave to us, and we shall be a small and solitary people.” (6)
After this was said, the Seljukians sent an envoy to the Khwarazm city of Zandak and requested that Islamic scholars be sent to them to teach them about Islam. The Muslims in Zandak sent to the Turks a Muslim missionary (or mubashshir). (7)
The type of Islam that the Turks accepted, however, was not exactly the mechanical form of Sunni Islam that most Muslims follow, but the severely mystical Sufi Islam, which appealed to them more since it was quite paralleled to Buddhism. From Attila the Hun to the Muslims who massacred the Armenians, they brought nothing constructive, only death. Like the Huns, the Seljuks hated Christians and invaded Christendom. The Seljuks under Togril invaded and overtook significant regions of Georgia, they also seized Christian Mesopotamia, Melitene, Koloneia, and all of the regions adjacent to the Euphrates River. If it was not for the brave Romans who fought and died striving to defend their lands, the Turks would have reached all the way to the Christian lands of Galatia, Honorias, and Phrygia. (8)
The Seljuks did not cease with their conquests and pillaging, but like the wolves they so revered, they continued their hunt for domination and their establishing of an Islamic empire. (9) They continued their Mongol strategies of battle, eventually coming to the territories of Christendom. Thus a writer of old Christendom, Matthew of Edessa, wrote of this brood of vipers:
“In the beginning of the year a calamity proclaiming the fulfillment of divine portents befell the Christian adorers of the Holy Cross. The death-breathing dragon appeared, accompanied by a destroying fire, and struck the believers in the Holy Trinity. The apostolic and prophetic books trembled, for there arrived winged serpents come to vomit fire upon Christ’s faithful… At this period there gathered the savage nation of infidels called Turks. Setting out, they entered [our] province and put the Christians to the sword. Facing the enemy, the Armenians saw these strange men, who were armed with bows and had a flowing hair like women.” (10)
With this said, surely were these the people of Antichrist who St. John saw when he wrote:
“And they had hair as the hair of women, and their teeth were as the teeth of lions.” (Revelation 9:8)
And surely were these the people of whom St. John wrote:
And the dragon was angry against the woman: and went to make war with the rest of her seed, who keep the commandments of God, and have the testimony of Jesus Christ. (Revelation 12:17)
The Romans were suddenly attacked by this unknown race of barbarian, one more sinister, fierce and savage than the regular Muslims they were used to fighting. The Turkish horsemen overran a frontier of six hundred miles from Tauris to Arzeoum. With their endurance fit for the highest peaks of Asia, and their horses conditioned for the most fatiguing sprints of war, these Mongols shed the blood of a hundred and thirty thousand Christians for the appeasement of Allah. In the Persian city of Tus alone, the Seljuks massacred one hundred thousand people. When the Seljuks entered Nishapur, they immediately wanted to plunder. Their leader, Togril, prevented them from doing so because it was Ramadan, in which war is forbidden. His fellow tribesmen began to mock him, jokingly talking about how Togril all of a sudden made himself a religious authority to pass Islamic decrees. The Seljuks finally reached a compromise, that they could slaughter, rape and plunder after the Eid al-Fitr, or the end of Ramadan. “Grant them respite for the rest of this month,” said Togril, “after the [‘Id of] al-Fitr, do what you will (a’malu ma shi’tum ba’d al-fitr).” (12) The Turks, being Muslim, slaughtered other Muslims on Ramadan, revealing their priorities, and one of them was not Islam, but plunder and domination.
When the Seljuks entered Halwan, they raped the women and “deflowered the virgins.” “Every beauty they came across,” says al-Katib al-Ishfahani, “they disfigured. Every fire they passed, they extinguished. Every house they passed, they dismantled. How many dams they broke, how much shame they left behind … Many kings escaped from their path, fearing the Turks … Every town they entered they subjugated the people. They ruled the towns through fear and terror.” (13)
Bar Hebraeus wrote of the Turks: “In every place where his troops meet together they plunder, and destroy and kill.” (14)
The Huns slaughtered, and they were not Muslim; the Seljuks slaughtered, and they were Muslim. I am not attempting to exempt Islam, but what I am arguing, is that the pagan Turkic peoples, being averse to Christianity, has, for centuries, been an enemy of Christianity. Even if they did not convert to Islam, they would still be a menace to Christendom, as is evidenced by the Huns and the Mongolian Empire. Seljuks were simply another part of the Mongolian expansionism that was taking place from the time of the rise of the Huns. As the historian Hilaire Belloc wrote:
“It is remarkable that the Mongol hordes, from their first wave onward, had fitted in at once with the social structure and creed of Islam. … Their own bloody or absurd superstitions, barbaric as they were, without substance or philosophy or reason, yielded at once to the religious spirit of the society into which they came. They became not only Mohammedan, but fanatically Mohammedan, and through their military power what had already begun to be the decline of Mohammedanism recovered.” (15)
if it were not for the Turk converting to Islam, and leaving his shamanistic religion, Islam would be nothing today, probably just a small sect like the Zoroastrians, written of in a few obscure books, and a footnote in some others. When the Arabs controlled Syria, Armenia, North Africa, Iraq, Arabia, Iran, and other lands of the East, they were not capable of controlling their provinces due to their lack of unity and military strength. The Arab would conquer a land only to lose it just as fast as he captured it.
The intermixture of other peoples with the Arabs, on account of the conquests of Persia, the Berbers and other Asian tribes, diluted Arabian unity on which Islamic strength rested, and division sprung amongst the Muslims, for “iron cannot be mixed with clay.” (Daniel 2:43)
Hope was lost for the utopian vision of Muhammad, and it was believed that the Arab Islamic empire was finally about to crumble and allow the Christian Byzantine Empire to recover what it had lost from Muslim invasions. Until all of a sudden bands of Mongol hordes, experts in archery and cruelty, swiftly swarmed into the Middle East where they would find a religion that fit their savagery, Islam. By becoming Muslims, the Mongols, being stronger in body and more warlike than the Arab, reinvigorated the Islamic empire. By the eleventh century they would replace the Arabs in power, and with their sadism and destructive temperament, they ravaged, pillaged and massacred everywhere they went, dominating the central power of the Muslim world.
Islam was founded by Arabs, but was nothing without the Mongol Turk, who was bent on expansionism and violence even before he discovered Islam, a religion that he would accept only to give spiritual sustenance to his sanguinary desires of empire. Togril once told the Caliph: “If I did not honor you, I would have destroyed all Baghdad with the edge of the sword.” (16) The Turk was going to do what a Turk did: slaughter, ravish and plunder. What kept him from annihilating much of the people was the common religion of Islam that he shared with the local Muslims, and notwithstanding this, the Turks still slaughtered Muslims for their own gain.
After the Seljuks converted to Islam, they would become very loyal fighters and advancers for the cult of Muhammad. Muslim princes hired the Seljuks as mercenaries, and soon they emerged to become governors of provinces, and then from there they became rulers over entire regions. (17) as we read in one eleventh century letter, written by the Seljuks to the Caliph al-Qa’im Bi-Amr Allah:
“We, the servants from the family of Saljuq, have been a perpetually obedient group, supporters of the state (dawlat) and obedient to Islam and helping it (mitwa’ wa mu’adid-i islam). We have always striven in waging war against the enemy and jihad, and have been assiduous in visiting the Ka’ba.” (18)
When Togril, one of the earliest leaders of the Seljuks, visited the Kaaba, the Caliph praised him as the “Pillar of the Faith (rukn al-din)”. Togril’s elder brother and co-ruler, Chaghri Beg, gave himself the divine title of Malik al-muluk (King of kings). (19)
The hatred exhibited by the Seljuk and Hun Turks towards Christians was also harbored by another Turkic people, the original Turks, the Mongols. For one hundred years after the death of Genghis Khan, the Mongolians terrorized Europe. (20) There is a story that reveals the antichrist spirit of the Mongol Turks. A Russian prince named Michael came to submit to the Mongolian ruler, Batu Khan, the Mongolians told him to bow down south to worship the spirit of Genghis Kahn, just as the Antichrist will do in the future. Michael told the Mongolians that he would rather die than do such a thing. One of the Mongolians trampled on Michael’s chest, and as he was going through this torture, he looked to one of his Christian soldiers and said: “Be strong because your punishment will not last long and then at once eternal joy will follow.” They took Michael and decapitated him, they then took his soldier and beheaded him as well, (21) fulfilling what John foresaw:
And I saw seats; and they sat upon them; and judgment was given unto them; and the souls of them that were beheaded for the testimony of Jesus, and for the word of God, and who had not adored the beast nor his image, nor received his character on their foreheads, or in their hands; and they lived and reigned with Christ a thousand years. (Revelation 20:4)
The prophecies of persecution were not made solely for isolated events in the future, but for all of Christian history. The Mongol Turks killed Christians, the Muslim Turks killed Christians, and the future Turkish Ottoman empire will as well slaughter Christians for the Antichrist.
The Mongolians invaded Russia and annihilated the Christians in Kiev. An Italian friar, Giovanni DiPlano Carpini, who was sent by Pope Innocent IV in 1245 to observe the Mongols, entered the city of Kiev and witnessed the horrifying aftermath of the genocide:
“They destroyed citifies and castles and killed men and besieged Kiev, which is the greatest Russian city, and after a long siege they took Kiev and killed the townspeople, so when we went through that country we found countless human skulls and bones from the dead scattered over the field. Indeed Kiev had been a very great and populous city but now is reduced to almost nothing. In fact, there are hardly two hundred houses there now and the people are held in the strictest servitude. Carrying the war from there, the Tartars [Mongols] destroyed all of Russia.” (22)
The Mongolians took numerous Russian princes, or Knyazes, placed them under a board and ate dinner on top of them as they suffocated to death. It is no wonder that the Russians called the Mongols, “shedders of Christian blood.” When the Mongolians invaded the Russian town of Volodimir, the Christians fled to the Church of the Holy Mother of God. The pagan Mongols broke “down the doors, piled up wood and set fire to the sacred church; and slew all, thus they perished, giving up their souls to God.” (23) After the Mongolians invaded Moscow, Perevaslavl, Yurev, Dmitrov, Volok, and Tver, they invaded Torkhok, “slew all from the male sex even to the female, all the priests and the monks,” (24) just like the Huns and the Muslim Turks. What is most interesting is that after the Mongolian invasion, in the year 1380, the Mongolians returned to Russia to completely vanquish it. But this time these Mongolians were not shamanists, but Muslims, led by the commander of the Blue Hoard, Mamai. And unlike before, the Russians were not utterly pillaged and plundered, but stood their ground in the profound Battle of Kulikovo. When the Mongols were pagans, they wanted Russia, and when they were Muslims, they wanted Russia. Regardless if they were pagan or Muslim, the Turks wanted Russia, and the whole of Christendom. It will be the same in the future, with a revived Ottoman Turkey fighting to destroy Christian Russia.
The Mongolians were not some sudden plunderers who would come and start scuffles, they were an empire, and not just that, they formed the largest empire in history. Their trail of blood and gore went from Central Asia all the way to Western Europe. They wanted to take Europe just as the Muslims wanted Europe. When they struck Europe, they, in the words of Matthew Paris, “came with the force of lightening into the territories of the Christians, laying waste the country, committing great slaughter, and striking inexpressible terror and alarm into every one.” Paris also described how the Mongols “struck great fear and terror into all Christendom. Already had they, with unheard-of tyranny, in a great measure reduced to a desert the countries of Friesland, Gothland, Poland, Bohemia, and both divisions of Hungary, slaying or putting to flight princes, prelates, citizens and rustics.” (25)
The seriousness of the Mongol invasion was so prodigious that the Emperor Frederic wrote to the king of England, that:
“We cannot be silent on a matter which concerns not only the Roman empire, whose office it is to propagate the Gospel, but also all the kingdoms of the world.”
The same letter speaks of how when the Mongols invaded Hungary, they “slew the prelates and nobles of the kingdom who opposed them, and massacred such a host of the Hungarians, that a similar slaughter was never remembered to have taken place in one battle, from the most remote period.” The letter also speaks of how the Mongolians invaded Catholic Poland, and how “that country has been devastated by them.” (26) In a letter addressed the Archbishop of Bordeaux, it states that “Experience alone shows what great danger threatens the Christians through the invasion of the Tartars [Mongols].” (27)
The horrific brutality inflicted by the Mongol reminds me of how Pope Urban II described the Seljuk Turks. He spoke of how they invaded the lands of the Christians and “depopulated them by the sword, pillage and fire;” how they “destroy the altars, after having defiled them with their uncleanness. They circumcise the Christians, and the blood of the circumcision they either spread upon the altars or pour into the vases of the baptismal font. When they wish to torture people by a base death, they perforate their navels, and dragging forth the extremity of the intestines, bind it to a stake; then with flogging they lead the victim around until the viscera having gushed forth the victim falls prostrate upon the ground. Others they compel to extend their necks and then, attacking them with naked swords, attempting to cut through the neck with a single blow. What shall I say of the abominable rape of the women? To speak of it is worse than to be silent.” (28)
The Mongolians were said to have styled their hair in the shape of the crescent moon on their foreheads — the mark of Antichrist — they also braided their hair, as what the Muslim warriors themselves did. As the scholar, C. de Bridia, wrote:
“On the foreheads, however, they wear their hair in a crescent-shaped fringe reaching to the eyebrows, but gather up the remaining hair, and arrange and braid it like the Saracens [Muslims].” (29)
As the Seljuk and Ottoman Turks wanted Christendom to submit to the Muslim Caliph and the Sultan of their Islamic Turkish empire, the Mongol Turks wanted Christendom to submit to their khans or emperors. As the Muslim Turk ruler, Chaghri, called himself “King of kings,” the Mongolian king, Guyuk Khan, called himself “The Power of God, the Emperor of all Men,” and the superscription over his seal said: “God in Heaven and Cuyuc [Guyuk] over the Earth, the Power of God, the Seal of the Emperor of all Men”. Reminiscently, the Muslim Turkish Caliph calls himself, “Khalifa-t Allah,” or “the Inheritor of Allah on earth.” This is reminiscent to some of the other extolling appellations that Seljuk rulers would uphold on themselves. For example, in a decree ordered by the Seljuk sultan, Malik-Shah, it reads:
“the Exalted and Almighty [Divine] Presence chose me from all of humanity for being a padshah, and made me a vicegerent (khalifa) in ruling over the world.” (30)
In fact, the Seljuks, like the Mongolians, believed that it was their divine destiny to rule the earth. It is said that Saljuk, the father of the Seljukians, had a dream in which he urinated fire, and sparks flew from the flames and spread east and west. Saljuk consulted a mu’abbir, or dream interpreter, and he told him what the dream signified: the Seljuks were “destined to rule over the whole Earth.” (31)
With this sense of destiny of universal empire, the Seljuks invaded Christendom, conquering most of Christian Anatolia, and almost took Constantinople if it were not for the Catholic Crusaders who struck them in the late eleventh century. As Saljuk had a dream interpreter tell him of a divine destiny for world empire, Genghis Khan was also told by an interpreter of dreams, only this time it was the interpreter who had the dream. In a Mongolian text it says:
But a sign from Heaven came to me in a dream
and told me that Temujin [Genghis Khan] was meant to be our leader.
In this dream I saw a great cow enter our camp.
First she circled Jamugha,
then she charged at his tent,
then charged at Jamugha himself,
striking him with her head and breaking one of her horns.
‘Bring me my horn!’ she cried to him,
‘Bring me my horn!’
bellowing at him as she stood there
kicking up dustclouds with her hooves,
with one crooked horn on her head.
Then an ox with no horns at all
pulled up the tent stake and harnessed himself to the cart.
He drew away Jamugha’s cart and began bellowing,
‘Heaven and earth have agreed
that Temujin should be Lord of the Nation.’ (32)
The Mongolians, the Altaic brothers of the Seljuks, demanded that Christendom, the Pope — the vicegerent of Christ — and the Catholic Church submit to the khan or emperor, an antichrist and vicegerent of the devil. Carpini, the Italian friar who stayed with the Mongolians to learn more about them in order to help prepare Christendom to fight these heathens, wrote this warning:
“Therefore, because except for Christendom, there is no land in the world which they have not taken, they are preparing to fight us. Everyone should know that we lived at the Tartar court where there had been convened a solemn counsel at which it has been decided for many years (we were there when they elected Cuyuc emperor in our presence, who is called Khan in their language) which aforesaid Cuyuc Khan raised his standard along with those of all his princes, against the Church of God and the Roman Empire, and against all the states of Christendom and the people of the West, unless they do what he has ordered of the Lord Pope and the great men anf the whole population of the Western Christians.” (33)
This reminds me of what Alp Arslan, the Seljukian sultan who enabled the Turks to vanquish Anatolia, proclaimed to his men after the Battle of Manzikert in 1071:
“Henceforth all of you be like lion cubs and eagle young, racing through the countryside day and night, slaying the Christians and not sparing any mercy on the Roman nation.” (34)
This strong sense of being divinely destined to conquer and rule the earth amongst the Mongol Turks, was recorded by C. de Bridia, when he wrote of how Genghis Khan ordained that the Mongols “should conquer every country in the world and make peace with none unless they surrendered unconditionally and without treaty, and even then he ordered that all of nobler rank should be slain and only plebeians be spared.” (35)
So, the Seljukian Turks, the Hun Turks and the Mongol Turks, all hated Christians and warred against Christendom. Let us look to some more peoples who would, conventionally, not be considered Turks: the Japanese.
The Mongolians, just like the Japanese, worshipped their emperors, especially Genghis Khan, whose spirit they worshipped after his death. This apotheosis of Genghis was written of by C. de Bridia in his study on the Tatars:
“They place before the station of every Khan an idol which they first made in the image of Chingis Khan, and offer it gifts.” (36)
The Mongols made an image of this beast, Genghis Khan.
In one correspondence contemporaneous with the Mongol invasions, it describes how the Mongols “have for their lord one, whom they worship and reverence with all obedience, and whom they call god on earth.” (37)
The chronicler Matthew Paris recounted how the Mongolians were “thirsting after and drinking blood, and tearing and devouring the flesh of dogs and human beings;” (38) and in the letter addressed to the Archbishop of Bordeaux, it recollects how when the Mongolians invaded Austria, “Virgins were deflowered until they died of exhaustion. Then their breasts were cut off to be dainties for their chiefs, and their bodies furnished a jovial banquet to savages.” (39)
Rape and cannibalism was done by the Japanese at a mass level when they invaded and pillaged China. During their conquest of Nanking, Japanese soldiers would cut off the genitalia of Chinese men because there was a high demand for human penises, since it was believed amongst the Japanese that the human phallus would provide virility once consumed. Iris Chang documented this absolutely diabolical evil:
“One Japanese reporter who later investigated the Rape of Nanking learned that at least one Japanese soldier tore the heart and liver out of a Chinese victim to eat them. Even genitals, apparently, were consumed: a Chinese solider who escaped from Japanese custody saw several dead people in the streets with their penises cut off. He was later told that the penises were sold to Japanese customers who believed that eating them would increase virility.” (40)
Like their Mongol and Seljuk brethren before them, the Japanese raped women to death and did innumerable inhumanities and violations. “Every day, twenty-four hours a day,” reported the Dagong Daily newspaper, “there was not one hour when an innocent woman was not being dragged off somewhere by a Japanese soldier.” Even elderly women were sodomized by the Japanese soldiers; grandmothers and even great-grandmothers could not escape the reprobate clutches of the savages. One Japanese soldier raped a sixty year old woman, and then he was ordered to “clean the penis by her mouth.” One sixty-two year old woman, surrounded by soldiers, protested that she was too old for sex, and the heathen Japanese “rammed a stick up her instead.” Many eighty year old women were raped, so much so that they were ravished to death. Pregnant women were also raped, or women who had just given birth a few days prior. Japanese soldiers would also rip open the bellies of pregnant women and tear out the unborn children for their own sadistic entertainment.
There are countless stories of horror from which one can learn about the absolute diabolism of the Japanese. There is the story of a slaughter of an entire household, which took place on December 13, 1937. Thirty Japanese soldiers approached a home, shot the landlord dead as soon as he opened the door, and entered. The landlord’s wife asked why they killed her husband, they looked at her, and shot her dead as well. They spotted a woman, Mrs. Hsia, hiding under a table holding her baby. The Japanese soldiers gripped her and dragged from away from underneath the table, stripped her naked and gang raped her. They then bayoneted her through the chest and shoved a bottle of perfume into her vagina. After this, they took her baby and pierced the infant’s body with the blade of a bayonet. They continued to walk within the home. They entered one room and saw Mrs Hsia’s parents and her two teenage daughters, ages 16 and 14.
The grandmother desperately tried to shield the two girls; the Japanese shot her dead with a revolver. The grandfather held onto the body of his wife, and the soldiers swiftly slew him. They took the two girls, denuded them, and several soldiers took turns raping them. Afterwards, they took a bamboo stick and shoved it inside the older girl’s vagina, and the other girl they bayoneted to death. They continued to walk about the house, they spotted two children, ages 4 and 2, who belonged to the landlord. They seized the younger child and split his head in two with a sword, and the other they bayoneted to death. Before they left they spotted an eight year old girl, a daughter of the landlords. They bayoneted her and she was left for dead. The Japanese left the home, to continue their creation of an ocean of gore and carnage. The eight year old girl, now injured, hid in the home with her four year old sister. The four year old was hiding under the covers during the massacre, and almost suffocated. Weeks after the massacre, a member of the International Committee entered the home, spotted the two children — who were living off rice crusts — and all of the aftermath of the butchery. “While I was there,” he later testified, “the blood on the table [was] not all dry yet.” (41)
The Japanese, like the Seljuks and the Mongolians, believed that they were divinely destined to rule the earth. Shimizu Ryuzan, former president of Rissho University, said in 1934:
“The underlying principle of the spirit of Japan is the enlightenment of the world with truth. Just as our bother Manchurians have come to follow us with affection, so also must we lead all the nations of the world into righteousness and establish heaven on earth, where brotherly love and worldwide peace shall prevail and where all men shall be Buddhist saints. This is the true ideal of the spirit of Japan.” (42)
In 1946, Narahashi Wataru, chief cabinet secretary in the government of Prime Minister Shidehara Kijuro, explained the Allied position on Japanese ideology and how it pushed Japan to war:
Because the Japanese people believed the emperor to be a god, they calmly died on his behalf, crying out, “May the emperor live for ten thousand years!” Claiming that it had to make the August Virtue of His Majesty shine throughout the world, Japan adopted [the slogan of] “the eight corners of the world under one roof” and committed aggression. (43)
Just as the Mongolians wanted the world to worship Genghis Khan, and all of their other khans, and as the Seljuks wanted the world to bow down towards Mecca and to revere the sultans, so the Japanese wanted all of humanity to bow down towards the emperor.
The Japanese worship the sun goddess, Amaterasu, even till this day. They even carry up a little tabernacle, called a mikoshi, in which they believe a deity lives. On top of the false tabernacle is placed an idol of a bird, which looks like a cherubim from the Near East, which obviously represents a demon, or fallen angel.
The Mongolians were as well very devout to sun worship. In an ancient Mongolian text, it reads of how Temujin (Genghis Khan) bowed down to the sun:
“Temujin turned toward the Sun and took his hat in his hand.
He loosened his belt and threw it over his neck.
Then striking his breast with his hand,
he knelt nine times to the Sun,
sprinkling offerings of mare’s milk in the air,
and he prayed.” (44)
And just like the Mongols and the Seljuks, and the Huns, the Japanese hated Christianity, and believed that their war was a divine mission to not only have everyone submit to their emperor, but to also destroy Christianity. For example, Ouchi Seiran, a very reputable Japanese Buddhist scholar, in a work published in 1912, wrote:
“Christianity and our imperial house can never coexist, for it is impossible to truly revere the imperial house while believing in Christianity. …Christianity not only turns its back on the righteous Buddhist teaching of cause and effect, but it is a heretical teaching that tears apart the establishment of our imperial house and destroys the foundation of our country. …Therefore we must all join together to prevent this heretical teaching from spreading throughout our land.” (45)
The antichrist spirit of the pagan Japanese was most definitely manifested in their genocides. In the words of Iris Chang, “The Japanese attacked women in nunneries, churches, and Bible training schools. Seventeen soldiers raped one woman in succession in a seminary compound.” (46) For six weeks the Japanese set fires to Nanking, and one of their particular targets were churches, setting them to flames. (47)
Raping women in churches, and destroying churches, was what was committed by the Ottoman Turks and their Islamized European auxiliaries when they invaded Constantinople. The Turks flooded the Church of the Hagia Sofia where they raped women and took Christians to be their slaves. The loveliest maiden was sought out by the most degenerate Turk, and not even the nuns were spared by the rapacious Muslims who indulged themselves in the wickedest acts of rape and kidnapping. The braids of women were tugged and pulled by Turks who competed for them; they ripped through their garments and exposed their breasts and bosoms. People were driven out of the church and flogged, and within one hour all of the men where bounded together by a cord like the Hebrew slaves in ancient Egypt. They were chained together and were treated as though they were not human, but a herd of beasts. Over sixty thousand people were transported to the Muslim camps and ships, exchanged and sold, and dispersed throughout the provinces of the Ottoman Empire. (48)
The Janissaries tore down the crucifix in the Hagia Sofia, placed a Turkish turbin on the thorn-pierced head and mockingly paraded through the streets as they scoffingly said, “Behold the God of the Christians.” Ever since then the Hagia Sofia has never been touched by Christian hands; it still remains in Turkey as a great bare slab in iconoclastic fury. (49)
Spiritual deception was utilized by both the Turks and even the Japanese in their invasions of Christian countries. For example, a few years after the Turks invaded Constantinople in 1453, they brought in a new bishop named Gennadius to be the patriarch of the church in Constantinople, and each year, the Ottoman approved patriarch would have dialogues with the sultan on the similarities between Islam and Christianity. The Japanese also used spiritual deception to bring their Catholic subjects into submission.
When the Japanese invaded and conquered the Mariana Islands, including Guam, they understood that it would have been difficult to get the locals — called Chamorros — who were Catholics, to submit to the cult of the emperor. The Japanese invaded Guam on December 8th, 1941, the day of the Feast of the Immaculate Conception. The people were getting ready to partake in the celebration, when Japanese bombs struck the land. Bishop Miguel Olano, after finishing the Mass in his city of Hagatna, told everyone in the congregation to evacuate the city as soon as they could. In the early hours of December 10th, six thousand Japanese troops covered the beaches of Guam. The Japanese authorities declared as a message to the Christian locals of Guam that they conquered their island “for the purpose of restoring liberty and rescuing the whole Asiatic people and creating the permanent peace in Asia. Thus our intention is to establish the New Order of the World.” All churches in Guam were confiscated and declared as Japanese property.
The Japanese took the Cathedral in Hagatna, they committed an abomination of desolation, where the wheat offering is expelled, and forced the Catholic Sacraments to be removed, and transformed it into a prison for American civilians, and then later on into a distribution center for Japanese propaganda and a dance and entertainment hall. The Japanese also took over the Baptist Church in Hagatna and made it into a Shinto shrine. All American Catholic priests in Guam were arrested and imprisoned in the Cathedral, and the Spanish bishop, Angel Olano Urteaga, was as well confined behind bars. After the Japanese did this, there were only two Catholic priests left in the whole island — Fr. Oscar Lujan Calvo and Fr. Jesus Baza Duenas — to minister to 21,000 Catholics. There was also the sole Baptist minster in Guam, Reverend Joaquin Flores Sablan. Fr. Jesus was the older priest, and because of his tough exterior and indomitable spirit, he was called the “Lone Ranger.”
One day the Japanese governor of Guam, Homura Teiichi, told the two Catholic priests and the Baptist pastor to discourage the people from celebrating the Catholic feast days, since the war — according to him — could have forced the populace to starve. The Baptist minister and the younger priest agreed to these demands, but Fr. Jesus refused to do this, exclaiming that it was in hardship where the Catholics could exhibit their true love and faith.
The governor was so furious that it appeared that he was about to unsheathe his Samurai sword and decapitate Fr. Jesus. In a different meeting, governor Homura told the Baptist minister, Sabalan, that the Japanese had come to destroy any trace of American culture in Guam, and that included him and his church.
The Japanese knew that they needed to create a synchronism between Catholicism and Shintoism, in order to have the Chamorros bow down to their emperor. They created a very strict law for both the Catholic and Baptist services, that before each church service, the congregation had to bow down towards the emperor, the image of the beast and an antichrist on earth. To help keep this enforced, Japan sent two of their Catholic priests, Monsignor Dominic Fukahori and Fr. Petero Komatsu. Fukahori used the pulpit to convey Japanese propaganda during the homily, praising “the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere which Japan was attempting to build during World War II and extol the glories of the Emperor.”
He would also declare that Japan was defeating the Americans in the war. To the majority of Guam’s Catholics, and to the two sole priests, these priests from Japan were spies who could not be trusted. While Fr. Jesus was not present in his perish, Monsignor Fukahori and Fr. Komatsu tried to convince the Catholics in the church that Japan was already victorious in the war, and that if they would cooperate with the regime of the emperor, Japan would bring peace and harmony to Guam. Once Fr. Jesus was aware of these evil wolves, he wrote a letter to Fukahori, calling him a spy for the Japanese military, and, referencing Pope Benedict XV, affirmed that it was contrary to the Faith for a priest to work in a nation while at the same time advancing the agenda of a foreign country.
In 1944, the Americans fought the Japanese in Guam, and the Japanese in turn forced the locals to be slaves in the fields, to help feed the Japanese forces, carry supplies and munitions and build defenses. Fr. Jesus explicitly ordered that Catholics disobey the Japanese. Fr. Jesus, and other Catholics, were helping an American radioman, George Tweed, clothing and hiding him from the Japanese who were viciously trying to kill him. One of the Japanese priests told Fr. Jesus to stop ministering to the Chamorros alone. Fr. Jesus told the heretic that he only answered to God, and the Japanese race was not God nor divine.
Fr. Jesus, along perhaps hundreds of other Catholics, were arrested. The Japanese tortured the priest and the Catholic prisoners, demanding from them to reveal where the American radioman was hidden. As Fr. Jesus endured torture, the Americans were rescuing George Tweed. Fr. Jesus never talked, regardless of all of the tortures they put him through. Fr. Jesus’ last words were: “God will look after me. I have done no wrong.” After he said this, his neck was struck by the Samurai sword, and he was beheaded, on July 11th, 1944. He was an Elijah, defying the tyranny of false priests, striking at the enemy with the Sword of the Spirit, and in emulation of the Incarnation of Hope, allowed himself to carry the Cross with Christ, and brought vision to mankind on the ascendency of humility over the guile of despots and the despotism of delusion.
As martyrs were made under the oppressions of the heathen, so will many more continue leave the finite existence of the world, and enter eternity. The war has never stopped, between the saint and the slaves of the diabolical, between civilization and tyranny, between Christendom and savagery, sanguinary bloodlust that will be seen by horrified witnesses in the face of oceans of blood spilt by the restored empire of the Turk.
It is true that the people of Turkey are, for the most part, not really Turks, but Greeks, Slavs and Circassians whose ancestors were forced into Islam by the Turks in the past, and who were brainwashed into zealously accepting the race of their conquerers. But the concept of “the Turk,” has become, for people in Turkey, more of an ideology than a race. Ottomanism is an ideology that glorifies a race, and it is subscribed to by a people not even of that race, but who nonetheless are willing to kill for its ideology. The ideology is world conquest under the spirit of antichrist, and the means by which to do it, is to use the very people that you want conquered to do the conquering for you. It is a curse, a curse only broken by Christianity. As it was in the past, so shall it be in the future, with the Cross of Christendom, crushing the crescent of the Turk.
REFERENCES
(1) Gregory, History of the Franks, 2.16, trans. Thorpe
(2) That the Turks are Huns, see John Skylitzes, Byzantine History, 21.9. Michael Attaleiates calls the Seljuks “Nephthalite Huns” (History, 8.1; 14.1)*
(2a)*Safi, The Politics of Knowledge in Premodern Islam, ch. 1, pp. 9, 10
(3) See the Chronicle of Pseudo-Joshua, 60, 279, alongside the notes by the translators, Frank R. Trombley and John W. Watt
(4) Safi, The Politics of Knowledge in Premodern Islam, ch. 1, p. 11
(5) For more on the Seljuks, see Belloc, The Crusades, ch. ii, pp. 9-11; The Great Heresies, The Great and Enduring Heresy of Muhammad, p. 50; Moczar, Islam at the Gates, prologue, act 3, p. 19; Mills, Hist. Crus. ch. i, p. 2; Nicolle, Manzikert 1071, ch. 1, pp. 8, 12
(6) See Safi, The Politics of Knowledge in Premodern Islam, ch. 1, p. 16
(7) See Safi, The Politics of Knowledge in Premodern Islam, ch. 1, p. 16
(8) Michael Attaleiates, History, 14.1
(9) See Michael Attaleiates, History, 8.2-3
(10) In John France, “Impelled by the Love of God”, in Thomas F. Madden’s The Crusades, part 2, p. 35
(11) See Gibbon, Decline and Fall, vol. v, ch. lvii, pp. 1034-1036
(12) Safi, The Politics of Knowledge in Premodern Islam, ch. 1, pp. 25-26
(13) Safi, The Politics of Knowledge in Premodern Islam, ch. 1, p. 43
(14) Safi, The Politics of Knowledge in Premodern Islam, ch. 1, p. 43
(15) Belloc, The Crusades, ch. 2, p. 10, ellipses mine
(16) Safi, The Politics of Knowledge in Premodern Islam, ch. 1, p. 35
(17) See Itzkowitz, Ottoman Empire and Islamic Tradition, ch. 1, p. 4
(18) Safi, The Politics of Knowledge in Premodern Islam, ch. 1, p. 30
(19) Safi, The Politics of Knowledge in Premodern Islam, ch. 1, p. 30
(20) McCullough, Chronicles of the Barbarians, ch. 13, p. 269
(21) Carpini, The Story of the Mongols, ch. 3, pp. 43-44
(22) Carpini, The Story of the Mongols, ch. 5, p. 68
(23) See the Chronicle of Novgorod, ed. McCullough, ch. 13, pp. 286-287
(24) Ibid
(25) Matthew Paris, Chronicles, ed. McCullough, ch. 13, p. 291
(26) See Matthew Paris, Chronicles, ed. McCullough, ch. 13, pp. 293-294
(27) Matthew Paris, Chronicles, ed. McCullough, ch. 13, p. 296
(28) Pope Urban II at the Council of Clermont, the version of Robert the Monk, in Edward Peters, The First Crusade, p. 2
(29) C. de Bridia, The Tatar Relation, ed. McCullough, ch. 13, p. 276
(30) See Safi, The Politics of Knowledge in Premodern Islam, ch. 2, pp. 61-62
(31) See Safi, The Politics of Knowledge in Premodern Islam, ch. 2, p. 18
(32) The Secret History of the Mongols, pp. 47-48, ed. Paul Khan
(33) Carpini, The Story of the Mongols, ch. 8, pp. 85-86
(34) Nicolle, Manzikert 1071, p. 92
(35) C. de Bridia, The Tartar Relation, ed. McCullough, ch. 13, p. 278
(36) C. de Bridia, The Tatar Relation, ed. McCullough, ch. 13, p. 277
(37) See McCullough, Chronicles of the Barbarians, ch. 13, p. 294
(38) Matthew Paris, Chronicles, ed. McCullough, ch. 13, p. 290 2
(39) Matthew Paris, Chronicles, ed. McCullough, ch. 13, p. 297
(40) Iris Chang, The Rape of Nanking, ch.4, pp. 88-89
(41) Iris Chang, The Rape of Nanking, ch. 4, pp. 92-93
(42) Shimizu, Rissho Ankoku no Taigi to Nippon Seishin, p. 46, in Victoria, Zen At War, ch. 5, p. 64
(43) Quoted in Tamaki Benkichi, Kaiso — Yamamoto Tempo, p. 156, in Victoria, Zen War Stories, ch. 6, p. 100
(44) The Secret History of the Mongols, p. 34, ed. Paul Khan
(45) Akiyama, Sonno Aikoku Ron, pp. 49-52, in Victoria, Zen at War, ch. 4, 52
(46) Iris Chang, The Rape of Nanking, ch. 4, pp. 90-91
(47) See Iris Chang, The Rape of Nanking, ch. 7, p. 160
(48) See Gibbon, Decline and Fall, vol. v, ch. liviii
(49) Carroll, A History of Christendom, vol. iii, ch. xiii, p. 568