9-11 Significant Throughout History
By H.W. ‘Hawk’ Kiefer
Special to the Herald Courier
The anniversary of Sept. 11 is tomorrow, a date that marked a horrendous triumph for Muslim terrorists. Oddly enough, it also is the date of one of Islam’s worst defeats. On an earlier occasion, Muslim armies had attacked the West, but in a battle on that earlier Sept. 11, they were thoroughly beaten.
The radical strain of Islam has repeatedly attacked the West. The first such attacks came after Muhammad’s death in AD 632, when Muslim warriors swept out of Arabia to India in the east and Spain in the west. Those attacks ended in defeat at the hands of Charles Martel at Tours in AD 732.
The second wave of attacks came when the Mongols captured Constantinople in AD 1453. After they changed the name of that city to Istanbul and created the Ottoman Empire, they invaded the Balkans. Intent on conquering Eastern Europe, they set siege to Vienna, the capital of the Hapsburg Empire.
On Sept. 11, 1863, however, a Hapsburg coalition broke the siege and routed the armies of Islam. The Treaty of Karlowitz ended the Ottoman attacks by penalizing the Muslims so severely that the fortunes of Islam went into a 200-year decline. In the first half of the 20th century that decline was complete and Muslims were insignificant on the world stage. Most Americans could then not find Mecca on a map.
The armies of Islam were so cowed that when I was in the Middle East in the 1960s, I walked the streets of Cairo, Jeddah, Riyadh, Beirut, Amman and Jerusalem alone, at night, unarmed and unharmed. If an American were to try that today, the chances are good that he would be kidnapped, tortured and beheaded. What changed?
Money. In the seventies, Saudi Arabia raised the price of a barrel of oil from one dollar to $35. Suddenly Muslims had more money than they could spend, and a percentage ended in the hands of Islamic radicals.
One set of such hands belonged to Hezbollah. The so-called Army of God was formed in 1982, inspired by the Ayatollah Khomeini and trained by Iran’s Revolutionary Guards. In 1983, with Persian guidance, training and money, Hezbollah launched yet another attack by radical Islam against the West, when they drove an explosive-laden truck into the Marines’ barracks at Beirut and killed 241 Americans.
Hezbollah did that because Muslims have long memories and large egos. They remember the Crusades, Charles Martel at Tours and the Hapsburgs in the Balkans. Osama bin Laden may have chosen Sept. 11 as the appropriate date to attack the World Trade Centers as one way to ease Muslim memory of the date of Islam’s defeat before Vienna.
The radical strain of Islam also attacks the West because that religion had never reached accommodation with the rest of the world. The other great monotheistic religions of our civilization, Judaism and Christianity, long ago learned that they had to adjust and compromise with each other and with those who did not believe as they did. Islam has never accepted that concept. Many Muslims believe that Islam’s way is the only way, and they are willing to die to prove it. They will continue to attack as long as they have money and the silence of more moderate Muslims.
How can America contend with such radicals? Three come immediately to mind. First the free world must defend itself when attacked. We are doing that in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere. Second we must pressure Islam to accommodate. We have taken baby steps in that direction by focusing on the lack of human rights, religious freedom, universal suffrage and freedom of the press in countries like Saudi Arabia. Finally, we must cut off the money. We are sending $700 billion abroad each year to import energy. Significant sums fall into the hands of those who want us dead. If those fanatics did not have that money, they would be powerless.
If the United States had a strong domestic energy program, the price of a barrel of OPEC oil would drop $100, gasoline would be below $2 a gallon and Islam would no longer be a threat.
An effective domestic energy program would include conservation, drilling, mining, nuclear power, alternative energy and new technology. We must not pick and choose which to adopt, especially based on political or economic gain. We need them all. For the sake of our children’s future we should stop bickering and start to free ourselves from Middle East oil.
H.W. ‘Hawk’ Kiefer is a retired Army colonel who lives in Abingdon. He can be reached at .
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Hello, Dad5
“I would love to hear the Col. explain why Israel has not sent anyone to Iraq or Afganistan to support the USA. “
The good Colonel won’t be able to answer that question due the Kool-Aid overdose he’s experienced. But I’ll be glad to if that’s acceptable.
Unless Israel is “Pearl Harboring” an enemy they can’t fight their way out of wet paper bag. They simply don’t have the courage or the skill. The only wars they ever won were those in which they had state of the art weaponry against primitive weapons or when they outnumbered their enemy 1000 to 1.
There are Israelis in Iraq, they work for the Mossad. LINK
They are there to torture suspected “insurgents” and commit further atrocities. Something Israel is famous for, atrocity.
But there won’t be any Israelis in the battle field because their whole plan was to have the Goy die instead of them. And Bush/Cheney was more than happy to sacrifice our kids for Zion. Now, the whole thing backfired and Iraq is now West Iran. Israel’s ultimate error was deposing Saddam’s secular buffer between Israel and Iran.
Now Maliki and the Shia run Iraq and are 100% beholden to Iran like all Shiites are.
Israeli/NeoCon failure. And our troops paid the ultimate price.
Israel is good at sneaking up from behind and committing murder. They are masters of deception and other Satanic ways. They have no root in the morality that our society derived from the teachings of Jesus. Therefor there is no low to which they will not stoop. You gotta figure, if they betrayed their own Messiah to death why would they have a problem .
My words are not intended to be an attack on Jews. There are plenty of Jews that feel the same way I do about Israel. The problem is the Zionist Jew and the Christian Zionists such as Pat Robertson, Dobson, and their vile and filthy ilk.
Zionism is Nazism with “lipstick”. Israel has become what they hate. The Palestinians are the New Holocaust.
Zionism must be destroyed because America’s freedom is one of their targets. I firmly believe that Israel was at least partly responsible for the 9/11 attacks. Perhaps more involved than that.
No one stood to gain more than Israel from an attack on America that was committed by “Muslims”. How do we even know that the hijackers were Saudis as stated? There are no remains. Only the pictures we’ve been shown. How did we have pictures of people who were random “terrorists”.
Israel is America’s primary enemy. They are the ones who agitate the Middle East and are the root cause of the problem we face there. We still owe them for the attack on the USS Liberty. Our sailors were never avenged, Israel was never punished.
Instead, we embrace these Yamamoto’s of the Middle East when we should be kicking their asses.
Send IDF to actually fight in Afghanistan and Iraq? The couldn’t even beat Hezbollah in Lebanon.
The IDF and the Mossad are nothing but cowards and we should have nothing to do with them. They have influenced our government and their American sympathizers have committed treason against this nation.
Scott, I apoligize if my post seems to imply that all Christains are the same.
But at times the anger at all the harm in my life me and my family have experienced at the hands of Christians just boils over. Each of us have been defrauded, experienced malprasticed, been cheated, maligned, defamed, attacked, or harmed by Bible Thumpin Christains !
I know in my heart all Christian are not that way. But living thru insurance fraud when my family lost everything because the insurance agent lied to protect a wealthy business owner claiming it was my mother who had the car wreck that killed another driver.
It hit at a time when we had little cash and could not afford a lawyer to fight back.
We lost our home and lived in a shack I could see thru the floor to the ground for 5 years before we could recover.
I witnesses the hate for poor people from Chritians who use to be our friends. I fought old friends off when they tried to attack my little sister and my mother simply because we were poor at the time. I saw my mother hoe corn for $0.50 cents a day and the farmer try to rape her. A deacon in the church. My father called names when he came home dirty from working two jobs.
So forgive me if my anger and disgust for those who shout religious beliefs intead of just letting their actions speak for them. My ability to trust them was worn out years ago and they have yet to earn it back.
I would love to hear the Col. explain why Israel has not sent anyone to Iraq of Afganistan to support the USA.
They receive $ 3.6 Billion Dollars in aide every year. $3.6 Billion in on elump sum so they can draw interest all year on it. The USA has to pay interest on that money!
Please explain why they have sent no military personnel to help the USA !
Well Jim Fred I hope you know the difference between Voting Majority and the Simple Majority.
In the Senate is take 60 votes to pass a bill.
With only 58 the Republican Block so many bills but blame the Democrats saying the Majority is not doing anything.
I hope you know the difference.
Did you see the Drug and Sex Scandel in the Interior Department with the Oil Company Executives ?
Dear dadw5boys, While I would agree that many Evangelical Christians have supported the Bush administration, please do not lump all of us into that same category. I am definitely one of those Christians who believes that Christianity is the only true way, but as a Calvinist, I do not believe it is my place to “make everyone a Christian” - that would be up to God Himself. Like you, I have made the point for years that the world hates us because we (USA) have supported so many despotic regimes in the name of “protecting our freedom” when it has actually been to support our corporate business interests, i.e. remember the “Ugly American”? Your hostility against Christianity is misguided. I’m in favor of a return to a nation with a more localized rather than a global economy; then we would have less dependence on foreign oil, no trade deficit, no open doors for terrorists to come here, etc.
Well, Colonel.
That’s a bunch of crap. And what’s more, you know it is.
The war in Iraq is immoral, illegal, and amounts to nothing more than the wholesale murder of our troops and the Iraqi people. There is no eminent threat from a collective Islam. Only a fool would believe that which is so obviously untrue.
There is no “bigger picture” involved with the war in Iraq. That war was conducted for two reasons:
1) Israel’s behest.
2) Residual profiteering.
Our guys are dying and being maimed fighting a fight Israelis are too cowardly to fight for themselves. The Iraq war was outlined and instigated by the PNAC. Israel’s spy agency in America.
SOURCE
Dick Cheney took the Israel plan to the white house.
Of course, the criminal administration that now runs this nation knew there would be the opportunity to loot Iraq and our tax dollars also. Our tax money has been used to pay traitors like Halliburton, Blackwater, etc for no-bid contracts to do nothing but cause our people on the ground problems.
Blackwater’s murdering of civilians (women and children) caused our soldiers a lot of problems. Maybe the only chance they had to win the peace.
Israel and money. Not sure which came first but I know that neither is worth even one American life. Sad to think that you, as a soldier, are content to watch our people die fighting a war based on fabricated evidence and pure lies. Aluminum Tubes anyone? WMD? Under the desk?
If you want to be a McSame shill that’s up to you, Colonel Klink. The fact is that our soldiers lost their lives for an unworthy Israel and the greed of a few corporations. And you’re making excuses for it.
Col. Kiefer wrote;
“If the United States had a strong domestic energy program, the price of a barrel of OPEC oil would drop $100, gasoline would be below $2 a gallon and Islam would no longer be a threat.“
We have a do nothing Congress with the lowest approval rating in history. Can we expect them to create an energy policy sometime in the near future? They are using energy as a political football.
MODERATOR:
Did my post get lost?
So I need to put E-5 DIABLED VIETNAM VETERAN in fornt of my name to garner any respect ?
Sorry I do not pretend to know everything. But I do know that NYC Police answered a call about several people acting strange. It turned out to be 5 members of the Israeli Secrect Services who were reported acting strangly by neighobrs on 9/11 and they had Video Equpiment setup pointing at the World Trade Center 3 hours before the attack. Told Police they were making going to send film home to their familys.
After the attack the Police retuned and the men were gone !!!!!!
Thank you COL. Kiefer…You have written an excellent and accurate letter. There will alway be those who will blame President Bush for 9-11 but I don’t buy their garbage.
James F…....
US Army Retired
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