This is a powerful insight. Virtually all the Middle East remained non islamic with perhaps one eight Arab Islam acting as a ruling class from 700 AD through mid sixteenth century AD or for a total of eight centuries. It was then that the Ottomans used forced conversion to make Islam the dominant religion throughout.
That means that Islam as a majority religion is only four hundred years old and claims to an earlier Islamic civilization are totally bogus as are claims to a pre Renaissance European civilization as well when they were borrowing scraps from Roman Civilzation by way of Byzantium.
Worse, this majority Islamic civilization is antique at best and generally failed at worst. At least the Romans extended legal rights uniformly which gave it the edge.
And yes, he is quite right to understand that the shipping paths and the unusual Protestant colonization effort in the face of Spanish prior claims supported by the Catholic Church made refugee settlement a thriving trade opportunity.
It was never enough to be dominant just as French colonization and Spanish colonization also failed to dominate as well. what ultimately succeeded was tobacco and later cotton to assure English dominance and absorption and that was just good luck. We also forget that the USA was populated by European immigrants during the nineteenth century effectively minimizing even English ethnicity. What the USA did out of necessity was to create a new ethnicity and impose it through the school system as all do today.
I was brought up as a loyalist of the British Empire first even though all my ancestors found themselves in opposition. that ho;ds true today for almost everyone and we need to remember how important that early education happens to be. You do not have to believe it but you must be prepared to give it a pass as a citizen and that is always good enough.
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More info for those with Middle Eastern DNA
http://peopleofonefire.com/more-info-for-those-with-middle-eastern-dna.html
Native American Brainfood
There is a surprising
connection between the Ottoman Empire, the Netherlands and Elizabethan
England that might explain the early presence of Middle Eastern
Christians and Jews in the Southeast.
The BBC and the History Channel, during its early years, produced
some outstanding documentaries on the history of the Middle East. When
the United States sent troops into Afghanistan and Iraq after the 2001
terrorist attacks, the History Channel programs became “white washed”
propaganda . . . leaving out many facts of history that might offend
Muslims in Middle Eastern countries because they conflicted with the
religious propaganda coming out of that region.
Many of you still wonder where those Middle Eastern DNA markers came from. Here is some more info.
Even at the beginning of the Renaissance, Islam was a minority
religion in most of the Middle East, north of Arabia. In 1512, 2/3 of
the population of the Ottoman Empire was Christian. Another 10-15% were
either Jewish or Zoroastrians. As long as the Christians were a
majority, they were generally treated with tolerance, since a religious
tax on Christians, Jews and Zoroastrians furnished most of the revenue
for the empire. Muslims were not required to pay taxes or serve in the
military at that time. Only non-Muslims could be enslaved.
The ruling classes were entirely Muslim and Jewish, but most of the
common folks outside of western Turkey were Christian. All of the
Turkish sultan’s harem were Christian slaves. Virtually all of the
Turkish army and navy were either Christians or Zoroastrians. The
Turks had been trying to conquer Armenia and Christian Anatolia for 700
years, with little success, so in turn went into southeastern Europe in
the 1400s and conquered a vast swath of the region.
Until after 1512, the Turks only attacked Christian countries.
However, in the early 1500s, Spain became the primary enemy of the
Ottoman Empire. The sultans needed more money to expand their navies to
combat Spain, so they declared the rulers of all the other Middle
Eastern nations to be heretics and conquered most of the Middle East.
With the wealth captured in these campaigns, the Ottomans were able to
create massive armies that swept across Anatolia, Armenia, Georgia,
Bulgaria, Romania and Hungary.
By 1600, the percentage of Christians in the Ottoman Empire had
fallen to about 1/3. There had been several periods of persecutions and
massacres of Christians in Anatolia and Armenia because the sultans
were afraid of the Armenians, whom they had just conquered. In one 16th
century campaign alone, 300,000 Anatolians and Armenians were expelled
from the Ottoman Empire after 500,000 had been killed or enslaved.
Now this is really interesting . . . the Ottoman Empire was an ally
of the Protestants in the Netherlands and England. On several occasions
the Turks replenished treasuries of either Queen Elizabeth or the
Dutch so they could keep on fighting Spain. First generation Sephardic
Jews in the Netherlands could generally speak Arabic and maintained
constant communication with Jews living in Istanbul and the Ottoman
province of Thessalonika in Greece. Dutch ships were allowed to dock at
Ottoman ports. Many of their crew members were Anatolian Christians.
So, in the exact period when Southeastern North America was first
being explored and colonized, vast numbers of expelled Middle Eastern
Jews, Christians and Zoroastrians were wandering across the landscape,
looking for a place to live, while Dutch ships were regularly making
trips from the ports of the Ottoman Empire to Northern Europe, North
America and a Dutch colony in Brazil.
It makes perfect sense that the Dutch would help establish a “New
Jerusalem” for these stateless refugees within the interior of North
America. The locations of these colonies were far enough from the coast
and Florida that they were out of reach of the Spanish military.
It was undoubtedly assumed that the colonies would grow so strong
that they could conquer Florida and be a major threat to Spanish
shipping. I suspect that French efforts during the 1560s to establish
colonies on the South Atlantic Coast and Northeast Georgia were directly
connected with the plight of the Middle Eastern refugees.
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