Thread by @nickguitar1776

0)"Do remember that history is to the Nation, as memory is to the individual. As a person deprived of memory becomes lost and disoriented, so a nation denied a conception of the past, will be disabled in dealing with its present and its future."

3/17/19
THREAD: Jihadi History

1)In 330, Constantine the first Christian Emperor moved the capital of the Roman Empire to the site of the ancient Greek city Byzantium. Byzantium was renamed Constantinople, and it would become the capital of the Byzantine Empire

2) In 526 the Dome Church named 'Hagia Sophia' was built and completed within five years of its construction. It served as a Eastern Orthodox Church.

3) Following the death of Mohammed in 632, the religion he founded spread across North Africa. By the close of the 7th Century, believers of Islam, in search of new converts to Islam and plunder, surged out from Arabia to conquer surrounding lands.

4) In a span of 20 years, the rest of North Africa fell and the Muslims had conquered Spain. Territories once ruled for centuries by the Byzantine (Eastern Roman) and Persian Empires were quickly conquered.

5) The Arab Empire was ruled by the successors of Mohammed. These new leaders were called Caliphs, and the political-religious state of the Muslim community and the peoples and lands under their control was known as the Caliphate

6) Under Heraclius' reign, the Byzantine lost Syria, Palestine, and Egypt to Muslims. Constantinople was also under attack, but the Byzantium Empire maintained control for a few century before Constantinople was eventually taken over and renamed Instabul by the Ottoman Turks.

7) The Ottoman Empire was a political and military entity of the Muslim Turks. It was established in July 1299 and reached the peak of its power and glory in the 16th and the 17th centuries. The Ottoman Empire lasted till 1922

8)The Empire spanned across three continents and included Southeastern Europe, North African and Western Asia. Including present-day Hungary, the Balkan region, Greece, parts of Ukraine; areas of the Middle East now occupied by Iraq, Syria, Israel, and Egypt and North Africa.

9) In their initial stages of expansion, the Ottomans were leaders of the Turkish warriors for the faith of Islam, known by title ghazi (Arabic for “raider”), who fought against the shrinking Christian Byzantine state.

10) In 1453, Constantinople was conquered by the Ottoman under Mehmed, who ordered the Christian Church, The Hagia Sophia, converted into a mosque. The bells, altar, and other relics were destroyed and the mosaics depicting Jesus, Mary, saints, and angels were also destroyed

11) The Muslims of North Africa also known as the Barbary States found piracy far more lucrative than farming. Piracy yielded slaves, treasure, and ransom. Piracy also provided Muslims an opportunity to strike at the Christians of Europe.

12) As Turkish power waned, they began to exploit a new means of obtaining wealth: They would promise to refrain from plundering the ships of Christian powers that paid tributes. England made a treaty with Tunis in 1662, in which England agreed to pay the reigning Bey a tribute.

13) In return, the Bey ordered Tunisian corsairs to refrain from attacking English ships. England made similar treaties with the other Barbary States.

14)After 1776, U.S. ships were no longer protected by the tributes Britain paid. The pirates began to prey on U.S. ships. In 1785 Algeria seized the American vessels, Dauphin and Maria. "The Betsey" was captured off the coast of Africa. The American crew were sold into slavery.

15) On March 28, 1786, Thomas Jefferson, who was U.S. Ambassador to France, met with Sidi Haji Abdrahaman, the Ambassador of Tripoli. Jefferson inquired as to why they were attacking the ships when they've done them no wrong. Jefferson reported back what the ambassador told him.

16) "It was founded on the Laws of their Prophet, that it was written in their Koran, that all nations who did acknowledge their authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found

17) Jefferson directed the negotiators who obtained the release of the crews. The Agent in Morocco ransomed the Betsey and her crew for 5k pounds sterling. The Dey of Algiers demanded 59k for the crew of the Maria and the Dauphin. Agent couldnt pay, and crew remained in captivity

18) 1794: Congress raised one million dollars to purchase peace with the Barbary States and begins to construct a small naval force. Jefferson obtained a Koran to learn the ideology of the pirates.

19) Once Thomas Jefferson was first inaugurated as President of the
The United States in 1801, he dispatched a naval squadron to the Mediterranean Sea to combat privateers sent by the Bashaw of Tripoli to prey on American shipping.

20) By 1890, States within the Ottoman Empire began calling for change and in some cases revolution. Christians, Muslims, and Jews were now joined by Turks and even members of the nobility like the Prince, in pushing to replace the absolute monarchy with a constitutional monarchy

21) In 1907 the prince organized the second Congress of Ottoman Liberals. At the meeting representatives from the political reform movement, the Young Turks led by Ismail Enver called for the immediate overthrow of the sultan

22)1913, Mehmed Talaat and Ismail Enver organized a military coup led by members of the Committee for Union and Progress (CUP) and formed a new government. The CUP was a coalition who believed the only way to hold on to the Empire was to embrace a radical idea of ethnic cleansing

23)In October 1914, The Turks launched attacks on Russian ports after signing a secret treaty with Germany and entered the German side in WWI. They tell the German Amb that its time to conclude the "Armenian question," in discussing plans to eliminate the entire Armenian people

24) From April 1915, targeting of Armenian Christians begins on a vast scale with murders, burning of villages, rapes, deportations. No regards were given to age or sex. More than 1 million Christians are estimated to have been killed in the Armenian Genocide by The Young Turks

25) In September 1918, Mehmed Talaat visited Berlin, Germany, and Bulgaria. He came with the understanding that the war could no longer be won. With Germany probably looking for a separate peace, the Ottomans would also be forced to do so.

26) Talaat convinced the other members of the ruling party that they had to resign because if they thought the people who started the war were still in power, the Allies would impose much harsher terms.

27) Turkey signed an armistice with the Allies in October 1918 and subsequently dismantled the Ottoman Empire. On March 3, 1924, the Turkish Grand Assembly abolished the Caliphate and Sultan Mehmed VI left the country. This enabled the nationalist Turk wing in Ankara to govern.

28) The Muslim Brotherhood was founded in 1928 by Hassan Al Banna in Ismailia, Egypt, following the abolition in 1924 of the Islamic Caliphate in Istanbul, Turkey. The movement has grown rapidly, setting up branches in other countries, particularly Syria.

29) One of their first objectives was to establish mosques and schools in the community. The Muslim Brotherhood's first branch was established in Cairo, Egypt, in 1932. The Muslim Brotherhood grew to over 2 million by 1946 from 800 members in 1936.

30)According to Al-Banna: It is the nature of Islam to dominate, not to be dominated, to impose its law on all nations and to extend its power to the entire planet.

31) Knowing it would be impossible to achieve the ultimate goal of a universal Islamic State overnight. The Brotherhood adopted a bottom-up approach of incremental political movement. In respect of Western imperialists and Jews, it still embraced jihad.

32) Its wasn't only during WWI that Germans and Muslims would fight alongside each other. In WWII Muslims would fight in an armed branch of the Nazi SS Army. The Palestinian Mufti met with Hitler and discuss plans they have for the Jews.

33) The Germans subsidized the Muslim Brotherhood before and during WWII. In 1942, as German forces approached Egypt from the west, the Brotherhood led an uprising that called for the massacre of the Jews and Christians in the country.

34) Large quantities of arms supplied by the German authorities were hidden to be ready for the revolt. But the British defeat of the forces of General Erwin Rommel and British decisive action in Cairo kept the country under control.

35) In 1947, after the end of WWII, the Brotherhood volunteered to fight for the transformation of all Palestine into an Islamist state, armed with the guns provided five years earlier by the Germans. Yasir Arafat was one of the soldiers.

36) At the end of 1987, violent confrontations between Palestinians and Israelis increased sharply, and Palestinian demonstrations became widespread physical resistance to Israel's presence in the West Bank and Gaza. They were labeled as the 1st Intifada, Arabic for "uprising"

37)Hamas began in 1987 and is a offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood. The founder was the Muslim Brotherhood's Palestinian branch leader. Hamas is an international terrorist org with the stated objective of destroying and replacing Israel with an Islamic State through violent jihad