Redstate

If you could provide an example of an attempt to "prove" massacre and genocide with demographics alone -- and not with the assistance of, say, reference to historical records of massacre and subjugation -- you might have a point.

Old Atlantic starts as early as 1300 because even at that early date Islam was engaged in a ferocious offensive against the Byzantine Christian communities of the Near East. In fact, one could go farther back. The city of Byzantium herself was besieged, and nearly conquered, about the same time in the 8th century as the conquest of southern Spain, which is to say about a generation after the Prophet's death.

I wonder: if someone cited demographic statistics of Jewish population declines in mediaeval Europe and early modern Russia, as evidence of oppression, would you cry foul?

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And the Lord upon the Golden Horn is laughing in the sun.

>>If you could provide an example of an attempt to "prove" massacre and genocide with demographics alone

Post no. 52.

Taken in the totality of the argument, I agree there is other context. But I stand by my point that the figures alone prove nothing.

>>I wonder: if someone cited demographic statistics of Jewish population declines in mediaeval Europe and early modern Russia, as evidence of oppression, would you cry foul?

If someone suggested this was a sufficient argument, sure. Wouldn't you?

Quentin Langley
Editor of http://www.quentinlangley.net

If someone suggested this was a sufficient argument, sure. Wouldn't you?

Old Atlantic does not, by an stretch of the imagination, suggest that the numbers alone are sufficient argument -- otherwise why would he go to the trouble to adduce reports of atrocities and the like.

I think the demographic trends of beleagured minority populations is legitimate, but not sufficient, evidence of oppression. I think that your fastidiousness on this point is unbecoming. You have already conceded that Old Atlantic is not guilty of the charge you make, only that one or two of his comments, taken in isolation, shows some evidence of it. If this high a standard of precision and care were demanded of all comments, half those on this website would fall short.

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And the Lord upon the Golden Horn is laughing in the sun.

I have not acquitted Old Atlantic of any charge that I have made.

I have suggested that one particular line of argumentation was not an argument. It is nothing but a debating trick, and a rather cheap one. It might, given greater context, such as records of absolute numbers, be seen as illustrative of a wider argument.

Quentin Langley
Editor of http://www.quentinlangley.net

Did you not write, "Taken in the totality of the argument, I agree there is other context" -- the other context being elements of evidence and inference and so forth added to mere figures, to create an argument?

The only way I can see your charge having any validity is if Old Atlantic had failed to substantiate is claims about dhimmitude with anything other than demographic data. He did not fail to do so. He appealed to authority (J. Q. Adams), to other evidence (research on Aremenian genocide), to historical records (the Barbary wars), etc.

Where is the cheap debating trick? Christmas communities declined preciptiously under Islam (Bat Ye'or wrote a well-received book on it). Old Atlantic cited demographics, and a mass of other evidence, in order to show that dhimmitude is the cause of this decline. Cheap?

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And the Lord upon the Golden Horn is laughing in the sun.

I did not say, at any point, that his whole argument was nonsense. I said that this particular tactic was.

The cheap debating trick is to cite, absent of genuine context, some demographic data. It is cheap because in the context in which it is supplied it implies that the entire cause of the decline in numbers is slaughter or ethnic cleansing.

The fact is, when borders move or are created people move. There are varying degrees of coercion involved. Take Ireland as an example. When the border was created by Southern Ireland leaving the UK in 1922 it left a majority Catholic country in the south and east and a majority Protestant country in the north west. The south then had a civil war and there was a massive decline in the Protestant population. Can we conclude from this that there was ethnic or religious cleansing? Was the Pope responsible, and is the current Pope? Or was much of the decline attributable to population movement rather than slaughter?

Many of the examples you cite are very old. While that, too, is legitimate it, too, needs a context. J Q Adams can be taken as a source for human rights abuse in the US, too, given his role campaigning against slavery. Yet, apart from Jesse Jackson and a few of his acolytes, few people believe that you are personally responsible for slavery.

Quentin Langley
Editor of http://www.quentinlangley.net

Re: Old Atlantic starts as early as 1300 because even at that early date Islam was engaged in a ferocious offensive against the Byzantine Christian communities of the Near East.

Um, it would be more accurate to say that the Turks were engaged in such an offensive, unless we are also going to say "Catholicism conquered the New World and slaughtered many natives" or "In 1941 Shintoism and Buddhism attacked Pearl Harbor"

You got me on a point of pedantry in a comment again.

Except wait: it might be fair to say Catholicism launched an offensive during the Crusades. I don't know what our Catholics would say, but I think my affection for the Church, and my antipathy for glib abuse of the Crusaders, are well-known enough to acquit me of any charge that by saying this I mean to accuse the Crusaders. In war, an offensive is not generally thought intrinsically bad, and there can be no doubt there was, beginning well before the year of our Lord 1300, a war on between the leaders of Islam (then the Turks) and the Orthodox remnants of the Byzantines.

Also, the context of my repeated assurance that my policy would aim at doctrines not religions, is something I think a regular reader might be inclined to remember.

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And the Lord upon the Golden Horn is laughing in the sun.

There is no doubt of the mistreatment some endured, and are enduring today, at that hands of Christian men. I never said otherwise.

You may be right about the degeneration of Muslim mercy "beginning in the nineteenth century"; but that hypothesis could be plausibly countered by pointing to the fact that historical scholarship, at least in the vital field of collection of facts, advanced markedly as the nineteenth century dawned. Peering deeper into the history of the Jihad, we find less aggregate data, but in its place vivid and terrible episodes. We learn of the flaying of Marcantonio Bragadino, Venetian governor of Cyprus, after a flag of truce was betrayed, by the Turkish commander Lala Mustafa Pasha in 1571. We hear of the horrible agonies of Constantinople, which stole the heart of the Sultan-conqueror, when the city fell. We perceive echoes of the terror of the southern Mediterranean communities at the hands of the corsair slavers.

Again like the slavery that we Americans once practiced, its brutality and humiliation has effaced much of its record of sins, and so we are forced upon speculation and conjecture. We can have hope, however, in the fact that God's Justice can penetrate to what these eyes of sinful flesh cannot see; and hope eternal in that His Justice is also His Love.

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And the Lord upon the Golden Horn is laughing in the sun.

all absolutely correct, but the topic at hand was treatment of subject peoples, not conduct in war (into which I'd group the massacre at Nicosia and the subsequent revenge after Lepanto). Much of the internecine violence in Anatolia and the Balkans arose as Greece and then Serbia lurched toward independence, while in Lebanon it accelerated as the French sought to achieve a semi-formal mandate (which became a capitulation in the latter half of the nineteenth century). Older records are limited, to be sure, but these Christian sects had bishops and patriarchs and it seems unlikely that violence of any scale would have been ignored by the communities themselves.

It would be hard to find a concept that's more inseparable from the practice and tradition of Islam. It applies to everything from running a military insurgency to practicing hijab in an Amercian school despite teasing from classmates.