NOTES ON THE SILK ROAD EXHIBIT

By Tabitha Korol August 2014

“Traveling the Silk Road,” at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, appears to be a small section of a larger, global exhibition, “1001 Inventions,” which, accompanied by an award-winning film, professes to be a revelation of a thousand years of scientific and cultural achievements by the Muslim world, with a nod to some contributing faiths and cultures. However, these faiths and cultures were victims of Muslim jihadists who, following in Mohammed’s footsteps, invaded the “infidel” world for more than 1400 years, enslaving, slaughtering, and plundering. Their greatest achievement was their ability to expropriate every creative, innovative, groundbreaking device of Islam’s victims and, defying all logic, fraudulently claim each as their own.

The Silk Road exhibit is a betrayal of its name and deception to the tourists, individuals, schoolteachers and students. Some of the visitors are of those cultures whose contributions were formidable, but were given scant recognition or complete disregard, thereby denying them the knowledge and sense of pride to be had upon learning that their heritage contributed to the growth of civilization along the early trade routes. This Islamic presentation allowed about 20 percent to China.

Islam’s growth in both religious adherents and these “achievements” emanated from their invasions into foreign lands, enforcing their will under penalty of death, and booty acquired from the invaded and enslaved cultures (the worst, the black African trade, was excluded). Slavery, including sexual slavery, is justified in the Qur’an and practiced in many countries, to this day.

Islam is socialism, and socialism is antithetical to creativity. Islam is based on envious hatred of what is noble, the aspirations and outstanding creative individuality in all fields of human endeavor. Muslims are enraged that a small Israel could smash the rocket launchers and their terror tunnels of Gaza, for example. They resent and hate human excellence, yet they take ownership of the ingenuity of others out of envy and deceit to entice.

The museum exhibit is just such an example of Muslims’ adopting achievements of others for their own acclaim, because they have produced nothing of value in 1400 years of existence. The majority of the Islamic world is illiterate, violent combatants who commit atrocities beyond the Western imagination – although we are beginning to learn of what these people are truly capable.

DEFINING THE SILK ROAD

The Routes Network ofChang’on-Cianshan Corridor, Eurasia

A vertical screen hangs at the entrance:

WHAT WASN’T SAID:

1. That this was an Islamic exhibit.

2. that Islam provides a martyr’s way to Paradise, which includes destruction, slavery, suicide and genocide, and looting.

3. That Islamic countries lead the world in illiteracy.

FACTS:

1. The most prominent reward promised Islamic Martyrs are the 72 Dark-Eyed Virgins in Paradise. A Palestinian religious leader explained, “…the purpose of authentic Islam is to fill Muslims with desire for Paradise” – the anticipation and love of death. He [Muhammad] said (in a Hadith, Islamic tradition): “[There is] a palace of pearls in Paradise and in it seventy courts of ruby… And in each court [there are] seventy houses of green emerald stone. In every house, seventy beds. On every bed, seventy mattresses of every color and on every mattress a woman.” (Hadith)

2. Sahih al-Bukhari HadithHadith 1.35 Narrated by Abu Huraira The Prophet said, “The person who participates in (Holy battles) in Allah’s cause and nothing compels him to do so except belief in Allah and His Apostles, will be recompensed by Allah either with a reward, or booty (if he survives) or will be admitted to Paradise (if he is killed in the battle as a martyr).” http://www.inthenameofallah.org/Shaheed%20OR%20Martyr.html

EXHIBIT SIGN:

HISTORIC BACKGROUND:

Ancient Chinese guarded the silk production secret for centuries. Ottoman Turks and Persians fought over it; English and French competed to restrict its markets, but every culture was touched by silk. It was found aboard medieval Viking ships sailing out of Constantinople, as kerchiefs from India and as silk bandanas brought by pirates and worn by American cowboys. Damask silk of Damascus, Syria, was actually from China. Martha Washington wore a dress of Virginia silk to George’s inauguration, and Native Americans learned silk embroidery to decorate traditional apparel.

WHAT WASN’T SAID:

1. That the Persian and Babylonian Jews pioneered the intercontinental trade and the Silk Road.

2. It is likely that “Arab traders” is an all-encompassing term to include all the people, religions and cultures that existed in the Middle East, that the Muslims captured and made their own. In fact, the Arab ethnic groups included Lebanese, Syrians, Emiratis, Qataris, Saudis, Bahrainis, Kuwaitis, Iraqis, Omanis, Jordanians, Yemenis, Sudanese, and Egyptians. These were not all Arab, in fact; neither were they of the same original religion; the exhibit is misleading.

FACTS:

1. Intercontinental trade was pioneered by Persian Jews who forged the “Silk Route” to the heart of China in the fifth century BCE. Augustus, first Roman emperor, is said to have commissioned “the first travel guide” from Isidore of Charax (a Greco-Roman geographer of the 1^st century BC and 1^st century AD). Centuries later, while the Europeans were still deep in the Dark Ages, Persian Radhanite scholar/travelers (medieval Jewish merchants who traded between the Christian and Islamic worlds, 500-1000 AD) pioneered land and sea trade routes to the Far East. “These merchants speak Arabic, Persian, Roman, Frankish, Spanish, and Slavonic,” wrote Ibn Khurdadhih in the ninth century CE, “They travel from East to West and from West to East by land as well as by sea.” They also spoke Hebrew and Aramaic.

2. The Silk Route was pioneered by Babylonian Jews in the fifth century BCE. The Kaifeng, China synagogue complex was erected in 1163 to serve a community of three thousand worshipers, and to accommodate Jewish trader-travelers who came across Asia with their caravans.

Cinnamon, Cassia (the bark from which cinnamon is made), jade, camphor, and many other Chinese products were greatly in demand in the West. The earliest reference in any literature to the oriental products, cinnamon and cassia, occurs in Exodus 30:23: Moses is instructed to take “principal spices, of pure myrrh five hundred shekels, and of sweet cinnamon (kinamon besem) half so much.” In 30:24 he is likewise instructed to take “of cassia (kiddah) five hundred shekels.”]

1. Herodotus (485-425 BCE) stated that Kinnamomon (Greek) came from Canaan (3.111); the word in Exodus for cassia, kiddah, appears in Greek as Kitto. Another Biblical word, kes’iah (Psalms 45.9), became the Greek ² The transcription of Aramaic words into the Greek language identifies the merchants who first brought these spices in the 5th c. BCE from the Orient to the Mediterranean.

2. Linen fabrics (Byssus) were as marketable in China as silk fabrics were in the west. One of the earliest centers of industrial weaving of fine linen fabrics was the city of Beth She’an. The Bible informs us that Beth She’an (“Scythopolis” by the Greeks), was a Canaanite town that fell to the forces of David. By the 3rd c. BCE, the Jews of Beth She’an achieved world fame as producers of fine fabrics. The Jerusalem Talmud refers to “the fine linen vestments which come from Beth She’an.”

3. Beth She’an is described as a city that supplies textiles to the world in the Latin Descriptus Orbis, 4^th The superiority of the textiles and clothes made by Jews in Beth She’an was affirmed by Roman Emperor Diocletian, in 296 CE. The edict listed Judaic glassware (by Jews of Judah) and vitri Alessandrini (by Jews of Alexandria). Hadrian also asserted that Jews were the glassmakers of Alexandria.

4. Rabbi Chiyya bar Abba, a famous sage is named in the Bible, was involved with trading goods of glassware, flax, and linen along the Silk Route into China.

5. The tradition of travel and trade expanded into a world-girdling network of Jewish trade under the Rhadanites. Ibn Khurdadhibih, an Arab chronicler of the ninth century, wrote that “these merchants speak Arabic, Persian, Roman, Frankish, Spanish and Slavonic. They travel from East to West, and from West to East by land as well as by sea.” They also spoke Hebrew and Aramaic. The routes radiated out from the Jewish centers of population in the agricultural and industrial heart of Babylonia to Europe, North Africa, India, and China.