A Concise Overview Of Muslim Occupation

In Epistle to the Muslims: Christian leaders abase themselves before Islam, Bruce S. Thornton reacts to a full-page ad last year in The New York Times. Paid from by various Christian leaders, in the ad claims

"that in the past (e.g. in the Crusades) and in the present (e.g. in excesses of the 'war on terror') many Christians have been guilty of sinning against our Muslim neighbors," and so "we ask forgiveness of the All-Merciful One and of the Muslim community around the world."

Thornton's reacts to the ignorance evident in such an apology:

The groveling self-abasement of this language, particularly its begging forgiveness of Allah, is matched only by its remarkable historical ignorance. "Outright hostility" has indeed existed between Muslims and Christians, for the simple reason that for 13 centuries Islam grew and spread by war, plunder, rapine, and enslavement throughout the Christian Middle East. Allah's armies destroyed regions that were culturally Christian for centuries, variously slaughtering, enslaving, and converting their inhabitants, or allowing them to live as oppressed dhimmi, their lives and property dependent on a temporary "truce" that Muslim overlords could abrogate at any time.

And let's not forget the seven-century-long Islamic occupation of Spain, the centuries of raids into southern Italy and southern France, the near-sack of Rome in 846, the occupation of Sicily and Greece, the four-century-long occupation of the Balkans, the destruction of Constantinople, the two sieges of Vienna, the kidnapping of Christian youths to serve as janissaries from the fourteenth to the nineteenth centuries, the continual raiding of the northern Mediterranean littoral for slaves from 1500 to 1800, and the current jihadist terrorist attacks against the West.

These historical crimes dwarf those committed during the few centuries of the Crusades, which, for all of their excesses and mixed motives, were fought to liberate from Muslim hegemony the lands that had been Christian for six and a half centuries before Islam burst forth from the Arabian Peninsula. Many contemporary Christians betray their moral and spiritual incoherence when they demonize the Crusades but excuse, as justified "liberation," the numerous Arab assaults on Israel's "occupation" of lands to which the Jews have a 3,000-year-old connection.

For those who insist that courses in Islam be introduced to sensitize us to Muslims, an overview of Muslim history would be a good place to start.

Technorati Tag: Islam.