March 22, 2005

New Book To Debunk the Myth that the Crusades were a War of Conquest

Robert Spencer has a book coming out in a few months called The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam and the Crusades. It debunks all the nonsense about the Crusades being a war of conquest. He discusses it in brief in a current article on FrontPage:

Islam originated in Arabia in the seventh century. At that time Egypt, Libya, and all of North Africa were Christian, and had been so for hundreds of years. So were Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, and Asia Minor. The churches that St. Paul addressed in his letters collected in the New Testament are located in Asia Minor, modern Turkey, as well as modern Greece. North of Greece, in a buffer zone between Eastern and Western Europe, were lands that would become the Christian domains of the Slavs. Antioch and Constantinople (Istanbul), in modern Turkey, and Alexandria, in modern Egypt, were three of the most important Christian centers of the first millennium.

But then Muhammad and his Muslim armies arose out of the desert, and — as most modern textbooks would put it — these lands became Muslim. But in fact the transition was cataclysmic. Muslims won these lands by conquest and, in obedience to the words of the Qur’an and the Prophet, put to the sword the infidels therein who refused to submit to the new Islamic regime. Those who remained alive lived in humiliating second-class status. Conversion to Islam became the only way to live a decent life. And lo and behold, the Christian populations of these areas steadily diminished.

The conquest was barbaric:

Here is a contemporary account of the Muslims’ arrival in Nikiou, an Egyptian town, in the 640’s:

Then the Muslims arrived in Nikiou. There was not one single soldier to resist them. They seized the town and slaughtered everyone they met in the street and in the churches — men, women and children, sparing nobody. Then they went to other places, pillaged and killed all the inhabitants they found. . . .But let us now say no more, for it is impossible to describe the horrors the Muslims committed when they occupied the island of Nikiou. . . .

The Crusades were a move to halt the Islamic conquest of Europe:

The circumstances of the first Crusade were these: Christian pilgrims to the Holy Land were being molested by Muslims and prevented from reaching the holy places. Some were killed. This was finally the impetus that moved Western Christianity to try to take back just one small portion of the Christian lands that had fallen to the Muslim sword over the last centuries. “The Crusade,” noted historian Bernard Lewis, “was a delayed response to the jihad, the holy war for Islam, and its purpose was to recover by war what had been lost by war — to free the holy places of Christendom and open them once again, without impediment, to Christian pilgrimage.”

Whatever undeniable sins Christians committed during their course, the Crusades were essentially a defensive action: a belated and insufficient attempt by Western Christians to turn back the tide of Islam that had engulfed the Eastern Church. “When accusing the West of imperialism,” says the historian of jihad Paul Fregosi, “Muslims are obsessed with the Christian Crusades but have forgotten their own, much grander Jihad.” The lands in dispute during each Crusade were the ancient lands of Christendom, where Christians had flourished for centuries before Muhammad’s armies called them idolaters and enslaved and killed them. If Westerners had no right to invade these putative Muslim lands, then Muslims had no right to take them in the first place.

And let me tell you something—it’s not over. We’re playing out what may be the endgame right now. And they could still win. The goal of radical Islam is what it has been for centuries—conversion of all peoples to a repressive form of Islam.

They can’t really win by force of arms. If they nuke a U.S. city, we’ll nuke Mecca, and then it’s game over. But we cannot afford to let them do that to a U.S. city. We must prevent that.

The only way they can win is by doing what is working so well for them in Europe—immigrating in, in vast numbers, and then refusing to assimilate. This has the effect of Islamizing the entire surrounding culture. Here’s an example from the Netherlands. It’s happening in the U.S. right now in schools, mosques, and companies.

To save our freedom and our way of life in this country, we must be aware of the Muslim tradition of non-assimilation, and determine acceptable ways to address it.

I thought a gigabyte was a lot. I was getting ready to think about having storage space in terabytes, which are about 1,000 gigabytes. But for the coming generation of 64-bit computers, we’re already starting to talk about exabytes, which are over a billion gigabytes:

The great advantage of 64-bit systems is seen in memory-hungry applications such as CAD: while a 32-bit processor can address a working memory of no more than four gigabytes, the 64-bit systems have 16 exabytes at their disposal (1 EB = 1,152,921,504,606,846,976 bytes).

It was only 1997 when the notion of a device that could store a terabyte of data was science fiction, described in Arthur C. Clarke’s sci-fi novel, 3001: The Final Odyssey:

Nothing could have looked more harmless and innocent than the perfectly standard terabyte memory tablet, used with millions of braincaps every day.

Exabytes? I wasn’t even familiar with the word until this morning.

Hillary Wants People to Vote Without Showing Proof of U.S. Citizenship

Hillary, Kerry, Boxer and Dean—what a litany of lunatics. They just introduced a bill with provisions that are as crazy as they are potentially harmful:

Senator Clinton… introduced — along with fellow Democratic senators John Kerry and Barbara Boxer — legislation called the “Count Every Vote Act of 2005.” ...Although its stated purpose is to “count every vote,” its actual effect would be to make it impossible for polling-place officials to determine which votes should be counted and which should not.

... there is the provision requiring states to “accept and process a voter registration application for an election for federal office unless there is a material omission or information that specifically affects the eligibility of a voter.” The bill specifies that an applicant’s failure to provide a Social Security number, a driver’s-license number, or any proof of citizenship may not be considered a “material omission,” that is, may not be used to judge whether the applicant is eligible to vote. In fact, it is not clear what — other than, say, not knowing one’s own name — would constitute a “material omission” under the Clinton standard. In any event, a person who is not registered, who is not a citizen, and who has no identification would be able to show up at a polling place and register and vote.

And more:

Another feature liable to abuse is the provision requiring states to allow anyone to cast a provisional ballot anywhere in the state, regardless of where that person may — or may not — be registered to vote. That could allow someone who is not registered to cast provisional ballots at as many poll locations around the state as he could physically visit in a day…

Byron York discusses it:

Let’s say it’s Election Day 2008. You really, really, really want to vote for the Democratic nominee for president, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.), but you’re not registered to vote. You also don’t have a driver’s license or any sort of official photo identification that would tell the people down at the polling place who you are.

You don’t even have anything to show that you’re an American citizen.

But it’s Election Day, and you still want to vote for Clinton. What do you do?

Well, you go right down to that polling place, tell them you want to register, on the spot, and vote. And if anybody questions you, tell them you don’t need a prior registration, or a photo ID, proof of citizenship or anything else.
Clinton said so.

She really did — just a few weeks ago, in the form of her new bill, the Count Every Vote Act of 2005.

This is an extreme example of the leading Dems explicitly seeking to harm the nation in a quest for votes.