[Old Professer]

The Dutch have had an association with the Islams since the 17th century through treaty; now with 1-in-16 of the population being Islam there are mutterings of sharia law; the people of the Netherlands are right to be fearful of this growing force.

[muawiyah]

Actually, it was since the EARLY part of the 17th century, and it was formed through conquest, not a "treaty" (although the Dutch might have euphemistically called it a treaty).

In reality, at the Battle of Batavia in Java the Dutch beat King Rama I of Thailand for the control of the Indonesian archipelago.

Most of the Dutch were actually Germans or French ~ and they were among the luckiest of men since their win in Indonesia kept them from having to face the devastation and terror of the Thirty Years War "back home".

Some time back I repieced together a short story about an ancestor who participated in that event ~ the tale was found at the main library in Stuttgart in the mid-1800s.

Those "collections" had been destroyed or damaged in WWII. I updated some of the "place names" and estimated "dates" reported in the short story based on more modern archaeological studies and sent it to an friend at the Potsdam Institute who translated it all back into modern German and refiled it in the library.