For Mohammad and Charlemagne, see
http://www.alibris.com/search/search.cfm?chunk=25&skip=0&wauth=henri%20pirenne Barnes and Noble, Amazon, etc. don't carry it.
"free men make better killers than slaves do. This is something that we don't see in the Islamic world and until they do grasp it they will not be able to match the west."
I agree with you there. Also a free society which is based on capitalism is open to innovation and new ideas which help generate the technology and market for new inventions, including sophisticated weaponry. An Islamic state is a socially retrograde entity, fossilized in the past and antagonistic to new ideas.
"Victor Davis Hanson touches on this in his book Carnage and Culture."
Thanks for that reference, I shall check it out.
"The problem with democracies (and Turkey can not be caled a strong democracy) is they sometimes do what we don't want them to."
Giving people the freedom of choice also gives them the opportunity to make incorrect decisions. There should be a price to pay for incorrect decisions and I hope the U.S. and its coalition partners impose that price on Turkey, France and Germany. It would be in our best interests for Turkey to come around to our side, so such consequnces in their case should be conditional on future behavior. As far as the French and Germans are concerned, particulary the French who were the ring-leaders and habe been implacable opponents of the U.S. and Britain, we should isolate them and destroy them economically. I would like to see France relegated to the social status of a second Afghanistan. The contemporary French are ungrateful, perfidious, arrogant, deceitful, vile creatures totally without redeeming merit.
"The idea of killing competators for the throne is really nothing new in the ancient/medival world particularly in the near east but Richard the III also comes to mind."
True. Richard III however was killed in battle and really died a hero defending his right. (His successor, the usurper Henry of Richmond, descendant from a Welsh gigolo, created a dynasty which did not outlast his grandchildren, and except for Elizabeth I, were really horrifying monsters, even by the standards of their own day, e.g. Henry VIII and Bloody Mary I.) This is a far better fate than being strangled in one's bedchamber. Throughout the long Plantagent period, I believe only two monarchs were really murdered vilely in an oriental fashion - Edward II and Richard II. The massacre of family members was not episodic, but continual in Islamic Ottoman Turkey.
Thanks for the link. I'm down to only 4 books I'm reading...and we can't have that!
Carnage and Culture I can't recomend it highly enough. He does use a broad brush but, he asks the question 'why'. It really was the first time I've ever looked at history that way, so much I've read has dealt with the who, what, where, when but not the why.
(as an aside he also writes a column for NRO)
I've always understood that Richard the III murderd his way to the throne?
Could I be wrong? Is this possible? I'm shocked!