[quidnunc]

gpl4eva wrote: : but this is where i think your mistake lies. you're treating this history as a singularity, an indivisible unit of 'islam'. thats a mistake -- if anything, made much by the islamofascists. moorish iberia didn't have much of a central government. and moorish iberia has very little to do with any muslim country today. just like we don't associate christianity with the inquisition -- not calling it a 'religion of peace' or anything really.

There is no way that you can make Islam into something warm. fuzzy and non-threatening by establishing that at ceretain times and in certain places it was somewhat less barbaric than other contemporary religions.

What matters is what Islam is today vis a vis Western Civilization, and it is inescapable that it is a dark, sinister, primative thing, antithetical to our concepts of freedom and human dignity.

Any attempt to prove otherwise is akin to putting lipstick on a pig.