I know this is a delicate matter for Islamics, but didn't they ask France to help? France had to send some special forces into Mecca to drive the rebels out, according to one Freeper I've read. Not sure if it was this incident or another.
From my own studies, I'm surprised that Isabella and Ferdinand of Spain weren't mentioned. It was a very dramatic war that shocked the world. Isabella inspired churches to donate their gold artifacts, along with every merchant and every citizen of Spain to give to the Holy Cause of driving out the Moors. She and Ferdinand built a powerful, modern army with many cannons, and simply marched from one place to the next, completely disregarding the element of surprise. They also formed the first standing navy since Rome, if I'm not mistaken. The Islamics were trying to quickly build a fleet to send aid to the Moors, but Ferdinand had his fleet destroy their shipyard. With sheer firepower, the Spaniards defeated the Moors, ending a long, bitter struggle to halt Islamic expansion that began in the Dark Ages.
"In principle, the world was divided into two houses: the House of Islam, in which a Muslim government ruled and Muslim law prevailed, and the House of War, the rest of the world, still inhabited and, more important, ruled by infidels. Between the two, there was to be a perpetual state of war until the entire world either embraced Islam or submitted to the rule of the Muslim state. ...Thus began a process in which Islam was humiliated; a failure in political, economic and military terms. All attempts to regain strength by modernization failed. Still the desire for conquest remained. Then came the wealth from oil and the dangerous fantasy that it had "defeated" the Russian superpower. Europe opened its doors to unlimited Islamic immigration. Another opportunity for a renewal of hostilities presented itself and the truce was over. But one obstacle remained. America.
The canonically obligatory state of war could be interrupted by what were legally defined as 'truces,' but these differed little from the so-called peace treaties the warring European powers signed with one another."
"for most of the Middle Ages Christendom was on the defensive. In the fifteenth century, the Christian counterattack expanded. The Tatars were expelled from Russia, and the Moors from Spain."
"For Khomeini, the United States was 'the Great Satan,' the principal adversary against whom he had to wage his holy war for Islam."The djinn has emerged from his cave and is rampant on the field. The malignant whispers are now a towering howl of triumph and its deliquescent body shimmers with the montage of souls it has absorbed. And none but America stands in its way.
Bin Laden and his followers clearly have no such concern, and their hatred is neither constrained by fear nor diluted by respect. As precedents, they repeatedly cite the American retreats from Vietnam, from Lebanon, and—the most important of all, in their eyes—from Somalia
The legacy of the Democrats is a spectre of death for us all.
A free-market economy without private ownership of the land won't work.
Individual liberties that can be suspended by the first strongman to come along, won't work.
Scientific research and development without a free-market economy won't work.
A constitution without appropriate checks and balances, won't work.
Capitalism run by a strong central power at the expense of individual liberties won't work.
One man who calls all the shots without other men/women having the power of checks and balances won't work.
Giving over people you don't like, even jews, to the mob like happened in Ramallah, won't work.
Creating a military structure to defend the country that can just as easily be turned against the people, won't work. Free market captialism requires the people who are building it to feel secure.
One can go on and on. It's only the combination of ALL of these things and more that make the Western world work. As long as the Islamics pick and choose what they want and what they don't want, it'll never work for them.
They want scientific advancement but they don't want free elections. They want people to own the land, but they don't want to provide them security. They want people to feel secure but they want to throw their political opponents in jail at the drop of a hat.
(I'm sure I'll draw some fire for it but ...) To a certain extent there HAS to be a seperation of church and state. Free speech and blasphemy laws (using the prophet's name in vain is a jailable offense in Pakistan) are totally incompatible.
Just some thoughts.
"In modern parlance, Jews and Christians in the classical Islamic state were what we would call second-class citizens, but second-class citizenship, established by law and the Koran and recognized by public opinion, was far better than the total lack of citizenship that was the fate of non-Christians and even of some deviant Christians in the West. "
This stuff purporting to show the supposed "superiority" of Islam in the medieval period is very nice and sweet and quite PC, but is it really true? There are NO christians or jews in Arabia because of genocide by the muslims. As for the "tolerance" shown by the muslims toward jews and christians:
Non-muslims were required to pay a weekly "protection tax" every Thursday evening. A "head" tax---if you didn't pay, you lost your head! You could not wear shoes, ride a horse (you might look down on the "superior" muslims), or have any building taller than the mosque. If a muslim decided to become a christian, he was immediately butchered. Such a generous definition of "enlightened!"
Now, it is true that the "christian" nations of the period were bloody affairs as well, but this article suggests some strange and false division between "2nd-class citizenship" in muslim lands versus "non-citizenship" in christian lands. The medieval muslim state had no concept of "citizenship," not 1st-class, 2nd, 3rd or 4th. (It wasn't much further developed in the west!). There were many significant rulers in the west (Charlemagne, for example) who protected non-christians, and to bifurcate the medieval period between the enlightened muslims and the benighted christians is flat-out ignorant.
In my opinion, no.
You cannot have democracy without a commitment to the concept of "freedom of conscience." At the most basic level, religion is about (among other things) describing the meaning of the world, the meaning of human existence.
If one is threatened by death or imprisonment (as in the "nice" muslim countries) for rejecting the OFFICIAL VALUES about the most basic questions, free discussion no longer is an option, and free expression is essentially dead. When the Arab states announce that they will reluctantly accept that a person may change his faith, then the first step toward democracy will have been taken. Until then, it's slavery for all.
This is an excellent summary of the history of the practical and theoretical Islam, and should be permanently available to all those seeking light, and not heat.
Huge BUMP!
President Bush and Western politicians cannot put Arabs or Muslims on the side of civilization. Only they themselves can do that, if they choose to do so.