I discovered Bat Yeor's work shortly after 9/11. I've read several of her books. They're a little dry and academic -- even for me, trained as an academic historian -- but, they are essential reading and paint a very nuanced view of the history of Islamic relations with its conquered peoples. Not entirely or unremittingly hostile, she lays out what is, in total over three volumes, a thoroughly damning case against Islam. Beginning with the very first conquests, and continuing through the taking of North Africa and Spain in the West, the push into Central Europe through the Balkans after the fall of Constantinople, and the conquests in the East through Mesopotamia and Persia into Afghanistan and India, one learns just how completely Islam destroyed the cultures it conquered and just how much its own period of high civilization was the work, not of Arab Moslems, but of the conquered peoples.
The better I get to know Islam and its history, the less tolerant I am becoming. If the Iraqis use WMD on us, I think we should be explicit about the historical anologies and tell the Arab world that our vengance will make Richard I's behavior after the Seige of Acre look like a Sunday School picnic.
Me too. Islamic culture isn't 'stable' either, as Arabs and the Western media keep telling us. It's STAGNENT. Wherever Islam has conquered, freedom of thought is annhilated. Without freedom of thought, there can be no creativity. That's why Islamic culture has produced no no important breakthroughs in over a thousand years.