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I’m still waiting for David to state which of the references to historical events I made in the comment which he cites that he thinks is open to dispute. So no more silly caricatures of my position, David, let’s have some specifics.

My point in referring to these matters is to show that conquest and colonialism is not an exclusively Western pathology, and that it was practiced on a grand scale by successive Muslim empires.

I will number each of the relevant historical episodes, for David’s convenience:

1. The Islamic conquest of the Middle East and North Africa in the decades following Muhammad’s death in 632 CE, followed by…

2. The military conquest of the Sasanian empire in Persia.

3. The advance into Spain via the Gibraltar Straight in 711 CE and subjugation of Spain over the following two decades, followed by the attempted advance into Europe only halted by Charles Martel at the Battle of Tours in 732 CE.

4. The repeated Ottoman advances into the Balkans and beyond, culminating in sieges of Vienna in 1529 and 1683.

5. The extremely bloody Islamic conquests in the Indian sub-continent, leading to the establishment of the Mughal Empire that dominated much of South Asia between the 16th and 19th centuries.

Not a bad effort, for a ‘religion of peace’.

I cited the distinguished historian Efraim Karsh, Emeritus Professor of Middle East and Mediterranean Studies at King’s College London who argues in his 2013 book Islamic Imperialism: A History (Yale University Press, 2013) that the imperative to imperialist conquest is an inherent feature of Islam that has been frustrated by the power shift that followed the scientific and industrial revolutions in the West. You might want to argue about that, but points 1 to 5 are indisputable.

Finally the broader issue of the challenge Islam poses to Western liberal civilization today is based on a combination of factors: Islamic history, its scriptural tenets and how they shape the behaviour of significant number of adherents, such as the tens of thousands who left Europe, North America and Europe to fight for ISIS, and what we see unfolding in a number of countries with large Islamic populations, especially Western Europe. I set these out in more detail in the long comment I posted above.