Peter Baldwin commented on 2020-05-31 04:11
You seem to be switching ground here – your original critical comment challenged the veracity of the factual claims I made about Islamic conquests, and I challenged you to point to any errors in the c (article 657252-12351)
Link back to commentYou seem to be switching ground here – your original critical comment challenged the veracity of the factual claims I made about Islamic conquests, and I challenged you to point to any errors in the claims I made.
I never claimed that ancient history, by itself, is sufficient to sustain the broader case about civilizational challenge. The historical reference was the final para in a long post by way of rebuttal of the view that Islam is always the victim, never the perpetrator, as well as the kind of nonsense peddled by people like the popular Islamic apologist Karen Armstrong who asserted in a video I saw that the ‘age of religious wars started with the Crusades’ (I turned it off after than).
To repeat what I said in my previous comment (above) and laid out in detail in my longer comment (also above) 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 the disturbing changes, such as the balkanization of cities and the emergence of parallel legal systems and the growing restrictions on the ability to freely debate Islam that we see unfolding in a number of countries with large Islamic populations, especially in Western Europe.
I would note however than in his history of Islamic imperialism Efraim Karsh does assert that there is an imperialist imperative inherent to Islam that has been frustrated for several centuries by the technological dominance of the West and that ‘Islam has retained its imperialist ambition to this day’. But maybe you consider him just a Fox News regular (PS which Fox News regulars have I cited in this discussion?)