Peter Baldwin commented on 2020-06-01 00:42
Unless those ancient battles concern, say, the Christian crusades, which are invoked repeatedly as evidence of Christian villainy (and yes, there was a lot of villainy in the behaviour of some of the (article 657252-12360)
Link back to commentUnless those ancient battles concern, say, the Christian crusades, which are invoked repeatedly as evidence of Christian villainy (and yes, there was a lot of villainy in the behaviour of some of the crusaders). And by the way some of these battles are not that ancient - Vienna was besieged by the Ottomans as recently as 1683.
As to the significance of this, let me quote what I said in an earlier comment (above)
'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 The historical reference was the final para in a long post by way of rebuttal of the view that Islam is always the victim, never the perpetrator, as well as the kind of nonsense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?)'