by Peter Beolingus

Created on: July 02, 2007   Last Updated: November 15, 2007

Fear of Islam may have something to do with the fact that this religion began as a militant creed of conquest from Muhammed, its founder, in the 7th century A.D. Islam then, as now, taught a doctrine of conversion, tribute, or death. Unlike Christianity, which took several centuries before it began to engage in bloody wars, Islam was born of blood and slaughter. If you want to praise the golden age of Islam from the 5th to 10th centuries A.D., please remember all the cultural and intellectual achievements in the Islamic world were part of the booty of having conquered older Christian and Jewish civilizations in places East. For much of its history, Islam has indeed brought peace-the peace of conquest and the graveyard.

It is easy for simpletons like Madeline Albright (Madeline Not-Bright would be a more accurate name) to blame the present hostility of Islam toward the West on The Crusades. However, let us look at history without the simpering of Western liberals always trying to apologize. Pope Urban II preached the First Crusade at Clermont in France in 1095 as a response to the atrocities wrought by the Seljuk Turks against the Christians in the East. It was also the Muslim attempt to conquer Western Europe in the 8th and 9th century that caused concern. Islam has always been an expansionist religion, so to try and blame fear of Islam on Western bigotry is at best stupidity and at worst dishonest. In other words, while The Crusades were horrible wars done in the name of religion, they were initially a counter-strike in defense against aggressive and militant Islam. Sorry, Madeline, but in that case, as in most other cases, Islam threw the first punch.

Let us not forget the Turkish Muslim persecution and massacres of Armenians and other Christians in 1915, the first attempted genocide in the 20th century. There was no Israel then, the United States had not yet emerged as a world power, these were defenseless minorities whose only crime was being Christian minorities among an Islamic majority. The long history of the Ottoman Empire was one of oppressing religious minorities who never posed a threat to them. Yes, that sort of unprovoked hostility from Muslims is indeed unsettling.

If we want to bring up the irrelevant issue of slavery in America, let us remember that when slavery had died out in Western civilization during the Middle Ages, it was reintroduced into the Modern Western world (17th-19th centuries) by Muslim Arabs. Yes, it was Muslims who first brought

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