Islam must be defeated by exposure and argument, and so – eventually, with luck – by the sort of generalized revulsion that irredeemably condemns Nazism, Stalinism, and Maoism. (Individuals who believe in it, or have simply had the misfortune to be born into it, should not of course be harmed – unless they have committed a crime in Islam’s name, and then by the law, not by their neighbors.)

In connection with the Ground Zero Mosque controversy, and generally whether the enemy is Islam or only a “tiny radical element within Islam”, there are two arguments that liberals and Christians of the left constantly bring up  to show what nice tolerant people they are. One is the myth of a wonderfully tolerant, diversely populated, creative,  advanced civilization the Moors established in Spain; the other is the claim by Christians that “Christians have killed far more people in America than Muslims have”.

As to the first: our reader and commenter, Bornagainpagan, has drawn our attention to an article by Professor Bruce Thornton in which he accurately writes:

Andalusian Spain has particularly been evoked as an example of an interfaith tolerance unknown to Christians, as President Obama claimed in his June 2009 speech delivered in Cairo, when he extolled Islam’s “proud tradition of tolerance”.

As many historians have shown, the historical facts of Islamic rule in Spain and elsewhere belie these claims. The “proud tradition” would have surprised the several thousand Jews massacred in Grenada in 1066, or the 300 Christians crucified, per Koranic injunction, in 818 during a three-day rampage of killing and pillaging in Cordoba, or the 700 Christians slaughtered in Toledo in 806. These are just a few examples of numerous Muslim massacres of Christians and Jews in Spain, whose lives were circumscribed by prohibitions on everything from the sorts of animals they rode to the height of their houses.

As to the second, the massacres carried out by Christians, they cite the killing of Indians during the early wars of conquest. True many Indians were killed. True, the people who killed them were mostly Christians and some saw themselves as having a mission to spread Christianity. (Of course the Indians did their share of killing too, but they were “only defending themselves and their land”, comes the retort.)

What puzzles us is this: how can the fact that Christians killed Indians in wars fought hundreds of years ago mean that Americans today, of many faiths and none, have thereby lost the moral right to protest the insult of a triumphalist monument at a place of a mass slaughter committed in the name of Islam?

Verily, these liberals and lefty Christians are as muddle-headed as they’re self-righteous!

Europeans may indulge themselves in mea-culpa multiculturalism in penance  for a colonialist past, and though it’s hard to see what benefit the policy brings to anyone, one can understand their argument. But for Americans, imitatively, to put their necks on a block and ask for their heads to be cut off because their ancestors fought wars of conquest is irrational to the point of being ridiculous – and seriously dangerous for the health of the nation.

Afterthought: Strange that conservatives should find themselves having to defend America in argument with fellow Americans; stranger still atheists defending Christians in argument with Christians!