“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”
George Santayana
I would also add that, pure reason void of human experience will lead to tyranny.
YES, “ITALY MUST REMEMBER ITS … PAST” WITH ISLAM
Exposing Muslim attempts to rewrite history.
Although the conflict between Islam and the West is not an aberration but a continuation of history, the strategy of those who seek to whitewash and thus empower Islam is to fixate on peaceful aberrations while suppressing the continuum of hostility.
Thus, in “Italy must remember its pluralist past,” Akbar Ahmed, Chair of Islamic Studies at American University, Washington, DC, highlights uncharacteristic episodes from Italy’s past with Muslims in an attempt to convince Italians to be even more accepting of Muslim migrants.
Before looking at his claims, some actual historical context concerning Italy and Islam—otherwise devoid in Akbar’s article about the “past”—is needed.
Once the jihad was unleashed from Arabia, not only was Italy bombarded and under threat for centuries, but as the seat of Rome—the capital of Western Christendom, i.e., Infidel-dom—several ambitious caliphs and sultans especially targeted it, often while making the perennial Islamic boast that they would be first to turn St. Peter’s altar into a feeding trough for their horses.
As early as the seventh century, “the nation of the Saracens that had already spread through Alexandria and Egypt,” wrote Paul the Deacon (b. 720), “came suddenly with many ships, invaded Sicily, entered Syracuse and made a great slaughter of the people—a few only escaping with difficulty who had fled to the strongest fortresses and the mountain ranges—and they carried off also great booty…and thus they returned to Alexandria.”
By 846 Muslim fleets managed to land on the coast of Ostia, near Rome. Unable to breach the walls of the Eternal City, they sacked and despoiled the surrounding countryside, including—to the shock of Western Christendom—the venerated basilicas of St. Peter and St. Paul. The invaders vandalized the two holy shrines, desecrated the tombs of Christendom’s two most revered apostles, and stripped them of their treasures.
Such sacrilege prompted Pope Leo IV to erect strong walls and fortifications along the right bank of the Tiber to protect the basilicas and other churches from further Muslim raids. Not ones to be deterred, “in 849 the Muslims attempted a new landing at Ostia; then, every year from around 857 on, they threatened the Roman seaboard,” explains French medieval historian C. E. Dufourcq.
