Wednesday, March 19, 2008

"Every honest Jew who knows the history of his people cannot but feel a deep sense of gratitude to Islam"

Someone at MPAC-UK explains how well Jews were treated in Islamic countries:
[...] Prior to the creation of Israel, Jews and Muslims generally lived together in harmony, with Arab lands being a source of refuge for Jewish people against Christian oppression. Uri Avnery in his article 'Muhammad’s Sword’ writes: "As is well known, under Muslim rule the Jews of Spain enjoyed a bloom the like of which the Jews did not enjoy anywhere else until almost our time. In Muslim Toledo, Christian, Jewish and Muslim scholars worked together and translated the ancient Greek philosophical and scientific texts. That was, indeed, the Golden Age."

"When the Catholics reconquered Spain from the Muslims, they instituted a reign of religious terror. The Jews and the Muslims were presented with a cruel choice: to become Christians, to be massacred or to leave. And where did the hundreds of thousand of Jews, who refused to abandon their faith, escape? Almost all of them were received with open arms in the Muslim countries. Nowhere were they persecuted. They knew nothing like the tortures of the Inquisition, the flames of the auto-da-fe, the pogroms, the terrible mass-expulsions that took place in almost all Christian countries, up to the Holocaust. Why? Because Islam expressly prohibited any persecution of the "People of the Book". In Islamic society, a special place was reserved for Jews and Christians. Every honest Jew who knows the history of his people cannot but feel a deep sense of gratitude to Islam, which has protected the Jews for fifty generations . . .
How positively inspiring!

Thanks for the Dhimmitude
The Jizya that we paid
Your spittle on my face
The beatings I received
Because I didn't know my place
How chastened I was

Thanks for the Almohades
We ran away from Spain
That is, if we weren't slain
We thought we had a golden age
Then it went down the drain
How golden it was

Thanks for the Massacres
Fez 1465
Eleven left alive
Granada in 1066
When most did not survive
How final it was

Thanks for "Convert or die"
In Yemen it was bad
Morrocco and Baghdad
Compulsion in relgion
Was really quite a fad
Transforming it was

Crossposted on Soccer Dad

No comments: