Think Again: Dangerous godlessness

Jerusalem Post ^ | Sep 6, 2007 | Jonathan Rosenblum

[Greg F]

I’m a Protestant, but in light of the conflict with Muslim’s today, I think Belloc is looking like a prophet. The Catholic and patriotic Spanish historians didn’t have a chance when the Protestant and Jewish historians lined up the horrors of the Inquisition to beat the Catholic Church with, centuries after the Muslim threat had abated and people had forgot what the times were like for the Spanish immediately after the Reconquista was complete in 1492. Spain blazed as the world’s greatest power for a century and then drifted away and the power was in the hands of the Protestants. It makes for inaccurate or incomplete history when the historians have a grudge, as the Protestant and Jewish historians had against the Catholic Church and nations..

[Ancesthntr]

ALL of the Jews worked with the Muslims - even children?

As for "7 centuries of special privileges under the Muslim masters" - give me a break. Christians were, for the Moslems, THE enemy. The way they looked at things then (and even most of them today-the total fanatics notwithstanding) was that at least the Jews worshipped the same Deity - whereas, in their view, the Christians are idolators. Oh, and the Jews were a small minority with no military forces and no hope/desire to fight the Moslems for that reason. So OF COURSE the Jews had "special" privileges - "special" being no forced conversions, as long as they acted like proper Dhimmis, paid their Dhimmi tax, etc. Maybe you refer to the "Court Jews," those exceedingly few Jews who were advisors, physicians or merchants who acted on behalf of the Moslem leadership. Well, OF COURSE they had special privileges - they served a purpose, and would have lost those privileges the moment they stopped doing so. Such is the case in virtually every society, no matter who the minority and majority parties are.

7 centuries - you kind of get the feeling if things have been a certain way for quite a while that they're going to be that way FOREVER. After a while, the Moslems ceased being "the conquerors" and just became "the ruling class" (which for Jews is always someone else). How can you blame Jews living in Spain then for cooperating with the ruling class, when failure to do so would have entailed grievous penalties? Oh, and lest we forget, many Christians were less than kind to the Jews well before the Moslems conquered Spain - so why on Earth would the Jews of that time and place have resisted cooperation with a government that at least allowed them to keep their religion and let them live and work in whatever jobs they wanted to in order to feed their families.

Should American Jews cease to work with the largely white power structure, or refuse to aid the US in wars? After all, the white man is a conqueror of the continent from the Indians.

Please, stop excusing the Inquisition. You didn't do it, nor did the modern Church, and no one is blaming you or it for the heinous crimes committed over hundreds of years - just as modern day Turks didn't carry out the genocide of the Armenians during WW1 - so why are you (or the Turks) so sensitive about it?

[Greg F]

The Inquisition wasn’t directed at all the Jews, only the Jews that were suspected of lying in their profession of a change of faith to Catholicism. The Reconquista began almost immediately after the Muslim conquests, it was a centuries long war, with Jews and Muslims on one side and Christians on the other for the most part.

I don’t defend the Inquisition per se, but rather a historical view of it, because we are once again at war with Muslims and it is important that we know our true history instead of the carictures that have been offered in the past. The histories of the Crusades and the Inquisition have both been falsified by historians with agendas against the Catholic Church. I am not a Catholic. But we face a new enemy now, Islam, and we need to know the true history of our conflict with Islam, which has now been going on for over a thousand years.