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MSNBC is running a special section on how wonderful it is that Europe is being overrun by Islam; here’s a video report about Spain that is so whitewashed and sanitized you’d think the Spaniards never had a problem with the Moors: Reviving Granada’s Muslim traditions. " GRANADA, Spain - In southern Spain, once the center of Islamic learning during the reign of the Moors, some Spaniards are reviving the tradition by converting to Islam. "

Christian soldiers take a beating over battle with Moors From Thomas Catan in Calpe CHRISTIAN and Muslim armies clash in Spain today in a titanic battle for control of the Costa Blanca, just miles from the tourist towers of Benidorm. After a spectacular Moorish landing on the beaches the Christians will emerge victorious, as they did in Calpe in 1240. But there will be no crowing, and the end of the “battle” will be accompanied by speeches about civilisations living together in harmony. Welcome to Spain in the era of cultural nervousness. Throughout the country towns and villages are toning...

MADRID, Spain "Spain has devised a school textbook it calls unique in Europe — a primer for Muslim first-graders to learn about Islam but do so in the local language and thus not feel like outsiders, officials said Wednesday."... "Europe has 40 million Muslims and governments don't know what to do to assimilate them," Lopez said in an interview. "This book is a hint."

As the night falls, the "troubles" start; and the pattern is always the same. Bands of youths in balaclavas start by setting fire to parked cars, break shop windows with baseball bats, wreck public telephones, and, ransack cinemas, libraries and schools. Once the police have arrived on the scene, the rioters attack them with stones, knives and baseball bats. The police respond by firing tear-gas grenades and, on occasions, blank shots in the air. Sometimes the youths fire back, with real bullets.The scenes described above are not from the West Bank but from 16 French cities, most of them close...

One year after the Madrid bombings, calls for made-in-Spain imams grow stronger in a region that still reflects on its past Muslim glories At the Jamal Islamiya mosque in this seaside town, a Muslim lament of historic proportions is proclaimed in large letters on a framed poster: "In 1492, we lost everything." For the mosque's leader, and much of the Muslim world, the year marks the traumatic conclusion of Islam's golden age, a time remembered like a collective wound. It's a period when the last piece of Muslim-held territory in Spain fell to Catholic monarchs, ending almost 800 years of...

It is important to notice what he has stopped saying in this speech. He has stopped talking about the restoration of the Global Caliphate. There is no more mention of the return of Andalusia. There is no more anticipation that Islam will sweep the world. He is no longer boasting that Americans run at the slightest wounds; that they are more cowardly than the Russians. He is not talking about future operations to swathe the world in fire but dwelling on past glories. He is basically saying if you leave us alone we will leave you alone. Though it is...

Even ordinary extortionists, when they get paid off, always want more. I am not a Spaniard.Somewhere, on March 12, I saw the headline, "We are All Spaniards Now." It was an allusion to the Le Monde headline from 9/12, "We are All Americans Now." As we now know, that initial French (and German) sympathy for America was short-lived. In no time flat, the Old Europe of France and Germany sought to appease Islamist terror, and to hurt America, through claiming to be our allies, while betraying us at every step of the way. Not so, the Spaniards. The 1,300 troops...

<p>In the legend of Moorish Spain, the last Muslim king of Granada, Boabdil, surrendered the keys to his city on January 2, 1492, and on one of its hills, paused for a final glance at his lost dominion. The place would henceforth be known as El Ultimo Suspiro del Moro -- "the Moor's Last Sigh." Boabdil's mother is said to have taunted him, and to have told him to "weep like a woman for the land he could not defend as a man." An Arab poet of our own era gave voice to a historical lament when he wrote that as he walked the streets of Granada, he searched his pockets for the keys to its houses. Al Andalus -- Andalusia -- would become a deep wound, a reminder of dominions gained by Islam and then squandered. No wonder Muslim chroniclers added "May Allah return it to Islam," as they told and retold Granada's fate.</p>

Iberia looms large in Islamist ambitions and regrets, writes Isambard Wilkinson in Madrid. Thursday's bombings have raised an uncomfortable question for Spaniards. Is Osama bin Laden dreaming of exacting revenge for the loss of Al-Andalus, the ancient Moorish kingdom in Iberia? A group said to be close to bin Laden's al-Qaeda, the Brigade of Abu Hafs al-Masri, sent a message to a London-based Arabic newspaper saying: "This is part of settling old accounts with Spain, the crusader and America's ally in its war against Islam." While the authenticity of the message is open to doubt, there is no question that...

New forensic evidence on the bombings has raised an uncomfortable question for Spaniards. Is Osama bin Laden dreaming of exacting revenge for the loss of Al-Andalus, the ancient Moorish kingdom in Iberia? A group close to bin Laden's al-Qa'eda network, the Brigade of Abu Hafs al-Masri, sent a message to a London-based Arabic newspaper explaining the reasons for attacking Spain. "This is part of settling old accounts with Spain, the crusader and America's ally in its war against Islam," the statement said. While the authentiticy of the message is open to doubt, there is no question that it reflects the...

Granada, Spain – A dispenser of iced lemonade sits invitingly by the door of the newly whitewashed building — hospitality for summer visitors coming to the first mosque built in Granada in over 500 years. But looming over the freshly planted garden, seeming to quiver in the furnacelike heat, is another image: the Alhambra, a 14th-century Muslim fortress of red-tinted stone that is everything this mosque is not: ancient, battle-scarred, monumental. It seems at once a reminder of lost glories and a spur for their restoration. It may also inspire darker sentiments. For it was from the Alhambra's watchtower that...

Archaeologists in the Spanish city of Cordoba have uncovered beneath the university's old veterinary faculty Europe's biggest Roman amphitheatre after the Coliseum.The find, considered to be "of transcendental importance", dates from the first century AD, when Corduba, as it was then known, was the provincial capital of Betica, today's Andalusia, in imperial Hispania. "We initially thought it was a circus, the circular arena the Romans used for horse races and chariot rides," says Desiderio Vaquerizo, professor of architecture at Cordoba University. "But we discovered it was an immense oval amphitheatre - 178m by 145m and up to 20m high -...

RABAT, 15 July — Prince Abdul Aziz ibn Fahd, state minister and chief of the court for the Presidency of Cabinet affairs, yesterday inaugurated here the Center for Andalusian Studies and Dialogue between Civilizations. At the opening ceremony, he announced the center’s plan to institute an international annual prize for best research on Andalus. He also stressed the importance of bringing out an encyclopedia on Andalus. Prince Abdul Aziz commended the center’s efforts to organize seminars and studies on Andalusian culture and translate books and documents related to Islamic culture in the Spanish city. "The main objectives of the center...