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[–] novictim ago  (edited ago)

" saw the beginning of the Renaissance, a development made possible largely by the cultural flourishing of Islam, which through translating Aristotle into Arabic and other intellectual accomplishments kept alive the knowledge and wisdom of the past. "

How Ironic that, in a article opposing false hope, Islam gets put on a rickety old pedestal. What delusion.

How Ironic is it that Islam, the same force that weakens and nearly destroys the Eastern Roman Empire/Byzantium starting in 700CE gets this genuflection by "progressive" academics. Its all really nonsense. Islam did not create anything other than ruin and enslavement. That some libraries of Greek and Roman origin survived is called a Islamic triumph of some sort?? What the hell is really going on here?

Byzantium was the functioning repository for most of the Roman and Greek and scientific knowledge as it was the bastion that had held out against the waves of Germanic tribes as well as the Golden Horde. It only falls when the Ottoman Caliphate finally succeeds in capturing Constantinople during the Renaissance period (29 May 1453 = Fall of Constantinople to Ottoman Sultan Mehmed II after 2 months of siege ).

Take a look at a map of the Mediterranean . Every coast line was once controlled by the Byzantines to some degree. In 700CE the peoples all along these bordering lands were mostly Christians...and then the sword of Islam arrives while the Byzantines are busy fighting invaders to the East.

That is the reality. Forced conversion, slavery and death by Islam. One million "European" peoples are exported as slaves from Spain and Italy and France to the markets of Islam. Oh, but Islam "saved the knowledge"? Islam did nothing. Muslims sacked cities and a few saw the value of the bits of the classical world that they had yet not trashed.

So please, you moron Chris Hedges. Stop being obsequious to Islam as though it offers some of that Enlightenment thinking. Islam offers submission and oppression and nothing else. We need to cut the HOPE of Islam being something it is not.

And, BTW. Hedges gets it wrong quite often In a recent speech that referenced Lenin he declared how the WWI Wiemar Generals did not play a hand in spreading his ideology to the Russians. That was incorrect and speaks to a need to rewrite history so that Communism/Leninism is seen as being more "organic" than it actually was. General Ludendorff arranged for Lenin to make it to Russia so that the Tsar's armies would stop their fight...and it worked. Germany helped engineer the bolshevik revolution. History is what happened, not what you want to have happened.

(Muslim battle map: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I_To-cV94Bo )