John Hayden, whose blog I highly recommend, left a long and interesting comment on our blog yesterday. Here is an excerpt from the comment that can be found in its entirety here:

Conflict between the Moslem world and the Western world has been ongoing for a thousand years, give or take. It used to be called a conflict between the Moslem and Christian worlds, and some would continue to characterize it as such. However, it is no longer reasonable to characterize the Western world only by Christianity. The hold of western religions on populations has weakened in many places. But the hold of religion seems to have intensified in much of the Moslem world.

Almost from the beginning, Muslims were expansionist, conquering Northern Africa and half of Spain. During the era of the Crusades, Christianity, led by the popes, saw the Muslim world as “Infidels.” Likewise, the Muslim world saw Christians as “Infidels.” Centuries of land and sea battles ensued.

This longstanding battle between east and west has been on hold for a century of more. During that pause, “modernization” has tremendously widened the gulf between the Muslim world and the West, with Turkey sort of caught in the middle. Muslims and Christians have lived side by side in many places. But the breakup of Yugoslavia is instructive. As soon as central government disappeared, ancient enmities between Christians and Muslims turned violent.

Thank you, John! I love long, intelligent, passionate comments like yours. Since you mentioned Spain, I was inspired to write a little comment of my own. If any of my students are reading this, I warn you that you will be bored to death because you’ve heard this a hundred times already.

In 710, the Iberian Peninsula (the part of the world where Spain and Portugal are located today*) was a very sad place. The barbaric tribe of warrior Visigoths had conquered the peninsula and destroyed the great civilization of the Roman Empire that used to be there. These barbarians had no appreciation for the philosophy, art, and culture of the ancient civilizations of Europe. They ravaged the peninsula, enslaved the Jews, demolished the repositories of knowledge, and the wisdom of the Greeks and Romans was lost. The situation in rest of Europe mirrored that on the Iberian Peninsula.

Then, in 711, an enormously more advanced and civilized culture came to the the Iberian Peninsula. Muslims crossed the Straight of Gibraltar and soon conquered almost the entire peninsula. They brought with them the scholarly, artistic, and scientific sophistication that the poor, dumb Visigoths couldn’t even begin to imagine. They built palaces, gardens, repaired the Roman roads, and – most importantly – they brought to Europe the greatest gift our Western Civilization ever received. Muslims brought back the lost knowledge of the ancient Greeks and Romans.

The Iberian Muslims established the Caliphate of Córdoba which was later destroyed in a civil war and was substituted with a number of smaller Muslim kingdoms called “reinos de taifas.” In all of these Muslim states on the territory of the Iberian Peninsula, Christians and Jews could practice their religions freely, with only few minor restrictions (for instance, the sound of the bells on a Christian church was not allowed to drown out the call of the muezzin and the tallest church was not allowed to be higher than the tallest mosque.) Jews were known to reach highest ranks in the management of some of these Muslim kingdoms. The most famous example of that is Sh’muel HaLevi ben Yosef HaNagid who served as a vizier to the Muslim king Habbus al-Muzaffar. 

Now, let’s remember that this was all taking place in the Middle Ages when everybody was constantly at war with each other. Christians kings fought other Christian kings, Muslims battled with other Muslims. Often, Christian leaders would recruit Muslims to fight against other Christians. Then, one Muslim kingdom would turn against a former Christian ally, and they would fight against each other, etc. Everybody had their religion, everybody’s religion was super central to their lives, but somehow, all these folks managed to co-exist quite well together, creating what today is our Western civilization. Crowds of scholars and intellectuals from all over the known world would congregate on the Iberian Peninsula to imbibe the great knowledge of the Western and Eastern civilizations.

* Of course, the words “Muslim Spain” in the post’s title are incorrect. While there were still Muslims on the Iberian Peninsula, there was no Spain. Once Spain started to consolidate around a shared manufactured identity, Muslims (and, of course, Jews) had to be expelled and vilified.

For the most part, the issue is disappointing, with two long articles dedicated to bitching about the supposed dishonesty of more successful journalists, an uninspired article on the results of the most recent war in Gaza, and an article on Obama that put me to sleep on paragraph 4.

However, the issue was redeemed for me by a brilliant piece on the efforts to bring 20,000 Jewish refugee children to the US during the Holocaust. The article was written by Robert Slayton and reveals why the attempts to bring even such a tiny number of these refugees to the US failed. There was never any talk of spending even a tiny amount of state money on the refugees. Charitable organizations volunteered to take care of the Jewish kids. However, there were powerful organizations that opposed the plan and fought to prevent charities from being charitable to Jewish kids.

When the issue was debated in the Senate, the US region that showed the greatest hospitality to Jewish refugees was the Midwest. But even there, only 1/3 of senators voted in favor of the plan. After a protracted battle during which an enormous amount of anti-Semitic and vicious statements was made, the bill failed and the kids were not saved.

The issue ends with a great article arguing that Rand Paul is actually a total Liberal. It seems that Rand Paul stinks so badly that now Liberals and Conservatives are sticking him into each other’s arms and yelling, “No, you take him! No, he’s yours!”

Christophe de Margerie, a French oil magnate and a close buddy of Putin, was killed in an accident in Moscow 3 days ago when his airplane collided with a snowplough whose driver was extremely drunk.

It’s hard to be sorry for a freakazoid who died as a result of his own choice to keep kissing Putin’s ass. It is very significant that he died in an airplane, too. These rich nasty criminals forgot all too soon about the passenger airplane shot down by Putin’s terrorists. 

A large group of elderly people in Russia was swindled out of their savings, pensions and apartments by a group of con artists.

During a TV show taped to warn people about this scam, the newscaster asks one of the victims, “You don’t seem very worried. Are you still hoping that these criminals will give your money back?”

“That doesn’t matter,” the old gentleman responds with supreme indifference. “If they don’t return the money, I will go to the embassy of the United States, tell them what happened, and they will give me the money.”

“But what does the United States have to do with any of this?” people in the audience ask. “What makes you think they will give you money?”

“Because that’s what they do,” the old gentleman waves off the concerned people. “There is somebody in a neighboring town who got a condo from them. And they give money. They’ve got lots.”

All of the attempts to get the gentleman to talk about persecuting the scam artists who robbed him are met with a wall of stony indifference. He only wants to talk about the Americans who will give him back the  money stolen by Russian criminals “because that’s what those Americans do.”

When the US Embassy fails to give him money, the sad old gentleman will join the army of people around the world who feel betrayed by Americans.

Since people wanted stories on the USSR, I can offer a documentary:

I warn you that this is very very disturbing and the images are graphic and tragic.

The people of Spain still can’t get over the 500,000 people who died in the Civil War. In the same decade, Ukraine – whose population is the same as Spain’s – had 10,000,000 people slaughtered. Spaniards are talking about their war, studying it, publishing novels and academic studies about it, trying to process the trauma.

Ukrainians dared to mention the genocide timidly and a couple of times which angered the country who perpetrated the genocide against them. After years of ruthlessly and cruelly mocking the genocide in Ukraine (the 10 million of dead Ukrainians were the butt of endless jokes and stand-up comedy routines in Russia since Putin came to power), the Russians outlawed any discussion of the genocide by scholars. Even that wasn’t enough, so Russia decided to start a new genocide of Ukrainians to distract everybody’s attention from the one in the 1930s.

Back in 1930s, happy, chirpy, fat Western Lefties traveled to the USSR in droves, publishing gushing accounts of how ecstatically happy everybody there was. Today, happy, chirpy, fat Western Lefties don’t even go to the trouble of traveling. They know for a fact that there is a civil war in Ukraine and that Putin is a good guy because. . . well, he’s just got to be a good guy, right? Any other possibility would be too hard to process.

I want to tell you about my favorite online game because it isn’t just a game, it’s a social phenomenon.

There are several of these farm games, and millions of people are playing them all over the world. I have 114 Facebook game partners (whom I’ve never met, of course) and we play together. Together means precisely that. We don’t play against each other. The game is completely non-competitive.

In the game, you create a farm, grow crops and fruit trees, buy machines to produce food, toys and bouquets of flowers. You also have a kitchen where you make dishes with the food you produce. There is a pond where you catch seafood.

If you help your game friends, you get prizes, and the better other players do, the more prizes you get. There are challenges where players get prizes but the supply of prizes is unlimited. You don’t have to worry that other people win everything and you will be left with nothing. Prizes include cute little squirrels, penguins and toucans. You can decorate your farm and send gifts to other players. Sending gifts and responding to requests for help is rewarded.

There is no space in this game for anger, competition or resentment. There is also no possibility of losing. If you don’t complete a challenge, a new one appears immediately. A while ago, we all observed Ramadan on the farm and everybody got prizes. Now we are ready to celebrate Halloween.

This is a game for busy people who can’t play for 2 hours straight. There isn’t anything to do in the game for more than 15 minutes at a time. You can stay away for months and then gone back, having lost nothing. There are no leaderboards or score charts.

The players are overwhelmingly in their 30s and 40s. These are people who are busily constructing their careers and come to the game for a brief respite from the world of competitiveness, speed, and stress. These are also people who miss the crops and the natural cycles around which the lives of their ancestors revolved.

So do you remember this academic from Spain who wrote the article I was going to write? I stalked him on his blog and on Twitter, and now we are talking online.

Technology has been vindicated in my eyes.

So it turns out that other people in Vine were offered to review the new biography of Stalin while I wasn’t. This is both wrong and stupid. Who is better qualified than me to review this book, seriously??

In the meanwhile, I’m getting offered endless Christian romance novels. Of which I obviously never bought or reviewed any in my life.

I feel very slighted. I never get upset when people receive computers or expensive gadgets in Vine (because I have received a fair share of them myself and can’t complain), but a biography of Stalin??? I want it! Now!

Jesus, people, did you hear what happened in Ottawa? I’m in class all day, so I missed those news altogether. 

My first instinct is that this is connected to Canada’s decision to support the war against ISIS.