Not often do I disagree with the eminent Hugh Fitzgerald, but no territory should ever be ceded to the dar-al Islam unless it gives us some strategic advantages. The Spanish have to defend Ceuta & Melilla, with weapons, if necessary. And the Europeans have to defend their borders, with weapons, because no other method works.
“We will recover al-Andalus, Allah willing. Oh dear Andalus! You thought we forgot about you. I swear by Allah we have never forgotten you. No Muslim can forget Córdoba, Toledo or Xàtiva. There are many faithful and sincere Muslims who swear they will return to al-Andalus.” — Islamic State video, January 31, 2016
Muslims are keenly aware that they once controlled most of the Iberian Peninsula, and that it took the Christians 700 years of war, the Reconquista, to recover, kingdom by kingdom, all of that territory. The final victory over the Muslims took place in 1492, when the Kingdom of Granada was won by the Christians. There are now many millions of Muslims all over Europe, in France, Great Britain, Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, and Scandinavia, always much in the news because of the disruptions that they cause, as they challenge the laws and customs of the Infidels, vacuum up every conceivable welfare-state benefit, repay their benefactors with skyrocketing rates of criminality, and commit acts of terrorism as a useful adjunct to the relentless demographic conquest and stealth jihad inflicted on their unhappy hosts. And Spain, though it does not as yet have as large a Muslim presence as that found elsewhere in Europe. remains quite special in Muslim hearts. For on the To-Do list of Muslims, the lands that were once part of Dar al-Islam are those that should be the first to be recovered for Muslim rule. As it says in the Qur’an 2:191, “Expel them from wherever they have expelled you.” And for several years, some Muslims in Spain have been conducting a campaign on social media in support of the Islamic State, while the Islamic State, for its part, has continually called for the “return” of Spain to Muslim rule, as in a video it produced in Spanish in which an IS spokesman says: “I say to the entire world as a warning: We are living under the Islamic flag, the Islamic caliphate. We will die for it until we liberate those occupied lands, from Jakarta to Andalusia. And I declare: Spain is the land of our forefathers and we are going to take it back with the power of Allah.”
In 2014 Spain and Portugal offered a “right of return,” that is, a granting of citizenship, to the descendants of Sephardic Jews who had been expelled from the Iberian Peninsula. The two countries were attempting to offer both sorrowful recognition of, and a kind of recompense for, the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492 and from Portugal in 1497. At once Muslim groups demanded that descendants of those Muslims (Moors) expelled from Spain be granted Spanish citizenship. Spanish and Portuguese authorities rejected this demand which, had it been accepted, would no doubt have led to a flooding of Arabs into Spain and Portugal, by the millions, bringing Spain and Portugal much closer to becoming part of Dar al-Islam yet again. The Portuguese lawmaker who drafted the Portuguese law of return firmly replied that “Persecution of Jews was just that, while what happened with the Arabs was part of a conflict [the Reconquista].” Similar statements came from the Spanish, who reminded Muslims that it was they who had settled in and colonized Spain, and they were a military foe who, finally defeated only after 700 years of the Reconquista, were in a far different position than the inoffensive Jews who had lived in Iberia for centuries before Christianity arrived, but had never tried to conquer or colonize it.
Continue reading Hugh Fitzgerald: The Once and Future Al-Andalus
