Friday, April 17, 2009

GERALD WARNER is spot on: there's no reason why Spain should apologize for expelling the Muslims -- in the Middle Ages, mind you:
Let's start with the massive Islamic invasion of Spain by Arabs, Syrians and Berbers in 711, which conquered the entire country by exemplary brutality within five years. Would Morocco like to start the ball rolling by apologising to Spain for that?

Then there was the little incident at the Battle of Tours on October 10, 732 when Abdul Rahman Al Ghafiqi, governor-general of al-Andalus, the Muslim kingdom of Spain, was finally stopped in his tracks by Charles Martel, 12 miles north of Poitiers - not what you would call a traditionally Islamic area. The signs are these chaps were not going to stop even at the Watford Gap, unless somebody took drastic action. How about an apology to France for that incursion?

It took the Christians of Spain 800 years to recover their country in the bloody and relentless campaign known as the Reconquista, completed only with the fall of Granada in 1492. During those centuries, along with such atrocities as salting dissidents' decapitated heads as trophies for the Caliph, the Mediterranean populations were dragged in their hundreds of thousands to the slave markets of North Africa. Any apologies on offer?