The 'islamic sites' in Spain of course were not originally islamic in the first place. Christianity was long established in Spain when the Mohommadans arrived and started to co-opt Christian sites.
St Sophias, if it were reconsecrated in the future in to a Christian Cathedral would be by this logic 'stolen moslem property' In Spain the rightful owners of these places have them, but the thieves have come back and are demanding their 'rights'.

As textbooks are riddled with "historical distortions," most students in the West won't know any better and of course will be sympathetic toward the "Muslims from whom the churches were stolen." And who is to blame for the sorry state of our educational system? I wonder, it's easy to blame ourselves, but sometimes we are the dupes of those that distorted the textbooks and hired the professors with the radical, postmodern, or Leftist bent that have trained and conditioned us to be accepting. It is only after a long, painful period of re-eductiing and reconditioning that many Westerners are beginning to realize the sorry condition that find ourselves to be in. Yes, "we" are responsible, but some of the "we" are more responsible than others.

I would not yield an inch of ground, but would demand instead that Jews be allowed to worship freely on temple mount, a site of great import to Jews and Christians, and one where Muslims are attempting to eradicate every archaeological trace of a Jewish presence.

It should be pointed out that this did not only happen to Christians and Jews, but to Hindus and Buddhists as well. A dispute over a mosque built on the site of an ancient Hindu temple has caused deadly riots and all kinds of religious strife in India. And yet despite all the evidence of how much this kind of behavior is resented by non-Muslims, Muslims persist in doing it.

A Christian service in the Hagia Sophia - don't hold your breath on that one.

Check out the insults that were heaped on JP II when he visited a Syrian mosque on a goodwill mission in early 2001:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/pope/story/0,12272,765601,00.html

The Guardian presents this mosque as one of "Islam's Most Important Sites" (like what ISN't one of Islam's Most Important sites?) but late in the story the Guardian is forced to admit the "mosque" was once an important Christian church.

The message from this story, the Telegraph story and a great deal of other media: The Muslim claim is the "legitimate" claim, by virtue of it's being Muslim; other claims do not count. It's scary how the Western media has so readily adjusted to Islamic supremacism.

Susan, from that article you linked;

"The Vatican has shrugged off Syrian invitations to visit the tomb of Saladin, whose tomb lies a few yards from Umayyad mosque, saying the Pope did not visit unholy places."

I'd love to have seen their faces when they read that.

Since Islam is a heresy of a heresy (stems from Nestorianiasm) and didn't arise until the Church was centuries old, just about *all* their "holy sites" used to be Christan or Jewish. Why is it this appeasment only goes one way? When will people realize that Islam is *not* the oldest religion in the middle east and that the only way they have ever gotten anything is through violence?

I once had dinner with a company of completely westernized Istambullis, whose conversation consisted of their ostentatious insistence that "we are not Arabs, we hate the Arabs, they are primitive" and their making fun of "real Muslim fundamentalists. Warming to whast I took to be their theme, I suggested that it would be nice if the government of Turkey once again permitted Christian worship somewhere in the Hagia Sophia (where a huge green flag of Islam, with a Quran'ic inscription, hangs over the beautiful building, with its broken crosses, and vandalized frescoes, and security guard of minarets). Looks were exchanged among the Turks. It was gently explained to me that if such a thing were to be permitted, in even the tiniest and most out-of-the-way corner of the Hagia Sophia, Turkey, advanced, civilized, supposedly westernized Turkey, even after 80 years of Kemalist containment of Islam, and the cult of personality devoted to the very man, Ataturk, who had originally transformed it from mosque to museum, would be shaken: "We would have a revolution on our hands."

For those wishing to understand what destruction was wrought on Byzantium, without visiting Istanbul, the reproductions of the frescoes on the walls of the Kariye Djami (see Underwood's 3 vols. in the Bollingen Series), which survived Muslim depredations better than did those in the Hagia Sophia, are easily found. The Kariye Djami itself is in the middle of a district of indifferent, not-yet-hostile Turks. Postcards and Kodak film and soft drinks sell briskly.

To comprehend the full extent of what Constantinople, for nearly a thousand years the first city of the West, must have looked like before its Fall (accomplished, incidentally, with the aid of Western technology: long before there was A. Q. Khan, stealng his nuclear secrets from Holland, and getting a little help later on from a renegade Swiss and an Englishmen, there was a Christian Hungarian cannon-maker who supplied the superior guns that helped the Ottoman Turks finally conquer the city, by then reduced to 50,000 inhabitants, in 1453), visit Topkapi, and when you are in the complex of buildings, go to the second floor of the Archeological Museum, where carefully out of the way, and not much visited, is a scale-model of pre-1453 Constantinople, with all of its churches indicated, and also what befell them.

To imagine the fabulous wealth, worked into art, of Byzantium, the silver Sion Treasure on display at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington is an ex-ungue-leonem sample. It was found not in Constantinople, but buried in provincial Antalya, and thus provides a hint of the riches that Constantinople, and the Hagia Sophia, must once have possessed.

When Muslim demands are made in Cordoba, as you suggest, counter-demands ought immediately to be made by non-Muslims. One such demand might be an end to the Jihad murders of southern blacks in the Sudan. Another would be ratification of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (not the "Islamic Declaration," which is quite different). A third might be legal recognition of the right of freedom of conscience, so that within Muslim countries those wishing to abandon Islam might do so. All of these matters should be constantly raised, by governments, the press, and others, in any case, so that the consciousness of Infidels, who are not generally aware of the tenets or practices or history of Islam, will have their consciences, and consciousnesses, raised. Let there be television documentaries on the Jihads of the twentieth century, on the origins of Islam (not the "sugary nonsense" that Patricia Crone derides, but the real thing), on what happened to non-Muslims under Muslim rule (the real story, not the kind of thing brought to you by the princelings and sheiks of the Gulf, or by Aramco, which are worse than worthless). Instruction is needed. Many Western university courses are nothing more than propaganda, obvious or cleverly designed, on behalf of Islam.

It is said that should "the lie" be told often enough, the certainty is, people will begin to believe it.

The liberal socialists and communist have always been very good at lying, and will tell the lie repeatedly. I'm to wonder if it was the communist or the muslin who developed this method.

Regardless if one or the other, or both, it certainly proves effective, and that people seem never to learn from history, therefore it repeats itself.

Islam is not a heresy. Islam does not build on the ruins of other religions. CHristianity did the same to other religions? What about Jews and Arabs in Palestine? Be real guys, Europe should stand up for its democratic standards, and allow any minority its full rights. Stop living in the dark ages like the Arabs are doing now.