“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.
This distinction has infuriated the Muslim Arabs of today. They claim that the expulsion of the Muslims was identical to that of the Jews, refusing to recognize the fact that the Jews were never a colonial power, unlike the Muslim Arabs, and that they never posed a military threat to the Christians of Spain and Portugal, again unlike the Muslims. In fact, there was not one but several expulsions of the Muslims, or Moors. The Mudejars were those Muslims who remained in Spain after the Reconquista and who, in the early 16th century, were forbidden the outward practice of Islam. Eventually those among them who converted to Catholicism, or seemed to, were called by another name – Moriscos – and were regarded with suspicion by the Spanish, who did not always trust the sincerity of their conversions, and worried about possible plots by the Moriscos to take Spain back from the Christians. To prevent any such reversal, between 1609 and 1614, in a series of expulsions, the Moriscos were forced out of Spain, with decrees covering the various regions being passed at different dates, and with varying degrees of success. Most of them went to Morocco.
It is on this basis that Muslim Arabs are now demanding their own “right of return” to Spain and Portugal. The flavor of their fury can be tasted in an essay published in the Morocco-based Spanish-language newspaper Correo Diplomático by the Morisco-Moroccan journalist Ahmed Bensalh, who wrote that the “decision to grant Spanish citizenship to the grandchildren of the Hebrews in Spain in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, while ignoring the Moriscos, the grandsons of the Muslims, is without doubt, flagrant segregation and unquestionable discrimination, as both communities suffered equally in Spain at that time. The decision could also be considered by the international community to be an historic act of absolute immorality and injustice…This decision is absolutely disgraceful and dishonorable.”
An act of “absolute immorality and injustice”? It was the Muslim Arabs who seized Spain from the Spanish, not the Jews. It was the Muslim Arabs who occupied the Iberian peninsula, and who fought the indigenous Christians tooth and nail to keep them defeated and down. What must the treatment of the Christians in Spain have been like to keep them fighting for 700 years? Certainly there was not that imaginary convivencia in which Karen Armstrong and Maria de Menocal so devoutly believe. Ahmed Bensalh then made a threat to Spain of the or-else variety: “Is Spain aware of what might be assumed when it makes peace with some and not with others? Is Spain aware of what this decision could cost? Has Spain considered that it could jeopardize the massive investments that Muslims have made on its territory? Does Spain have alternatives to the foreign investment from Muslims if they ever decide to move that capital to other destinations due to the discrimination against Muslim?”
Fortunately, neither the threat nor the preposterous claim by the descendants of the Muslim invaders of Spain that they have a moral right to receive Spanish citizenship, has changed Spanish minds. Because if they were to obtain such citizenship, Muslims would indeed stream into Spain.
Al-Andalus remains on Muslim minds and on that To-Do List. Arab tourists flock to southern Spain, to see what they regard as the once-and-future Al-Andalus. At the Alhambra in Grenada, they can take triumphalist satisfaction in the mosque that was built nearby, on the highest ridge in the city, the first mosque to be built in Grenada in 500 years. And with its 45-foot minarets towering over a nunnery next door, the Spanish nuns complain of the call-to-prayer that wakes them too early, and keeps them up too late, and that disrupts the rest of their day, but it is the Muslims who have prevailed.
The opening of this mosque was the object of deep interest among Muslim Arabs, who took it as a sign of the rebirth of Islam in Al-Andalus. Al-Jazeera even broadcast the opening of the mosque to all of Arabdom, as if celebrating the establishment of an Islamic beachhead — which, in a way, it was. The Spanish government had thought, like so many other European governments, to win Arab goodwill. It thus allowed, over the objections of many Spaniards, the building of this mosque, inadvertently colluding in the physical declaration of the Muslim claim to Grenada — and never mind about the complaints of the nuns next door. But instead of winning Arab gratitude, the Spanish government simply whetted Arab appetites for more. Claims to Al-Andalus have multiplied. Osama bin Laden himself referred frequently to Al-Andalus, and the need to again make it Muslim. And so too did members of ISIS, beginning in 2014 and repeated most recently this January, when the Islamic State issued a threat that it would “retake the land [of Spain] from the invaders.” For Muslims, the Spanish are the invaders, and they the dispossessed but rightful possessors, who deserve to, and will, recover Al-Andalus. The Spanish don’t need reminding that while they have so far suffered only one major terrorist attack, the simultaneous bombing of four train cars as they travelled between Alcala de Henares and the Atocha Subway Station back in 2004, that attack killed 191 people and remains the deadliest single terror attack in Europe.
While at the moment ISIS’s dreams of glory seem to have been shattered in the its slow-motion defeat in Mosul and the certain surrender in coming months of ISIS’s last redoubt, in Raqqa, Muslims – not “extremists” but ordinary Muslims – still yearn for Al-Andalus. And one of the ways they can get to Al-Andalus is through two towns in North Africa, on the Moroccan littoral, that belong to Spain. Desperate Africans and Arabs try to get to those towns, Ceuta and Melilla, for once they set foot there, they have made it not just to Spain, but to the European Union, and cannot, by the foolish commitments European states have made in regard to “refugees,” be turned back.
There is the Guardia Civil, the barbed wire that caps the fences, even moats. But still the migrants manage to come, by the thousands, sometimes more, sometimes less, depending on everything from the weather, to the fickle behavior of the Moroccan government. The king of Morocco, like Khaddafy in Libya, can do a lot to prevent migrants from reaching Ceuta and Melilla, and does so if it suits him – that is, Spain offers a quid pro quo, with economic agreements deemed helpful to Morocco. And King Hassan can regulate the flow of migrants – increase or decrease it – depending on what he wants of Spain, and how much pressure he needs to apply to make the Spanish comply with his demands.
Where do the migrants come from? From Mali, Senegal, Mauritania, and Somalia, in sub-Saharan Africa, and from Arab countries — from Morocco itself, and now from Syria, too. Most of these migrants are Muslims. And while the world has not been paying attention, the Muslim population of Spain rose by 800% between 2001 and 2014.
Perhaps the Spanish need to rethink their African Tarbaby. When Morocco obtained its independence from France in 1956, Spain held onto the two towns of Ceuta and Melilla, the last bits of its once far-flung Spanish empire, mostly for reasons of historic memory and prestige. But there are no significant resources or other economic benefit to holding onto either town. They are not especially attractive to tourists. Close to 40% of the permanent population in those towns is Muslim, and that percentage keeps rising. For migrants, the easiest way to get from Africa to Spain, and thus to Europe, is through Ceuta and Melilla. Tens of thousands try every year to make it. Symbols of a past empire, these towns are a present drain on Spain, which has to pay for those now 10-meter high fences with barbed wire, for the sensors and cameras, for the helicopters and the speed boats, and for all those members of the Guardia Civil, now almost one thousand of them in Melilla alone, and to the cost of preventing most of the tens of thousands of making it to Ceuta and Melilla one must add the cost of processing those migrants who did manage to get through, and the grim cost, too, for tending to the unluckiest of all, that is, the corpses of the drowned that the Spanish have to pull from the sea and bury.
Why not simply give Ceuta and Melillla to Morocco? The Moroccans will be ecstatic, will regard this as a triumph of the firmness of their diplomacy. Let them. But in fact it will be even more of a triumph for Spain, which will have unstuck itself from the Tarbaby of Ceuta and Melilla. The only people who will not be pleased with this will be those migrants from a half-dozen countries, all of them Muslim or mainly so, who had hoped to make it to one of Europe’s welfare states but now finding that managing to make it to Ceuta or Melilla is no longer the same thing as making it to Spain, and thus to the European Union. Now, if migrants reach Ceuta and Melilla, they will still be in Africa. And the Moroccans, as one can imagine, will allow themselves to use methods for discouraging migrants travelling to what are now their territories that the Spanish, doing their worst, could never have used.
This headache can be cured. Don’t make it easier, don’t help swell the Muslim population of Spain or the European Union. Don’t do anything more to a future Al-Andalus. Give up Ceuta, give up Melilla. Kutuzov defeated Napoleon’s Grande Armee not by fighting, but by strategic retreat. History teaches that sometimes, less is more.
no_one says
Spaniards should not have allowed a mosque in Granada. They compromised too much. Probably too late now to demolish the mosque.
StacyGirl says
For all the criticism of Franco, no mosques were allowed on his watch. When he died circa 1974, people forgot why there were no hives around for the mud wasps.
Daniel Triplett says
Agreed.
Great plan Hugh.
DFD says
OFF TOPIC, FOR AMERICANS:
=========================
I recently asked my friend’s little girl what she wanted to be when she grew up. She said she wanted to be president of the United States.
Both of her parents, liberal Dems , were standing there, so I asked her what she would do first. She replied: “I’d give food and houses to all the homeless people.” Her parents beamed.
“Wow, what a worthy goal,” I told her, “but you don’t have to wait until you’re president to do that. You can come over to my house, mow the lawn, pull weeds and sweep my driveway, and I will pay you $50. Then I will take you over to the grocery store where the homeless guy hangs out, and you can give him the $50 to use toward a new house and food.”
She thought it over for a few seconds, then asked, “Why doesn’t the homeless guy come over to your house and do the work and you can just pay him the $50?”
I said, “Welcome to the Republican Party.”
Franc says
Thanks, I’ll use this some day. With your permission, of course!
DFD says
You are welcome. This one was relayed, wasn’t mine.
This one is mine, feel free to use it if you want to: https://www.jihadwatch.org/2017/03/uk-muslims-barrage-muslima-in-hijab-with-death-threats-for-twerking/comment-page-1#comment-1631054
Stan Lee says
Islam promises! Why doesn’t Islam promise to beat the illiteracy of so many of its followers, and lift up what is Araby from the “bottom of the barrel?” There is no Islam as the one in the years before the Reconquista! Even the word “reconquista” is from the Spanish, not any of the languages of the Muslims. In more than 1000 years, Islam hasn’t done as much as improve upon a basic wooden clothes pin! No sooner than Arabic leaders knew that oil was coming out of the grounds of Araby did they say “to he– with the poor who work for us at the risk of the lash or worse” Then did the poor Arabs get brain washed by Imams in the pay of the Arab leaders to indoctrinate the followers of the Islamic royalty to execute what is directed by the koran….and no more. The koran would do all the thinking Arabs needed in life. They did not need the education of the westerners….the Christians. The koran was to be all the education they would ever need.
But, “conquest of lands and people” That is quite a different subject, and by Islam multiplying like rabbits, it would have Muslim lives to dedicate in the conquest of lands of the “unbelievers.”
That is Islam’s quest and the poor, illiterate stiffs that die for it get the ultimate prize…martydom!
‘Can’t beat that! The only thing the Muslim leaders get are lands, and the riches of those lands. And, besides, the losses of Muslims does not go for naught, they can be replaced by more of the same, by those who are forced conversions who will work to the bone or die for the royal types of Islam.
A plan only about 1400 years old which never changes itself, only those slaves who come and go for it.
It is no wonder why other religions are hated by Islam, they, the other religions, want their followers to live for their religious beliefs, not die in the act of warring and killing for it.
mortimer says
“The Myth of the Andalusian Paradise: Muslims, Christians, and Jews under Islamic Rule in Medieval Spain” by Dario Fernandez-Morera is a book that debunks the idea that Islamic rule is benign.
Christians and Christian churches virtually disappeared from all the areas under Muslim rule.
https://www.amazon.ca/Myth-Andalusian-Paradise-Christians-Medieval/dp/1610170954
Get the book.
Shmooviyet says
@mortimer: Thank you for the recommendation! Was just going to ask about this particular book.
jewdog says
I agree, let Spain jettison those two magnet cities. As for the Muslim desire to be let back into Spain or Portugal, not only has their past aggression soured attitudes, but their present threats and the unspoken menace of terrorism must surely weigh heavily. A religion that seeks to “cast terror into the hearts of the unbelievers” will not be welcome into unbeliever hearts or homes.
billybob says
“Eventually those among them who converted to Catholicism, or seemed to, were called by another name – Moriscos – and were regarded with suspicion by the Spanish, who did not always trust the sincerity of their conversions…”
– and further on, this…
“Fortunately, neither the threat nor the preposterous claim by the descendants of the Muslim invaders of Spain that they have a moral right to receive Spanish citizenship, has changed Spanish minds. Because if they were to obtain such citizenship, Muslims would indeed stream into Spain.”
It would seem that the “suspicion by the Spanish, who did not always trust the sincerity of their conversions” was correct, because if these conversions were sincere, the descendants of the Moriscos would be Catholic, not Muslims.
Rob says
Muslims claiming Spain, is like the descendants of Napoleon’s Army of 1812, claiming Russia.
simpleton1 says
A definition of the problem and differences, though far from perfect was Chronica Prophetica (883–884)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronica_Prophetica
A full translation of “Chronica Prophetica” http://pages.pomona.edu/~kbw14747/prophchr.htm
Where one can go easily to the heading of “HISTORY OF MUHAMMAD”, (a long paragraph) where there is a summation of just some of the deeds of Muhammad, ending in ;-
It is the calling out of very much of what Muhammad is about, to name the difference , and in those days it was naturally from an old style Christian perspective.
The problem was named, and despite hitches, politics, it was 600 years, before the job was completed, but always with the knowledge and saying exactly that, islam was not compatible with Christianity.
In today’s terms there is no getting around that islam, being in considerable part an ideology, is not compatible with democracy either!
The other major part of our problem is also how to expose the “double think” in our institutions, and through out the general public.
Calling out Mohammad is exposing both “double thinks”
This seems to be one of the guiding beacons in defining the problems of islam, and why it had to be not only resisted but in the end proved it had to be removed from Spain.
It was done in a sense of nationalism, which today is almost forbidden in Europe
Charlie in NY says
And yet, both Spain and Portugal fully support the rights of Arabs to return and again become sovereign in lands they had once conquered but lost to the original inhabitants – where those original inhabitants are Jews.
Rob says
Arabs didn’t even conquer Palestine. They arrived in numbers after WW1 to work in the burgeoning Jewish industries made possible by (again Jewish) hydro development on the Jordan.
In 1920 Winston Churchill wrote of the Palestinian Arabs:
‘The Arabs would have sat in the dark forever had not the Zionist engineers harnessed the Jordan for electrification. Now they swarm to Palestine seeking the light.’
Census records show overwhelmingly that Palestinians are from as far afield as Morocco.
Charlie in NY says
The Arabs did conquer the Holy Land by 638 from the Byzantine Empire. You are referring to the modern subset of Arabs who now go by the name “Palestinians.”
Paul says
It’s far more complicated than that. If I recall correctly, the Byzantines expelled the Arabs, who later returned to expel the Byzantines, and these Arabs were in turn expelled by the Ottoman Turks (fellow Muslims), who were then expelled by the British. The British colony was subsequently to be divided into Arab and Jewish states, in accordance with international law under the League of Nations mandate and UN resolution, but the Arabs refused to go along, and the subsequent wars between the Jews and Arabs led to Jews gaining more land. So it isn’t exactly Jews expelling Arabs.
Paul says
Sorry correction: The Arabs expelled the Byzantines (who inherited the land from the Romans who had conquered the Jews), and then the Crusaders came and expelled the Arabs, and then the Arabs returned to be later expelled by the Turks, etc. Very confusing–surely not as simplistic as the Israel-haters would have you believe, and obviously too complicated for the college campus BDS types.
Shmooviyet says
Great Churchill quote.
What he would have thought of the multi-tolerant PC guilt-culture and its country-by-country destruction.
So much more effective than the mechanized horrors he witnessed.
Jeanette says
Take note of this history, illegal alien-loving liberals!
ternak ayam says
thanks for your info.
frederick King says
I agree on returning these small plots to Morocco. Why don’t they just throw to muslims back over the fence ? EU rules ?
Charli Main says
” Muslim population of Spain rose by 800% between 2001 and 2014″.
I see it every day, in the town that I live in. A few years back you would see the odd hijabed Muslima slinking down the road. Now you see them in swarms, confidently strutting down the road, pushing people out of the way with their baby carts.
Spain has committed national suicide by letting these invaders back into the land they fought 800 years to liberate.
Cicero says
An 800 percent increase is frightening indeed.
I have just returned from Andalusia to London. I was very pleasantly surprised at the obvious absence from the terrain of Seville, and Ronda any burqa, niqab, hijab or beards and man dress. Andalusia was as Andalusia was almost 40 years ago!
I congratulated the Andalucians on this and advised them to be on their guard.
Comparisons with London did not benefit London at all. London is heavily Islamised and the UK ‘s national discourse is replete with references to UK’s largest religion – the religion of peace.
Angemon says
Let me guess: Catalunya?
gee says
Frankly the Spanish deserve their Islamofascist friends. I hope all the EuroNazis get their fill
nona says
Well, it doesn’t matter whether Spain has officially admitted them, it’s still opened its doors to moslems! THe country is having a hell of a prolem, now with this Horde! Isabela must be SPINNING in her grave!
Angemon says
How many can find them in a map?
Jeanette says
Let’s hope that if the Muslims do re-take Andalusia, the Andalusians get their fabulous horses to safety before that.
Zé says
It is a terrible idea to give back those two cities.
I can repeat the argument that was made in the 16th century when John III, king of Portugal wanted to abandon some portuguese cities in morrocan litoral:
if we managed to impose christian castles in moorish land, we should not give them away.
Unfortunately John did not follow that advice. A lot of morrocan litoral cities were portuguese. Ceuta (which eventually became spanish), Tangiers (which was given to the english and abandoned by them less than 30 years latter), Ksar es Ceguer, Arzila, El Jadida. Casablanca was just a small village nearby a portuguese fortress.
Did abandon a fortress result in anything good? No, the morrocan just went on attacking the next.
If Spain abandons Ceuta and Melilla, then the morrocans will want the small islands between the two countries, than Granada, then Cordoba, Seville, and all that separates Gibraltar from the Pyrenees.
Jeanette says
I agree 100% !!!!
Don’t give them an inch; they will take a mile.
Unknown says
“when the Islamic State issued a threat that it would “retake the land [of Spain] from the invaders.” For Muslims, the Spanish are the invaders, and they the dispossessed but rightful possessors, who deserve to, and will, recover Al-Andalus.”
WE ARE EUROPEANS, PORTUGUESE AND SPANIARD ARE THE NATIVES OF HERE SO STUP.
If it is to avoid a major damage then Spain should let go Ceuta and Melilla or even better take the population out and send it to the bottom of the ocean since they cannot claim for the rest. I wish we could have another Isabela and Ferdinando but they are dead thus it’s our time to fight. Jews weren’t exactly saints but at least they didn’t want to conquest our land, they just wanted to live their life but Muslims are totally oppose, they want to kill us all and conquer our land, basically: convert or die.
Aquilan says
It is not only the Middle East, Northern Africa or Central Asia Muslims that dream, scheme & plot to reconquer “Andalusia”! Even in Pakistan, India, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand & Philippines, the Muslims there have books, songs, drama & teachings about the ‘glory’ of Andalusia! The Muslim occupation of Spain is romanticized like Camelot in England. Even in these lands far away from Spain, the idea of Andalusia as “Darul Islam” or “Land of Islam” is widespread & accepted as fact by the Muslims there! So is the expectation that Spain will fall to the Muslims in due time.