My latest in PJ Media:
Christopher Columbus was the “progenitor of a continental genocide,” claims Alan Mikhail in the Los Angeles Times Monday, and Mikhail is not part of some affirmative action plan at the Times to give a voice to those who propagate insanely ahistorical anti-American garbage. Mikhail is, in fact, the chair of the Department of History at Yale University, and if that isn’t evidence of the advanced state of rot in American academia today, nothing is. Columbus, in Mikhail’s febrile fantasies, was something even worse than a genocidal maniac: he was an “Islamophobe”: “A primary force behind Columbus’ Atlantic crossings was a fear and hatred of Islam.”
Columbus – or so the august academic Mikhail and the Los Angeles Times would have you believe – was motivated to sail the ocean blue in 1492 by the worst impulse possible, as far as the contemporary Left is concerned: “At heart, Columbus was a Crusader. Throughout his life, in his encounters with and then battles against Muslims, he felt the burden of holy war deep in his soul.” For shame, infidel! All these years you have lived in America without realizing that its very foundations are built on “Islamophobia.”
Nor does the villainy stop with the discovery of the new continent: “An anti-Islamic worldview was the mold that cast the European understanding of race and ethnicity in the Americas, as well as the concept of warfare in the Western Hemisphere.”
While portraying the discovery of America as an exercise in gratuitous racial hatred, Mikhail doesn’t bother to mention what really led up to Columbus making his voyage. He did so because the land route to Asia had been closed to Europeans since the fall of Constantinople in 1453. The fall of the city was the occasion for an unforgettable demonstration of jihadi bloodlust. As The History of Jihad shows, the warriors of jihad entered the great city on May 29, 1453, and made the streets run with rivers of blood. Muslims raided monasteries and convents, emptying them of their inhabitants, and plundered private houses.
Mikhail says nothing about that. Nor does he inform his hapless Los Angeles Times readers that in this course of this plunder, pillage, and wanton murder, the jihadis entered Hagia Sophia, which for nearly a thousand years had been the grandest church in Christendom. The venerable old building was filled with Orthodox Christians: the faithful had gathered within its hallowed walls to pray during the city’s last agony. The Muslims halted the celebration of Orthros (morning prayer), while the priests, according to legend, took the sacred vessels and disappeared into the cathedral’s eastern wall, through which they shall return to complete the divine service one day. Right in the church, the jihad warriors then killed the elderly and weak and led the rest off into slavery.
There is more. Read the rest here.
Mike says
no surprise Thomas Jefferson wrote about Islam in 1784 to 1789
https://www.danielpipes.org/comments/35803
it was not good
gravenimage says
+1
revereridesagain says
+2
DazzleMe says
I was not aware that the American/English knew anything of Islam then. Traveling around the world was so new. I gather it was not good. There are certainly a lot people talking about it.
gravenimage says
DazzleMe, as soon as the Americans gained independence from Britain the Barbary pirates considered us fair game for piracy and enslaving our crews. The US also began paying protection money to them, which soon threatend to outstrip the entire federal budget. Then we decided to build a navy and fight back.
The US, later joined by the British and the French, defeated the Muslim pirates and made the Mediterranean Sea safe for shipping for the first time *in a thousand years*.
This is a great achievement by a young nation–and should be known by everyone.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbary_Wars
maria says
LA Times is the most racist America hating lying thrash paper. Who is the creature Mikhail? Is he a Russian ? Or probably a muslim?
gravenimage says
He seems to be an apologist for Islam–I have not found anything suggesting he has actually converted to Islam himself–although it scarcely matters.
And he’s written for other papers as well.
Tanya Notkoff says
There’s a reason he catalogued his Qur’an under Mythology. He certainly never intended it to be protected under the US Constitution’s First Amendment. Yet here we are, bowing to Sharia!
JanD says
Gee whiz! Exactly what does Mikkail think Islam’s intentions for the rest of the world are/were? It takes two to tango, MF!
gravenimage says
Jan, he has a long history of trying to whitewash Islam.
tunde says
I literally sat up in my chair and muttered “Woah” when I read that this guy is a Department Chair at Yale. College is by and large nothing but a pure scam depending on what you enroll for. You spend thousands a year just to come out with insane amounts of debt, a useless degree, and lost time that could have been spent getting practical and hands-on experience. Mikhail’s article is a disgrace.
From Spencer’s article: “Mikhail, however, gives the impression that the Europeans’ fear of Islam was baseless, an irrational ‘Islamophobia’ that right-thinking people must eschew.”
Bingo!
DazzleMe says
Sounds like that should have been true, Islam is a bunch of lunatics.
James Lincoln says
tunde,
Yale University used to be a top rate university – back in the day.
Today, unless you are studying a STEM major at Yale, you are literally throwing your money away.
On top of that, a typical liberal arts student at Yale will end up becoming brainwashed by the far left.
Sad…
somehistory says
https://www.laboratoryequipment.com/579997-Documents-Suggest-Italian-Sailors-Knew-of-America-150-Years-Before-Christopher-Columbus/
“Documents Suggest Italian Sailors Knew of America 150 Years Before Christopher Columbus”
“Chiesa says Cronica universalis “brings unprecedented evidence to the speculation that news about the American continent, derived from Nordic sources, circulated in Italy one and half centuries before Columbus.”
“What makes the passage (about Marckalada) exceptional is its geographical provenance: not the Nordic area, as in the case of the other mentions, but northern Italy,” said Chiesa. “The Marckalada described by Galvaneus is ‘rich in trees’, not unlike the wooded Markland of the Grœnlendinga Saga, and animals live there. These details could be standard, as distinctive of any good land; but they are not trivial, because the common feature of northern regions is to be bleak and barren, as actually Greenland is in Galvaneus’s account, or as Iceland is described by Adam of Bremen.”
Overall, Chiesa says, we should trust Cronica universalis as throughout the document Galvaneus declares where he has heard of oral stories, and backs his claims with elements drawn from accounts (legendary or real) belonging to previous traditions on different lands, blended together and reassigned to a specific place.”
Evidently, it wasn’t just Columbus, but others before him…for 150 years before him. The curious thing to me is, no mention is made of ***mozlums**** being there. Unless the Friar was referring to them as “animals.”
The la times is so “woke,” they are asleep at the wheel. And “yale” at one time had a certain quality…or was thought to have. This mikhail dude is really ignorant and stupid and just trying to get on the bandwagon before the headhunters come calling….not those guys who look for workers in other places, but the evil ones who actually behead and parade around with their booty.
Terry says
If Columbus hated Muslims he was not only a great sailor but knowledgeable about Islamic doctrine and history.
DazzleMe says
Agreed, he obviously knew they were not Christians for sure. Back in those day the Christian religion was vet important to people as it should be in today’s world.
gravenimage says
Recently revisionists have tried to claim that most of Columbus’ crew was Muslim, which is utterly absurd.
Charlie in NY says
Considering he’s a specialist on the Ottoman Empire, his failure to include the period in its full historical context would seem to be inexcusable. On the other hand, he’s on leave this academic year and maybe is looking for some speaker’s gigs.
https://history.yale.edu/people/alan-mikhail
Keys says
Here is a brief, devastating review of Mikhail’s book, “God’s Shadow: Sultan Selim, His Ottoman Empire, and the Making of the Modern World” released in paperback in August, 2021. It has two chapters on Columbus: “Columbus and Islam” and “Columbus’ Crusade”.
The three co-authors from the University of Chicago, Harvard, and UCLA say:
“Why a historian in a respectable university has been possessed to concoct this tissue of falsehoods, half-truths and absurd speculations remains a mystery to us. Why a paper like the Washington Post would publish a set of such unsustainable claims and then block responses to it, is also a question that would bear examination.”
They responded to one of the editors of the Washington Post, who invited them to point out falsehoods in the book, highlighting 7 major factual errors. The editor responded: “… we believe that no corrections are warranted based on the evidence he [Mikhail] has provided.“
Something stinks ! Sounds like promotion pay-offs to lots of reviewers. Cultural jihad !
https://oajournals.fupress.net/index.php/cromohs/debate
gravenimage says
Thanks for the link to that review, Keys.
Keys says
You are welcome.
Tony Naim says
Indeed, it is: an advanced state of rot in American academia that produces nothing but garbage. I invite Alan Mikhail ( his family and dear ones) to experience life as non muslims living in an Islamic majority country, under Sharia law. Even though I do not wish this to my worst enemies! Only because he thinks he knows better, let him get a taste of it.
What an ignorant idiot .
mortimer says
Yes, let him get a taste of REAL ISLAM in a country that is similar to Islamic Spain.
If Alan Mikhail took his entire family to live in current-day AFGHANISTAN, he would experience backwardness and instability quite SIMILAR to what Spanish Christians experienced under Umayyad subjugation of Spain over their 781 years as rulers of the Andalusian CALIPHATE.
I will chip in.
gravenimage says
Mikhail seems to be an old-school orientalist in many ways, who considers the savage Muslim world to be fascinatingly “exotic”.
gravenimage says
Revisionist History: Columbus Discovered America Because He Hated Muslims, LA Times Claims
…………
Just ludicrous. Constantinople’s fall to Islam in 1453 meant that Christians could no longer easlily travel to Anatolia or east of there–but this was not Christian hatred of Muslims, but Muslim hatred of Christians.
Alan Mikhail also grotesquely claims that vicious Ottoman Sultan Selim I “made the modern world”. Yeah, ignore the Renaissance, you ‘filthy Infidels’…
mortimer says
Yes, the hatred of Islam towards the dirty kufaar is a canonical teaching of Islam that most Westerners and probably Alan Mikhail do not know of. This lacuna of knowledge puts his misleads him into whitewashing Islam and blaming the victims of Islam, instead of blaming ‘AL WALAA WAL BARAA’ … the hidden motivational teaching of Islamic apartheid and Dhimmitude. ..
gravenimage says
+1
mortimer says
Alan Mikhail is writing bad history … trying to force the facts into his personal political agenda.
After 781 years of Islamic occupation, Spain finally set itself free from Islamic subjugation in 1492. The Muslims’ great persecutions, massacres ,destruction of churches, genocides of the indigenous Spaniards and ethnic cleansings (which sent many thousands of Spanish Christians from southern Spain to Dhimmitude in North Africa) were finally over. Spain breathed a sigh of relief. Peace at last.
Columbus’s voyage to the New World had nothing to do with the understandable resentment of Islam in Spain after 781 years Islamic invasion. To say so is simply untrue and bad history. Columbus was a Renaissance man from free Italy and his interests lay in the search for new knowledge. Columbus was one of the finest sailors of history and his passion was to navigate. Columbus did in geography what Copernicus (a contemporary) did in astronomy.
The political respite from fighting Andalusian Muslim rulers allowed the Spanish crown to invest in research of new financial opportunities overseas. The Spanish crown was no doubt eager to replenish its treasuries ruined by constant war with the Muslims.
As an antidote to Alan Mikhail’s politicized history, read “The Myth of the Andalusian Paradise: Muslims, Christians, and Jews under Islamic Rule in Medieval Spain” by Darío Fernández-Morera, ISI Books, 376 pp.”
It’s a shame this tendency to undercut the brilliance of Columbus is being promoted at a once-excellent American university.
Doomer says
Columbus’ life is a mystery, the idea he was Italian has been rejected by some scholars. The evidence suggests,including DNA testing, he was Portuguese. And a double-agent for the Portuguese king
and the discovery of a secret document that gave Columbus the protection of the Portuguese king.
It appears the Portuguese had secretly sailed west decades before and knew about North and South America. For example, Corte-Real,Portuguese, is believed to have reached New Foundland,giant island next to Canada, in 1472,
and called it Terranova do bacalhau, New Land of the Codfish,and reported it was full of the fish bacalao,or cod.
Columbus named an island Cuba, and there is only one other Cuba in the world,in Portugal, and the he named,if I remember correctly, 40 islands in the Caribbean ,
with the Spanish equivalents of 40 Portuguese towns , that all exist near Cuba,Portugal.
The Portuguese apparently knew there was no way to get to China sailing west because of the American continent as a barrier, and that there were no great cities, civilizations, on the coast, for trade.
The idea was to prevent Spain from trying to sail around Africa, and get the spices of India. Columbus would sail west for Spain, claim he had reach China. The Portuguese finally sailed around Africa to India in 1499.
At first Columbus’ idea was rejected because the scholars in Spain said,and they were right, that the size of the earth was two times the size given by Columbus. They knew the distance from Spain to China was twice was Columbus claimed.
We also know that Magellan in 1521,who was Portuguese, emigrated to Spain, and became a loyal subject of Spain, and who proposed reaching the Spice Islands in Indonesia,
sailing west for Spain, claimed to have seen a strait , on a chart in the treasury of King Manuel I of Portugal. A strait at the tip of South America, the map showing the Portuguese had sailed around it.Check out,it is from Princeton University:
https://library.princeton.edu/visual_materials/maps/websites/pacific/magellan-strait/magellan-strait-maps.html
Here is a good documentary that gives details,”The Real Life Of Christopher Columbus | The Secrets And Lies Of Columbus | Timeline”
https://youtu.be/u0yoVsZfypQ
mortimer says
Prove it. If it was so secret, it’s almost impossible to prove. It’s rumors.
Doomer says
Well, there are also the two 1493 Papal Bulls ,in Latin, not Spanish or Portuguese, both called
“Inter caetera” (‘Among other [works]’) issued by Pope Alexander VI.
We have the ORIGINAL bulls.
Both those documents give the NAME of Christopher Columbus, but not in a Latinized version,Columbus, but the ORIGINAL name.
And it is in PORTUGUESE, Christopher in old Portuguese, or Cristofom, and
the last name is COLOM, which is the Portuguese way of saying Colon. In Spanish Christopher Columbus is Cristobal Colon, not Cristofom Colom. In both documents, the name written down is a Portuguese one, Cristofom Colom.
In Italian,his name is Cristoforo Colombo, not Colom.
They are different bulls but have the same name “Inter caetera” ,one written on 3 May ,the other one day later, 4 May.
The first bull, Inter caetera, dated 3 May, recognized Spain’s claim to any discovered lands not already held by a Christian prince, and protected Portugal’s previous rights.
The other bull ,also entitled Inter Caetera, dated 4 May, exhorts the Spanish monarchs to spread the faith west from a line drawn “one hundred leagues towards the west and south from any of the islands commonly known as the Azores and Cape Verde”.
Here is a bit of info on Columbus and the Portuguese claim,and has photos of the two papal bulls, with the name, in both documents, as Cristofom Colom:
https://youtu.be/BfX-RbOYwJg
gravenimage says
Doomer, it is no secret that Columbus spent many years in Portugal and married a Portuguese woman. This does not necessarily prove that he was born there and is of Portuguese descent.
Most evidence points to his having been born in Genoa on the Italian peninsula–although there have been vague claims that he was either Spanish or Portuguese for many years now.
Certainly, he went to sea at an early age–in his writings Columbus claims the age of 10.
Doomer says
Yes that is true. He could have adopted a Portuguese name.
The good news is they really have Columbus’ DNA, confirmed by comparing it with his descendants. In Italian Colombo means ”Pigeon”.
Due to new technology we now have Columbus’ DNA in sufficent amount to finally discover who he really was. The whole world needs to know. It demands it.
True,Dias went around Africa in 1488, but it was 11 years later,in 1499, that the Portuguese reached India.
In those 11 years Spain could have sent ships to India also, and established commercial treaties with India. But supposedly discovering China sailing west, it would have prevented Spain from trying to reach India by sailing east. Since Spain had already reached ”China”.
And by coincidence,the next year,in 1500, the second Portuguese expedition,13 ships, to India, by Cabral, according to him, was blown west by the winds,
and landed in South America, claimed it for Portugal, and then went to India.
Blown by the winds thousands of miles west of Africa. I think they already knew about South America.
In 2011 Portuguese historian Manuel Rosas wrote a book stating he thinks Columbus was,” the son of King Vladislav III of Poland, who disappeared at the Battle of Varna in 1444.
But, according to Rosa, Vladislav III survived the battle and went into exile to Madeira island, where he was known as “Henry the German.” In Madeira, the exiled Polish king fathered Columbus by his wife Senhorinha Annes, a Portuguese noblewoman.”
https://portuguese-american-journal.com/manuel-rosa-surprising-revelations-about-columbuss-true-identity-interview/
They never found the body of King Vladislav, it would have been easy,since he had SIX fingers on one of the FEET. With the DNA evidence we can find out if he was related to the Jagiellon dynasty.
And here,in reference to a 1450 visit of Madeira by Polish monks,
https://www.ancient-origins.net/history-famous-people/two-new-theories-hotly-debated-origins-christopher-columbus-005478
”They ignore the most important proof for it – a note from monks who traveled from Poland to Madeira.
These men noted that they met the king, alive and well, on the island. He apparently told them that he would not go back to Poland…but was he Columbus’ father?
To confirm it, DNA tests are necessary. Unfortunately, most of the Polish people do not want to exhume the family of Wladyslaw, so it is impossible to check if the theory by Manuel Rosa true.”
DNA testing will tell us who he really was, the whole world needs to kno
gravenimage says
Doomer, the Ottomans displayed King Vladislav’s head on a pike–generally pretty decisive clue that someone is dead, sadly.
And there have been other myths surrounding this monarch, including his having turned up in the Holy Land. Myths about those who died tragically surviving are rife–none of this about the Polish king is plausible.
And I very much doubt that he had six fingers on one foot–six toes, perhaps, but six fingers seems especially unlikely.
Then, it would be possible to see from his DNA whether Columbus was Polish, whether any of the Polish royal family is exhumed or not.
And the implication that the Portuguese had heard nothing about the existance of what would become known as the Americas in 1500–during Columbus’ *third voyage*, is just silly.
gravenimage says
Mortimer, my understanding is that DNA analysis of Columbus’ (likely) remains is ongoing, and that no conclusions have been released yet. Comparisons with descendants of Portuguese royalty has suggested that there is a link, but to my knowledge this has not been confirmed as yet.
Then, even if it is the case that all claims of contact with America prior to Coumbus are accurate–Irish monks, Norse explorers, Basque fishermen, etc etc–a bit iffy in any case–the claim that anyone in Europe at the time knew that North and South America presented a continuous barrier of 8,700 miles north to south is simply not accurate. *No one* at the time knew this.
Then, Columbus presented his proposal to the Portuguese king before he approached Spain. This makes no sense if you believe that his proposal to Spain was to prevent their sailing around the southern coast of Africa.
There is another problem with this claim, as well–Portuguese exolorer Bartolomeu Dias actually sailed around the Cape of Good Hope in 1488–four years before Columbus’ voyage, So he didn’t need to distreact the Spanish so that this could happen.
I can see no indication that Columbus made his watershed voyage in order to mess with Spain–and if he had, then the joke was certainly on him, since this led to Spain’s ruling a huge chunk of the world for centuries, and holding direct influence still widely felt today.
OLD GUY says
Columbus was dang smart and it worked until Biden came Along. Open borders is the end of a country and it’s society and culture.
JCA Reid says
Many years ago i read this in a History Book that the reason why Columbus sailed West to reach the East Indies was to avoid the middle East & the Muslims with their Banditry. After all, their “Religion” specifically makes it clear to rob from non-Muslim Traders. Only seen this once though.
gravenimage says
This may have been “Mohammed and Charlemagne” by Henri Pirenne–a fine and important book. Seeking a route to the Indes that had been cut off by the Ottoman Turks was definitely the main motive.
Jim says
As Mortimer explains, Spain kicked Islam out of Spain after some 700 years. It was the King and Queen of Spain who funded Columbus. They had the money to do this because they no longer had to pay for large armies. This “history professor” is not qualified to be the chair of the history department, nor is he qualified to teach on the subject. Lincoln had it right when he said that he learned that “ignorance is no obstacle to advancement.”
gravenimage says
This is true–that Spain funded this world-changing voyage *the very year* that they freed themselves from Islam is no coincidence.