Karen Armstrong, long famous for her description of Muhammad as the consummate “peacemaker” who “brought together the warring tribes of Arabia,” has assumed the mantle, yet again, not of the Prophet, but of the Prophet’s defender. In an article in The Guardian she retells in her inimitable fashion the story of European Christendom’s relations with Islam and […]
Wikipedia, Karen Armstrong, and Me
Wikipedia now has 55 million separate articles. It would be churlish to complain about them all. Some of them are very good, in fact; for example, the entry on the Russian playwright Alexander Griboyedov, whose Woe From Wit I studied, line by line, in Moscow, with a teacher at Patrice Lumumba University (I believe I […]
Hugh Fitzgerald: Apologists for Islam and History
Apologists for Islam are a varied bunch – some reveal ignorance, others deploy deliberate taqiyya – but all play fast and loose with history. Here are three examples: Karen Armstrong on the Expulsion of the Moors In 1492, the year that is often said to inaugurate the modern era, three very important events happened in Spain. […]
Robert Spencer in FrontPage: Imam Joe Biden Schools an Infidel
In FrontPage I discuss the latest absurdity from Joe Biden: The courageous ex-Muslim human rights activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali recently recounted that at a speech in Washington not long ago, she met Vice President Joe Biden. Biden seized the opportunity to tell her that “ISIS had nothing to do with Islam.” Hirsi Ali politely disagreed, whereupon Biden […]
Maher on likening of criticism of Islam to Nazi Jew-hatred: “Beyond stupid”
Maher answers this claim ably: “Jews weren’t oppressing anybody. There weren’t 5,000 militant Jewish groups. They didn’t do a study of treatment of women around the world and find that Jews were at the bottom of it. There weren’t 10 Jewish countries in the world that were putting gay people to death just for being […]