1. Beverly | 07.15.08

I read “The Battle of Lapanto” about 20 or more years ago and up to that time I really had no opinion of Muslims. I din’t know any. I didn’t think ill of them but after reading that book I began studying what I had ignored before. “THe Battle of Lapanto” is not a book for the squimish. Christians and Muslim behaving like beasts. If I remember correctly some Christians felt guilty but not the Moslims. “Empires of the Sea” no doubt is the result of great scholorship. I don’t think I’m up for it. The wins and losses are not like a game of Monoply.

2. Beverly | 07.15.08

I appreciate and admire people spend years researching their subject. I won’t read it because I don’t want to know any more about torture and bloodshed. Call me a sissy.

3. Dan | 07.15.08

In 1095, Pope Urban II shouted ‘Dieu li volt!’ (God wills it!) and with those words unleashed the first of what would turn into several Christian holy wars, or Crusades, to save Eastern Christendom and liberate the Holy Land from the forces of Allah which had wrested control of the region from the Byzantines in the 7th century and were now threatening southeastern Europe. These ‘Wars of the Cross’ continue to be the central historical reference point Islamists use to this very day to inflame Muslim rage against modern ‘Christendom’. But many fail to remember that four centuries before the first Crusade, Muslim armies from North Africa under command of the Ummayad Caliphs in far off Damascus had crossed the Pillars of Hercules (or as they renamed the straits in Arabic- Jabal Tariq- ‘the mountain of the path’, later corrupted into Gibraltar) and invaded Europe. Within two years the Muslim armies which poured over this ‘path’ in the name of Allah had routed the ‘Christian’ armies of the Iberian penninsula, before sweeping over the Pyrenees into France. There they were thrown back by Charlemagne’s grandfather Charles Martel (Karl the Hammer) and his Frankish Knights at Poitiers (also called Tours) in 732.

Having already engulfed most of the provinces of the Byzantine Empire in Asia and the entire Sassanid Empire of Persia, bristling Muslim scimitars originating in the Arab penninsula came to control a great swath of Earth from the Atlantic shores of Europe and Africa through Mesopotamia and deep into Northern India and Central Asia, first absorbing and then replacing native cultures and religions within the all-encompassing State-Religion of Islam. But the European hinterland remained infuriatingly outside their reach, certainly through no lack of effort. For nearly a millennium, first Moor, then Saracen and Barbary pirate, and finally Ottoman Turk waged war on and repeatedly assaulted the fringes of Europe, taking at last the great prize of Consantinople (corrupted into present-day Istanbul) in 1453 before finally being thrown out of Spain in 1492 and hurled back from the gates of Vienna for the last time in 1683 by an army of Germans, Austrians, and Poles, not to return again until this present campaign of Holy Terror. These latter-day Jihadists would do well to remember that for every decade since WWI in which Europeans have meddled in the affairs of the Muslims, imposing dictators and pillaging their oceans of underground oil, the Muslims had meddled in the affairs of Europeans and waged war for a century.

Precipitating the profound turnaround of Islam’s military fortunes from world power to stagnant backwater, the Europeans– having discovered the world was round– had made the Silk Road obsolete by opening sea- trade routes to Eastern and Southern Asia and gaining wholesale market access to the silks, spices, china, and other luxury commodities long sought after by European Emperor and Burgher alike. This was a huge blow to Islam’s fortunes, since the retail profits from the control of this trade had long supplied the Caliphs, Sheikhs and Sultans of the Crescent Moon and Star with all the Western gold they had required for their wars of religious aggression (and economic predation) against any infidel within reach of their slashing, curved swords and light cavalry. Having in effect been leapfrogged, with their middleman skimmings from that main artery of the Medieval Global Economy decreasing year by year, and having very little agriculture or industry for the creation of wealth, the Islamic world fell into long, painful decline, culminating in the breakup of the Ottoman Empire after WW I, followed by the humiliating neo-colonisation of the oil-rich region by the victorious European allies, whose rapidly expanding industrial economies and increasing reliance on the internal combustion engine necessitated a reliable, ever-increasing flood of the newly discovered wonder-fuel.

To maintain certain access to this essential commodity Britain, France, and more recently the U.S., first installed and then supported dictator Princes and puppet Sheikhs in the region, and companies like the Anglo-Persian Oil Co. and the Arabian American Oil Co. became the real governments of these new ‘nations’ with their clumsily drawn borders laid down by European bureaucrats with rulers, protracters, and compasses, facilitating first our easy access to, and eventually our dependence on, the black gold lying beneath the shifting dunes once trod only by reptiles, camels and bedouin. Indeed, Winston Churchill himself, Lord Admiral of the Royal Navy, took grand advantage of England’s having leveraged control over Iran’s petroleum stores from a playboy Shah in 1908, and oversaw the refitting of the British fleet from coal burning boilers to oil power in the years prior to the war, boasting afterwards that the British navy had floated to victory over the Germans “on a sea of Persian oil”.

Since that time, active suppression of all popular movements for political autonomy and national control of these valuable economic resources by the peoples of the region has been engaged in by Western powers, the most famous incident probably being the U.S. orchestrated, C.I.A. implemented overthrow of the democratically elected government of the western educated, Liberal-Democratic nationalist Mohammed Mossadegh in Iran in 1953, who has the dubious honor of having been the first and last democratically elected Prime Minister of that ancient nation before it’s descent into Islamic Republican dictatorship under Khomenie and the present day Mullahs. This undermining of all attempts at achieving popular sovereignty by democratic means in these states created a pressure-cooker situation in which Western politicians came to be seen as hypocrites, and Western political models came to be seen with derisive scorn, while homegrown, Islamicist solutions have been turned to instead.

It may be debated as to whether or not democracy along Western lines would ever have been possible among Muslims, for whom separation of ‘church’ and state is a foreign concept– condemned in the Koran, while Christ told his followers to ‘render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, and unto God what is God’s’. But certainly now, after sixty years of Israeli occupation and the many coups and wars the West has forced upon the Muslim people, there is very little chance that such experiments with our form of democracy will ever be attempted there again, as it once was in Iran. The conclusion which must be reached among Westerners, is that to the Muslims Sharia law is democracy. However draconian such measures as stoning, beheading, disfigurement, and the suppression of womens’ rights might appear to the West, they are seen as logical and just to the Muslims. Therefore, the only solution to the problems between the West and the Islamic world is to get off oil, develop alternative fuels, bomb all the pipelines, sink all the tankers, leave the region, and never return.

4. Beverly | 07.18.08

Thank you, Dan. I’m old enough to remember hot humid summers where the only relief was to fan ourselves with anything handy and drink iced tea if we were lucky enough to have a refrigerator or even electricity. As bad as that may sound I agree with you that we must rid ourselves of our dependency on oil and the people who own it and who hate us and who want us all dead. Over the years my sense of protection has been in knowing that our Heavenly Father is a whisper away and that I don’t need a car and that I can live on beans and cornbread and enjoy it if need be. We all can reduce our use of oil if only by a little bit, can’t we? A little bit by hundreds of millions is a whole lot.

5. Mac | 07.28.08

Beverly,

I am also old enough to remember hot humid summers with nothing but a fan and a cool drink. But unlike you I have also lived and worked in the Middle East and have traveled throughout the area - from Morocco to Oman - and never once did I feel like the locals hated me or wanted me dead. They dislike (hate if you prefer) the policies of he US government which has cause them tremendous grief but as a rule they like the people who accept them as human beings and fellow travelers on this earth. I also agree that some of their beliefs under the, Sharia law are barbaric. However, in the US, crime is a more prevalent than in those countries because in the US if you have enough money you can buy your way out of almost anything with good lawyer. In Muslim countries that is not the case. There, the assurance of the penalty is enough to prevent most of the crimes.

Getting rid of our dependence on oil is a very good thing - we need to in order to save the environment and protect the future of the US and the rest of the world.

6. Jim Hannington | 07.30.08

Ideology. Empires. Battles.

Are we indeed doomed to repeat history ?

Am I the only one that sees the common threads ?

You can change the names, times, places, and geography and the outcome is the same over and over again. We need an enlightened sense of self to reach the next level of heightened conscience that we have been on for the last few thousand years.

Times are a changing….Time for a new prophe ? Or fullfillment of the old ones ? Are we doomed to continue repeating history. I would like to break this current repeating cycle of “historical gridlock”.