Whoa!  It turns out that Muhammad Youssef Abdulazeez is a Muslim name.  Who’da thunk? 

It gets worse.  The Chattanooga shooter was a diligent student of the Qur’an and the Hadith.  He’s described as becoming increasingly “devout” recently, going to mosque each Friday and poring over the teachings of the Prophet.  Shortly before he killed four Marines and a Navy sailor, Abdulazeez texted a friend a Hadith verse: “whoso ever shows enmity to a friend of mine, then I have declared war against him.”  On July 13 he set up a Wordpress blog and posted two entries.  The first one concludes: “We ask Allah to make us follow their [the companions of Mohammed’s] path. To give us a complete understanding of the message of Islam, and the strength to live by this knowledge, and to know what role we need to play to establish Islam in the world.”

Apparently poor Abdulazeez was not acquainted with the research of the Islamic scholar George W. Bush.  All he had to go by was what he’d read in the Qur’an and Hadith.  And his knowledge of the history of Islam.

It’s a bloody history.  Islam is a religion of conquest.  Twice Muslims have brought fire and sword to Europe.  In the 7^th and 8^th centuries they poured out of Arabia, conquered the Christian Middle East, crossed Christian North Africa, and invaded Spain.  By middle of the 8^th century, all that remained unoccupied in Al-Andalus was the small kingdom of Asturia.  Muslims then conducted raids, razzias, deep into France, until famously repulsed by Charles Martel at Tours in 732. 

Hindus were not so fortunate.  The razzias of Mahmud of Ghazni in the 11^th century resulted in the conquest of most of Southeast Asia.  (Attacks had begun promptly in the 7^th century, but without Mahmud’s successes.)  Countless Hindu temples were destroyed and millions killed.  Population decreased by about 80 million in the five centuries after 1000.

In the 14^th century, Muslims tackled Europe again.  This time it was the Turks who invaded Christendom, conquering and then ruling the Balkans for nearly 500 years.  They, too, were stopped in famous battles, in 1529 outside the gates of Vienna and again in 1683.

Meanwhile, the Mediterranean remained a Muslim lake.  This had disrupted commerce in 7^th and 8^th centuries and ushered in a true Dark Age.  Worse, for over a millennium, Muslim slavers not only captured travelers, but raided towns along the Italian, French, and Spanish coasts, depopulating extensive areas.  Between the 16^th and 19^th centuries alone, over a million Europeans were seized.  This is a paltry number compared to the 12-18 million or more Africans enslaved by Muslims, and untold numbers of Indians.

The Islamic corsairs flew the flag of Islam.  This was adopted under the Ottomans, and there were many variants.  But for Southern Europeans, it was a far more ominous sight than the Jolly Roger.  The star and crescent was also flown by troops who entered villages in the Balkans, selected children they fancied, and shipped them off to Constantinople to become slaves of the Sultan.

The flag of slavers?  That rings a bell.  Of course, no version of the star and crescent on a green field flies over any statehouse.  So far.  But they are available on eBay and Amazon.  Both sites have banned sales of the Confederate flag.

We’ve been told the Stars and Bars is a symbol of “hate.”  We’ve been told it’s “divisive” – a word has the same root as “diversity,” which is not only a Good Thing, but the Best Thing.  Go figure.

Maybe we should contact Amazon and eBay and let them know how deeply offensive it is that they are profiting from the sale of a symbol of hate.

Then we can move on to the burka, both symbol and tool of the enslavement of women.  (Manufacturer’s tagline: “when genital mutilation is not enough.”)  The burka, too, is available on Amazon.