Hugh Fitzgerald on the suffocating embrace of Islam.

Mr. Fitzgerald describes in heart rending fashion the precise mechanism by which Islam invaded the unfortunate lands of the ancient world and smothered all inquiry, all opposition, and all competing thought, doctrine and belief.

How do you think the Middle East and North Africa Islamized? How do you think Anatolia, or the Empire of Byzantium, with its Greeks and Armenians and Jews, became what it is today, a place where those Greeks and Armenians and Jews still exist, but now they are called “Turks” and are Muslims, and have no memory of what happened before, no awareness, no sense of what must have happened, given the small number of actual “Turks” who arrived, Seljuks and then Ottoman Turks, from out of Asia?

And what do Pakistanis or Bangladeshis think? Do they think , at all, about the circumstances which forced their own ancestors to convert to Islam? What unendurable circumstances, or what direct threats, or what examples of mass murder – 60 to 70 million Hindus were killed during the nearly three centuries of Muslim rule – caused some ancestors -- of Musharraf, and Muhammad Ali Jinnah, and Pinky Bhutto, and the late General Zia, and the poet Iqbal, and every Muslim on the subcontinent, to convert, from being Hindus, or Jains, or (in more recent times, and not frequently) Sikhs, or Buddhists, to becoming, Muslims.

And what of Mohammad Khatami himself? Why do you think Mohammad Khatami is a Muslim? What happened to his own ancestors, the Zoroastrians who – as the great historian of Zoroastrianism Mary Boyce has noted – were so cruelly treated by the Muslims.

Comment to "Khatami: Failure of socialist movements led people to embrace Islam." By Hugh Fitzgerald, Jihad Watch, 8/19/07 (emphasis added).