The Muslims conquered the Iberian peninsula, but as they pushed forward into southern France, their advance was halted at Poitiers by Charles Martel in 745 A.D., thus keeping all of Western Europe except for that Iberian peninsula safe from Muslim conquest. This could, however, not prevent incessant Muslim attacks on coastal villages, especially along the coasts of Italy and France, though such attacks also reached as far as Ireland (the raid on the village of Baltimore in 1631, in which everyone was seized and taken back, as slaves, to Algiers) and, in one famous case, the Muslim corsairs reached as far as Iceland, resulting in the kidnapping and enslavement of the entire population of Grindavik in 1627 by Muslims from Algiers and Salé. The Muslims vandalized and destroyed the Christian villages, and seized their inhabitants, bringing them back to North African shores. The men were used as galley slaves, as laborers on construction sites, and as house slaves, while the women and girls became sex slaves of their Muslim masters. The most famous of those Christian slaves in North Africa was Cervantes, who was held in Algeria for five years, working as a house slave, until he could be ransomed.
How many people in the Western world today know that Muslim pirates managed to kidnap and enslave more than a million people taken to North Africa from their European coastal villages, where unless ransomed had to spend their lives as slaves of the Muslims, as revealed in Giles Milton’s study White Gold? Alas, very few.
Hugh Fitzgerald
"There are times when a people tolerate an evil for so long that they cease to recognize its enormity. The evil acquires procedures, professional language, political constituencies, legal protections and respectable explanations. Eventually bloodshed receives a clinical name, partiality becomes public policy, and injustice—once sufficiently regulated—begins to look almost ordinary."
-- Bill Evans
The @EU_Commission met today with Meta & TikTok on the situation in Ceuta.
"Platforms must act decisively in keeping the integrity of the digital space, in particular during crisis situations. Monitoring must increase, cooperation with fact-checkers to be strengthened."
What has social media been commanded to do? Cover up the fact that 72,000 military aged males invaded Spain over a two day period? Spin the story? Hire fact checkers who say, "Don't believe the misinformation. It was only 72 migrants." What were the orders given to social media regarding the Hungarian election of 2026? What orders are being given to the new puppet government of Hungary by the EU?
In a new book, two New York Times writers describe an interview in which Trump had an aide bring out a two-page list of the most powerful leaders in history — Genghis Khan, Attila the Hun, Julius Caesar, Napoleon, Stalin, Mao, Hitler — and argued he’s more powerful than any of them. The most powerful man, he told them, ever to walk the face of the earth.
Why would he want any association with these genocidal tyrants?
"Do not be deceived: "Bad company corrupts good morals."
Become sober-minded as you ought, and stop sinning; for some have no knowledge of God. I speak this to your shame."
I Corinthians 15:33-34