VMI Conference Shows 'Cities of Light' to Glamorize Islamic Conquests

Previously, Patrick Poole reported on an upcoming conference at the Virginia Military Institute celebrating the Islamic invasion and brutal 781-year occupation of Spain entitled “711-2011: East meets West“, and then on the cover-up when they changed “celebrated” to “commemoration.” And then we followed the money trail behind the Virginia Military Institute’s “East Meets West” conference, a trail leading to the real administrators of the conference grant – advisory committees from the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Jordan. To top that off, we exposed the “Out of Cordoba” film that will be shown at the conference, backed by Saudi and Muslim Brotherhood-associated funders like the Islamic Society of North America and the International Institute of Islamic Thought.

Now, as we investigate the second movie to be shown at the conference – “Cities of Light,” let’s look at the debunked myths underlying this thoroughly discredited Virginia Military Institute debacle.

“Cities of Light” (2007) is a reflexively anti-Christian “re-enactment documentary.” This is the kind of re-enacted historical narrative that plays like a bad Sword and Sorcery made-for-TV movie on the Science Fiction channel, only here with a Muslim Brotherhood-influenced propaganda twist. History as “Xena: Warrior Princess” with burkas and scimitars.

Here’s the spin from their website:

Over a thousand years ago, the sun-washed land of southern Spain was home to Jews, Christians, and Muslims, living together and flourishing. Their culture and beliefs intertwined, and the knowledge of the ancients was gathered and reborn. Here were the very seeds of the Renaissance.

But this world too quickly vanished … Greed, fear, and intolerance swept it away. Puritanical judgments and absolutism snuffed out the light of learning. Within a few centuries, the fragile union of these people dissipated like smoke. The time of tolerance was lost, forever.

Well, actually, the time of tolerance as they describe it never existed, debunked repeatedly by such highly-regarded scholars as Mark Cohen in Under Crescent and Cross, Bernard Lewis in The Jews of Islam, Ibn Warraq and Andrew Bostom in The Legacy of Islamic Anti-Semitism, and Bat Ye’or in The Dhimmi: Jews and Christians Under Islam. Instead, the conquered Iberian cities knew centuries of savage warfare and genocide, guerrilla resistance movements and the civilian Cordoba protest martyrdoms (protests for their right to free speech and religion), and ruinous taxation from the jizya tax on non-Muslims, a tax on the majority that paid for the luxury of the few, that luxurious “Golden Age” so celebrated in the film.

In fact, for the ROTC students at Virginia Military Institute, the study of what actually happened during those centuries could be instructive; the use of the Shariah then parallels the threat that Egypt and other countries face today, from the imposition of the Islamic State by the supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood; and today’s persecution of non-muslims in Islamic states is a simple continuation of the persecutions during the Islamic Iberian occupation centuries ago.

Even stronger parallels across the centuries: the infiltration, intimidation and simple bribery of Christian elites 1000 years ago is starkly similar to the same tactics used on today’s government officials and media. And for understanding the dynamics of popular insurrections against occupying powers, you just can’t beat the popular resistance movements against centuries of Islamic totalitarian rule. The well-documented history (free book download here) of the Martyrs movement in Cordoba in the 850’s is well worth the study of VMI faculty and students.

But instead, they’ll be told that Tariq ibn Ziyad – the first raider into the Iberian peninsula – “emerges as a Folk Hero, leading his people to a New Land.” And they’ll see crusaders chasing after little children, as “the time of tolerance was lost forever.”

Worst of all: the organizers of this conference, still scheduled for March 23-25 at the VMI Center for Leadership and Ethics, may impose the political correctness that pervades our military forces and intelligence community. The Virginia Military Institute cadets and faculty will have to sit silent and to submit to this tripe – because to question this propaganda is, in Shariah terms, to “insult Islam,” or in bureaucratic terms, to “violate diversity guidelines.”

Are there no VMI alums or donors or board members who can intervene? Are there no Virginia state officials – VMI is a public college – who have standing to stop this travesty? Are there no VMI faculty who can assert VMI’s standards of intellectual honesty and academic rigor and stop this debacle?