Traditional Tradesman
2 min readAug 30, 2017

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Again, my preference is to concentrate on our problems today rather than debate about who’s to blame for the sins of history, but when you say things like this, you’re certainly presenting as fact something that’s, at best, a half truth. Many Jews were expelled from Israel by the Romans in around 60 C.E., and then others continued to migrate out of the area thereafter, well before Islam came into existence. See, e.g., https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/24d156/were_the_jews_actually_exiled_by_romans_or_is_it/. Yes, it’s true that the Jews were again expelled by the Muslims in 641, but the history of Jews and Muslims thereafter is complex. For instance, as this Wikipedia article describes:

Jews under Islamic rule were given the status of dhimmi, along with certain other pre-Islamic religious groups.[1] Though second-class citizens, these non-Muslim groups were nevertheless accorded certain rights and protections as “people of the book”. During waves of persecution in Medieval Europe, many Jews found refuge in Muslim lands.[2] For instance, Jews expelled from the Iberian Peninsula were invited to settle in various parts of the Ottoman Empire, where they would often form a prosperous model minority of merchants acting as intermediaries for their Muslim rulers.

So I think it’s a mistake to engage in broad, sweeping, simplistic characterizations of history (or of religions). Life for Jews in Islamic lands was no picnic, but it wasn’t a picnic in medieval Europe either, and there’s a good argument to be made that Muslims were more tolerant than Christians throughout much of that period.

In any event, the more important point is that I think you and I agree that mainstream Islam today is problematic in many of its beliefs, and we also seem to agree that we need to stop wasting trillions on Middle Eastern interventions that just ramp up tensions, and we need to stop dropping bombs that end up blowing up in our face, and I think we also agree on the need to be much more careful in the way we approach our immigration policy and insisting on assimilation of immigrants into American culture. Whether or not this will solve the problem is uncertain, but I don’t think it can make it any worse.

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Traditional Tradesman
Traditional Tradesman

Written by Traditional Tradesman

I am an attorney specializing in general commercial litigation. I am a writer specializing in general non-commercial poetry, fiction, drama, essays & polemics.

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