Fri, Jun 22, 2007 at 9:30:14 am
How thoroughly has Spain caved in, in the face of Islamic terror attacks and threats to reconquer “Andalusia?”
So thoroughly that the government is actually considering a proposal to give special preference for Spanish citizenship to the descendants of the Muslim invaders.
And notice how Reuters blithely promotes the Islamic view of the Reconquista, ignoring the jihad and invasion, and summing the history up with the ludicrous statement that King Philip III simply expelled 300,000 people, apparently for no reason.
MADRID, June 21 (Reuters) - A call for descendents of Muslims expelled from Spain in the seventeenth century to be given preferential terms for Spanish citizenship has highlighted the country’s uneasy relationship with its Islamic heritage.
The proposal was made at a meeting this week in Cordoba, a city in Andalusia which was the centre of Islamic civilization in the Iberian peninsula during nearly eight centuries of Moorish rule of much of what is now Spain and Portugal.
In 1609, Spain’s King Philip III ordered all Muslims to leave his kingdom, leading to the expulsion of about 300,000 people. Their descendents today mainly live in North Africa and still regard themselves as “Andalusians”, after the old name for Muslim Spain — “Al Andalus.”
Giving them preferential terms for Spanish citizenship would be an act of symbolic reconciliation, said Mansur Escudero, head of Spain’s Islamic Board, the biggest group representing Spanish Muslims.
“The Andalusians who live in North Africa, most of them in Morocco, in Tunisia, in Libya, they’re part of those societies and aren’t going to want to come to Spain,” Escudero said. “It would be more of an emotional, moral gesture, a recognition of an historic injustice,” he told Reuters, adding that some “Andalusian” families still preserved keys to houses they left behind four centuries ago.
UPDATE at 6/22/07 9:44:08 am: