VMI Conference Shows ‘Cities of Light’ to Glamorize Jihad Conquest of Spain

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.”  Then we followed the money trail behind the Virginia Military Institute’s “East Meets West” conference, leading to  the real administrators of the conference grant – advisory committees from the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Jordan.  And we exposed the “Out of Cordoba” film to be shown at the conference, backed by the usual Saudi money as well as Muslim Brotherhood-associated funders like the Holy Land Foundation terrorism finance trial’s unindicted co-conspirator, the Islamic Society of North America, and the International Institute of Islamic Thought.

Now let’s look at the second movie to be shown at the conference – “Cities of Light,” a “renactment” of the debunked myths underlying this thoroughly discredited Virginia Military Institute conference.  Below, a screenshot from the trailer showing a representative scene, Crusaders chasing a little boy:

As this scene and others show, “Cities of Light”  (2007) is a reflexively anti-Christian “re-enactment documentary.”  This is “history” as a Sword-and-Sorcery-and-Shariah, made-for-TV movie.

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,   the civilian Cordoba martyrdom protests for freedom of speech and religion, and ruinous taxation from the jizyah tax on non-Muslims, a tax paid by the vast majority of the people for the luxury of the few elites – that “Golden Age” luxury so celebrated in the film.

In fact, ROTC students at Virginia Military Institute could greatly benefit from the study of the full range of documented history from the Shariah Iberian occupation a thousand years ago.  The enforcement of  Shariah law centuries ago in Spain is a direct parallel to the threat of institutionalized Shariah that Egypt and other countries face today from the  Muslim Brotherhood.  The persecution of  non-muslims a thousand years ago during the Shariah totalitarian occupation is a direct parallel to today’s persecution of non-muslims in Shariah-adherent nations worldwide.

Even stronger parallels echo grimly across the centuries.  The infiltration, intimidation and simple bribery of Christian and Jewish dhimmi elites a thousand years ago is starkly similar to the same tactics used on today’s government officials and media.  And if VMI students and faculty want to understand the dynamics of popular insurrections against occupying powers,  they will find instructive examples in the popular resistance movements against centuries of Shariah totalitarian rule in the Iberian peninsula – for example, the well-documented history (free book download here) of the Martyrs movement in Cordoba in the 850’s.

As George Santayana wrote in The Life of Reason, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”  The goal of the VMI “East meets West” conference is not to remember the Shariah-driven totalitarian past of Cordoba, but to obscure it precisely so that it can be repeated, as soon as possible, in as many nations as possible.

Now, a preview of the movie: VMI students watching “Cities of Light” at the conference will hear that Tariq ibn Ziyad – the first raider into the Iberian peninsula -  “emerges as a Folk Hero, leading his people to a New Land” (that’s a video segment from the film).  And they’ll see crusaders chasing after little children (more video), as “the time of tolerance was lost forever.”  It was produced with support from PBS; consider sending a link to your local Tea Party group, for suggestions for budget cuts.

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 disinformation  – because to question  this propaganda  is, in Shariah terms, to “insult Islam,” or in U.S. government bureaucratic terms, to “violate diversity guidelines.”

Are there no VMI alumni 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 once-respected standards of intellectual honesty and academic rigor and stop this debacle?

And who else is paying for this conference?  See this VMI publication (search on the term “March 23″): “The conference is funded in part from a grant VMI received in 2008 from the U.S. Department of Defense…”

Who are the other funders?