"CORDOBA" EXPLAINED

What the Ground Zero, terror sponsoring, Imam  wanted ignorant Americans to believe:

For hundreds of years during the middle ages, Cordoba was the capital of Muslim Spain. During much of its “golden age” from the 8th to 12th centuries, the Cordoba Caliphate witnessed a great flowering of culture, art, and philosophical inquiry amid a remarkable climate of religious tolerance. Religious freedom, while not perfect, was sufficient that many Jewish and Christian intellectuals emigrated to Cordoba, where they lived, wrote and flourished side by side with their Muslim counterparts in a strikingly pluralistic society. The Cordoba name reminds both Muslims and non-Muslims that a great Islamic civilization was once the most open and tolerant of its era.

The Cordoba Caliphate? An Islamic civilization?

That’s right. As Robert Spencer at Jihad Watch pointed out, Rauf has already abandoned the Cordoba name, Ground Zero mega-mosque group ditches name redolent of Islamic supremacism:

The name “Cordoba” has been marketed to gullible Americans as being a place where Muslims, Jews, and Christians lived in harmony and peace, but actually Medieval Muslim Spain enforced the dhimma and systematically oppressed the Jews and Christians, and was the site of a Muslim pogrom against the Jews in the year 1011

Maybe enough people caught on to the name’s bitter irony, and the deceivers decided it was best deep-sixed.

Maybe. Jihad Watch points to an article by Raymond Ibrahim for more detail:

Oddly enough, the so-called “tolerant” era of Cordoba supposedly occurred during the caliphate of ‘Abd al-Rahman III (912-961) – well over a thousand years ago. “Eight hundred years ago,” i.e., around 1200, the fanatical Almohids–ideological predecessors of al-Qaeda–were ravaging Cordoba, where “Christians and Jews were given the choice of conversion, exile, or death.” A Freudian slip on the part of the Cordoba Initiative?

At any rate, the true history of Cordoba, not to mention the whole of Andalusia, is far less inspiring than what Western academics portray: the Christian city was conquered by Muslims around 711, its inhabitants slaughtered or enslaved. The original mosque of Cordoba–the namesake of the Ground Zero mosque–was built atop, and partly from the materials of, a Christian church.

Modern day Muslims are well aware of all this. Such is the true–and ominous–legacy of Cordoba….

More pointedly, throughout Islam’s history, whenever a region was conquered, one of the first signs of consolidation was/is the erection of a mosque atop the sacred sites of the vanquished:

the pagan Ka’ba temple in Arabia was converted into Islam’s holiest site, the mosque of Mecca;

the al-Aqsa mosque, Islam’s third holiest site, was built atop Solomon’s temple in Jerusalem;

the Umayyad mosque was built atop the Church of St. John the Baptist; and

the Hagia Sophia was converted into a mosque upon the conquest of Constantinople.

So, why the name change after touting it as such a model of historical tolerance? Why did Rauf flush his Cordoba explanation down the memory hole prior to announcing his plans for a mosque at Ground Zero?

Then flush the name too?

Screen shot here in case they flush the memory hole down the memory hole.
http://creepingsharia.wordpress.com/2010/08/15/why-is-the-ground-zero-mosque-removing-web-pages-and-changing-its-name/