The Moors Declined Due to Economic Competition with the Holy Roman Empire (satire)

I once checked the genetic map for Spain. It turns out that the ancestry of Spanish men were likely to be Greek, Berber, and what used to be called Moorish, along with a few Normans, Carthaginians, and Visigoths.

On the female side, the mitochondria assaying shows a predominantly Western European gene-pool e.g. Christian Hispanics (of Norman and Visigoth ancestry) sealing trade deals with the Moors by marrying off their daughters to predominantly Berber and a few Arabic Muslims.

Indeed, Spain and a part of France, and Sicily was conquered by the Moors, who soon settled into fiefdoms, only to conquer their neighboring Moorish governor if he kept his borders unguarded.

Once the Moors began to encroach on the Christian northlands of the Iberian peninsula, Christian knights in France were beseeched by emissaries of the Pope to rid Hispania of the Moors.

However, during the Moorish domination of Hispania, increased trade led to alliances between Christians, Jews and Muslims. IMO the reason for the Inquisition was originally to ensure piety and forced Christian conversion, so that the Pope's coffers were full of the faithful's tithes (and property when they died without heirs).

So the Colonial Period of Europe was probably due to economic competition with the Muslims. And it is not preposterous to have the Muslims discover America first.

Once the Catholics had the Moors leaving Spain, they at first let the Moors alone, being told they would give up Islam for Christianity along with a few of the Jews. In the end, a mass exodus of Jews left Spain for Constantinople and Asia Minor.

Meanwhile the Moors were forced to accept Christian or be burned at the stake after being tortured by the Inquisitors from Rome, who were Jesuits.

So, it was not just the lust for gold in China that led to Colonial powers of Europe sailing west. It was also the fact that a lot of gold left with the vanquished Moors, and Spain became somewhat impoverished just as the Dark Ages were falling.

Without the Moorish presence, the King and Queen of Portugal had to send explorers to find more gold to rebuild Spain for Western European tastes.

A pity though. The Moors were a cash cow for Europe but the Pope's anti-Muslim bigotry led to the rise of the Plague, since the storehouses of grain probably had less cats keeping the rats at bay due to the wars that drove the Moors out.

Now today, the average European is ignorant of Muslim culture and its history in the Levant and Arabia. So are a great many Americans, whose hatred is unfounded and much Islamophobia is concentrated among neo-conservative religious folk some of whom can barely read science or do their income taxes. As for any sense of history, even their GOP leaders are simpletons about Arab history in the Middle East.

In my opinion, this is probably why 911 happened: to smarten the West up to the fact that it was not Muslims who bombed the World Trade Centres but Islamists and al Qaeda who have made a mockery of Islam by using Salafi and Wahhabi Islam rhetoric in perverted ways.

Meanwhile, these political ideologists are not truly religious but fanatical about Sharia without any compassion or mercy whatsoever. If the descendant of Moors were more organized, then they'd teach the fanatical terrorists about what real Sharia actually is. But alas! They are in an unofficial civil war in Liberia, or dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood west of Tripoli to Morocco.

Indeed, the Arab Spring has yet to bear any fruit of democracy, due to the perversion of Salafi and Wahhabi ideology into its political ideology consisting of being so pious everyone else is an unbeliever and only worthy of death.

Qatar, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia are their bankrollers, and America and Canada their propagandists.

Portugal in 2001: Decriminalizes Drugs

In 2001 Portugal made drug abuse a medical and social problem rather than a legal one.

Portugal has forced back the frontiers of drug liberalization in Europe with a law which, at a stroke, decriminalizes the use of all previously banned narcotics, from cannabis to crack cocaine.

The new law, which came into effect on 1 July, takes a socially conservative country with traditional Catholic values far ahead of much of northern Europe, including Britain, in treating drug abuse as a social and health problem rather than a criminal one.

Vitalino Canas, the drug tsar appointed by the Socialist prime minister, Antonio Guterres, to steer the law into place, said yesterday that it made more sense to change the law than ignore it, as police forces do in Holland, parts of Swizerland, and now experimentally in the Brixton area of London.

"Why not be clear about this, and change the law to recognize that consuming drugs can be an illness or the route to illness?" he said. "America has spent billions on enforcement but it has got nowhere. We view drug users as people who need help and care."

He admitted that Mr Guterres was taking a risk, but said Portugal had no real choice. The police had stopped arresting suspects and the courts were throwing out cases against users rather than apply legislation which sent them to prison for up to three years.

Margarida Costa, 35, a skeletal addict who has found a home at a drug treatment hostel, said prison had never helped her. "In fact, I started taking drugs in jail," she said. "You could get everything you wanted in there, every day."

Still emaciated from 10 years of heroin abuse and living rough, she is on methadone and preparing to return to living with her mother. -- http://opioids.com/legal/index.html

Stop the Drug War reports:

In the latest sign of European rejection of US and UN-sponsored repressive anti-drug strategies, Portugal's new drug laws went into effect on July 1. Under the laws, debated last summer and finalized in November, possession of personal amounts of any drug is no longer a crime. Instead, possession of up to a ten-day supply of any drug will be treated as an administrative matter rather than a criminal offence. Persons caught possessing drugs will have their stashes confiscated and be referred to a commission of doctors, lawyers, and social workers who will decide if they need counselling or treatment. Previously, persons caught with drugs faced up to a year in jail.

Drug trafficking remains a crime, although dealing to pay for a drug habit will be considered a mitigating factor.

United Nations International Drug Control Board (INCB) officials immediately lashed out at the new law. INCB Deputy Head Akira Fujino told the Swedish newspaper Svenska Dagbladet: "There is a clear trend in Western Europe to decriminalize use and possession of narcotics and to view addicts as patients. But that seldom solves the addict's personal problems nor reduces the demand for narcotics," complained the prohibition bureaucrat. "Other countries that have chosen a liberal approach such as special injection rooms, are Switzerland, Germany, Spain and Holland, and we are deeply concerned over this trend."

Citing the possibility of a spill-over effect for the rest of the European Union, Fujino warned that: "The Portugese law can trap more 'at risk' into dependency as well as increase the misery of those already addicted. The law, in effect, says that it's OK to consume narcotics."

Portuguese officials have more concrete concerns. The number of hard drug addicts has escalated over the past decade, and Portugal has Europe's highest HIV infection rate. According to the European Monitoring Center for Drugs and Drug Addiction (http://www.emcdda.europe.eu), Portugal, with a population of ten million, has between 50,000 and 200,000 drug addicts. By contrast, the Netherlands, with 16 million inhabitants and a liberal drug policy, has an estimated 25,000 addicts.

The new law reflects Portugal's turn to harm reduction and away from repression in an effort to blunt the damage from drug prohibition. "The idea is to get away from punishment and move toward care," Portuguese government spokesman Carlos Borges told Reuters.

That Portugal has decriminalized the possession of drugs is apparently not newsworthy in the US. DRCNet has been unable to find any mention of this story in mainstream media outlets in this country.


-- http://stopthedrugwar.org/chronicle-old/193/portugalpossession.shtml