- The WTC Jihad Memorial

Victor David Hanson teaches the NRO audience what Galvez has already taught us all right here:

The city was founded by Romans and remained Western in some sense until conquered by Muslim invaders in 711, when it soon became a capital of what Muslims called al-Andalus, the Islamic foothold in southern Europe, the recurrence of which is so nostalgically evoked by bin Laden and Co. The president’s Cairo speech cited Cordoba as a beacon of tolerance during the Spanish Inquisition (“Islam has a proud tradition of tolerance: We see it in the history of Andalusia and Cordoba during the Inquisition”), but that was mostly therapeutic myth-making: Cordoba had been captured in the first wave of the Reconquisita in 1236, and most of its Muslim population had fled, been converted, or forced out more than two-and-a-half centuries before the Inquisition even began.

But even before then, the once-cosmopolitan Cordoba — as handed down from the overtly homosexual and enlightened Al-Hakam II — was already in decline due to serial assassinations, court coups, and increasing Islamic intolerance for freedom of thought and expression outside the boundaries of the Koran.

The Rest at NRO.