Saturday, April 17, 2004
Becoming a father gives you a bit of time to think, especially when you are trying to help your newborn daughter to sleep, by carrying her on your shoulder at 2:00am. While carrying my daughter, I was thinking about a question that was posed to me right after the Madrid bombings: Where will they attack next? I tell people that Osama bin Laden is an amateur history buff and when he spoke of Spain, he referred to it as al-Andalus. So you can dust off your history books and look up military defeats of Muslim forces during the medieval and classical times in Europe. You can start your list with France, it had the Battle of Poitiers in A.D. 732, then add Austria, because it had the Battle of Vienna in 1683, finish with Italy because Sicily was occupied for a few hundred years by the Berbers. So there is your list of targets, but add Poland, since they provide the forces that won at Vienna. With the declining population of Europe and the increase of immigrants from Islamic countries, Europe should be a very interesting place for the next few years. For Osama it is just payback time for battles long forgotten by most of the Western world. More information here.
Greg Goebel writes monthly newsletters on science, history, aviation and other interesting subjects at Vector Site. If you want an easy to read but detailed articles on those subjects do drop in.
Greg Goebel writes monthly newsletters on science, history, aviation and other interesting subjects at Vector Site. If you want an easy to read but detailed articles on those subjects do drop in.
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