THE SARACEN TOWER
The Amalfi Coast on the Sorrentine Peninsula south of Naples, Italy, is considered to be the most beautiful coastline in the world (click on Read More for pictures). It is riddled with crumbling stone buildings known as "Saracen Towers."
They were built over a thousand years ago to protect the region from invasions and attacks from "Saracens" - the term Medieval Europe used for Moslems, from the ancient Greek Sarakenoi, the nomad bandit tribes of Arabia. In the centuries before the invention of Islam when all of the Middle East was predominantly Christian, the Sarakenoi developed a fearsome reputation for their raids on monasteries and murdering monks.
This became vastly worse when they acquired a religious rationale for their banditry. They called their new religion Islam, the Arabic word for "submission," claiming it meant submission to their deity Allah - but what it really meant was "unbelievers" submitting to them. And what that meant was they had a religious right to enslave Christians.
Last Sunday, we commemorated the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 Moslem attack on America. The 19 terrorists, most with Saudi visas, murdered 2,977 innocent people in a more grotesque way than any horror movie. It was an unforgivable act of unmitigated evil that traumatized us all.
We continue to deal with the trauma today - and what may help is to place it in a historical context. The examples of Islamic barbarity history provides are legion - so let's focus on that of the Saracen towers.
