So the "Palestinians" definitely don't have a "right" to a nation, since their "nation" was a concept invented in 1964. There was a place that had been named Palestine by the Romans as punishment for the Jewish revolt when they pushed the Jews out, but there was never any Palestinian nation before or after, until Arab nations--realizing …
So the "Palestinians" definitely don't have a "right" to a nation, since their "nation" was a concept invented in 1964. There was a place that had been named Palestine by the Romans as punishment for the Jewish revolt when they pushed the Jews out, but there was never any Palestinian nation before or after, until Arab nations--realizing they needed to create an entity smaller than Israel so they wouldn't look like the bullies--invented the concept.
Israel was a nation 1,600 years before Islam burst from the Arabian peninsula in the most thorough act of colonialization the world has ever witnessed. There were no Arabs living in "Palestine" until that, but there have been Jews there for three millennia. In fact, Israel has had the same name, the same language, the same religion, etc., for three thousand years. Egypt doesn't come close, inasmuch as it was one of the nations that succumbed fully to the Arab/Islamic colonial takeover.
No, no one has a "right" to a nation as though there were some central authority handing out rights (the above poster relies on twisting the words of others to support an anti-anti-Hamas agenda), but people do have a right to fight for their lives. That's a right that people like this want to deny them.
1. The term "Palestine" as a referent to the area south of Syria and northwest of Egypt is a Greek term that was in use for centuries before the Romans repurposed it (at an unknown time and for unknown reasons).
2. "Israel" seems likely to have been the name of a small and short-lived state in some of what is now northern Israel, which lasted about a hundred years before being conquered by Assyria. In no sense could it be called a "nation" in the modern usage of the term, any more than, say, one of the plethora of tiny kingdoms in Anglo-Saxon England could be (imagine if someone today identified themselves as "Mercian"). it has significantly less historical pedigree than such current non-states as Bactria, Kush, or Media.
3. Calling the Arab conquests "the most thorough act of colonization the world has ever witnessed" is an absurd exaggeration. They engaged in no large-scale massacres, population transfers, or population replacement; rather, they built an empire which was not fundamentally different from the Roman, Sassanid, or Achaemenid empires which had preceded it. The Mongol Ilkhanate engaged in more thorough efforts at wiping out the local populations of the Middle East than the Arabs ever did, though they were unsuccessful at doing so and ultimately were not able to hold on to Palestine. (It should be noted that the Franks of the First Crusade also engaged in mass slaughter of the local populations of Palestine, both Jewish and Arab, as a part of colonizing the region, though again there was a continual Arab and to a lesser extent Jewish presence even after the Frankish conquest.)
4. Arabs have lived continuously in Palestine since the beginning of recorded history. Antiochus III recruited huge numbers of local Arab troops as part of his attempted conquest of Palestine during the Fourth Syrian/Ptolemaic War, which culminated in the battle of Raphia, one of the larger and better-attested battles of the Hellenistic era. They continued to form a major part of the local Seleucid armies right down to the end of that kingdom at the hands of Pompey, including during the Maccabean Revolt, and have continued to live there ever since. In the post-Constantine era, several of the Palestinian Arab tribes were Christianized; this is all very well documented.
5. Said Maccabean Revolt forms a significantly better claim to historicity than do any of the pre-Babylonian Hebrew splinter kingdoms, since it resulted in the foundation of a well documented and unambiguously Jewish state. That state had an independent existence of about a hundred years followed by another hundred or so as a Roman vassal state before being annexed following the Jewish Revolt in the late 60s CE. It's odd that you don't mention it at all. But perhaps that's because it obviously, like Egypt, "succumbed fully to the [Roman] colonial takeover."
6. Modern Hebrew is an invented language formed by reconstructing old Hebrew from old texts and coining new words to describe concepts unknown to the ancient speakers. Hebrew had no native speakers as of roughly 1850 CE; at that time it was a liturgical language comparable to modern Latin, Coptic (which is just liturgical Egyptian-- oops, guess it didn't "succumb fully" after all) or Old Church Slavonic. Even in the Hasmonaean era it was not universally spoken even among Jews; Aramaic was the lingua franca of the region until it was displaced by Greek.
7. The extent to which modern Judaism could be described as the "same religion" as the animal-sacrificing Yahweh cult of the 8th century BCE is debatable, to say the least. It has been subject to the same erosive and avulsive pressures as any other religion, to the point where you've got a real Ship of Theseus problem.
So, now that we've exploded the quasi-mystical bullshit that this poster is attempting to weave into a "nationhood" narrative, we are left with the observation at the end that "people do have a right to fight for their lives." I suppose so, but that provides no moral high ground for Israel vis a vis Palestine, as both groups can lodge the same claim. And if your only method of differentiating one claim to nationhood from another is "Group A is better at killing and driving out its adversaries than Group B," then you can hardly be surprised when people react badly to mass expulsions and murders.
I'm aware of virtually all the historical details you bring up, except the part about modern Hebrew, which I'll take on faith. You marshal a great number of historical facts and are obviously quite adept at arguing a position, but facts are slippery things, as a sophist such as yourself knows, and there are many arguments to be made against your lengthy series of points. But that's a waste of time. What's interesting to me is this intensity of passion on your part, and on that of others, against a group of people who experienced what the Israelis did on October 7. From what you've said here and elsewhere, it's reasonable to guess that you'd say they had it coming, which is a sentiment I find difficult to comprehend. I certainly don't feel anything of the kind toward the Palestinians, and I've never met an Israel supporter who does.
Translation: "I cannot defend my propaganda points when they are exposed as lies, so I will launch an ad hominem attack on the person exposing them in the hopes that character defamation will cause people not to look into the matter carefully."
Of course, in this case you can't even defame me with actual quotes; you have to make up a straw viewpoint and attribute it to me as something that it's "reasonable to guess that I'd say," when of course I would not say (and don't believe) anything of the sort. This is unbelievably asinine behavior, but given that this subthread started with a series of brazen lies about the history of the middle east, I suppose I shouldn't be surprised.
At any rate, add another to the list of worthless hacks that this comment section is infested with.
Just to set the record straight before moving on, I know a good deal more than you think I know about these subjects, and could challenge your points effectively on almost every score, but that's not what I'm here to do. I've spent maybe ten hours of my entire life on boards like this, and probably nine of them have been on this one in the past six weeks, letting off steam about this situation and reading the words of others who feel the same. I'm not an online activist looking for fights, and I don't want to continue this pissing match, but you really do need to learn some history from a different perspective. Your reading of ancient Israel and the spread of Islam is extremely tendentious, as are your arguments regarding claims of nationhood, and while you might say mine are as well, I'm not presenting myself as the Smartest Guy in the Room, Here to Set Everybody Straight. (And btw, modern Hebrew is a *reconstructed* language, not an "invented" one. You made it sound like Esperanto.)
You're the one who cared enough to make a multi-paragraph argument with numerous claims of fact in it, so your sudden observation that actually you're too disinterested to bother defending those claims with the (totally real and very persuasive) evidence you're not telling anyone about is roughly as believable as saying you have a girlfriend in Canada.
I'm sure I'm not the only one put off by your extremely hateful tone, full of accusations and name-calling. That's why I chose not to engage with you. If you had approached this topic in the way of someone who's actually interested in the truth rather than simply scoring points, I would have taken time to respond to your long series of assertions. I'm still not going to spend a lot of time on you b/c you've made it clear that you're just an activist looking for people to take down online, but here are a few responses.
*The renaming of Judea did not occur "at an unknown time for unknown reasons." It was 135 CE, immediately after the Romans suppressed the Bar Kokhba Revolt.
*Another reason why I didn't take your laundry list seriously is that a lot of it seems to be fueled by anti-Semitic propaganda. Hence you diminish the existence of Israel in ancient times, referring to "a small and short-lived state." I'm not sure how its being small disqualifies it, and if you count the period from the establishment of the united kingdom of Israel to the end of the Kingdom of Judah, that's nearly half a millennium.
*Saying that Israel "has significantly less historical pedigree than such current non-states as Bactria, Kush, or Media" is further proof that you simply see Israel as an illegitimate state with no right to maintain its existence. Guess what? If those various non-states had been forcibly removed from a land where they had constructed buildings and created literature, and if they had a continuous history of shared identity, and if they sought to maintain a liberal democracy while being beset on all sides by authoritarian enemies, then yes, I would support them and say they had a right to be taken seriously.
*It's funny how you're so ready to dismiss the history of ancient Israel while according the region's Arab inhabitants the widest possible benefit of the doubt. The reign of Antiochus III was LONG after "the beginning of recorded history," and by that time the Jews had been living in the Levant for centuries. (FYI, some Jews remained during the Captivity, and many more returned in the years following.) So the fact that Arab troops fought for the Greeks is not a very impressive argument for the Palestinians' historic claims on the land they occupy.
*I call the Arab/Muslim conquests the most successful colonial effort in history b/c, in contrast to European colonization, the lands they conquered remain conquered. They also "intermarried" (that's a nice way of putting it) with the populace much more than the Europeans, and thus transformed the literal DNA of the countries they invaded. Morocco, for instance, was not Arab to begin with, but it is now and will be for the foreseeable future. It also wholeheartedly follows the religion brought to it by the Arabs. Where in the world is there a wide swath of former European colonies composed primarily of European descendants who *ardently* follow Christianity to the point of being willing to wage war against the enemies of their religion?
*As for the Mongol example, the reason why they didn't leave any lasting impact was that they didn't have any ideology they were pushing. The spread of Islam took place in an incredibly short period of time, engulfing a huge portion of the known world, and it was driven by the need to spread their religion in accordance with the edicts of the Quran. People could either convert willingly, or they could die. It's true that in some areas (Spain in particular), they still allowed non-believers to maintain a separate existence, but in accordance with Islamic law, those people were second-class citizens. I'm not suggesting the Franks were any good either, and I'm quite aware of the intellectual achievements of medieval Islam. But it was a religion founded by a warrior, and they followed him in a blaze of conquests far more rapid than anything seen since Alexander's shortlived empire.
*About the differences between ancient Judaism and the modern version, are you saying they're not the same religion? Yes, there have been a lot of adjustments and liberalization since the days of Moses, and somehow that's a bad thing?
*The business about modern Hebrew being "invented" took me aback at first and I didn't even know how to respond b/c that sounded so absurd. In fact that characterization is at best victim-blaming, and at worst something much more sinister. Hebrew has far more historical basis as a language than Palestine does as a polity of any kind.
From your past behavior, I'm guessing you'll whip through those points and race back at me with a whole bunch of accusations that I'm a liar or just plain stupid, to which I say, "Please give it a rest." Please try to be a nicer person and not such a combative blowhard. From what I can tell, most BARPod listeners are very open-minded people who don't take kindly to being screamed at, so maybe you'd be happier in one of the many places on the Net that caters to people like you.
I do indeed hate pathological liars and propagandists, of which you are both, so... guilty as charged I guess? Though I have to say, smearing your opponents by accusing them of "anti-semitic propaganda" (a ludicrous assertion; almost none of what I've posted here is even discussed in current-day debates over Israel/Palestine, and I'd love to see you try to prove otherwise) seems pretty hateful to me.
1. As a casual perusal of Wikipedia will make clear, there's a source conflict on the issue of the Roman renaming of Palestine. What there is no conflict at all over is that the term long predates the Roman usage of it.
2. There is very poor evidence that there was ever a "united kingdom of Israel" or, if it existed at all, when it was formed. The actual kingdom of Israel that can be proven to exist from Assyrian records was an almost completely insignificant splinter state whose relevance to modern life is nonexistent.
3. All three of Bactria, Kush and Media were forcibly removed from lands where they had constructed buildings and created literature. That's called "history." Almost all of the states that have ever existed no longer exist.
4. Israel is not a liberal democracy; it's a Jewish supremacist state by its own legislation, and not a democracy at all since a huge percentage of the population it forcibly controls is disenfranchised and stripped of rights.
5. I am well aware that Antiochus III ruled long after the beginning of recorded history. I offered the presence of masses of local Arab levies in his army as merely an especially convenient and well-attested refutation of your absurd lie that Arabs didn't live in Palestine until the Islamic conquests.
6. Again, the idea that Arab colonization of the Middle East was somehow more comprehensive than European settlement of America or Australia is self-refutingly dumb.
7. Arabs absolutely did not require conquered "people of the book" to convert-- anywhere. There have been continual Christian patriarchs in Alexandria and Jerusalem since the Byzantines controlled them (and there's still a patriarchate of Antioch as well, although it has been moved to Damascus due to Antioch itself being abandoned).
8. The Mongols absolutely left a "lasting impact" in the form of the piles of hundreds of thousands of corpses outside Samarkand, Baghdad, Damascus, etc etc etc. Those "intellectual achievements of medieval Islam" were crippled in the process. Then a few generations later Timur (a Muslim!) swept through and did the same thing a second time. Not exactly great for the old intellectual ferment to have all of your scholars slaughtered every hundred years or so. The damage those invasions did to the Mideast was incalculable; one can argue it has still never recovered.
So look at this from my perspective. We have someone who has come onto a thread that he claims to be disinterested in, yet immediately proceeds to spout off lie after lie in the apparent belief that no one will have the historical knowledge to refute them. When called on it by someone who actually does have that knowledge, he immediately retreats into assertions that he really doesn't care, do u? After considerable prodding, he returns with... yet another broadsheet of very easily disprovable lies. What precisely, pray tell, is the appropriate response to this? Politely asking him to please stop? No, thanks. What I want is to make your presence here extremely unpleasant so that you go away. That's how to deal with liars, and it's how I aim to deal with you going forward.
So the "Palestinians" definitely don't have a "right" to a nation, since their "nation" was a concept invented in 1964. There was a place that had been named Palestine by the Romans as punishment for the Jewish revolt when they pushed the Jews out, but there was never any Palestinian nation before or after, until Arab nations--realizing they needed to create an entity smaller than Israel so they wouldn't look like the bullies--invented the concept.
Israel was a nation 1,600 years before Islam burst from the Arabian peninsula in the most thorough act of colonialization the world has ever witnessed. There were no Arabs living in "Palestine" until that, but there have been Jews there for three millennia. In fact, Israel has had the same name, the same language, the same religion, etc., for three thousand years. Egypt doesn't come close, inasmuch as it was one of the nations that succumbed fully to the Arab/Islamic colonial takeover.
No, no one has a "right" to a nation as though there were some central authority handing out rights (the above poster relies on twisting the words of others to support an anti-anti-Hamas agenda), but people do have a right to fight for their lives. That's a right that people like this want to deny them.
Okay, so let's tick off the lies one by one here:
1. The term "Palestine" as a referent to the area south of Syria and northwest of Egypt is a Greek term that was in use for centuries before the Romans repurposed it (at an unknown time and for unknown reasons).
2. "Israel" seems likely to have been the name of a small and short-lived state in some of what is now northern Israel, which lasted about a hundred years before being conquered by Assyria. In no sense could it be called a "nation" in the modern usage of the term, any more than, say, one of the plethora of tiny kingdoms in Anglo-Saxon England could be (imagine if someone today identified themselves as "Mercian"). it has significantly less historical pedigree than such current non-states as Bactria, Kush, or Media.
3. Calling the Arab conquests "the most thorough act of colonization the world has ever witnessed" is an absurd exaggeration. They engaged in no large-scale massacres, population transfers, or population replacement; rather, they built an empire which was not fundamentally different from the Roman, Sassanid, or Achaemenid empires which had preceded it. The Mongol Ilkhanate engaged in more thorough efforts at wiping out the local populations of the Middle East than the Arabs ever did, though they were unsuccessful at doing so and ultimately were not able to hold on to Palestine. (It should be noted that the Franks of the First Crusade also engaged in mass slaughter of the local populations of Palestine, both Jewish and Arab, as a part of colonizing the region, though again there was a continual Arab and to a lesser extent Jewish presence even after the Frankish conquest.)
4. Arabs have lived continuously in Palestine since the beginning of recorded history. Antiochus III recruited huge numbers of local Arab troops as part of his attempted conquest of Palestine during the Fourth Syrian/Ptolemaic War, which culminated in the battle of Raphia, one of the larger and better-attested battles of the Hellenistic era. They continued to form a major part of the local Seleucid armies right down to the end of that kingdom at the hands of Pompey, including during the Maccabean Revolt, and have continued to live there ever since. In the post-Constantine era, several of the Palestinian Arab tribes were Christianized; this is all very well documented.
5. Said Maccabean Revolt forms a significantly better claim to historicity than do any of the pre-Babylonian Hebrew splinter kingdoms, since it resulted in the foundation of a well documented and unambiguously Jewish state. That state had an independent existence of about a hundred years followed by another hundred or so as a Roman vassal state before being annexed following the Jewish Revolt in the late 60s CE. It's odd that you don't mention it at all. But perhaps that's because it obviously, like Egypt, "succumbed fully to the [Roman] colonial takeover."
6. Modern Hebrew is an invented language formed by reconstructing old Hebrew from old texts and coining new words to describe concepts unknown to the ancient speakers. Hebrew had no native speakers as of roughly 1850 CE; at that time it was a liturgical language comparable to modern Latin, Coptic (which is just liturgical Egyptian-- oops, guess it didn't "succumb fully" after all) or Old Church Slavonic. Even in the Hasmonaean era it was not universally spoken even among Jews; Aramaic was the lingua franca of the region until it was displaced by Greek.
7. The extent to which modern Judaism could be described as the "same religion" as the animal-sacrificing Yahweh cult of the 8th century BCE is debatable, to say the least. It has been subject to the same erosive and avulsive pressures as any other religion, to the point where you've got a real Ship of Theseus problem.
So, now that we've exploded the quasi-mystical bullshit that this poster is attempting to weave into a "nationhood" narrative, we are left with the observation at the end that "people do have a right to fight for their lives." I suppose so, but that provides no moral high ground for Israel vis a vis Palestine, as both groups can lodge the same claim. And if your only method of differentiating one claim to nationhood from another is "Group A is better at killing and driving out its adversaries than Group B," then you can hardly be surprised when people react badly to mass expulsions and murders.
Absolute pack of historical lies. Will refute in more detail later.
I'm aware of virtually all the historical details you bring up, except the part about modern Hebrew, which I'll take on faith. You marshal a great number of historical facts and are obviously quite adept at arguing a position, but facts are slippery things, as a sophist such as yourself knows, and there are many arguments to be made against your lengthy series of points. But that's a waste of time. What's interesting to me is this intensity of passion on your part, and on that of others, against a group of people who experienced what the Israelis did on October 7. From what you've said here and elsewhere, it's reasonable to guess that you'd say they had it coming, which is a sentiment I find difficult to comprehend. I certainly don't feel anything of the kind toward the Palestinians, and I've never met an Israel supporter who does.
Translation: "I cannot defend my propaganda points when they are exposed as lies, so I will launch an ad hominem attack on the person exposing them in the hopes that character defamation will cause people not to look into the matter carefully."
Of course, in this case you can't even defame me with actual quotes; you have to make up a straw viewpoint and attribute it to me as something that it's "reasonable to guess that I'd say," when of course I would not say (and don't believe) anything of the sort. This is unbelievably asinine behavior, but given that this subthread started with a series of brazen lies about the history of the middle east, I suppose I shouldn't be surprised.
At any rate, add another to the list of worthless hacks that this comment section is infested with.
Just to set the record straight before moving on, I know a good deal more than you think I know about these subjects, and could challenge your points effectively on almost every score, but that's not what I'm here to do. I've spent maybe ten hours of my entire life on boards like this, and probably nine of them have been on this one in the past six weeks, letting off steam about this situation and reading the words of others who feel the same. I'm not an online activist looking for fights, and I don't want to continue this pissing match, but you really do need to learn some history from a different perspective. Your reading of ancient Israel and the spread of Islam is extremely tendentious, as are your arguments regarding claims of nationhood, and while you might say mine are as well, I'm not presenting myself as the Smartest Guy in the Room, Here to Set Everybody Straight. (And btw, modern Hebrew is a *reconstructed* language, not an "invented" one. You made it sound like Esperanto.)
You're the one who cared enough to make a multi-paragraph argument with numerous claims of fact in it, so your sudden observation that actually you're too disinterested to bother defending those claims with the (totally real and very persuasive) evidence you're not telling anyone about is roughly as believable as saying you have a girlfriend in Canada.
I'm sure I'm not the only one put off by your extremely hateful tone, full of accusations and name-calling. That's why I chose not to engage with you. If you had approached this topic in the way of someone who's actually interested in the truth rather than simply scoring points, I would have taken time to respond to your long series of assertions. I'm still not going to spend a lot of time on you b/c you've made it clear that you're just an activist looking for people to take down online, but here are a few responses.
*The renaming of Judea did not occur "at an unknown time for unknown reasons." It was 135 CE, immediately after the Romans suppressed the Bar Kokhba Revolt.
*Another reason why I didn't take your laundry list seriously is that a lot of it seems to be fueled by anti-Semitic propaganda. Hence you diminish the existence of Israel in ancient times, referring to "a small and short-lived state." I'm not sure how its being small disqualifies it, and if you count the period from the establishment of the united kingdom of Israel to the end of the Kingdom of Judah, that's nearly half a millennium.
*Saying that Israel "has significantly less historical pedigree than such current non-states as Bactria, Kush, or Media" is further proof that you simply see Israel as an illegitimate state with no right to maintain its existence. Guess what? If those various non-states had been forcibly removed from a land where they had constructed buildings and created literature, and if they had a continuous history of shared identity, and if they sought to maintain a liberal democracy while being beset on all sides by authoritarian enemies, then yes, I would support them and say they had a right to be taken seriously.
*It's funny how you're so ready to dismiss the history of ancient Israel while according the region's Arab inhabitants the widest possible benefit of the doubt. The reign of Antiochus III was LONG after "the beginning of recorded history," and by that time the Jews had been living in the Levant for centuries. (FYI, some Jews remained during the Captivity, and many more returned in the years following.) So the fact that Arab troops fought for the Greeks is not a very impressive argument for the Palestinians' historic claims on the land they occupy.
*I call the Arab/Muslim conquests the most successful colonial effort in history b/c, in contrast to European colonization, the lands they conquered remain conquered. They also "intermarried" (that's a nice way of putting it) with the populace much more than the Europeans, and thus transformed the literal DNA of the countries they invaded. Morocco, for instance, was not Arab to begin with, but it is now and will be for the foreseeable future. It also wholeheartedly follows the religion brought to it by the Arabs. Where in the world is there a wide swath of former European colonies composed primarily of European descendants who *ardently* follow Christianity to the point of being willing to wage war against the enemies of their religion?
*As for the Mongol example, the reason why they didn't leave any lasting impact was that they didn't have any ideology they were pushing. The spread of Islam took place in an incredibly short period of time, engulfing a huge portion of the known world, and it was driven by the need to spread their religion in accordance with the edicts of the Quran. People could either convert willingly, or they could die. It's true that in some areas (Spain in particular), they still allowed non-believers to maintain a separate existence, but in accordance with Islamic law, those people were second-class citizens. I'm not suggesting the Franks were any good either, and I'm quite aware of the intellectual achievements of medieval Islam. But it was a religion founded by a warrior, and they followed him in a blaze of conquests far more rapid than anything seen since Alexander's shortlived empire.
*About the differences between ancient Judaism and the modern version, are you saying they're not the same religion? Yes, there have been a lot of adjustments and liberalization since the days of Moses, and somehow that's a bad thing?
*The business about modern Hebrew being "invented" took me aback at first and I didn't even know how to respond b/c that sounded so absurd. In fact that characterization is at best victim-blaming, and at worst something much more sinister. Hebrew has far more historical basis as a language than Palestine does as a polity of any kind.
From your past behavior, I'm guessing you'll whip through those points and race back at me with a whole bunch of accusations that I'm a liar or just plain stupid, to which I say, "Please give it a rest." Please try to be a nicer person and not such a combative blowhard. From what I can tell, most BARPod listeners are very open-minded people who don't take kindly to being screamed at, so maybe you'd be happier in one of the many places on the Net that caters to people like you.
I do indeed hate pathological liars and propagandists, of which you are both, so... guilty as charged I guess? Though I have to say, smearing your opponents by accusing them of "anti-semitic propaganda" (a ludicrous assertion; almost none of what I've posted here is even discussed in current-day debates over Israel/Palestine, and I'd love to see you try to prove otherwise) seems pretty hateful to me.
1. As a casual perusal of Wikipedia will make clear, there's a source conflict on the issue of the Roman renaming of Palestine. What there is no conflict at all over is that the term long predates the Roman usage of it.
2. There is very poor evidence that there was ever a "united kingdom of Israel" or, if it existed at all, when it was formed. The actual kingdom of Israel that can be proven to exist from Assyrian records was an almost completely insignificant splinter state whose relevance to modern life is nonexistent.
3. All three of Bactria, Kush and Media were forcibly removed from lands where they had constructed buildings and created literature. That's called "history." Almost all of the states that have ever existed no longer exist.
4. Israel is not a liberal democracy; it's a Jewish supremacist state by its own legislation, and not a democracy at all since a huge percentage of the population it forcibly controls is disenfranchised and stripped of rights.
5. I am well aware that Antiochus III ruled long after the beginning of recorded history. I offered the presence of masses of local Arab levies in his army as merely an especially convenient and well-attested refutation of your absurd lie that Arabs didn't live in Palestine until the Islamic conquests.
6. Again, the idea that Arab colonization of the Middle East was somehow more comprehensive than European settlement of America or Australia is self-refutingly dumb.
7. Arabs absolutely did not require conquered "people of the book" to convert-- anywhere. There have been continual Christian patriarchs in Alexandria and Jerusalem since the Byzantines controlled them (and there's still a patriarchate of Antioch as well, although it has been moved to Damascus due to Antioch itself being abandoned).
8. The Mongols absolutely left a "lasting impact" in the form of the piles of hundreds of thousands of corpses outside Samarkand, Baghdad, Damascus, etc etc etc. Those "intellectual achievements of medieval Islam" were crippled in the process. Then a few generations later Timur (a Muslim!) swept through and did the same thing a second time. Not exactly great for the old intellectual ferment to have all of your scholars slaughtered every hundred years or so. The damage those invasions did to the Mideast was incalculable; one can argue it has still never recovered.
So look at this from my perspective. We have someone who has come onto a thread that he claims to be disinterested in, yet immediately proceeds to spout off lie after lie in the apparent belief that no one will have the historical knowledge to refute them. When called on it by someone who actually does have that knowledge, he immediately retreats into assertions that he really doesn't care, do u? After considerable prodding, he returns with... yet another broadsheet of very easily disprovable lies. What precisely, pray tell, is the appropriate response to this? Politely asking him to please stop? No, thanks. What I want is to make your presence here extremely unpleasant so that you go away. That's how to deal with liars, and it's how I aim to deal with you going forward.