Fashion News: House of Saddam

“What THIS means is that the LEFT has considerably re-written the history of Jews in Spain to make Muslims the good guys. But I kinda see how that works, now.”
Wolf Moon,
Before Marxism was even founded, four other factors were in play.
1.) The Iberian Christians in the early Reconquista period were in a really desperate position, and wanted to gain traction militarily and culturally over their Muslim foe as quickly as possible.
The get-it-done-cheap-and-dirty solution they came up with was to inoculate themselves against Islam by adopting Islamic methods.
So they came up with ideas like crusades (Christian derivative of jihad), forced conversions (got the concept from the Muslims), inquisitions (again, got the concept from Islamic practice), rule that if one parent is Catholic in a marriage, all children must be Catholic (reflection of Shari’a law that children must follow father’s religion, combined with Shari’a law that Muslim women cannot marry non-Muslims), etc.
Also, by the time they achieved victory, a large fraction of all Iberians were descended from Iberian Muslims. And Islam is very good at transmitting its beliefs, values, and practices to future generations. So Iberian Christian culture simply had soaked up a Moorish flavor that was much stronger than that of the rest of southern Europe, and completely unlike the culture of northern Europe.
This type of thinking caused Iberian, and especially Spanish, and even more especially Castilian culture, to be more brittle than that in the rest of Europe.
In general, this cultural difference between southern (front-line against the jihad) and northern (rear echelon mofos) Europe eventually became the driving force behind the Catholic-Protestant division, so much of the religious violence that Christianity is condemned for is ultimately jihadist in origin.
Jews were really caught in a terrible bind by this development. And the very first pogrom against Jews in the history of northern Europe was committed by a group of German knights who had just returned home from assisting Spanish Catholics in the Reconquista against the Muslims. So the worst ideas of religious violence inculcated by the Muslims proved to be contagious.
2.) Jews were persecuted in all parts of the Muslim world, and in all parts of Europe. But which lands produced the worst persecution varied from century to century, or even from decade to decade. Jews tended to flee to the north or to the south of the Mediterranean according to prevalent conditions at the time. Persecution in Medieval society also varied enormously in its effects from wealthy elite Jews down to the great masses of impoverished Jews.
So Jewish writers over the ages have tended to exploit these geographically shifting differences of persecution, attempting to shame their Christian neighbors into better behavior by painting a rosy picture of Jewish life in the Islamic world.
Until fairly modern times, no one attempted to do the opposite, and paint a rosy picture of European Jewish life to shame Muslim neighbors. Anyone familiar with Islamic ethics would know that Muslims wouldn’t care if they were treating Jews worse than others were.
3.) Muslims always exaggerate everything positive about their society. Medieval and early modern Muslims didn’t need Bolsheviks to teach them the value of propaganda.
In fact, Lenin was born and raised mixed-race in a part of the Tsar’s empire that historically had been largely Muslim. So if there was cultural transmission of propaganda and its techniques, at first the transfer was probably in the other direction.
4.) Protestants in northern Europe, especially in Britain, sometimes suffered mental disturbances connected to their REMF status. This caused a number of their writers to do unfortunate, counterfactual things like attempt to apply to their own position the Arab proverb that the enemy (Muslim) of my enemy (Roman Catholic) is my friend (FALSE).
They tended to see southern Catholics as unenlightened, intolerant, ignorant, and hidebound. They never tended to develop much empathy for the front-line plight of the southerners, nor to question if, in fact, cultural osmosis from the Islamic world to the southern European world could be responsible for the traits that the northern Protestants found so obnoxious in their fellow Christians. Nor did most of them develop much gratitude towards the southerners for the hard fighting that the latter performed to save Europe from repeated waves of attempted Islamic invasion.
The British also engaged in various academic flights of fancy, such as imagining that the 2nd century BC North African Carthagian descendants of Phoenician colonists were probably not so very different from the 19th century AD North African Arab Muslims, and that the lovely Phoenicians, and therefore the Carthaginians, were a maritime people, and so very like the British, and they fought those nasty Italians of the Roman Republic, etc.
For the century immediately preceding the rise of Marxism, #4 is probably the biggest source of error, at least in the English-speaking world.
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But, you’re right about the past century, and especially the last couple of decades. Commies have pushed the “warm, fuzzy Muslim” narrative hard in academia, and now in the popular culture as well.