Fibonacci Series for Dhimmies

I was intending to comment on this idiot article from Al Reuters website, dating February 22, as soon as it appeared, but, as I said, I am pretty busy lately outside the Internet. And anyway, self-hate like that is neither new nor will it be the last incidence, so it's not quite as if I'd missed the catching of Osama Bin Laden or something like that.

Of course, it's not just the cultural relativist and self-hating aspect that is so offputting, it's the shoddy journalism as well. If a headline informs me that "Medieval Muslims made stunning math breakthrough" I expect medieval Muslims having made a, well, stunning math breakthrough, and not some random stumbling over something mathematicians find intriguing.

Joshua Socolar, a Duke university physicist, said it is unclear whether the medieval Islamic artisans fully understood the mathematical properties of the patterns they were making.

So what is it? I wonder whether sunflowers know about the Fibonacci series according to which they are growing. "Sunflowers made stunning math breakthrough"... now THAT would be a headline, but sunflowers don't seem to be very high up in the sucking-up hierarchy.

However, no article about the random stumblings stunning breakthroughs Muslims made without a flattering comparison to the European "Dark Ages", even though professional historians, who are, different from journalists, mired in a deplorable quagmire of knowledge, and thus sadly have to rein in their politically correct urges, have ceased using it. Al Reuters has no such compunctions:

While Europe was mired in the Dark Ages, Islamic culture flourished beginning in the 7th century, with achievements over numerous centuries in mathematics, medicine, engineering, ceramics, art, textiles, architecture and other areas.

That's great! And, not to forget, achievements in the field of institutionalising slavery, pedophilia, misogyny, cruelty and belligerence in an unbroken tradition since the, yes, 7th century.

A recent book, Tom Woods’ "How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization" is better suited than I to deal with those self-hating clichés and offers a cornucopia of facts. It does, however, deal with what ought to be common knowledge, not with stunning new revelations and thus the question remains why have we all but forgotten our own history and its great progress in the fields of art, science and philosophy, made long before the Enlightenment, the only, so it seems, "legitimate" Western achievement, took place? Why do we tend to see our history as one burdened story of violence, intolerance, spiritual and intellectual decrepitude? And, worse, why do our educated and opinion-making classes suck up to a death cult who hasn't achieved anything but power through cruelty, violence and intimidation (oh yes, and some stunning florets arranged according to the Fibonacci series mosaics) over the course of more than a millenium, so that members of same death cult can now add a more subtle method like playing the bad conscience card of the West to their quaint stockpile of tactics like beheading, stoning, torture and rape.

Thank you, Al Reuters. As a news service, you are a multiplier. At least we know now what the reports from around the world you are supplying to newspapers and broadcasters are worth.