Journalist Benny Davis, who writes for the expat paper, EuroWeekly News, said: “Brits tends to live in a bubble. With more and more information available in English, there’s less reason to learn Spanish and, as a consequence, less opportunity to understand the local culture. Many residents speak no more than 10 Spanish words in an average week – usually restaurant Spanish – and they pride themselves on ‘getting by’.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/mar/29/europe-news
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abunoor
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thabet
A look at ‘Europe’s first Christian theme park’, which will be built in Spain:
The €10m development is to be built on seven hectares (17 acres) that include the former municipal rubbish dump at Capdepera, in the north of the island, if the plans presented to the town hall come to fruition.
The park will offer visitors everything from the last supper to “live resurrections” in a rolling programme of shows repeated through the day.
Although similar parks exist in Latin America and the US, Europe has yet to build a Christian theme park, perhaps because the number of those with faith is dwindling. But Sigma, the prospective builder of Mallorca’s venture and owner of a similar park in Buenos Aires, Argentina, want to bring its concept to Europe with a place that promises to recreate scenarios from the old and new testaments.
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thabet
This goes here too:
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MikeLyons
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Dean Esmay
Oy. Is there nothing too kitschy and tawdry for Fundamentalist Christians? Ye Gods the way they twist the faith.
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aziz
its actually not a bad thing. Anything that makes people of a certain faith celebrate their beliefs in a family friendly way is probably a good thing. Europe could use some more Christianity with conviction, to counterteh secularist mainstream.
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Dean Esmay
I guess if selling a watered-down, cheap, shallow version of Christianity is the goal, then they’ll be successful. But about the only people it would appeal to would be Fundamentalists or people who aren’t very serious about their faith anyway, based on what I can see from this vantage.
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aziz
isnt the whole of your comment pretty unfair? it’s a Christian version of pseudo-takfir, really. They take their faith seriously; whether its shallow or not in your estimation isn’t relevant (and they surely have similarly irrelevant opinions about your flavor as well)
I disagree strongly with everything about OBLs version and vision of Islam – but I cant deny it is Islam.
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Dean Esmay
Yeah I looked at it a bit more; this thing screams “Fundamentalist Christian,” and at least according to the Wikipedia entry, it was founded by a Baptist minister and Christian Zionist. You can tell; to orthodox Christian eyes–and by this I mean any serious-minded Christian including most mainline Protestants (Lutheran, Presbyterian, etc.) as well as to Catholics and Eastern and Oriental Orthodox, this thing looks not just cheap and tawdry, but outright offensive. And I, personally, would not consider it a safe place to take my family at all, as the theology on sale there would be radically different from things central to the faith as I understand it.
I mean, it’s cute, but in a really offensive way.
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plimfix
I wonder how they’re gonna “theme park” the Crucifixion. Let’s just hope it’s not “a ride”…
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Lawrence of Arabia
Among the many humdingers (really, one could spend days of sadness in there) that pepper the Newt Gingrich speech to AEI, referenced in the Slate article below, is this one concerning Park51…
Anybody who knew anything of history knew it was an act of triumphalism from
the original name; it was going to be called the Cordoba House. Well, Cordoba is the city in Spain where a conquering Muslim army built a mosque on top of a church. Do you think they happened to randomly pick that because they’re sitting around one evening and go, gosh, what will be a
good name in New York? What they’re relying on was that half of us are too ignorant and the other half are too timid to stand up and say “Baloney, this is nonsense!”All together now: “Baloney, Mr. Gingrich. This is nonsense!”
The implication from the former Speaker is that a bunch of peace loving Catholics, much like himself, had been hanging out in Cordoba, when, all of a sudden, some barbaric Moors swooped in, conquered the region, seized a church from the peace loving Catholics (much like himself), and, in an act of “triumphalism”, maliciously built a mosque on top of the venerable, sacred structure, with no concern for the dignity, rights and feelings of the peace loving Catholics (much like himself).
Of course nothing like this happened at all. In fact the Moors had been in the region going on 75 years by the time construction was begun on the Great Mosque. It is believed that the church, prior to this, may have been a worship space shared by Christians and Muslims. The ruler responsible for building the mosque, Abd al-Rahman I, had been in the city 30ish years by the time he undertook the project. And he did not seize the property in an act of “triumphalism”…HE PURCHASED IT! Given the history of Medieval Europe, this is hardly the image of violence, inhumanity and triumphalism that Mr. Gingrich wished his audience to conjure.
Btw, it was Charles V of Spain who “consumed” the Great Mosque within a new cathedral; this would be the same man who finally and completely made it illegal to be Muslim in Spain, after rescinding the toleration enjoyed by the large Muslim population in the Kingdom of Aragon (January 1526). This completed a pattern already initiated by his predecessors (affecting Jews and Muslims, and subjecting the converso and morisco populations to the dangerous hands of the Inquisition, who were, no doubt, peace loving Catholics, much like Mr. Gingrich himself).
One wonders which half of his audience were too ignorant, and which too timid, to say “Baloney!”.
One is led to guess that indeed, as Mr. Gingrich himself suggests, the name of Cordoba House was not chosen at random, but was chosen precisely because of the symbolic place al-Andalus holds, not only for Muslims, as a time in which — relative to the period, and to what would come following the defeat of the Moors in Spain — Muslims, Jews and Christians lived together harmoniously. However idyllic such an image of al-Andalus might be, it is a much grander vision than the one offered by the former Speaker.
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Null
Thank you.
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thabet
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aziz
Lawrence, can i reprint this at COB as a guest post?
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Lawrence of Arabia
yes, that would be fine.
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Hitch
It’s really worthwhile to go to Cordoba but even more so Granada. But I have no illusion that people who look for political leverage will have any open eyes about either place at all.
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thabet
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thabet
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Danny Afzal
What Spain fails to recognise, is that it’s own cultural heritage is heavily influenced by Islam and at the time of local elections, Muslim women are again made an example of and oppressed in respects to their beliefs.
Muslim women ARE oppressed allover the world but not in the name of Islam.
It is not Islam that subjudicates and marginalises women, it’s men who do that.
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thabet
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Wang Daiyu
Burka ban in Spain, makes one wonder why. Perhaps the reasons are similar to why the French did it?
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thabet
I don’t see why this is Islamophobia:
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aziz
i agree with you. its absolutely ridiculous to insist on this.
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Abu Noor
I don’t think the decision itself necessarily reflects anti-Muslim or Islam bias,but some of the comments seem to:
“If I let in the Muslims pray in the cathedral of Cordoba, it is equivalent to Catholics saying goodbye and good night
Of course these are comments translated and taken out of context so Allaah knows best about the original meaning, but he seems to be indicating that allowing Muslims to pray in the space would just be the first step of a Muslim re-re-conquista, which seems to be a bit of fear mongering given the reality of Spain today.
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johnpi
Muslim woman rebuked on burka by judge in Spain.
A Spanish judge yesterday expelled a Muslim woman wearing a burka from his court for refusing to show her face when testifying in the trial of a group of Islamic extremists.
“Seeing your face, I can see if you are lying or not, if you are surprised by a question or not,” Judge Javier Gomez Bermudez told the woman, the sister of an Islamic radical killed in a suicide bombing in Iraq in 2005.
The woman said that her religion forbade her from appearing in public without her burka, the all-covering article of clothing worn by some Islamic women, according to a journalist present.
When she refused to reveal her face, the judge expelled her from the courtroom.
But after speaking to the judge later in his chambers, a compromise was reached.
She said she had agreed to testify on Monday minus the part of her burka which normally covers the face “between the chin and the eyebrows” and with her back turned to the public in the courtroom.
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irfan
First Islamic Architecture Mosque Tour in the Bay Area – Friday May 1st in Fremont, CA. Check the details here:
http://almihrab.wordpress.com/2009/04/28/first-islamic-architecture-mosque-tour-in-the-bay-area/
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thabet
‘No chance’ of Spanish case against the Bush Torture Six moving forward.
Maitham, 
thabet, and 
abunoor are discussing. 
MikeLyons, 
aziz, and 2 others are discussing. 
Hitch, 
abunoor 8:00 am on March 29, 2011 Permalink | Log in to Reply
Just another example of “unregulated multiculturalism” run amok.
Maitham 11:42 am on March 29, 2011 Permalink | Log in to Reply
Actually, I would say this is an example of neo-imperialism running its natural course. Spain is on a lower rung of the hegemonic/economic ladder, so they have to welcome well-off retirees and vacationers from the imperial victor, even though they frequently behave like buffoons. Americans in Mexico are at least as bad. In the long run, the tables may turn.
Maitham 11:48 am on March 29, 2011 Permalink | Log in to Reply
A more pertinent moral-equivalency example might be when Mexico invited white ranchers to settle Texas and gave them generous land grants, then they turned traitor and declared independence.
thabet 1:27 pm on March 29, 2011 Permalink | Log in to Reply
Can someone tell me where multiculturalism is actually ‘regulated’? I’d be interested to see examples.
Maitham 4:49 pm on March 29, 2011 Permalink | Log in to Reply
Well, Thabet, a couple examples off of the top of my head are immigration quotas and mandatory civics education, both major policy priorities for early-20th-century American Progressives. They have since been rightly discredited, but there is still an element of truth in their motivation.