Conservatives are now taking aim at the AP test in European history

Related Link Cutting ‘liberty’ out of the history taught to America’s kids (NY Post editorial)

The new curriculum for the Advanced Placement European History test hides the role of Christianity in European history, and also hides Islam’s violent conquests in Europe and its tradition of jihad.

The history “guidelines don’t take seriously the idea that religious faith inspires people’s thoughts and actions,” David Randall, the author of a new report on the APEH framework, told Breitbart News. Randall – the National Association of Scholars director of communications – observes:

The almost complete excision of Islam’s 1400-year violent confrontation with Christendom also makes it almost impossible for students to understand that killings by modern jihadists fall squarely within the historical tradition of Islamic war. The jihadists actually understand that history far better than students educated by APEH do.

This ignorance also disarms Western citizens because you can learn from that history both to recognize the latest exercises in Islamic war for what they are and the range of policy measures European powers have used to counter jihad–which include intelligent and measured acts of statesmanship and security as well as the resort to defensive war. When APEH makes students ignorant of the history of Islamic war against Europe, it means they don’t know how to recognize an old enemy, and they don’t know that you can oppose that enemy by intelligent political action as well as by armed force. By making students ignorant, APEH reduces our choices when faced with jihad to capitulation or (too late, and without benefit of the lessons of the past) total war.

The apex of jihad in Europe came in 1683, when a huge Islamic army marched up from its base in the conquered Balkans to surround and besiege Vienna, now the capital of Austria. The city was nearly overwhelmed during the two-month siege, but was rescued by a Polish-led multinational army that crushed the Islamic army. That victory allowed European Christians to gradually push Muslim occupiers out of Hungary, Rumania, Bulgaria, Greece, Serbia and the rest of the Balkans over the next 225 years. Islam had earlier been pushed out of Spain in 1492, after a 700-year war. Muslim navies also wrecked trade and conducted slave raids in the Mediterranean sea from the 700s until just after 1800. ...