Is Cracked.com the Ground Zero Mosque of magazines? (Part 1)

The “Golden Age” trope also contains the seeds of its own uselessness:

If the last cool thing a Muslim invented is a thousand years old, doesn’t that prove they’re backward? Please name five Muslim winners of the Nobel Prize, or explain the UN’s famous finding that

“in the 1,000 years since the reign of the Caliph Mamoun, the Arabs have translated as many books as Spain translates in one year.”

(Incidentally, one of Quercia’s gotchas is that not all Muslims are Arabs. Which is true. It is also true, as per that UN report mentioned above, that all Arabs are Muslims…)

We’re informed by Cracked that Muslims “****ing invented algebra” – when in actuality, they just stuck an Arabic name on the work of the Greeks, and stole the zero from the Hindus.

(By the way: if you’ve ever dared to wonder why modern day Greeks don’t, er, look quite like those ancient statues, or seem capable of creating anything more complex than a cheeseburger, that’s because Greece was invaded. By the Turks. Who are Muslims.)

Even worse, Quercia insists that Islam is a peaceful religion, deliberately ignoring how much of the Koran is devoted to pacific matters like the treatment of slaves, how to divide the spoils of war, and whose women you get to rape, and when.

So I was disappointed by this rare display of idiocy at Cracked, in an essay which, at last count, was viewed over 2 million times.

Then, while researching another project, I happened upon a factoid that might explain how this uncharacteristically mendacious essay got the go ahead at Cracked.com

You can read about what I discovered in Part 2 of this post, coming later this week.

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