43
With the Persian superpower out of the way, the Byzantine
citizens thought that only their internal opponents mattered.  They
forgot that their real enemies might exist somewhere outside the
comfortable borders of their own land.
While the Byzantines attacked each other in the streets over fine
points of theology, a horde of Bedouins and backwater merchants rode
out of the unfamiliar deserts to the southeast, roused to a frenzy by a
new religion that made battle a holy deed.  These armies of Islam
snatched nearly everything the bickering Byzantines had.  The
Mohammedans took Syria, Palestine, Armenia, Mesopotamia and
Egypt in a mere twelve years.131  Then they gradually pried North
Africa, Spain, Greece, Yugoslavia, and all the rest from Byzantine
hands.  In 1453, even Byzantium itself would fall, to become the new
capital of an Islamic Empire.  The city's name--Constantinople--would
disappear from the map, replaced by the Turkic label "Istanbul."
Like the citizens of Constantine's capitol, we would rather fight
each other than acknowledge a simple reality: that there are people in
the outside world who relish the opportunity to destroy us.  Our 1980s
anti-nuclear movements were not directed at makers of atomic bombs
in Pakistan, Iran, Iraq or North Korea, just at those in Washington.  Our
protesters against U.S. meddling in El Salvador or Nicaragua couldn't
have cared less about the deaths of millions in Cambodia, the murder
of 20,000 in Syria, or genocide in black Africa.  They focused their
attention solely on American misdeeds.
Our internal fights often prevent us from even seeing external
dangers.  Under Ronald Reagan in 1983, the U.S. sent its marines to
Lebanon as a peacekeeping force in the hope of slowing the civil
violence that was tearing Beirut apart.  One day, a member of the
Ayatollah-inspired Hezbollah drove a truck filled with explosives into
the building where the marines were encamped, killing over 200 men,
most of them unarmed and sleeping.
American politicians and reporters did not condemn the groups
which had declared all western infidels impure as excrement, fit only
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