…I hope you all saw the news item about Sultan Recep Tayyip Erdogan saying the Muslims discovered America before Columbus.

And I say, no less delirious are people who insist that we in Israel make nice to these Muslims by driving a half-million of our people from their homes and handing the communities they created – homes, schools, synagogues, medical clinics, factories, as stations, an electricity grid, cell phone antennas, good roads — over to the Muslims.

Notice too in Erdogan’s claim the theft of the very idea of discovering America. Fact of the matter is the Ottoman Empire was chained to the land. It was all a contiguous land mass spreading northwest into Europe and southeast from Istanbul to the Middle East and into Egypt and the Arabian Peninsula and across North Africa. This was an empire with no overseas colonies for the simple reason the Muslims never mastered celestial navigation. Not even solar navigation. Muslims when they put to sea and they did, preferred never to lost sight of land because they never learned navigation. The discovery of the New World was the exclusive enterprise of North European Christians and Jews, especially the Jews who were the great astronomers and cartographers of the 15th century…