Cortez and his Spanish soldiers who conquered the Aztecs are known to history as “Conquistadors.” That label of “Conquerors” was applied to them by their contemporaries -- but it originated a generation earlier. It was first used to describe the Spaniards who liberated their own country from Islam.

Arab invaders had swept across Spain in the early 700s, and it took centuries for the Spanish to kick them out. Cortez was not yet 10 years old when they were finally ejected from their last stronghold in Grenada in 1492. When Cortez first looked upon the pyramid temples of the Aztec gods, he called them mezquitas -- mosques.

Cortez saw himself as a liberator -- just as his fathers had liberated Spain from the Islamic yoke, so he would liberate “New Spain” from the Aztec yoke. Yet he had little idea of how deep were the political-religious parallels between the Arabs and the Aztecs.

The parallels go beyond the death worship of Aztec warriors and Arab suicide-bombers. One of the latter responsible for the train bombings in Madrid declared in a letter: “You (Christians) love life -- we (Moslems) love death.” Compare this Aztec poem:

There is nothing like death in war
Nothing like the flowery death
So precious to the gods who give us life
Far off I see it! My heart yearns for it!

The deeper parallel is this: both the Arabs and the Aztecs invented a Religion of Jihad as a rationale to justify their imperialist empires.

The State Department is causing most of the problems in the War in Iraq today. Squishiness is endemic to Foggy Bottom. There’s something that oozes out of Foggy Bottom that emasculates people. Richard Armitage, for example, is a powerfully built weightlifter who intimidated a lot of folks when he was at the Pentagon. Once he became a State bureaucrat, he’s just another sissified pinstripe whimpering about how the Mullah Dictatorship in Iran is really a special kind of democracy.

A prediction we hear often regarding the War on Moslem Terrorism is that it is going to last a long, long time -- for so many years into the future that no one can see the end of it.

Maybe it will. Maybe it will be a war our grandchildren will be fighting when they’re our age. But no analysis of the war shows that it must be this way. It’s just a prediction, one which could turn out to be dramatically wrong. It’s entirely possible that the War on Moslem Terrorism could be won quickly.

The liberal Alphabet Media is once again doing its best to snatch American defeat from the jaws of victory in Iraq. This time, however, there is a very big difference:

To update you on the Freedom Research Foundation delegation to Croatia with Congressman George Radonovich, June 26-July 3:

The delegation,led by me and accompanied by Congressman George Radonovich, will be focusing on investment opportunities in real estate, tourism, construction companies, and investment banking.

As I mentioned last week (“The Pro-America VIP Investment European Vacation,” now posted in the Classics section), we’ll be meeting with Prime Minister Ivo Senader, government officials, business leaders and bankers.