For real, though, I can't even express how much I love this.

Octopus games, 1840-42, by Utagawa Kuniyoshi

In this day and age that is not a fucking excuse.
In the Dark Ages humanity didn't have the fucking internet, plumbing, electricity, etc.
Hell, the life expectancy was like 40 years or less.
The knowledge that we have now of everything in our world and even outside of it makes it absolutely fucking inexcusable for such barbarism to continue to exist in this world.
To justify any part of it is idiotic.

I wasn't trying to justify it so much as put it into perspective.
Look, we're basically living in a second Enlightenment period. The Enlightenment was encompassing the Victorian Age to 1914 where Europeans, especially Brits, just thought they knew everything, on top of the world.
Nowadays, we hear "Victorian", we think "old-fashioned", "sexual repression", and "racism". Now we've come back to that, with our iPhones and World Wide Web, and we think we're fucking Masters of the Universe.

We're not.

I'm not trying to justify anything that ISIS or any other Islamic extremists do. Fuck, I see that shit on the TV and my blood boils. All I wanted to do was put into perspective how things can change. What pisses me off are the entitled little pricks who make thinly-veiled or even straight-up racist comments based on a few loud, violent cunts.
And certain Muslims most definitely are violent cunts, but that does not mean the entire group of people are savages.

tl;dr: You know what's almost as bad as violent lunatics? The people who complain about the violent lunatics, and then don't do anything about it.

Mainly because of the Muslim Crusades into Europe at the time.