Fall of the West

The spread of the message of Muhammad has been aided by the tendency of Europeans to forget who we are. We’re like the man described by James, our Lord’s half-brother, who walks away from a mirror and immediately can’t remember his own face. Even with fourteen centuries of history as a guide, Western liberals tell us that Muslims in the Middle East hate us because of our support for Israel while conservatives think they hate us because of our freedom.

Both ideas are absolute nonsense.

In 1786, when the government of the United States still operated under the Articles of Confederation, Jefferson and Adams met with the ambassador to England from Tripoli. They sent a report of that meeting to Secretary of Foreign Affairs John Jay:

We took the liberty to make some inquiries concerning the Grounds of their pretentions to make war upon Nations who had done them no Injury, and observed that we considered all mankind as our friends who had done us no wrong, nor had given us any provocation.

The Ambassador answered us that it was founded on the Laws of their Prophet, that it was written in their Koran, that all nations who should not have acknowledged their authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found, and to make slaves of all they could take as Prisoners, and that every Musselman who should be slain in battle was sure to go to Paradise.^[1]

It’s a bit surprising that educated men like Jefferson and Adams were caught off guard by the reasons for Muslim attacks on American ships and sailors. But they were products of the Enlightenment, which, in a spiritual sense, has blinded the West to the threat of Islam. Two of the most intelligent men in American history struggled to understand how anyone could take their god so seriously as to use the words of his prophet as pretext for war. Centuries later, our brightest minds still ask the same question:

The first reaction to the Brussels massacres [the bombings of March 22, 2016 that killed thirty-two and wounded three hundred] among postmodern European intellectuals was predictable: What did we, Europeans, do to them, our Muslims?^[2]

It’s the same answer today. All nations who have not acknowledged Allah’s authority are sinners, and it’s their right and duty to make war upon us wherever we can be found.

If that sounds harsh and closed-minded, well—too bad. Allah, Inc., is a bloodthirsty bunch of small-g gods who inspire their most devout followers to say things like:

It is neither hunger nor poverty that has driven us from our land [Arabia]. We, the Arabs, are drinkers of blood and we know there is no blood more tasty than that of the Greeks. That is why we have come, to spill and to drink your blood.^[3]

Khalid bin al-Walid, the “Sword of Allah” (636 AD)

See if you can spot the similarity in the following statement from ISIS, issued 1,380 years later:

Fox News reports that jihadi web sites are rejoicing over today’s terrorist attacks in Paris. The line we have heard more than once from ISIS-related sites is, “The American blood is best, and we will taste it soon.”^[4]

(2015)

Khalid bin al-Walid was a companion of Muhammad and one of early Islam’s most effective military leaders. He led the campaign that captured Damascus in AD 634. and the army that defeated the Roman forces at the Battle of Yarmouk in 636, which led to the fall of Jerusalem in 637. His words are echoed by violent jihadis today, fourteen centuries later. Yet “virtually no one in the West understands that they are quoting the verbatim words—and placing themselves within the footsteps—of their jihadi forbears.”^[5]

Even the term, “the West,” has its roots in the bloody history of Islam, as it refers to the remnant of Christendom after the armies of Allah, Inc. conquered three-quarters of it.

The West is actually the westernmost remnant of what was a much more extensive civilizational block that Islam permanently severed.… It further implies that all those “eastern” lands conquered by Islam were never part of “Western civilization,” when in fact they were the original inheritors of its Greco-Roman and Christian heritage.^[6]

Constantine the Great moved the capital of the Roman Empire to Byzantium, later Constantinople (and now Istanbul), in the fourth century because it was closer to most of the wealth and civilization of the Roman world. Even though Rome and the western half of the empire collapsed in the fifth century, the Eastern Roman Empire—which never called itself “Byzantine” or “Eastern,” just Roman—survived for another thousand years. For most of that time, it was the most powerful economic and military force in Europe, an odd and unfamiliar fact to most of us educated in “the West.”

Again, if Constantinople had fallen in AD 674, or anytime before 1453, for that matter, the history of the West would be very different. Instead, the city held out long enough against Muslim pressure for European civilization and technology to develop to the point that it was no longer possible for the Islamic world to destroy what was left of Christendom.

Oddly enough, in a scenario that’s been repeated again and again over the years, disunity among the Christian defenders of Europe made it more vulnerable to attack. I won’t go so far as to suggest the Reformation touched off by Martin Luther in the early sixteenth century was a bad thing, but it came at a bad time for Europe.

By portraying the Catholic pope as more of an “Antichrist” than the Ottoman sultan—an office held by Muslim leaders responsible for the slaughter and enslavement of hundreds of thousands of Christians—Luther and other Reformation leaders† ushered in a sort of relativism that prevails to this day, one that cites (often distorted) episodes from Catholic history to minimize ongoing Muslim atrocities.

The Catholic Church responded with its own invective “and frequently tried to discredit Protestant doctrine by likening it to Islam—Muhammad was an early Protestant and the Protestants were latter day Saracens.” It finally got to the point that both Catholics and Protestants began “heaping praise upon the infidel” in an effort to portray each other as unparalleled evil.^[7]

In 1683, more than one hundred sixty years after Spain established a colony in the Americas and more than sixty years after the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock, the army of the Ottoman Empire assaulted the walls of Vienna, Austria. The Ottoman forces were led by Kara Mustafa Pasha, an Albanian Muslim who served as Grand Vizier to Sultan Mehmed IV. Mustafa was described as “fanatically anti-Christian,” which seems appropriate; after capturing a Polish town in 1674, he had the citizens flayed alive and sent their stuffed hides to Mehmed.^[8] The ambitious Mustafa was driven to accomplish what the famed sultan Suleiman the Magnificent had failed to do by capturing the capital of the hated Habsburg Empire.

Only the last-minute arrival of a relief army led by heroic Polish king Jan III Sobieski kept the Ottomans from taking the city and controlling key trade routes from the Mediterranean and Black seas to western Europe. Vienna was essentially the gateway to Europe; “from it, Italy (and Rome) to the south and the disunited German kingdoms to the north could easily be invaded.”^[9] If not for Sobieski, Saint Peter’s Basilica in Rome might have been turned into a mosque decades before the American colonies declared independence.

But even after the Ottomans’ defeat at Vienna, Muslim pirates made life on and around the Mediterranean dangerous. Robert C. Davis, a professor at the Ohio State University, estimated in his 2003 book Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters that more than one million Europeans may have been enslaved by Muslim pirates between 1530 and 1780.^[10]Between 1627 and 1633, the island of Lundy, off the west coast of Britain, was occupied by the pirates as a base to launch raids on England.^[11]

Yet, two of America’s learned founding fathers were stunned to learn that Muslims felt entitled to confiscate the new nation’s cargo ships and enslave its sailors. Thus, America’s first war as a nation began even before George Washington was elected its first president. The fighting against the Muslim pirates of North Africa dragged on for more than thirty years, provoked Congress to create the United States Navy in 1794, and finally ended in 1815. One of the battles inspired the line, “to the shores of Tripoli,” in the Marine Hymn.

Western academics often rationalize these encounters by referring to the Crusades, as though the Vatican is responsible for the violence done in the name of Allah since the twelfth century. President Barack Obama infamously scolded Americans at the National Prayer Breakfast in 2015, drawing a moral equivalence between the Islamic State and the Crusades of nine hundred years ago.

“Humanity has been grappling with these questions throughout human history,” he told the group, speaking of the tension between the compassionate and murderous acts religion can inspire. “And lest we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ. In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ.”^[12]

The former president’s view is shared by many academics, who have an inexcusable blind spot when it comes to the Crusades. When the history of post-Roman Europe is reviewed, the terms Arabic, Turk, Tatar, Moorish, or Ottoman are used easily enough, but the words “Muslim” or “Islamic” rarely appear—as though the shared religion of the forces that nearly conquered all of Christendom is coincidental. The truth is the Crusades were a response to centuries of Muslim war against the West. Yes, atrocities were committed by the Crusaders; and no, “they did it first” is not justification for those atrocities.

The difference is that only one of the two religions under discussion here has made bloodshed for profit a sacrament, and it’s not the one under the banner of the cross. As Saudi journalist Abdelrahman al-Rashid wrote in 2004: “It is a certain fact that not all Muslims are terrorists, but it is equally certain, and exceptionally painful, that almost all terrorists are Muslims.”^[13]

The bottom line is this: War, and the booty to be gained from it, was one of the driving forces of Islamic expansion from its earliest days. The prospect of wealth from successful raiding or an eternity of carnal pleasure for dying in the attempt has enticed millions of young men over the centuries to take up the banner of jihad.

The blood spilled for Allah, Inc., over the last fourteen hundred years has only whetted the appetites of the old gods for revenge against the Most High. They are determined to press on until Armageddon—the final battle for the mount of assembly, Jerusalem.

^[1] “American Commissioners to John Jay, 28 March 1786.” Founders Online (https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/01-09-02-0315), retrieved 1/19/19.

^[2] Leon de Winter, “Europe’s Muslims Hate the West.” Politico, March 29, 2016 (https://www.politico.eu/article/brussels-attacks-terrorism-europe-muslims-brussels-attacks-airport-metro/), retrieved 1/19/19.

^[3] Ibrahim, op. cit., 13.

^[4] John Hinderaker, “‘The American Blood Is Best, and We Will Taste It Soon.” Powerline (https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2015/11/the-american-blood-is-best-and-we-will-taste-it-soon.php), retrieved 1/19/19.

^[5] Ibrahim, op.cit., 296.

^[6] Ibid., 9.

^[7] Ibid., 261.

^[8] Ibid., 267.

^[9] Ibid.

^[10] Rory Carroll, “New Book Reopens Old Arguments about Slave Raids on Europe.” The Guardian, March 11, 2004 (https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2004/mar/11/highereducation.books), retrieved 1/19/19.

^[11] Ibrahim, op.cit., 280–281.

^[12] Juliet Eilperin, “Critics Pounce after Obama Talks Crusades, Slavery at Prayer Breakfast.” Washington Post, February 5, 2015 (https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/obamas-speech-at-prayer-breakfast-called-offensive-to-christians/2015/02/05/6a15a240-ad50-11e4-ad71-7b9eba0f87d6_story.html), retrieved 1/19/19.

^[13] Magdi Abdelhadi, “Arab Journalist Attacks Radical Islam.” BBC News, September 7, 2004 (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/3632462.stm), retrieved 1/23/19.