How Europe, led by the Church, disarmed itself against Islam

While it is somewhat understandable that Americans, who have so little historical consciousness, would not know about the history of Islam and its nature as a conquering religion, it has often struck me as incredible that the Europeans, whose ancestors waged a thousand-year-long war against Islam to avoid the conquest, enslavement, conversion, and utter destruction of Christian civilization, would be as ignorant of Islam’s true nature as Americans are.

Well, here’s a partial answer to my question. In 1965 Pope Paul VI, as part of the work of the Second Vatican Council, issued a noble document, Nostra Aetate (In Our Time), in which the Church recognized the common patrimony of the Jewish and the Christian religions and rejected the idea that the Jewish people were responsible for and should be punished for the Crucifixion of Christ. However, alongside its good and sensible parts about Judaism, Nostra Aetate also had some very foolish and dangerous things to say about Islam:

Since in the course of centuries not a few quarrels and hostilities have arisen between Christians and Moslems, this sacred synod urges all to forget the past and to work sincerely for mutual understanding and to preserve as well as to promote together for the benefit of all mankind social justice and moral welfare, as well as peace and freedom. [Italics added.]

Thus the Pope and the assembled bishops counseled the world of Christendom that we must forget 1,400 years of history, as though they never happened! We must forget that the mission of Islam is to conquer and convert the whole world and impose on it the totalitarian shariah law. We must write off a thousand years of Moslem aggression as mere “quarrels and hostilities” that have “arisen,” as though there weren’t an actual entity, the Moslem religion, whose divinely appointed task it is to wage holy war against all non-Moslems. No wonder Europe forgot. The historic core of Europe, the Catholic Church, told it to forget.

Nostra Aetate was proclaimed on October 28, 1965. On the 3rd of that same month President Lyndon Johnson, in a ceremony at the foot of the Statue of Liberty, signed the 1965 Immigration Act, granting to the people of all nations the numerically equal privilege of immigrating to the United States. At the moment when the West officially forgot what Islam is, the leading Western nation opened its borders to a mass immigration of Moslems.

(This topic is discussed further here.)

Posted by Lawrence Auster at April 20, 2005 02:05 PM | Send