Let’s celebrate September 12th

A reader reminds us that September 12 is as important a date in Islam’s 1,400-year-long jihad against the West as September 11. In fact, September 12 is a much more important date.

I’ve been a reader of VFR for about six months now and I love the straightforwardness of your website in addressing the greatest dangers to our people—our country. Over the last decade I’ve railed against the farce of “moderate Islam” to my friends, family, and co-workers. With the Four Year Anniversary of September 11th, 2001 having come yesterday, I thought it would be appropriate to note a special anniversary today. Today marks the 322nd Anniversary of the West’s great victory against the jihad of the Ottoman Empire. The Battle of Vienna on September 12, 1683 ranks up there with the Battle of Tours in 732 as one of the West’s greatest triumphs.

And it was not just a triumph, it was a historic turning point leading to the ebb of the Ottoman power and the liberation of the West from the ten-centuries-old fear of Muslim conquest. When Edward Gibbon in the 1780s concluded his History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire with the complacent observation that modern Europe, unlike ancient Rome, faced no conceivable threat of barbarian invasion, he seemed to have forgotten that only a hundred years previously the Muslims had been on the verge of conquering central Europe, and, further, that Islam, notwithstanding its military defeat by the West, had not disappeared from the world, but could rise again.
Posted by Lawrence Auster at September 12, 2005 12:48 PM | Send