You point to hopeful signs that at least some Europeans are awakening to the threat Islam poses (has always posed; let’s be honest) to our civilization. Here, courtesy of the Brussels Journal, is one more:
a review by Thomas Bertonneau of a recent book by Sylvain Gouguenheim, Aristote au mont Saint-Michel : Les racines grecques de l’Europe chrétienne (Aristotle at Mont Saint-Michel: the Greek Roots of Christian Europe). Gouguenheim is a professor of medieval history at the Ecole normale supériere in Lyon, and rather controversial among his more dhimmified colleagues, who have tried to gag him in the name of “pedagogical serenity” and other scholarly virtues.
On the strength of Bertonneau’s review, I have ordered the book from French Amazon (via VDare link so they’ll get a kick-back—maybe you should set that up for VFR?). Tiberge of GalliaWatch comments on it here, and the International Herald Tribune deigned to notice it, skeptically, shortly after it was published.
The title refers to Jacques de Venise, a 12th century scholastic who according to Gouguenheim made his way from Venice to Mont Saint-Michel, where he worked at translating Aristotle directly from Greek into Latin.
According to Bertonneau, Gouguenheim offers a robust defense of the continuity of Western civilization through the Dark Ages, arguing that after the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, Western knowledge of Greek and the Greek as well as Latin Classics was never entirely lost and that the Western search to recover more of that heritage continued throughout the Dark Ages. Our Greek heritage was not recovered for us uncouth barbarians by benevolent civilized Moslems providing us translations of it as an unearned gift.
Most important, Gouguenheim apparently thoroughly debunks the multiculturalists’ cherished notion that Western civilization’s debt to Islam and the Moslems is somehow comparable to its debt to Christianity and Christianity’s Jewish roots. Gouguenheim makes the obvious point that, throughout the critical centuries (sixth through eleventh, roughly), the Greeks of the Eastern Roman Empire were still active as cultural preservers and transmitters. He also notes that, to the extent we are indebted to translators in the Levant, those translators were mostly if not entirely Syriac Christians, and neither Arab nor Moslem.
Gouguenheim also discusses Islam’s inability to absorb the Greek and Roman Classical tradition, in most of which Islam forbade any interest anyway. If Islam could not absorb that tradition for itself, it is unlikely to have been much good at transmitting (or re-transmitting) it to others! As quoted by Bertonneau, Gouguenheim even tackles the notion that Christianity, Judaism, and Islam share a common monotheism: that Christians, Jews, and Moslems, despite different perceptions of God, worship the same God. Here is the quote, as Bertonneau translates it:
To proclaim that Christians and Muslims have the same God, and to hold to that, believing thereby that one has brought the debate to its term, denotes only a superficial approach. Their Gods do not partake in the same discourse, do not put forward the same values, do not propose for humanity the same destiny and do not concern themselves with the same manner of political and legal organization in human society. The comparative reading of the Gospel and the Koran by itself demonstrates that the two universes are unalike. From Christ, who refuses to punish the adulterous woman by stoning, one turns to see Mohammed ordaining, in the same circumstances, the putting to death of the unfaithful woman. One cannot follow Jesus and Mohammed.
That surely has Islam’s agents in the West gnashing their teeth!
We need this corrective, and nowhere more than in France, where Frenchmen are constantly lectured to by their presidents about how integral Islam and the Arab world are to Europe. Remember Jacques Chirac, in October 2003, loftily informing Philippe de Villiers that “the roots of Europe are just as Moslem as they are Christian”? And, now, the “conservative” Nicolas Sarkozy, as he opens the new Dhimmi wing of the Louvre in the presence of his (and no doubt Chirac’s) Saudi paymasters, lauds Islam as “progress, science, finesse, modernity,” and reminds us that “fanaticism in the name of Islam is a corruption of Islam.” If Sarkozy has ever put in a good word for France’s traditional Faith, I have never heard of it. On our side of the water, no doubt both Barack Hussein Obama and George W. Bush would find nothing in either French president’s claims with which to disagree.
Another hopeful sign for France, and maybe the rest of us, is that both Le Figaro and Le Monde gave Aristote au mont Saint-Michel respectful reviews. I’m not so surprised about Le Figaro, but I would have expected Le Monde reflexively to vilify it. I look forward to reading the book, and I hope Sarkozy will read it, too. Chirac is a lost cause!
I can’t help noticing that (speculating on his surname) this Defender of the West appears to be Jewish.