Islam’s 1,400 year long war against the West

Steve H. writes:

Gates of Vienna has posted a video of Bill Warner, the founder of the Center for the Study of Political Islam, explaining the utter devastation that Islam has had on civilization, particularly classical Western civilization, over the past 1,400 years. It is an account of history that needs to be told. It demonstrates how relentless the jihadists have been since the time of Muhammad. Unfortunately, it is politically incorrect and at best will only get traction from those who are and have been willing to take the time to learn and understand the evils of Islam. I think that VFR readers would appreciate the opportunity to see and discuss it.

Why were we never taught this?

LA replies:

Because the moment Islam stopped being an immediate threat to Europe, at the end of the seventeenth century, liberalism was born, after which it gradually became the dominant European ideology. And according to liberalism differences between groups do not matter or should not matter, because all men have the same universal nature and the same universal rights. Feeling safe and secure, Europe dropped into the memory hole the history of Islam and Europe’s thousand-year struggle to defend itself from Islam (just as happened to Communism and the Cold War after the fall of the Soviet Union). By the late eighteenth century, barely a hundred years after the Muslim armies were driven back from Vienna, and barely a hundred years after John Locke wrote his Second Essay on Government, the secularist skeptic Edward Gibbon in his extremely influential Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire was sounding the same pro-Islam, anti-Christianity notes that are the norm today. Gibbon had no notion that Islam, then moribund, might once again arise and threaten Europe.

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David P. writes:

Hilaire Belloc had the foresight to see that Islam was the primary enemy of the West. I view it as a primary enemy of all humanity.

Belloc wrote in 1938:

Will not perhaps the temporal power of Islam return and with it the menace of an armed Mohammedan world, which will shake off the domination of Europeans—still nominally Christian—and reappear as the prime enemy of our civilization? The future always comes as a surprise, but political wisdom consists in attempting at least some partial judgment of what that surprise may be. And for my part I cannot but believe that a main unexpected thing of the future is the return of Islam.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at October 01, 2012 12:10 PM | Send