U.S. President Barack Hussein Obama's recent condemnation of
medieval Christian history to exonerate modern Islam is a reminder of how
woefully ignorant (or intentionally deceptive) a good many people in the West
are concerning the true history of Christian Europe and Islam.
The problem is that those Islamwho condemn things like the
Crusades—including "mainstream" academics, journalists, moviemakers,
and politicians—do so without mention of historical context. Worse, they imply
"we" already know the context: evil popes and greedy knights
exploiting Christianity to seize Muslim lands and wealth. Or as Karen Armstrong
put it, "the idea that Islam imposed itself by the sword is a Western
fiction, fabricated during the time of the Crusades when, in fact, it was
Western Christians who were fighting brutal holy wars against Islam."
The true story of Christendom and Islam is the antithesis of
such claims. Consider some facts for a moment:
A mere decade after the birth of Islam in the 7th century,
the jihad burst out of Arabia. Leaving aside all the thousands of miles of
ancient lands and civilizations that were permanently conquered—including
Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Iran, and parts of India
and China—much of Europe was also, at one time or another, conquered by the
sword of Islam.
Among other nations and territories that were attacked
and/or came under Muslim domination are (to give them their modern names in no
particular order): Portugal, Spain, France, Italy, Sicily, Switzerland,
Austria, Hungary, Greece, Russia, Poland, Bulgaria, Ukraine, Lithuania,
Romania, Albania, Serbia, Armenia, Georgia, Crete, Cyprus, Croatia,
Bosnia-Herzegovina, Macedonia, Belarus, Malta, Sardinia, Moldova, Slovakia, and
Montenegro.
In 846 Rome was sacked and the Vatican defiled by Muslim
Arab raiders; some 600 years later, in 1453, Christendom's other great
basilica, Holy Wisdom (or Hagia Sophia) was conquered by Muslim Turks,
permanently. (Till this day, Turkish Muslims celebrate the sack of
Constantinople, which saw much rapine and slaughter.)
The few European regions that escaped direct Islamic
occupation due to their northwest remoteness include Great Britain,
Scandinavia, and Germany. That, of course, does not mean that Islam did not
attack them. Indeed, in the furthest northwest of Europe, in Iceland,
Christians used to pray that God save them from the "terror of the
Turk." This was not mere paranoia; as late as 1627, Muslim corsairs raided
the northern Christian island seizing four hundred captives and selling them in
the slave markets of Algiers.
Nor did America escape. A few years after the formation of
the United States, in 1800, American trading ships in the Mediterranean were
plundered and their sailors enslaved by Muslim corsairs. The ambassador of
Tripoli explained to Thomas Jefferson that it was a Muslim's "right and
duty to make war upon them [non-Muslims] wherever they could be found, and to
enslave as many as they could take as prisoners."
In short, for roughly one millennium—punctuated by a
Crusader-rebuttal that the modern West is obsessed with demonizing—Islam daily
posed an existential threat to Christian Europe and by extension Western
civilization.
And therein lies the rub: Today, whether as taught in high
school or graduate school, whether as portrayed by Hollywood or the news media,
the predominant historic narrative is that Muslims are the historic
"victims" of "intolerant" Western Christians. (Watch my
response to a Fox News host wondering why Christians have always persecuted
Muslims.)
So here we are, paying the price of being an ahistorical
society: A few years after the Islamic strikes of 9/11—merely the latest in the
centuries-long, continents-wide jihad on the West—Americans elected (twice) a
man with a Muslim name and heritage for president; a man who condemns the
Crusades while openly empowering the same Islamic ideology that European
Christians fought for centuries.
Surely the United States' European forebears—who at one time
or another either fought off or were conquered by Islam—must be turning in
their graves.
But all this is history, you say? Why rehash it? Why not let
it be and move on, begin a new chapter of mutual tolerance and respect, even if
history must be "touched up" a bit?
This would be a somewhat plausible position—if not for the
fact that, all around the globe, Muslims are still exhibiting the same imperial
impulse and intolerant supremacism that their conquering forbears did. The only
difference is that the Muslim world is currently incapable of defeating the West
through a conventional war.
Yet this may not even be necessary. Thanks to the West's
ignorance of history, Muslims are flooding Europe under the guise of
"immigration," refusing to assimilate, and forming enclaves which in
modern parlance are called "ghettoes" but in Islamic terminology are
the ribat—frontier posts where the jihad is waged on the infidel, one way or
the other.
All this leads to another, perhaps even more important
point: If the true history of the West and Islam is being turned upside its
head, what other historical "orthodoxies" being peddled around as
truth are also false?
Were the Dark Ages truly benighted because of the
"suffocating" forces of Christianity? Or were these dark ages—which
"coincidentally" occurred during the same centuries when jihad was
constantly harrying Europe—a product of another suffocating
"religion"?
Was the Spanish Inquisition—also condemned by Obama—a
reflection of Christian barbarism or was it a reflection of Christian
desperation vis-à-vis the many Muslims who, while claiming to have converted to
Christianity, were practicing taqiyya and living as moles trying to subvert the
Christian nation back to Islam?
Don't expect to get true answers to these and other
questions from the makers, guardians, and disseminators of the West's
fabricated epistemology.
In the future (whatever one there may be) the histories
written about our times will likely stress how our era, ironically called the
"information age," was not an age when people were so well informed,
but rather an age when disinformation was so widespread and unquestioned that
generations of people lived in bubbles of alternate realities—till they were
finally popped.
Credit to Raymond Ibrahim
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