The recent Hamas invasion of Israel and its subsequent retaliation has removed any scabs there may have been on Muslim advancement in Europe and America. A crescent moon is rising in the West for the 3rd time in our joint history. Hilary Belloc first recognized the cultural and political dangers of Islam in his 1937 book The Crusades: The World’s Debate. At that time the European colonial powers had more to fear from Fascism and Nazism than anything in the Islamic world.
Belloc was more of a prophet than he could have imagined. Islam is now in the midst of a very long and gradual third invasion of the West. This one is subtler than either that of Muhammad in 632 or the Turks in the 13th century. Islam’s imperial expansion into the West was astonishing. Within 100 years of Muhammad’s death, Muslim armies had conquered the Christian provinces of Syria, Palestine, Egypt, and the rest of North Africa, as well as Spain, Portugal, and southern Italy. They were finally stopped by Charles Martel at Poitiers (Tours), in central France in 732 AD. It took over 700 years for the Spanish to get their country back during the Reconquista.
In 1453, the Turks, a central Asian people who had been converted to Islam, captured Constantinople, the center of the Eastern Orthodox Church. After they occupied Greece and much of the Balkans, they knocked on the gates of Vienna, which was only saved by the heroics of the Poles in the 17th century. Had it not been for this Christian Coalition most of Europe would be speaking Arabic.
In the 21st century, Europe and America have such glaring internal weaknesses that Islam’s third invasion might be successful without a shot being fired. Its political mainstream still believes that Islam can be accommodated by some vacant notion of Western values, which has no greater substance than a steady diet of Cokes, Big Macs, and Netflix. They also fail to understand that according to Serge Trifkovic’s 2002 book, The Sword and the Prophet, the Islamic Movement is an organized struggle to change the existing society into an Islamic society, based on the Qur’an and the Sunna.
This is happening, not just in Europe, but has already sown its seeds of destruction here. The problem is that the West stands for little more than material progress and an unnatural social reform. Its long history of faith and moral traditions seems to have vaporized in the evening mist after nearly a century of world war and communist occupations. Europe is a spiritual wasteland just begging for Islam to fill its emptiness.
There have been many causes of this decline. The most prominent has been that since World War II European culture has descended into an atheistic secularism that has virtually eliminated God from its cultural banquet table. The West’s adoption of gay and reproductive rights, supported by a politically correct government, replete with its cradle to grave, socialistic entitlements has left Europe without a viable soul.
This should surprise no one. Writers have been warning of this pending calamity for years. Conservative Pat Buchanan was one of the first to raise the red flag of danger in 2002 with his book, The Death of the West: How Dying Populations and Immigrant Invasions Imperil Our Country and Our Civilization.
Europeans have also lost their desire to leave their civilization to their offspring. Buchanan reminds the West that the Islamic world has retained something vital for the future that the West has discarded and that is the desire to have children and the will to carry on their civilization, cultures, families, and faith. Europeans and their American cousins have sacrificed the birth of their next generation on the altar of material and sexual pursuits. Consequently, its descendants never look to the past or the future but live for the moment.
It is a political truism that demography is the mother of all politics. Large families are the political weapon of Islam that is likely to make it the most dominant religion in the next two generations. The replacement rate for most societies is 2.0 children per fertile woman. While birth rates have plunged in Europe, the replacement rate in the United States is 2.1. However, I would offer that this stability can be based more on America’s immigrant population than its native daughters. Italy, the seat of the Vatican stands at a dismal 1.33. The European Union average is only 1.38. Contrast these with Pakistan’s 5.08 and Saudi Arabia’s 4.53.
In his 2006 book, America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It, columnist Mark Steyn wrote that modern feminists and their right to choose have insured that European women will end their days in a culture that doesn’t accord them the right to choose anything. This is the sentiment of Algerian president, Houari Boumediene, who predicted in 1974, Victory will come to us from the wombs of our women.
Should demographic and political trends continue, by the end of this century Europe will no longer exist, as the world knows it. Europe’s socialist governments have been mindlessly implementing laws to destroy marriage and the family, just as Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci hoped they would nearly a century ago. White flight and a declining native population will also allow Muslims to gain political control of many of its most traditional cities. European couples seem to have little desire to get married.
This thesis has only intensified with the millions of boat people that have invaded the shores of Europe in the last few years. This is also true of America’s broken Southern borders. When they are truly acclimated, they will fully accomplish this historic cultural transformation, not through bullets and bombs, but with the bassinet and the ballot.
Europeans are slowly starting to awaken to the dangers that confront Western Civilization. Steyn also pointed out that Since 9/11 Europe has seen the London Tube bombings, the French riots, and the Dutch murders of nationalist politicians. They have finally become aware that Islam has provided the cover for a dangerous 5th column for jihad. Even the European left is now asking whether once sacrosanct values of tolerance and multiculturalism should have limits. Viable neo-nationalist groups and politicians have gained momentum in the wake of this ferment. But it may be far too late.
While many are starting to recognize this Muslim invasion for what it portends to do to their culture, it is not a given that Europeans will fight to maintain or regain the rights that their ancestors secured for them. Americans can only hope and pray that they will summon the courage to reject Islamic cultural imperialism by all the power and force at their disposal. Democracy without protection of human and minority rights is mob-rule and unworthy of respect. Thusly, continuous immigration and the failure of Muslim assimilation are the continent’s most pressing political challenges in the 21st century.
The Catholic Church, which has endured a long and controversial history with Islam, has not been immune to this cultural invasion. In an honest attempt to transcend a history that included the Crusades, Belloc’s warnings, and Dante’s Divine Comedy, which consigned Muslims to the schismatics corner in his Eighth Circle of Hell, the late Pope Benedict XVI made several ecumenical overtures to Muslims around the world. He had high praise for Islam, saying that the Church regarded the Muslims with esteem because they adore the one God…merciful and all-powerful…Creator of Heaven and earth.
Benedict was the first Pope to have developed an active theological policy toward Islam. According to Daniel Madigan, a prominent Vatican adviser on Christian-Muslim relations, the pope had also been laying down challenges to Islam, telling Muslims, We need to do some hard talking on the subject of terrorism and the political and moral instability it holds for the world.
Unfortunately, Benedict’s relationship with Islam will always revert to his statement to a group of theologians at Regensburg University in September of 2006. In an honest attempt to open a dialogue of cultures with Islam, Benedict cited a question posed by the Byzantine Emperor Manuel II in a 1391 dialogue with a Persian guest.
The emperor asked the Persian to show me just what Muhammad brought that was new and there you will find things only bad and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached. Emperor Manuel was arguing against the Muslim practice of forced conversion, saying God is not pleased by blood, and not acting reasonably is contrary to God’s nature.
Nothing could have prepared Benedict for the Muslim reaction to his Regensburg’s talk. The Muslims misunderstood some of his verbal semantics and in less than 24 hours, riots and protests had broken out across the Muslim world. Before the issue died down, Benedict had been burned in effigy in Basra and an Anglican and Greek Orthodox Church had been firebombed in Nablus. In Mogadishu, Somalia an Italian nun was shot down in front of the children’s hospital where she worked.
The pope had tried to walk back his address but to no avail as young Muslims took to the streets, calling for the Pope’s death and waving placards that said, Islam will conquer Rome and Jesus is the slave of Allah. Palestinians attacked five churches in the West Bank and Gaza and an Iraqi insurgent group threatened the Vatican with a suicide attack. Sheikh Abu Saqer, the head of the Salafiya Jihadiya movement in Gaza, called angrily for the conquest and conversion of Rome: This is a crusader war against Islam, and it is our holy duty to fight all those who support the Pope . . .. The green flag of Allah and Muhammad will be raised over the Vatican. Perhaps with his predecessor’s experience in mind, Pope Francis has made an outreach to Muslims that has led to his moral ambiguity on the recent invasion of Israel and the subsequent bombing of Gaza.
The American focus has been largely on the cultural invasion of its Southwestern border from Mexico. The internal threat posed by Islam is far more serious for the nation’s future than the border issue, which has intensified under the Biden presidency. Muslims see the West as spiritually weak as epitomized by the U.S.’s citing the words of the Arab proverb, Falling Camel attracts many knives. Capitalism’s support of unrestricted immigration of a flood of different peoples with little cultural stake in Western culture has been the poison the West has ingested to kill its own heritage.
Their mosques, which are now in all the major cities of the West, have become recruitment centers for jihad. They also serve as charity drops, reaping millions of dollars for subversive activities against the American people. The plan encourages Muslims to run for public offices, especially Congress where they can serve as protectors of the faith. They advise Muslims to dominate the medical field, research, and pharmaceutical companies.
They also provide monetary grants to students, colleges, and universities in America for Islamic Studies Centers with Muslim directors for the promotion and defense of Islam. They have already introduced Islam to America’s prisons where the high percentage of black inmates have created a religious underclass that will someday demand Islamic Sharia instead of the American justice system.
In a 2007 article for Truth in Crisis, Dr. Anis Shorrosh, a member of Oxford Society of Scholars, elaborated a detailed plan, 20 years in the making, for Islam’s Reconquista of the United States. It is filled with cultural knives that are all aimed at the American people. Muslim Civil Rights organizations now abound in this country. In our last election, record numbers of Muslims were elected to state offices and their political power continues to expand as their population increases. Despite their religious beliefs, many have joined the Democratic Party because they sense it is broadly anti-American. If they ever gain control of it, the Democratic focus will change radically.
The sad truth is there are no Charles Martels, Holy Leagues, or Christian Coalitions on the horizon to stop this invasion. The West must first reject the Marxist multiculturalism that has allowed this scenario to happen. They must also look for assistance from India, China, Russia, and Africa which are also on Islam’s radar screen. It must reaffirm its 500 years of tradition of faith and freedom. If not, it will raise historian Arnold Toynbee to the level of Belloc as a prophet when he wrote in his A Study of History, civilizations die from Suicide, not murder.