How Europe Escaped Speaking Arabic

Revisiting a topic from the first Bradley Lecture Series in 1988-1989, Michael Novak delivered the fourth installment of AEI's twentieth-anniversary Bradley Lecture Series on December 8, 2008. Video, audio, and more information are available at www.aei.org/event1775/.

Jewett Scholar Michael Novak

How Europe Escaped Speaking Arabic

The Western world has never taken Islam with the full seriousness it has earned. Down through history, once Islamic armies have conquered a land, with very few exceptions, that land has remained Muslim. A Christian will wish in vain that the great circle of Christian lands around the Mediterranean (and on up into Syria, Iraq, Iran, and northwards into Georgia) had not fallen irretrievably into Muslim hands, most of them before 732 A.D. For Christians who think that the future of the world favors movement in their direction, a study of the latent dynamism of Islam is not a little unsettling.

Edward Gibbon, finishing up his The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776-78), was able to imagine how easily serene little Oxford could have been dominated by tall Islamic minarets before his birth, and the accents in its markets would have been Arabic: " . . . the interpretation of the Koran would now be taught in the schools of Oxford, and her pulpits might demonstrate to a circumcised people the sanctity and truth of the revelation of Mahomet" (469).

Gibbon was writing about the decisive battle of Poitiers in 732 A.D., when at last a Christian leader, Charles Martel ("Charles the Hammer"), drove back the Muslims from their highwater mark in Western Europe with such force that they went reeling backwards into Spain. From there, it took Spain another 750 years--until 1492--to drive Islamic armies back into North Africa, whence they had invaded. Even so, the Islamic terror bombers who just a few years ago killed more than a hundred commuters in Madrid did so (they announced) to avenge the Spanish "Reconquista" of 1492. For Islam, to lose a territory once Muslim is to incur a religious obligation to wrest it back.

It had been a marvel in 732 that a mere one hundred years earlier, Mohammed had launched his army from Medina, to conquer in rapid fire so many of the most glorious capital cities of Christianity--Jerusalem, Antioch, Alexandria, Hippo, Tunis, Carthage, and then all of Spain. More amazingly still, Muslims went very quickly further into the Far East than Alexander the Great ever had.

Read the complete article here. You won't regret you did.

Homicidal Islamic Bomber Recruited And Indoctrinated In The US

Clearly this homicidal jihadi scum wasn't indoctrinated in an American mosque and by an Islamic cleric. Otherwise the media and the authorities would have told us, right?

Militants Drew Recruit in U.S., F.B.I. Says

By DAVID JOHNSTON

WASHINGTON — The F.B.I. director, Robert S. Mueller III, said Monday that a Somali-American man who was one of several suicide bombers in a terrorist attack last October in Somalia had apparently been indoctrinated into his extremist beliefs while living in the United States.

The man, Shirwa Ahmed, was the first known suicide bomber with American citizenship. He immigrated with his family to the Minneapolis area in the mid-1990s, Mr. Mueller said, but he returned to Somalia after he was recruited by a militant group.

“It appears that this individual was radicalized in his hometown in Minnesota,” Mr. Mueller said, speaking at a meeting of the Council on Foreign Relations. Minneapolis claims the country’s largest Somali population.

Mr. Ahmed was driving a vehicle laden with explosives that blew up in northern Somalia in an attack that killed as many as 30 people, according to news reports. His body was returned to the United States with the help of the F.B.I.

Federal authorities have said that Mr. Ahmed was one of as many as two dozen young men of Somali descent who had disappeared in the past two years from their homes in the Minneapolis area after being recruited by the Shabab, a militia that is suspected of having ties to Al Qaeda and that has waged a war against the Somali government.

Mr. Mueller suggested that Somali recruiting posed a serious issue for the F.B.I., which has sought the cooperation of the Somali community to try to understand whether the recruiting represents a threat.

“It raises the question of whether these young men will one day come home, and, if so, what might they undertake here,” he said.

This begs the question: if all American Muslims are peaceful people minding their own business as we are always told by CAIR and their liberal Dhimmicrat friends.... then where, how and who brainwashed this man to become a homicide bomber?
I think I know the answer: must be a side effect of the fluoride in the water.

What Islam Fears: Laughter

Get your laughter treatment for an entire month on a single mega-dose of Islam mocking.

It's been a while since I had so much fun.



H/T Bluesky over at Calguns

Islam Demands Surrender

An insightful read about Islam from somebody who knows it

Islam Demands Surrender
Amil Imani (bio)
26 Jan 2009

What’s in a name? A great deal. Democracy, fascism, and communism represent different systems of government. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are also titles for different religious systems.

Whereas democracy is defined as the rule of the people, by the people, for the people, Islam is defined as the rule of Allah, by Allah and his emissaries, for the pleasure of Allah. And when people, out of concern for political correctness or ignorance, describe Islam as a religion of peace, they are, at the very least, guilty of misrepresenting it.

The word “Islam,” is derived from the word “taslim,” which means surrender. The word for peace is not “taslim,” but it is “solh.” Hence, when Muslims behave in violent barbaric ways, they are only doing so in obedience to the dictates of their creed. They are surrendering and sacrificing anything and everything in service to the will and pleasure of Allah, as they see it.

Of course, not every Muslim surrenders fully to the will of Allah. The great majority of Muslims are only partial Muslims. They may say their daily obligatory prayers, they may tithe some, and they may keep the fast from time to time. Yet, they may also have a few drinks now and then, and do many things that they are not supposed to do.

But Islam can be a “forgiving” religion, specifically for the male. If you neglect to say your prayers or you simply don’t want to, you can hire someone, preferably an imam or a mullah, to pray on your behalf. Going to the Hajj is too onerous and takes you away from the pleasures and comforts of your life? You can deputize someone else to go in your stead. You have a few drinks of the forbidden brew and it is time to say your prayer? Simply rinse your mouth and go ahead with praying. But, always remember the will of Allah and serve him. Do your duties to vanquish the unbelievers, promote the rule of the Shari’a, and make the earth Allah’s.

If only the masses of Muslims arise and carry out the orders of Allah, then we would have the promised paradise of Islam on earth as exemplified by such rules as that of the Taliban, Saudi Arabia, the Sudan, and of course the Shiite nirvana of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

In these model Islamic societies, freedom of expression, worship, and assembly are taken away. Women are treated as chattel. Young girls are subjected to barbaric genital mutilation to make them sex slaves and birth channels without the ability to enjoy intercourse. Minors are executed, adulterers are stoned to death, thieves have their limbs amputated, and much much more. Isn’t that everyone’s idea of paradise?

This misogynist religion of Allah is custom-made for the savage male. A faithful follower of Allah is allowed to have as many as four permanent wives – and replace any of them at any time he wants -- as well as an unlimited number of one-night or one-hour-standers that he can afford to rent. But, woe unto a woman if she even has a single love affair with another man. Nothing less than death by stoning is her just punishment.

The partial-Muslims are seemingly harmless, may appear normal, and are under the radar. What gets our attention is the die-hard, the real Muslims who are a small minority. Yet this virulent combative minority is campaigning simultaneously on two major fronts. It works to herd the partial-Muslim majority into its fold and vanquish all other non-believers by any and all means.

It is prudent to keep in mind that all important events in the history of humanity have been instigated by either an individual or a small group. These individuals or groups have been the sheep-dogs that have directed the movements and activities of the masses, the sheep.

This is exactly what the real Muslims, the Islamists, are doing in the world today. It is suicidal to dismiss the Islamists as a bunch of zealots of no consequences or as a fringe group that will burn itself out. Sadly enough, it is the bulk of the Muslims that pundits portray as “peaceful” who is either irrelevant or often serves as an instrument in the hands of the Islamists. A couple of examples from recent history conclusively prove the point that it is the fanatical minorities that launch and implement campaigns that inflict immense suffering on the larger society.

In the 1930s, very few Germans were Nazis, but many basked in the resurgence of German pride and many others were too busy with their own lives to care. Thus, Germany presented a wide-open unchallenged opportunity for the Nazis to push forward their agenda and gather power to a point that it was too late for any other force to stem their tide.

And we all know what suffering this gang of radical supremacists inflicted on millions of people before their own demise.

The Khomeinism of Iran was started by a band of Shiite fanatics who rode the tide of opposition to the rule of the Shah and promised the masses the Islamic nirvana. No sooner had the Khomeinists ascended to power than they made the entire nation captive by murdering tens of thousands of the complacent and the late-to-awaken opposition, imprisoning and torturing untold thousands more, and creating a state of Islamic menace that threatens the entire free world.

The fact is that too many die-hard Islamists continue leaving the failed Islamic states and settling in the lands of the Kafir. These new arrivals bring with them the deeply engrained hatred of the infidels and believe that they are indeed the rightful owner of the entire earth and all other non-Muslims are mere squatters that must be either subjugated or eliminated all together.

In this relentless campaign, the Islamists have a vast cadre of “experts,” “talking heads,” and for-purchase politicians who keep endlessly broadcasting the false mantra that Islam is religion of peace. This latter bunch is criminally complicit in making the populace complacent and furthering the work of the Islamists.

Islam may be a religion of peace. It is the kind of peace imbedded in its very name: Surrender. Free people shouldn’t be cowed by the Islamist savages and should take into account their accomplices who are shamelessly deceiving the public regarding the true nature of Islam

Islam demands surrender of all that free people cherish and hold sacred. It is Islam, a pathological doctrine and a vestige of long ago barbarism that must surrender to the wholesome principles of freedom and free people.