Whenever I hear Western liberals, even more than Muslim apologists, speak of Islam as "a religion of peace", which has only been hostile to Western civilization because of the crusades (11th-13th centuries A.D.), I mention a few places and dates which throw them into terrible confusion.

Syraia, 634 A.D., Jerusalem, 637 A.D., Egypt, 638 A.D., Persia, 640 A.D., North Africa, 687 A.D., Spain, 711 A.D., Sicily, 9th century A.D.

All of these were sudden, brutal invasions and conquests by Islamic militants against Chrisitan and non-Christian regions wihtout provocation based upon the direct commands of the The Prophet Mohammed, founder of Islam.

While some historians marvel that a movement whose founder was born only in 570 A.D. should have swept so much of the then-known world in so short a time, the basic point is often overlooked.

Islam, over four centuries before the crusades, was an expansionist, imperialistic creed that never practiced anything remotely approaching religious tolerance such as we, in the "decadent West", understand it.

Yes, some will say, the Muslims had a policy of "conversion, tribute, or the sword" which was somehow preferable to the alleged Christian policy of "conversion or death".  Yet one wonders how this tribute-which extended only to Jews & Christians as "People of The Book" while animists and polytheists were shown no mercy-is so much leniency as it was expediency.  Islam not only practiced religious apartheid in its domains, but found a steady source of income capital from those minorities gradually losing their spiritual heritage by a process of attrition.

Although Hollywood tries to portray Islam as an innocent victim of Western Christian aggression-televison and movies keep showing doe-eyed Muslims asking Americans, "Why do you people keep invading us?" -the historical fact is that, four and a half centuries prior to Pope Urban II's call for the First Crusade at Clermont, France, in 1095 A.D., Muslims attacked Christians in fulfillment of their basic religious tenets.  It is Islam, not Christianity, that is the aggressor in this ancient conflict.

While it took three centuries for Christianity to engage in religious wars and the oppression of dissidents, having been persecuted by the pagan Romans until tolerance was granted by Constantine in 315 A.D., and becoming the official creed of the empire under Theodosius in 380 A.D., Islam was born amidst blood and slaughter, the so-called "religion of peace".

I am not slighting Islam here or the many good and decent Muslims, indeed in the majority of the world. I am simply stating historical facts Western liberals and Islamic militants would rather ignore or revise.  Historical revisionists of the Left would like to blame everything upon our own Western Christian society, but an honest and objective referee would have to admit in this fight, it was NOT Christianity that threw the first punch.

Leftist Hollywood (if that is not a redundancy) in its ongoing struggle to demean and deride Christianity, highlights the backwardness of Christian Western Europe during the early Middle Ages in juxtaposition to the highly sophisticated Islamic East. There is some truth in that, if you take into account that from the 5th to 7th centuries A.D. Western Europe was climbing out of the wreckage caused by the colapse of the Roman Empire in the West, 472 A.D., the real "dark ages" (not to be confused with the entire span of the medieval period). Yet if the Islamic world once held intellectual superiority over the Christian West, kindly remember that it was only achieved by purloining the academic resources of both Jewish & Christian learning centers such as Antioch (Syria) and Alexandria (Egypt). Islam, like ancient Rome, was more of a borrower than an innovator of ideas.

A closer look at Islam's history reveals an undeniable reversal of fortunes from the 10th to 15th centuries A.D., as learning grew and spread in the West while it stagnated in the East. By the time of the 15th-century Renaissance and 16th century Reformation to the scientific discoveries of The 17th & 18th century Age of Reason, Christian Western Europe grew in leaps and bounds while the Ottoman Empire, the successor of Islam's hey-day, declined into corruption, lethargy, intellectual aridness, and ultimately its fate in the 19th century as "the sick man of Europe (and Western Asia).

Herein lies another, and far more important, reason for why "the Arab street" has had such resentment toward Western civilization, quite independent of the unfortunate horrors of the crusades.  The glory days of Islam are long past, and the overwhelming majority of its people since the fall of the Ottoman empire live in abject poverty under either a theocratic (as in Iran) or secular (as in Saddam's Iraq) oligarchy that has never understood the concept of human rights. 

Small wonder the Islamo-fascists want to retreat to a medieval, fear-driven world view; it is the only way to keep the masses subdued.  It was never that they feared another "crusade" from the West in our invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, it has always been their fear of democractic institutions in their lands that would put the masters of Middle Eastern apartheid out of business.

Consider what fanatics have done who claim to speak in the name of The Prophet, Mohammed, who insisted upon the protection of women and children in warfare: toddlers strapped with explosives and sent into enemy camps. Consider how these people have ignored almsgiving, The Fifth Pillar of Islam, and sent to their poor and malnourished co-religionists not food, clothing, and medicine, nor training for better employment, but guns, bombs, and hate speech. 

Consider that  Muslim-on-Muslim crime since the death of The Prophet and the creation of factions such as Sunni & Shitte' has killed more Muslims than all the crusades and recent Western intervention put together, yet it is the West that gets blamed.  Consider that if the radicals ever do get control the first people they will execute will be fellow Muslims that dissent from their extremist view.

Consider that France, with its low native Gallic population growth, faces the prospect of becoming a nation with a majority of Muslims, which some radicals have boasted will be the ultimate revenge upon Charlemagne-a mostly Muslim France. Reminiscent of Yassir Arafat, who said Israel would be defeated by the fertility of Arab women (no respect for human life from those who use children as suicide bombers), Muslims keep having babies while the native French, like the good Catholics they have always been, continue to practice birth control and have abortions.  A war of attrition, from a "religion of peace".

The Western secularists who see Christianity as the great foe of all human freedom would do well to take a closer look at what kind of theocracy the Islamo-fascists would impose upon us if they win the day, the kind of theocracy that would suffer a woman to death for naming a teddy bear after The Prophet.  They should thank God or whatever higher power they believe in, such as Global Warming, that they live in a culture that produced the concept of separation of church & state. Their contempt for the Western world that has nurtured them and protected their freedoms is an immature symptom not too different from spoiled brats who hate their own parents because they have been told they cannot have everything they want, and idealize the parents of strangers simply because they are different.

I have great respect for Islam and the many Muslims I know, but I am longing for the day when more Muslim leaders come out and denounce this "tattered edge of the lunatic fringe" that claim they represent "a religion of peace", who dishonor one of the world's great religions.

As for the Western liberals who acquiese to such reprobates to satisfy their own anti-Christian and anti-Western prejudices, I have no respect for them at all.

Peter July 2008