A Time For Truth

A Time For Truth
By Charles T. Buntin

Pope Benedict was meeting with a group of scholars the other day, and made the following statement, quoting a medieval text of a statement by the 14th century Byzantine emperor, Manuel Paleologos II

The emperor comes to speak about the issue of jihad, holy war," the pope said. "He said, I quote, 'Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.'"

The reaction in the Muslim world to this mild academic observation included protests, the burning of several churches, and death threats to the Pope—in other words, the actions of the “Islamic street” served to prove the comments of the long-dead emperor. And so should the Byzantines have known, because 28 years after the death of Emperor Manuel, Constantinople, the capital of the Byzantine Empire, fell, and tens of thousands of its people were slaughtered; churches were converted to mosques, Christian scholars were driven from all the surrounding lands to Western Europe (helping lead to the Renaissance), and the long oppression by the Islamic rulers of the Christian majority of the Balkan Peninsula and Greece continued to expand.

The Truth is that Islam roared out of the Arabian Peninsula in 632 AD, after either convincing by various means or forcing by the sword, the conversion of all of the Arabic tribes, except for two. Those two tribes were Jewish, and they were virtually annihilated, all the men being slaughtered and the women and children sold into slavery or absorbed into the mass of the faithful. Over the next 100 years, Islam expanded by military conquest until it reached from the middle of France clear to the far borders of what had been the empire of Alexander the Great, and everywhere, forced conversion, atrocities, and mass slaughters characterized the spread. Only in 732, at Tours, France, was the onslaught halted. There, the gallant and greatly outnumbered Frankish army under Charles Martel, the grandfather of Charlemagne, turned back a far larger and better-armed Islamic horde and drove it back to Spain. It took the Spanish 760 years to fully regain their independence from their Muslim rulers.

Christian Europe attempted to regain some of the land in the Middle East that had been taken by Islam—we call that the crusades, and Europeans and Americans of European descent are, in this age of political correctness, supposed to feel bad about the attempt to take back what had been taken. From 732 until 1683, there were many attempts by various Islamic empires to conquer Christian Europe. The victory by the Portuguese at Diu off the coast of India in 1509, the Venetian naval triumph at Lepanto in 1574, and the back-breaking triumph of the Polish army at Vienna in 1683 were just some of the major actions in these many wars. Were the Western armies any less savage than the Islamic forces? No; the armies of the West equaled their opponents in savagery and atrocities—war, as General Sherman said, is hell. These are all objective facts of history, and one could mention many more.

This should be ancient history; after all, the states of Europe have long been secular and not Christian, and they have welcomed Islamic workers and refugees in large numbers. The Islamic guests of the European democracies have enjoyed political freedoms that none of them have in their own homelands; they have been allowed to practice their religion; they have been treated far better than the tiny Jewish and small Christian minorities in some Islamic countries. In other Islamic nations, there are no minorities, because practicing any other religion than Islam leads to death. In each European nation, there are Jihadi organizations that hate and seek to destroy the very civilization that extends such kindness to its Islamic guests. In Islamic nations, editorial cartoons, political speeches, even the curricula of their schools often contain strident and venomous anti-semitic and anti-Christian content. The difference is, that a scholar of any race or conviction can freely talk about the actions of the Europeans, and no one cares, nor does anyone burn down any houses of worship. No European mobs burn down any mosques. The nutty president of Iran denies the Holocaust and hosts conferences with collections of scurrilous pseudo-intellectuals who deny that the Holocaust took place. Are any Islamic houses of worship destroyed? Are there mass protests in the West? No—we believe in freedom; say what you want, we will let evidence and the force of free thought determine the outcome. These are not bigoted statements, they are true statements.

There are, to be sure, many Muslims in Europe and the US who do not support the aims of the Jihadi movements, and who are often embarrassed by the Islamic “street.” And, there are no doubt large majorities in most Islamic nations that just want to get on with life and be peaceful and prosperous. However, these “moderates” face the same Jihadi menace that we face. They face an implacable foe who wants to turn their lives and ours back to 800 A.D. Islamo-Facism (a very good, descriptive and accurate term that the forces of political correctness despise) is a force that will either be annihilated or Western Civilization will. This is a struggle for our way of life, our faith, and our ideals, and many of our own people are either on the side of the Islamo-facists or don’t have enough sense to realize that the gun is aimed at them too.

The bottom line is this: if we cannot speak the truth, we have lost. If we are intimidated by mobs into modifying our statements to fit someone else’s agenda, our freedom is gone, and the terrorists have won. If the pope has to back off and distance himself from a scholarly quote made to a group of scholarly people, we have surrendered the hard-won rights that cost us an ocean of “blood, sweat, tears, and toil” to gain and maintain. It is time someone said this—so I have.