Smoky Mountains Sunrise

Tuesday, August 23, 2011

Europe’s Islamophobes

By Rebekah Maxwell


“The fact that in Mohammedan law every woman must belong to some man as his absolute property must delay the final extinction of slavery until the faith of Islam has ceased to be a great power among men.”
“Individual Moslems may show splendid qualities. Thousands become the brave and loyal soldiers of the Queen; all know how to die; but the influence of the religion paralyses the social development of those who follow it. No stronger retrograde force exists in the world.”
“Far from being moribund, Mohammedanism is a militant and proselytizing faith. It has already spread throughout Central Africa, raising fearless warriors at every step; and were it not that Christianity is sheltered in the strong arms of science, the civilization of modern Europe might fall, as fell the civilization of ancient Rome.”
Winston Churchill wrote these words in 1899 in his book “The River War,” his first-hand account of fighting Islamic militants in the Mahdist War in Sudan. His words resonate over a century later when the European continent, now wracked by financial and cultural instability, is plagued with a question  no one wants to ask: has Europe’s multicultural experiment failed?

For the fear of being called a racist, intolerant or an Islamophobe,  Europeans will not explore the question.  They refuse to look at the potential side-effects of the growing culture clash for fear that a  post-Enlightenment chapter in the 1000-year history of violence between Christendom and Islam will erupt, disturbing the peace and civility they have long hailed.

The popular social discourse against Western dominance of historically Western territory has silenced a good many critics. But that silence is hard enough to preserve and uneasy at best; wholly ignoring a millennium of attempted mutual destruction is quite a feat of self-deception.

But a question beyond the failure of European multiculturalism might be whether a civilization that will not protect its own citizens from systematic racially-motivated violence deserves to be salvaged.

The essence of “multiculturalism” demands that one cannot criticize any culture, cannot use one’s own standard to judge another culture…even when that culture allows women to be controlled like property, married at gunpoint, or young girls mutilated. There is no objective truth, only the promise of mutual tolerance. Now, it appears the ideological necessity of maintaining silence for multiculturalism’s sake has aided and abetted Europe’s own destruction.

That silence has bought Europe a few decades of good PR and a population that cannot defend itself from a strong, exclusive ideology, like Islam.  Because Churchill was wrong. It was not “science” or technological progress that protected Christianity; Europe’s greatest progress was achieved (in spite of the epic failures of some of her leaders) when her churches were thriving.

When the churches stopped teaching Christ, they ceased reaching out to the people, stopped calling for higher standards of living. They just tried to survive, to fit in, marginalizing themselves. Their response to continental secularization was silence. That silence has now been filed with a growing challenge from Islam, a religion that is actively striving for dominance.

I don’t blame Muslims for the decline of Europe/Western culture. I blame the combination of cowardice, ignorance, and self-loathing that has characterized Western Christians for decades.  There is no better time now for the church to become relevant…the fate of their nations depend on it.

The secular governments of nations like Norway have tolerated violence against their own citizens in the name of Islam and have done little to stop it, having already sacrificed individual God-given rights for the illusion of peace. And nations that will not stand up to protect their vulnerable and their victims deserve to be called far worse than racists

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