On the 18th
anniversary of the September 11, 2001 jihadist attacks on United States soil, as
on every anniversary, the cry “Never forget!” went out across social media as Americans
somberly vowed to keep the memory of 3,000 murdered innocents alive. But the
danger today is not that we will forget the victims, but that we will forget
the perpetrators. The New York Times epitomized this
willful blindness with a commemorative tweet on the day declaring that “airplanes
took aim at the World Trade Center” on 9/11 – a cowardly evasion by the Times, denying any
human agency whatsoever behind the attacks instead of placing the blame
squarely where it belongs: on Islamic terrorists waging war on unbelievers in the
West.
In our politically
correct self-loathing induced by decades of leftist indoctrination, the West – or
what properly used to be called Christendom – has spent the past eighteen years
not extinguishing the Islamic supremacism that brought down the Twin Towers,
but often aiding and abetting it, welcoming the barbarians inside the gates and
pretending we can coexist. As Raymond Ibrahim writes in his new book Sword
and Scimitar: Fourteen Centuries of War
Between Islam and the West, “The West has learned to despise its
heritage and religion, causing it to become an unwitting ally of the jihad.” As
a culture we now lack the historical perspective to view the 9/11 attacks in
the context of this ongoing, 1400-year clash of civilizations. “Very few
understand,” Ibrahim notes, “that this modus operandi stretches back to and has
been on continuous display since Islam’s first contact with Christian
civilization.”
Raymond Ibrahim is
a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center and a scholar at the
Middle East Forum. His previous books include the eye-opening The
Al Qaeda Reader and Crucified Again, a must-read
about the genocidal persecution of Christians in the Middle East. Sword
and Scimitar, an elegantly packaged book (with 16 pages of black-and-white plates)
from Da Capo Press, is a deeply researched, thoughtfully analyzed
military history of the ancient, existential struggle between the mortal
enemies Islam and Judeo-Christian civilization. “[W]hile this book is not a general history of
Western-Muslim relations,” Ibrahim clarifies, “it is most certainly a history
of the most general aspect of said relations – war.” It “demonstrates
once and for all that Muslim hostility for the West is not an aberration but a
continuation of Islamic history.”
- the Roman defeat at Yarmuk in 636, after which “the unity of the ancient Mediterranean was shattered and the course of world history forever altered”;
- the failed Muslim siege of Constantinople, 717, wherein Leo III led a resistance that “saved not only the Byzantine empire and the eastern Christian world,” as one historian put it, “but also all of Western civilization”;
- the battle of Tours, 732, in which Frankish hero Charles Martel and his army, Europe’s last (and perhaps only) line of defense, turned back an overwhelmingly larger Islamic force and limited the Islamic Empire to the Iberian peninsula;
- the Turkish victory at Manzikert, 1071, the beginning of “the longest death-rattle in history”;
- Saladin’s slaughter of Crusaders at the battle of Hattin, 1187;
- King Alfonso’s “miraculous” victory at the battle of Las Navas de Tolosa, 1212, the beginning of the end of Islam’s hold on Spain;
- the second siege of Constantinople, 1453, the “greatest of conquests” and the fulfillment of Muhammad’s centuries-old prophecies;
- Jan Sobieski’s successful defense of Vienna in 1683, essentially ending a thousand years of military threat to Europe from Islam.
Ibrahim sets the
scene with a “bare-bones, hagiographic-free summary” of the rise to power of
Islam’s prophet Muhammad, of the birth of jihad, and of the tide of Islamic imperialism
that, in less than a hundred years, carved out an empire larger than Rome’s had
been. Then Ibrahim digs deeper into the specific battles and their significance
in the context of the times. He concludes with a brief look at the clash of
America and Islam in the Barbary Wars and the decline of the Ottoman Empire,
which seemingly ended the age-old struggle between Islam and the West – seemingly, for as Ibrahim
puts it, “Islamic jihad is back in full vigor” today. Because of the imbalance
of military power between the West and the Islamic world, however, the conflict
is no longer about epic battles of the sort Ibrahim details, but about insurgencies
and terrorism, lawfare and civilizational jihad, mass migration and demography.
Sword
and Scimitar manages to be both a treasure of detailed
scholarship and page-turning storytelling. And it is more than the
limiting label “military
history” might suggest. This is not a dry recitation of troop movements and siege
strategies. In addition to fleshing out the historical and cultural backdrops
behind each battle, the book teems with a cast of vivid characters whom Ibrahim
brings to life, depicting their pieties and perversions in almost cinematic
fashion: kings and sultans, crusaders and warlords, popes and caliphs. It is essential
reading for grasping the full sweep of the forever war between Islam and the
West.
We once crushed both
the global threats of Nazism and Japanese imperialism in a mere four years. But
nearly two decades after the 9/11 terror attacks, our leaders and elites cannot
even bring themselves to name Islamic supremacism as the enemy, much less commit
to eradicating it. Indeed, even the U.S. Army War College disinvited Raymond Ibrahim from
speaking about his book a few months ago to appease the bullies at CAIR, the
Council on American Islamic Relations. We have Chamberlains when we need
Churchills. “If Islam is terrorizing the West today,” Ibrahim concludes in Sword
and Scimitar, “that is not because it can, but because the West allows it to. A
still swinging Scimitar will always overcome a strong but sheathed Sword.”
If we truly want to honor the
9/11 victims and all those who have been slain in the name of jihad over the span
of fourteen centuries, we will do more than cry “Never forget!” once a year. We
will unsheathe the Sword.
From FrontPage Mag, 10/9/19
