Counter

Pageviews last month

Wednesday 8 February 2006

The Cartoon Conundrum--time for the Tenth Crusade?

CounterThe forces of Radical Islam have unleashed a new Intifada upon the civilized world. Interestingly enough, few of the Islamists who have rioted over the cartoons supposedly depicting Mohammed have even seen any of the artwork. It was enough for them to be told that it existed, and that its existence necessitated a renewed jihad against infidels everywhere.

Western (read: Non-totalitarian) governments are caught in a conundrum. They can't ban the art, because to deny the right of an artist to make a non-inflammatory depiction of a historical figure solely because someone will thereby become offended, even violently so, is inconsistent with any remaining notion of Free Speech. On the other hand, accustomed to being able to slap Christians in jail for Hate Crimes just because they publicly opposed a Gay Parade, these governments are frustrated at their inability to placate Radical Islam with toothless apologies and repeated calls for tolerance.

It is starting to dawn on some people, perhaps, what was painfully obvious to Catholics from Europe who attempted to make pilgrimages to the Holy Land around the turn of the 12 century: Muslims and anti-Muslims cannot practice their respective faiths in the same place and at the same time. That first realization launched, over the course of the next two centuries, a full nine different Crusades, which each managed to, however temporarily, dislodge the Muslim foe guarding the Christian holy sites against the entry of pilgrims. These came to an end when the Turks finally overran the Kingdom of Jerusalem for the last time, and, taking the battle back to the enemy as it were, began closing in on Constantinople. For the next few centuries Christendom was in a pitched battle for survival which did not come to an end militarily until the vanquished Ottoman Empire was partitioned by the winners of World War One.

Unable to meet the foe in pitched battle, Jihad has now gone global, with major victories in New York, Madrid, and London. The aim is the same now as it always was: to bring the infidel nations of the world into subjection to Islam.

Islamists have thrown down a mighty gauntlet to the governments of the Free World, saying essentially what the original Messengers of the Prophet said to the three emperors of Christendom: "Submit to Islam, or die!"
The emperors refused, and their empires all fell to the scimitar, leaving only small remnant populations behind to forever live as an oppressed minorities in a vast Muslim empire: the Copts in Egypt, the Assyrians in Syria and points westward, and the Armenians and Serbians in what had been the Ottoman Empire. Only on the Greek and Iberian peninsulas did the majority non-Muslim population endure through the centuries of Muslim occupation--and to this day these are the only two countries in existence to have shrugged off their Muslim oppressors once and for all.

The Global War on [Islamist] Terror has taken on a very broad front.
So far, the only response to this latest offensive has been diplomacy. I don't know what our governments ultimately plan to do about this, but it's looking to me very much like the lead-up to the Battle of Senlac Hill. The regime change that was brought about that day has endured to this, nearly a millennium later.

1 comment:

One comment per viewer, please--unless participating in a dialogue.