Oh dear, it wasn’t meant to turn out like this at all! When the Egyptian uprising began almost two years ago, it was cheered on by enthusiastic Western governments and an even more avid Western mass media who saw a brilliant democratic future for Egypt led by all those bright young people orchestrating peaceful revolution on their mobile phones. There were voices here and there – and I am not too shy to mention that this blog was among them – which spoilt the party by predicting the eventual takeover by the Islamists.
Why stop at two Irans when you can have three? Syria – where the idealistic “activists” were also lauded to the skies by the West – is heading the same way. Some of these idealists are now resorting to suicide bombs and torture in their campaign to be rid of Assad. The jihadists in Jabbat al-Nusra threaten to take over the Syrian uprising. One of the secular revolutionaries was quoted in Idlib over the weekend as saying: “We are not fighting Assad to go from living in an autocratic to a religious prison.” Another warned, “The next war after this will be between us and the Islamists.”
When will the West recognise the nature of the existential threat which it faces? It is nothing new. From time to time militant Islam has made war on the civilised world:
In AD 732 a Muslim army of 200,000 men were defeated by the Christian Charles Martel at Tours. If that battle had been lost, all of Europe would have fallen to militant Islam. In 1565 the relief of the Siege of Malta, by a Christian alliance, ensured that the Mediterranean did not fall into Muslim hands and so give them a toehold in southern Europe
At the Battle of Lepanto on 7 October 1571 a fleet of the Holy League, a coalition of Spain, the Republic of Venice, the Papacy, the Republic of Genoa, the Duchy of Savoy, the Knights Hospitaller and others, decisively defeated the main fleet of the Ottoman Empire. Then there was that other 11th September – 1683 when Christian armies under Jan Sobieski arrived at the gates of Vienna and defeated the last substantial Muslim incursion: the last, that is, before the one which we face at present in which secularists, Christians and Jews face daily slaughter all across the Middle East, in Pakistan and in many parts of Africa. Meanwhile, the British government, backed by the pusillanimous bishops, sets up an everlasting talking-shop with “moderate Muslims” – forgetting the fact that the Islamofascists massacre the moderate Muslims too.
Tragically, the West, consumed by self-hatred and the postcolonial guilt which accepts as true its enemies’ propaganda to the effect that the present militancy and its attendant terrorism is repayment for the “oppression” to which we have subjected Muslims worldwide, remains paralysed.
It looks as if we really are going to die of political correctness.
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The Rev Dr Peter Mullen is a priest of the Church of England and former Rector of St Michael, Cornhill in London. He has written for many publications including the Wall Street Journal. The Telegraph.