Let me try to explain why we are losing to the jihadists and suicide bombers.

For 1400 years Islam has made war on the West. Mohammed commanded from the very first that Muslims were to seek conversions at the point of the sword. There are 300 verses in the Koran urging the killing of Jews and Christians wherever these might be found. Islam’s aim was always the conquest of Europe. A strategic pattern emerged in which Muslim armies would attack and threaten conquest, only to be driven back, and there would follow a period of relative peace and quiet before a renewed insurgency.

There were many such insurgencies and incursions, but let me mention just a few of the most significant:

In AD 732 a Muslim army of as many as 200,000 men was defeated by the Christian Charles Martel at Tours. If that battle had been lost, all 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

Following the defeat of the Muslim Turks by the Knights of St John at Malta in 1565, there came the Battle of Lepanto on 7th October 1571 when a fleet of the Holy League, a coalition of Spain (including its territories of Naples, Sicily and Sardinia), 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.

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.

The most notable thing about all these life and death conflicts is that the victors were Christian princes and Christian soldiers. But now Europe has discarded Christianity, our churches are empty and new mosques are proliferating throughout the continent. Where our Christian forefathers repulsed the invaders, our modern leaders pay them to come in – in their millions. The character of Europe is thus being radically altered, in fact Islamised as Islam marches into the vacant space left by departed Christianity. We are left without the political will to repel these militant imperialists. More importantly, we entirely lack the moral and spiritual qualities required of us to defeat them and drive them out.

Islam is certainly a vile and detestable ideological cult, but at least its adherents believe something. They pray fervently. They fill their mosques regularly and often spill out into the street for lack of space. So European leaders build more mosques until what was once an incursion of an alien culture becomes an occupation. In thirty years’ time the great cities and towns of what was once Christendom will resemble the impoverished, wasted and filthy townscapes of the Middle East, North Africa, Afghanistan and Pakistan. Yes, the Muslims passionately want to come to Europe, but to do what? To turn Europe into the sorts of hellholes from which they have emerged. If you want a preview of what this will look like, visit parts of east London, Birmingham, Walsall, Wolverhampton, Bradford, Leicester, Luton, Rochdale, Oldham and a dozen other locations which have been turned into ill-kept Muslim ghettoes. Here with impunity – because the police will never intervene for fear of being accused of “Islamophobia” – they operate sharia, ill-treat their womenfolk and some drug and rape underage white schoolgirls. These ghettoes are beyond the law.

Europe lacks the intellectual, moral and religious resources to resist the Muslim takeover. Listen to the words of our political leaders after each succeeding atrocity – and cringe. They talk about “our values” and “our spirit.” What values are these? What spirit is this? Only the values and spirit of democracy, diversity and political correctness; of rampant, gaudy consumerism in which millions buy more and more things for which they have less and less purpose; the decadent spirit which animates our gadgeteered menagerie of ubiquitous pop music, electronic games and mindless chatter.

Churchill said, “We will fight them on the beaches…we will fight them on the landing grounds…we will never surrender.” What, metaphorically speaking, might our present leaders’ version of his resounding words sound like? “We will fight them in the chat-rooms…we will fight them on Facebook…we will fight them with Bakeoff and Strictly Come Dancing…we will fight them in teeny boppers’ pop concerts…we will fight them with our ‘roadside shrines’ and with our downloads of sub-musical trash. And above all we will fight them with our policy of pre-emptive self-abasement, appeasing editorials in all our newspapers and our confessed hatred for all that was best in the history of our nation and continent.”

Our today’s leaders cannot add, “We will never surrender” – because we have surrendered already.

Our culture is numb, effete, dead from the neck up. When Muslims show us their magnificent and crowded to overflowing metropolitan mosques – packed with fervent worshippers – we shall show them our cathedrals, empty of everything except failure, bad debts and the blundering tourists. And then we may show them our infantilised modern architecture which has turned the City of London into a species of Disneyland. We shall show them our meretricious installation “art” – art replaced by advertising and the contents of the junkyard that is Tate Modern.

The Muslim zealots constantly cry, “Allahu Akbar! – Our God is greater than your God!” They are right, for Europe now has no gods except the public display of fornication, the celebration of deviant sexuality – blessed by what’s left of the church, by the way – and wall-to-wall trivial entertainments. Everyone is encouraged to cultivate “self-esteem.” But the banality of our “lifestyle” is not something to esteem and a sane person would despise it.

Our immediate responses to each succeeding Muslim atrocity say all there is to say about the shallowness and feebleness of European civilisation and culture: a Martian visiting Manchester would be justified in thinking that the sole purpose of terrorist slaughter is to restore the flagging industries of counselling and psychobabble, and the markets in teddy bears and floral tributes.

Our leaders claim “We will never be defeated.” But we are defeated already. European civilisation is not in its death throes: it lies dead in its mouldering shroud. And we failed even to give it a decent Christian burial.

Peter Mullen