The American public was largely unaware of events in the Middle East until the Carter administration, when a series of inexplicably bad foreign policy decisions on the part of the United States allowed the secular postcolonial governments there to fall into the hands of persons explicitly adopting the political system called Sharia Law. Since the fall of the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, the conflict has occupied the headlines and made blatant what we previously had the luxury to ignore.

The public discourse surrounding these headlines is carried out with a curiously evasive quality, mute and indirect, as if everyone who speaks on the topic dare not name the topic. It is like listening to two Victorian matrons discussing a matter of sexual misconduct, all in hints and euphemisms.

I suggest it is because the history is too terrible, simple, and painful to the pride to admit.

This is no conspiracy, unless a Victorian prudishness unwilling to mention the unpleasant counts as a conspiracy. The facts are plain and are not disputed. They are merely not mentioned by the press and not taught in public schools. There is no hidden history, merely the unmentioned history. I reveal nothing that a few afternoons of patient reading can confirm to any skeptical inquirer.

In 610 AD, Mohammed entered a cave and emerged with the verses of the Koran, a manual containing a plagiarism of the Bible, as dictated to him by a spirit who denied that Christ was the Son of God. In Mecca, Mohammed preached in a peaceful fashion for a dozen years, and converted less than seventy persons all told. The pagan Quraysh princes of the city cast him out, and he traveled to the Jewish city of Medina, where he begged for sanctuary, pretending to be a man of peace.

Here he attracted a large following among the poor and discontent, and after eight years was a political leader to be reckoned with. He and family began raiding caravans from Mecca. He was a brilliant and innovative bandit chief, attacking where and when unexpected and selling the prisoners as slaves. This tactic of attacking economic centers and sources of wealth has been carried on to this day.

After a signal victory against the Meccan princes during what is called the Battle of the Trench, Mohammed besieged his hosts, the Jews of Medina, and drove them out of the city. The Mohammedan taste for torture has its roots in Mohammed’s torture of the Jewish prince of the Medina, whom he staked to the ground and built a fire on his chest. When the man did not yield, he was beheaded.

In 628, making the first pilgrimage to Mecca, Mohammed made a peace treaty with the Quraysh, which was highly unpopular as his companions had just vowed to avenge the rumored death of one of their number, should the rumor prove true. However, the Quranic sura “Al-Fath” (The Victory) assures the faithful that the expedition was still a success, on the grounds that it increased the prestige and reputation of Mohammed, and, more to the point, gave him time to restore his military strength.

The later and more warlike Koran was written at this time, and the verses enjoining Mohammedans to live in peace with Christians and Jews were overruled and reversed. Mohammed fought battles each year of his remaining five years of life: his immediate disciples carried out his will and wish and habits in his name after him.

So the tactic was established: approach in peace, preaching peace, when you are weak; make treaties when you gain political strength and need allies; betray the treaties when you gain military strength and no long need allies. The same tactic was done again and again, with astonishing success, for centuries.

Within twenty-five years after the death of Mohammed, the southern and eastern reaches of the Byzantine Empire, all Christian lands, and all fertile, were reduced by terror and sword to a wasteland. Te Jewish colonies of Yemen were conquered. Libya and much of Egypt to this day retains this character. All seven of the Churches mentioned by name in the Book of Revelation were conquered.

The Mohammedanism, like the Stalinism who came later, demand history be abolished, and are responsible for the burning and loss of nine tenth of the known lost ancient manuscripts of history. The destruction of the Stone Buddha statues in Afghanistan, or the famous museum in Babylon, was not a mistake or the act of some odd extremists: it is a central part of mainstream Sharia. Christian churches and relics are destroyed whenever they fall into Mohammedan hands: to this day, the Church of Saint Sophia in Constantinople is used as a mosque, in triumphant mockery of the defeated Christians.

You have no doubt heard that there was a Golden Age of Islam, where Muslim scholars preserved the works of Aristotle and the ancients, invented the zero, or made great strides in astronomy and mathematics. This is all an outrageous lie, the precise opposite of the truth. There were certain Spanish scholars, mostly Jews and Christians, conquered by Muslims, but who preserved the ancient texts despite the Muslim program of destroying them. The Byzantine Empire preserved what we have of ancient learning, and scholars fleeing the downfall of one Byzantine theme, province, or city after another in the relentless onslaught of Mohammed reintroduced them into the West. The Moslems not only were not the preservers of the knowledge of the ancient literature, they were the main force destroying it.

But one of the main causes of the fall of the ancient world was indeed Islam. The Mohammedans soon had control of the Mediterranean, which was the main trade route of the day, travel by land being prohibitively expensive. By cutting off Egypt from Europe, they cut off the breadbasket of Europe, the main source of grain to Christian lands. The economy of Europe contracted by two thirds during the Sixth and Seventh Centuries.

Spain and Turkey were invaded, hammered over and over again, in relentless and unceasing wars. Each new caliph would renew the wars and attempt to outdo his predecessors in savagery and enormity because this is what Mohammedan law teaches.

By the Thirteenth Century, just when Thomas Aquinas was successfully integrating Aristotelian philosophy into Christian Theology, an influential Mohammedan philosopher named Algazel convinced his world that there were no such thing as cause and effect, no secondary causes, nothing but the direct will of God. Fire does not cause paper to burn, the paper is destroyed by God’s will. In the meanwhile, Christians, everywhere these days portrayed as the enemies of science and learning, established the parallel institutions of the university system and academic freedom. Mohammedan scholars were having their schools and observatories closed.

And the fighting never stopped. Never. In no decade in history did the Moslems live in peace with their neighbors, except a brief respite when they were conquered by European powers.

When they invaded Egypt, it was 98% Christian; now there are nine thousand Coptic Christians left. Most Americans do not even know Egypt was ever a Christian land. Many Americans have heard of the Armenian genocide by the Turk: very few know this was Mohammedan Turks killing Armenian Christians, who had been Christian since the Fourth Century, since before the Fall of Rome.

Europe fed the slave trade of the Moslems for centuries. Our boys and women were routinely captured, sodomized and raped. The African slave trade was entirely Moslem for centuries, until the Spaniards, the only land in history ever to successfully throw back a Mohammedan conquest, adopted this practice from their ex-conquerors. Slavery had been largely abolished in Europe after the Christianization of the Roman Empire, going the way of gladiatorial games.

Ours is a shocking and traumatizing history: merely looking at the maps of the centuries between the sixth and the sixteenth, and seeing the Christian lands that one reached from the Rock of Gibraltar to beyond Persia turning rapidly Mohammedan as they are conquered, enslaved, subjected to this ruthless system of conversion-by-the-sword.

The Mohammedan dominion of Europe was curtailed at the battle of Lepanto; the Barbary Pirates to whom Jefferson (at first) paid tribute were quelled when France conquered Algiers, and then when the Ottoman Empire collapsed there were no longer any major Mohammedan powers threatening anyone.

For a very few, brief years, the main energies of the West were involved in that act of self-destruction known as World War One, and preoccupied with battles against national socialism and communist socialism. The self-absorption of the West, and a foolish notion that democrat republics could exist outside the ambit of civilized peoples, led to the rapid de-Westernization of the Mohammedan territories, and in a few decades, from the end of the Cold War to now, the somewhat secularized and westernized Moslem world returned enthusiastically to their Sharia Law roots, and now attempt once again to resume the endless war against Christendom Mohammedan started in the Sixth Century. Lacking the men and material for a direct battlefield assault, they proceed by the time honored techniques of economic warfare, propaganda, and random acts of terror inflicted on the innocent.

So history teaches that the Mohammedans are relentless, and merciless, and that they have tortured, enslaved, defeated and humiliated Christians again and again and again, with only a brief respite between Lepanto and the Cold War. With the Fall of the Soviet Union, they emerge again.

History shows that only Spain ever repelled the Mohammedan, and only due to a Christian warrior spirit long vanished from the Earth. Asia Minor, Armenia, Syria, and all the Middle East and North African lands never were free again once they fell. As far away as Ireland, whole coastal villages were depopulated by Moslem corsairs, and every man, woman, and child carried off in chains.

And history teaches that we cooperated and collaborated with them. Small wonder our history is not taught: we are ashamed of it. The Crusades are perhaps the sole shining example of a unified Christian world rising against the relentless Muslim aggression, and even at that, the conflict between Byzantine and Roman Christians turned bloody. (Ironically, this one glorious time is the only period modernism heaps shame upon Christianity, when we defended ourselves, and regained the Holy Land for a century.) Meanwhile both Jewish merchants and princes of Italy participated in the Moslem slave trade.

History teaches us that they are a satanic mockery of Christian civilization, the opposite of everything we believe, or a gross parody of it, and the war is endless. History shows that we are cringing losers and they are the insanely sadistic winners, their sadism glorified and made sanctimonious by fanaticism.

History teaches us to be afraid. And so we are. Too afraid to talk about it. Too afraid to name the enemy.

History says this is a religious war. But you cannot win a religious war if you trample your religion underfoot.

Richard the Lionheart might be willing to march to war and face capture, torture and death for the greater glory of Christ; but is any pajama-wearing cocoa-sipping partisan of gay marriage, gun control, socialized medicine or free trade in aborted baby organs willing to march into the hell of war for his self-centered and sick beliefs?

Photo by jackof / Getty Images

Read other articles in the Help for the History Impaired series.

John C. Wright is a retired attorney and newspaperman who was only once hunted by the police. He is a graduate of St. John College (home of Mortimer Adler’s “Great Books Program“). In 2004 he foreswore his lifelong atheism and joined the Roman Catholic Church. He has published over 10 SF novels, including one nominated for a Nebula award, and was described by Publisher’s Weekly as “this fledgling century’s most important new SF talent.” He currently lives in fairytale-like happiness with his wife, the authoress L. Jagi Lamplighter, and their four children.

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