Let us not neglect History, it often sheds light on the present and offers perspectives.
What we now call the war in the Middle East is just one battle in the oldest war in history, a war that has lasted for fourteen centuries. The Christians had succeeded in defeating Rome from within and then marginalizing and persecuting Pagans and Jews, their fathers in worldview, when a new ideology took shape and power in the sands of Arabia, an ideology of conquest and enslavement in the name of the same god… since creator of the universe. It is also claimed to be the same since the Jewish and Christian predecessors are immediately qualified either as falsifiers or as mistaken believers. In this new ideology, only adherents to this belief are real men, men superior to all others having to submit or enslave or even eliminate those who do not submit. Conversion, dhimma or death!
The Jews, without any more national independence or military power since the passage of the Romans, could only submit. The Christians who then dominated many kingdoms obviously tried to resist these invaders, driven by unshakeable faith and boundless greed. In less than a century the Arab empire, which quickly became Arab-Muslim by imposing its faith and its language, extended from the Indus to the Atlantic which it reached via North Africa. Everywhere cultures are annihilated from the borders of China, the Caucasus, Persia, Egypt and the Berbers of North Africa. The invaders seize all the wealth and all the cultural advances.
The Christian world was then divided by numerous internal conflicts and it was a Visigothic clan opposed to its king who brought the Muslim troops of Tariq ibn Ziyad onto Spanish soil which was conquered in four years. Then from Narbonne, the Muslims spread into what would be France, failing in front of Toulouse but massacring the population of Carcassonne in their ebb. Towards the east they go up the Rhône valley, cross the Morvan, go down the Yonne to Sens. To the West, they bypassed the Pyrenees, destroyed Bordeaux and rushed towards the extremely wealthy abbey of Tours. They were arrested not far from Poitiers in 732, just for the centenary of the death of Mohammed; their leader lost his life, they fled towards Spain. The Carolingians, who would develop a powerful Empire, stopped them. There will remain a few Muslim enclaves for quite a long time, like Saint Tropez. In Spain, the Reconquista began from a center of Visigothic resistance in Asturias, a war lasting seven and a half centuries. It was a halt to the colonization of Western Europe and the beginning of the slow reconquest.
The Muslim empire, despite its ups and downs and its internal wars, continues with its warlike intentions: only Muslim lands could experience peace (but this was not the case), the rest of the world is considered the domain of war of conquest. The objective is a Muslim planet. Monotheistic non-Muslims are subject to the d’hima, a Cornish requirement since the battle of Khaibar (628), its procession of massacre of Jews, rapes and enslavements), a status of absolute inferiority with a ritual of humiliations codified for random survival.
The empire therefore extends to the East, beyond India,1 towards what is today Malaysia and Indonesia, through the infiltration of merchants but the subsequent destruction of Buddhist Temples, such as that of Borobudur, testifies to the violence of history. Control of the Horn of Africa and the coasts of East Africa ensured the Zeng slave trade, particularly in Zanzibar. But attempts at Western conquests were not absent and Byzantine Anatolia was constantly under pressure. The weakening of the caliphate brought invaders, such as the Seljuk Turks, to power; noting the religious fanaticism of the Muslims, they converted to Islam to reign in peace (later Mongol invaders would do the same). The Seljuks also became fanatic, persecuting Christians and forbidding them from the pilgrimage to Jerusalem, which was one of the causes of the Crusades and the liberation of islands in the Mediterranean. Nevertheless, the successive internal dynastic wars of the Abbasids, Seljuks, Fatimids, Ayyubids, Mamluks and then Ottomans were probably a boon for the Christian world, which was also extremely divided into competing kingships.
The war never stops. The Franco-English War known as cent ans is thus a bitter joke in view of the Muslim war against the Christians which had already lasted for seven centuries when the Ottomans came to power. Then sounds the death knell of the limp truce for Europe. In 1354, they entered the Balkans, conquered Bulgaria (1396), vassalized Wallachia and Moldavia (Romania today) and completed the conquest of the Byzantine Empire by taking what remained of it: Constantinople (1453) , the Hagia Sophia basilica becomes a mosque, the Ottomans make it their capital. Nothing stops them anymore. Twice (1529 and 1683), they besieged Vienna, the Austrian capital, and colonized Hungary (1541-1699).
If the Spanish Reconquista is over, the era of Barbary pirates is beginning in the Mediterranean. They will constantly ravage the European coasts, pillaging, massacring and enslaving under the protection of the Caliph of Constantinople. It even happened that the King of France Francis I called on them in his conflict against Charles V; in the year 1543, Nice (Duchy of Savoy, ally of Charles V) was ravaged, Toulon opened by Francis the First and emptied of its population but the king had to pay a ransom so that Barbarossa (pirate and Grand Admiral of Soliman) left… this are the permanent ravages of these Barbary pirates who also attack Western ships and enslave or ransom the crews (although all the States paid the Regencies so that their boats were not boarded!) which were factors in the 19th century in the creation of the American Navy and Marine Corps (Babarian Wars) then the French conquest of Algeria…
Times had changed, modernity and its technology made the West extremely powerful while the immutable Muslim world was fading away. This century saw the emergence of Nations, the ebb of the Ottomans from the Balkans, Eastern Europe and Greece with the support of the British, Russians and French…
In reality, we see, the West was quickly blinded by its power, especially after the dismantling of the Ottoman Empire after the First World War and the creation of numerous Arab-Muslim countries, particularly in the East. Little attention was paid to the creation of the Muslim Brotherhood (and other radical movements) in reaction to the abolition of the Caliphate by Kemal Atatürk (1924). Seljuks and Mongols had understood the drama of the fanatical influence of Islam on the peoples, the Westerners, essentially freed from the religious pressure of the Church, could not understand it, they already lived with the idea of tolerance (the other cheek) of a Christianity ultimately poorly digested and were ready for another yoke.
Islamic ideology has once again taken over the world. Violence and terror in the East, Asia, Africa, infiltration, demography and demands in the West. Infiltration was even desired in Europe by politicians and businessmen (Eurabia agreements2) who were not interested in measuring the consequences. Violence will come there later to impose the liberticidal ideology. In all Islamic countries non-Muslims are persecuted. Forbidden to say it! A tartuffery that the Yom Kippur War accelerated as post-Christians and Muslims share an anti-Jewish prejudice or at least, for Europeans, a deadly indifference towards the Jews. Cover this breast that I cannot see.
However, burying your head in the sand is terribly dangerous and burying your head in the sand is not the worst thing… Not seeing a war that is declared is the best way to lose it. To restrain your alleged ally and leave him alone to do the dirty work is suicidal madness. It is an existential war since it is a conflict of civilizations, that is to say, of visions of relationships with the world and with men.
by Richard RossWriter, former Secretary General of MSF, co-founder of MdM, former Vice-President of the European Academy of Geopolitics
+ This text was published on October 5, 2024 by Le Spectacle Du Monde.
1 For the record, the name of the Hindu-Kouch mountains, the path to the Muslim Courts of the Caucasus, means killer of hindus which says a lot about the ordeal of Hindu slaves.
2 Title of a journal published in France from 1973 to 1989 by the European Coordination Committee of Friendship Associations with the Arab World
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