Western Europe is currently paying the price of historical amnesia.<\/p>\n
Thanks to decades of mass Muslim migration\u2014with particularly severe outcomes in the United Kingdom, Germany, and France\u2014Western Europe has experienced surging crime rates in migrant-dense areas, grooming gang scandals involving the systematic sexual abuse of thousands of native girls, the emergence of parallel societies governed by sharia norms, welfare systems strained to breaking point, and growing cultural enclaves that function as de facto no-go zones for police and non-Muslims. Integration has largely failed, as large segments of these migrant communities reject Western values in favor of Islamic supremacism and separatism.<\/p>\n
In stark contrast, nations like Hungary and Poland, which refused large-scale Muslim settlement and maintained strict border controls and deportation policies, have largely avoided these crises, preserving far higher levels of social cohesion, public safety, and cultural continuity.<\/p>\n
This is the difference between those who remember\u2014and those who forget\u2014history: the latter are doomed to repeat it.<\/p>\n
Put differently, Western Europe is suffering from the same Islamic expansionism and supremacism that Europe faced for over a thousand years\u2014precisely because it has forgotten that long struggle; and nations like Hungary are not\u2014precisely because they remember it.<\/p>\n
The full magnitude of the modern West\u2019s rejection of its own history struck me as I recently pored over some early historical chronicles of the centuries-long jihad against Europe.<\/p>\n
Consider some facts for a moment:<\/p>\n
A mere decade after the birth of Islam in the seventh\u00a0century, the jihad burst out of Arabia. Leaving aside all the thousands of miles of ancient lands and civilizations that were permanently conquered, today casually called the \u2018Islamic world\u2019\u2014including Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Iran, Central Asia, and parts of India and China\u2014much of Europe was also savaged by the sword of Islam.<\/p>\n
Among other nations and territories that were attacked and\/or conquered in the name of Islam at one time or another\u2014including prolonged domination in parts of Iberia, southern Italy, and the Balkans, as well as repeated raids or temporary occupations elsewhere\u2014are (listed here roughly in order of historical significance): Spain, Portugal, Italy (including Sicily and Sardinia), Greece, Bulgaria, Serbia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Albania, Croatia, Hungary, Romania, Armenia, Georgia, Cyprus, France, Austria, Britain, Ireland, Russia, Ukraine, Poland, Malta, Crete, Corsica, Moldova, Montenegro, Macedonia, Slovakia, Switzerland, Lithuania, Belarus, Iceland, and the Faroe Islands.<\/p>\n
\u2018The full magnitude of the modern West\u2019s rejection of its own history struck me\u2019<\/p>\n
In 846 Rome was sacked and the Vatican defiled by Muslim Arab raiders; some 600 years later, in 1453, Christendom\u2019s other great basilica, Holy Wisdom (or Hagia Sophia) was conquered by Muslim Turks, permanently.<\/p>\n
Even in the furthest northwest of Europe, in Iceland, Christians used to pray that God save them from the \u2018terror of the Turk\u2019. In 1627 Muslim corsairs raided the Christian island seizing four hundred captives, selling them in the slave markets of Algiers.<\/p>\n
Nor did America escape. A few years after the United States gained complete independence from Britain in 1783, Muslims corsairs plundered American trading ships in the Mediterranean and enslaved their sailors. Thomas Jefferson met with a Muslim ambassador to negotiate the Americans\u2019 release. He later summarized the meeting in a rather telling letter to Congress dated March 28, 1786:<\/p>\n
\u2018We took the liberty to make some inquiries concerning the grounds of their [Barbary\u2019s] pretentions to make war upon nations who had done them no injury, and observed that we considered all mankind as our friends who had done us no wrong, nor had given us any provocation. The ambassador answered us that it was founded on the laws of their Prophet, that it was written in their Koran, that all nations who should not have acknowledged their authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found, and to make slaves of all they could take as prisoners, and that every Musselman [Muslim] who should be slain in battle was sure to go to Paradise.\u2019<\/p>\n
In short, for over 1,200 years\u2014punctuated by a Crusader-rebuttal that the modern West is obsessed with demonizing\u2014Islam posed an existential threat to Christian Europe\u2014and, by extension, Western civilization.<\/p>\n
And therein lies the rub: Today, whether as taught in high school or graduate school, whether as portrayed by Hollywood or the news media, the predominant historical narrative is that Muslims are the historic \u2018victims\u2019 of \u2018intolerant\u2019 Western Christians.<\/p>\n
Hence why the West feels \u2018obligated\u2019 to \u2018make up\u2019 for their ancestors\u2019 purported crimes against Islam, by welcoming Muslims in by the millions and giving them all sorts of unprecedented rights and privileges.<\/p>\n