perfidy

By way of Dodgeblogium and Momma Bear at On The Third Hand, we find this essay by the Gray Monk. The Monk is talking about the history underlying our current difficulties in the Middle East, and makes several valid points.

Islam, the religion of peace, was spread by the sword. Beginning in the seventh century, in a matter of little more than a hundred years, Arabs fired with religious fervor conquered first Arabia, then Persia, Syria and Palestine, Egypt and North Africa and Spain. Except for Persia, these regions had been Christian for centuries. Over the next several centuries, Islam reduced the once mighty Byzantine Empire to a nub of Asia Minor and Greece. It moved East, eventually all the way to Malaysia and Indonesia.

For all but the last three hundred years, Islam has been pressing at the borders of Christendom. As late as the seventeenth century, the Turks besieged Vienna several times within a few decades. The great victory at Lepanto ended the threat of Islamic navies only in 1571. For most of a millennium, Islam was an ever present threat to the survival of the West.

The Crusades are a big problem for Osama bin Laden. He forgets that Islam won those wars, and Christianity failed to achieve even the very limited goals the crusaders set for themselves. The Crusades were meant to regain Christian control over the holy lands. No one ever imagined that the Crusades would eliminate Islam, or take back the formerly Christian lands then held by Islam. The tragedy of Andalusia was used as an excuse for the Madrid bombings. The Islamofascists forget that the reconquista was in fact a re-conquest of territory seized by Islam from Christians hundreds of years before.

The crusades were not some sort of proto-colonialism from Edward Said's fevered brain. Hundreds of thousands of Christians died in defensive wars against the Arabs and the Turks. Since the Renaissance, the Industrial and Scientific Revolutions, and the Great Age of Discovery, Europe transformed itself from a marginal, impoverished and backward region at the outskirts of civilization to the center of the world. (Some in America might argue that they're heading back to marginal, impoverished and backward.) Islam has not lost any power or wealth. But they have stood still while Europe, and later America and the Far East made enormous gains in knowledge, wealth and power.

Islam failed to keep up. And the people who say that America and the West need to look at root causes for solutions to the problem of terrorism are missing the point. By saying that, they usually mean that the West should amend its behavior, be nicer to the Arabs, or some other Pollyanna program. They oppose the one real solution that would get to the actual root cause - globalization and the spread of liberty, he network of ideas and habits that allowed the West and other civilizations to advance. And this is the program that we are trying to implement in Iraq.