Following the Islamic terrorists’ attacks on 9/11/2001, President George W. Bush naively referred to Islam as “the religion of peace.” Nonsense! As the great Harvard historian Samuel Huntington said many years ago, Islam has always had “bloody borders.” The great French philosopher Jacques Ellul also rejected the “current of favorable predispositions to Islam” notably evident in the many euphemistic discussions of jihad,” saying Jihad is basic to Islam— a sacred duty for the faithful, the “normal path to expansion” via wars of conquest. Devout Muslims are determined to conquer and control as much of the globe as possible. Writing presciently, in 1991, Ellul declared: “Hostage-taking, terrorism, the destruction of Lebanese Christianity, the weakening of the Eastern Churches (not to mention the wish to destroy Israel) . . . all this recalls precisely the resurgence of the traditional policy of Islam.” History records this, for immediately following the prophet Mohammed’s death in 632 A.D. Muslim warriors launched a century of world-wide conquests remarkable both for their rapidity and brutality. Though Spanish Christians notched a memorable victory at Covadonga in 722, their nation would be controlled for centuries by Muslims. Only in France, in 732 (at the Battle of Tours), did Charles Martel’s Christian soldiers successfully defeat the Arabs and save most of Europe from Islam. But in 1453 Muslims finally conquered Constantinople, burying the last remnants of the once powerful Byzantine Empire and adding the Balkans to their hegemony. Less than a century later, in 1529 (as Luther was orchestrating his Reformation in Wittenberg), Muslim armies threatened Vienna, only to be repelled by Emperor Charles V. In short: for 1400 years Islam has waged Jihad and taken control of great regions once controlled by Christians.
The recent Hamas slaughter of innocent Israelis on October 7, 2023, is yet another instance in this centuries-long Jihad. On that day some 6,000 Muslims charged out of Gaza and killed 1200 Jews. Equally appalling, almost immediately there were mass demonstrations in the West supporting not the Israelis but Hamas! Protestors carried signs that read “From the River to the Sea,” “Resistance Is Justified,” “Resistance Is Not Terrorism,” “Fight White Supremacy,” “Long Live the Intifada,” and “By Any Means Necessary.” They celebrated the terrorists and chanted their victory cry: “Allahu Akbar!” Jewish synagogues and schools were firebombed and shot at. Still more: “Throughout this period, from the moment news of the massacre in Israel emerged, one thing in particular is worth noticing: there was not a single major protest against Hamas in any Western city. Not one. The people who carried out the massacre and started a war did not find themselves the object of criticism on the streets of one Western city” (p. xi).
To understand what happened (and why it matters), reading Douglas Murray’s On Democracies and Death Cults: Israel and the Future of Civilization (New York: HarperCollins, c. 2025; Kindle Edition) proves enlightening. Murray is an English journalist living in America, the author of some fine works, including The War on the West. As soon as he heard about the Hamas invasion he flew to Israel to investigate. Having covered wars on three continents, he’d “seen my share of horrors. But there was something unusual about this atrocity.” What appalled him “was that the terrorists of October 7 did what they did with such relish. Not just the endless shouting of their war cries. Or the visible glee you could see in their faces and hear in their voices. It was the fact that all of this gave them such intense joy. And that they were proud of their actions” (p. xiii). Murray provides historical details as well as eye-witness accounts to explain the significance of 10/7/23. The role of Ayatollah Khomeini, who established the radical Islamist regime in Iran in 1979, must be understood, for Hamas today is largely funded and supplied by the Iranians who, at Friday prayers, cry out “Death to America,” calling America “the Great Satan” and Israel “the Little Satan” who need to be destroyed. But Hamas has also received generous subsidies from the United States! “Since 2009 alone, two years after Hamas took full control of Gaza, the US government sent over $400 million there, mainly through the United States Agency for International Development” (p. 123). Much of this money ended up in the pockets of Hamas’s leaders, making several of them billionaires! “While claiming that their people were living in a poverty-stricken concentration camp, these leaders lived in luxury hotels and penthouses in Qatar” (p. 124).
When Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005, it became a totally Muslim region. Shortly thereafter Hamas won an election and took control and ramped up rocket attacks on Israel. Jewish settlers near Gaza, generally living in kibbutzim, built bomb shelters for safety but tried to live peacefully with Palestinians in Gaza. But on October 7 everything changed. Hoards of armed Hamas terrorists swarmed through the region, killing and raping, stealing and destroying everything in sight. “Most terrorist groups do not distinguish between civilians and combatants. Or they regard all the citizens of a country they oppose to be one and the same. The professed logic of Hamas is that since Israel has military conscription for most young Israelis—both men and women—any military-aged Israeli is a legitimate target, whether they are in uniform or not, that the elderly could have served in the army, and that any young Israeli—even a baby—could grow up to be in the military. By this logic absolutely every Israeli is a legitimate target and there is no such thing as innocent and guilty, combatant and noncombatant” (p. 73).
Though Murray is personally quite secular, while writing this book he “kept finding the same lines coming back to me. First was the line from Deuteronomy when God says: ‘I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing: therefore choose life, that thou and thy seed may live.’ I thought also of the Psalmist who says, ‘I shall not die, but live.’ I thought of these lines continuously, even in the moments when things could not have been darker” (p. 157).
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In 2020 Douglas Murray republished an e-book, Islamaphilia: A Very Metropolitan Malady (Kindle Edition). Islamaphilia can “be defined as the expression of disproportionate adoration of Islam.” He thinks it strange that many people can be quite critical—even insulting—of other religions but give a “pass” to Islam. So he wrote this short book to illustrate the phenomenon by citing prominent persons mouthing it. Turning first to politicians, Murray cites a prominent French politician, Jacques Chirac, who deftly re-wrote history by celebrating a “Europe whose roots are as much Muslim as Christian.” Then there was President Barack Obama addressing the United Nations, praising Islam and warning: “The future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam” (p. 14). John Brennon, Obama’s head of the CIA, said he “came to see Islam not how it is often misrepresented, but for what it is—how it is practiced every day, by well over a billion Muslims worldwide, a faith of peace and tolerance and great diversity” (p. 15). Entertainers also endeavor to speak favorably of Islam. It’s difficult to find “one mainstream film, movie, TV series or documentary that has run anything at all that is critical of Islam” (p. 28). Cartoons are tightly censored. Comics muzzle themselves. “There is never an opportunity missed to portray the Crusaders as dirty, dark ages villains, and no opportunity avoided to show the Muslims as golden age golden boys” (p. 31). Academics and journalists rarely write anything negative about Islam. Fearless atheists such as Richard Dawkins become silent when asked to assess it. One might expect the Christian churches to defend their faith, but they “long ago made their peace with Islam. Today many appear to have fallen in love with it” (p. 55). The one prominent Christian leader who mildly criticized Islam was Pope Benedict XVI. In a lecture in Regensberg, Germany, he cited a Byzantine Emperor who said something negative about Mohammed. Though he differed with the emperor and tried to engage Muslims in dialogue, Benedict was subjected to torrents of rage throughout the Islamic world. They rioted, attacked and killed Christians in Africa and the Middle East. But not to worry, the future Pope Francis I (then the Cardinal Archbishop of Buenos Aires) criticised Benedict and urged other Catholics to join him in defying the head of the Church.
Summing up his presentation, Murray thinks Islamopiles refuse to criticize Islam because they have a “desire to be nice” while “knowing of very little” about it. They also live in fear of terrorists’ attacks. Summing up: “Islam is quite new to the West in such large numbers. In the last fifty years, millions of Muslims have come here. Most of them add a lot and want to give a lot. Some have views which are hard or impossible to compromise with and bring utterly unacceptable baggage. For all their talk, most people with any influence or position look at these people with terror. The politicians have no idea what they’re going to think of them. Artists and writers have been caught off-guard. Having poked at empty hornets’ nests for so many years they have forgotten the courage required to do the necessary poking at full ones. And then in general—in wider society as well—you have the terrible problem that as each year goes by more and more people appear to know less and less. Such people are easy prey to people who tell them lies about history, lies about the present and lies that simply sound nice” (p. 58). It’s time to learn some hard truths about Islam and deal with it both wisely and firmly.
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Melanie Phillips is an English journalist who moved from the radical left to the traditional right in the culture wars dividing her nation. More than a decade ago she wrote The World Turned Upside Down, warning of immanent threats to our civilization. As a journalist she strives to be tell truth to power, to follow the evidence and think logically. She came to believe “that power has now hijacked truth and made it subservient to its own ends. The result is a world turned upside down.” This results from two centuries of intellectual developments which can “be summed up as man first dethroning God in favor of reason, then dethroning reason in favor of man, and finally dethroning man himself. This was done by replacing objective knowledge with ideology, which grew out of the belief that man was all-powerful and could reshape the world in whatever image he chose.”
Prodded by the “Hamas-led program” on 10/7/23, Phillips sought to understand it in the broadest possible context. So she wrote The Builder’s Stone: How Jews and Christians Built the West—and Why Only They Can Save It (New York: Post Hill Press, c. 2025; Kindle Edition). Phillips warns: “The West is poised at a momentous and fateful juncture. I have written for many years about the onslaught being mounted against Western society by its enemies, both within and without. I have never felt such a strong sense of living at a key turning point in the history of civilisation itself—until now. In part, this is personal. I am a British Jew and I live for most of the time in Israel. I was there on October 7, 2023, that terrible day when Israelis endured the worst single attack on Jews since the Holocaust. I was there during the war that followed. It’s been impossible not to feel that we are living through a seismic episode in Jewish history” (p. 6).
Beyond describing what happened, Phillips wants to explain it, to unveil “the forces that have driven the supposed apex of reason, conscience and progress that is Western society off the intellectual, moral and cultural rails into unreason, demoralisation and a pre-modern atavism. This is at root a spiritual problem, a crisis over meaning and purpose. That takes us headfirst into the issue of religious belief” (p. 8). Religion is, indeed, the “key issue behind the West’s civilizational travails. A spiritual vacuum underpins the denigration of the nation, the abandonment of the family, the destruction of education; it has shaped contempt for the past and despair about the future; it has replaced emotional health by a profound loneliness. All these things are connected” (p. 9). The Hamas terrorists were not simply killing innocent Jews—they were trying to dismantle the civilization shaped by Jewish and Christian theology. The throngs of people in London and America supporting Hamas were in fact in fact turbo-charging “the West’s decades-long process of cultural suicide” (p. 12).
During the past century many Westerners have abandoned their civilization’s sinews, creating “a vacuum into which the Islamists have marched” (p. 26). Islam is now the fastest-growing religion in Europe, and some areas in France are completely controlled by Muslim immigrants. Islamists have successfully forged a “red-green alliance” with left-wingers so as to subvert and destroy Western Christian Culture. Thus: “White liberals are Islamic supremacists’ useful idiots” (p. 32). They portray Palestinians as victims and Israelis as oppressors. “The terrible truth is that the West no longer understands what civilization actually is. Specifically, it no longer understands that civilization is Western, that the West gave birth to it. Instead, our best and brightest have told us for decades that the West was born in the original sins of imperialism and colonialism, racism and white privilege. It’s not worth fighting or dying for. Indeed, John Lennon’s “‘nothing to fight or die for’ is the mantra of the modern deracinated liberal” (p. 35).
Western civilization has, unfortunately, been unravelling for some time. It seems incapable of defending itself or recovering its vitality. This is most manifest in the decline of patriotism, the collapse of the family and the decline of religious observance. Ours is the world proposed in John Lennon’s song “Imagine,” celebrating the “brotherhood of man” with “no countries…and no religion too.” The dedication to “human rights,” Phillips says, “is nothing less than a secular, quasi-religious movement. It provides what purports to be the defining creed of the modern world in a promise to perfect humanity” (p. 151). But Western Civilization was built in accord with the Jewish and Christian commitment to duties, not rights! The elevation of rights over duties is quite apparent in Britain and America, most especially in their churches. Wherever liberalism (or progressivism) prevails religious life atrophies. “The liberal churches, Phillips says, “seem to believe that moral laws militate against compassion, driving away people who want the freedom to live and love as they want. But a lax approach that goes with the flow and eventually changes the church out of all recognition undermines the point of having a church at all” (p. 331).
After exploring the myriad problems besetting us Phillips suggests some ways to revive Western Civilization and build a better world. Just as the medieval Spaniards launched a reconquista to take back their homeland from the Muslims we need to take up arms and recover our culture. What we need is a fresh corps of leaders, for those now in power “have trampled over the concerns of ordinary people, denouncing them as ‘deplorables,’ ‘racists,”’and transmitters of ‘phobic’ forms of mental disorder—otherwise known as dissenting opinions” (p. 308). But all this can change! “It is possible to insist upon educators actually educating rather than indulging in social engineering or propaganda. It is possible to empower parents, to incentivize marriage and having children. It is possible to junk the destructive attachment to universalist institutions such as ‘human rights’ law and revive instead the primacy of the common law in Britain and the primacy of legislation passed by national parliaments. It is possible to restore the value of the nation by policing its borders and safeguarding its historic identity. It is possible to choose cultural survival rather than to slide off the edge of the cliff” (p. 309).
All this is only possible, however, if the Judeo-Christian moral code can be reestablished. Young crusaders like Charlie Kirk could, in fact, lead us back to the eternal truths of Scripture. “People are palpably crying out for meaning in their lives. The apparently inexorable march of destructive cultural forces isn’t inexorable at all. The problem is that they have never been properly understood and properly opposed. The time has come for a counterrevolution on all fronts to save civilization. There needs to be a rescue program of action: civilization’s resistance movement,” a reconquesta akin to that undertaken by the Spaniards century ago. We need intellectual crusaders like Thomas Aquinas, who wrote Summa Contra Gentiles to counter Islam. And the Jewish people must play an essential role in that counterrevolutionary resistance” (p. 311). That they may do so leads Phillips to conclude: “For up against the unconscionable evil that was unleashed upon them on that terrible October day, the Jews are teaching their most important lesson of all, the one upon which all their other lessons depend, the one that lies at the very core of their astonishing resilience and survival in the face of overwhelming odds. It couldn’t be more simple, more obvious, and more ignored. It’s the most fundamental requirement for the West, and yet it’s the one that the West has yet fully to understand. It consists of just two words. Choose life” (p. 338).
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In 2006, following a terrorist attack in London’s underground railway (the Tube), Melanie Phillips published Londonistan: Britain’s Terror State from Within (London: Gibson Square; Kindle Edition). Recently writing a forward to the reissuing of that treatise, she notes “it is alarming beyond measure to record that Britain is even now sleepwalking into Islamisation.” The two-edged sword of Islam and cultural chaos is destroying her nation. “The London bombings revealed a terrible truth about Britain, something even more alarming and dangerous to long-term stability than the fact that foreign terrorists had been able to carry out the 9/11 attacks on U.S. soil in 2001. They finally lifted the veil on Britain’s dirty secret in the war on terrorism—that for more than a decade, London had been the epicentre of Islamic militancy in Europe. Under the noses of successive British governments, Britain’s capital had turned into ‘Londonistan’—a mocking play on the names of such state sponsors of terrorism as Afghanistan—and become the major European centre for the promotion, recruitment and financing of Islamic terror and extremism.”
This has come to pass because: “Britain has become a largely post-Christian society, where traditional morality has been systematically undermined and replaced by an ‘anything goes’ culture in which autonomous decisions about codes of behaviour have become unchallengeable rights. With everyone’s lifestyle now said to be of equal value, the very idea of moral norms is frowned upon as a vehicle for discrimination and prejudice. Judaism and Christianity, the creeds that formed the bedrock of Western civilisation, have been pushed aside and their place filled by a plethora of paranormal activities and cults. . . . . The outcome has been the creation of a debauched and disorderly culture of instant gratification, with disintegrating families, feral children and violence, squalor and vulgarity on the streets.”
At the heart of all this is an ideology of autonomous individualism, a feminism that despises men and marriage, schools celebrating “child-centered” pedagogy, and an anti-racism that is actually racist. Whereas in America some of the churches have held fast to the Western Christian tradition, “the Church of England has been in the forefront of the retreat from the Judeo-Christian heritage. At every stage it has sought to appease the forces of secularism, accommodating itself to family breakdown, seeking to be nonjudgmental and embracing multiculturalism. The result has been a shift in Britain’s centre of moral and political gravity as the Judeo-Christian foundations of British society have come under sustained assault.” Consequently: Britain “has effectively allowed itself to be taken hostage by militant gays, feminists or ‘antiracists’ who used weapons such as public vilification, moral blackmail and threats to people’s livelihoods to force the majority to give in to their demands.”
Following WWII and the collapse of the British Empire several million Muslims entered England, many of them enjoying the generous welfare system of their host nation—free education, medical care, unemployment benefits. They enjoyed the status of “victims” and manipulated the notion of “human rights” to magnify their political power. They now control significant sections of London. Linking hands with English socialists they are committed to destroying what’s made Britain British, making multiculturalism “the orthodoxy of the day, along with nonjudgmentalism and lifestyle choice. The only taboo now was the expression of normative majority values such as monogamy, heterosexuality, Christianity or Britishness.” Unless this process is reversed, Phillips warns, Britain will soon no longer be British.