Who is Colonizing Whom?

The discovery of America was a response to Muslim colonialism. Now it's being undone.

 

The discovery of America and the apogee of European civilization which ushered in the modern world were based on resistance to Islamic colonialism. Since then, European nations withdrew from the Muslim world to avoid colonialism only to be colonized by millions of Muslims from their old colonies. Rather than ending colonialism, Europe went from the colonizers to the colonized, and European governments were called on to once again rule over millions of Muslims, no longer in the Middle East, Pakistan, North Africa or Asia, but in London, Paris, and across their own nations. With that the rulers swiftly became the ruled.

Where the old European governments had looked to pacify Muslims abroad, their EU descendants struggled to pacify them at home. And America soon followed. After 9/11, America had been primarily worried about Muslim terrorism coming from abroad. Now it mostly worries about Islamic terrorism coming from Muslim converts and immigrants within the United States.

A history of Islamic colonialism is repeating itself with the complicity of ignorant ideologues who describe the process by which the cruel imperialism that crippled most of the world made a comeback, subjugating women, cultural and racial minorities and all non-Muslims, as liberation.

The long march of Islam across the Middle East, and then Africa and Asia, had climaxed in a struggle in Europe between the invading Muslim armies and the indigenous population. The Gates of Vienna marked a turning point in which the Islamic empires dominated much of what we came to call the Third World, but were prevented from conquering and colonizing Europe.

The price of the struggle was high and a mostly forgotten Islamic trade in European slaves continued, alongside the traditional trade in African slaves, into the 19th century. The discovery of America allowed European civilization to expand laterally, bypassing the snake pit of pirates and slavers that Africa and the Middle East had become under Islam, and discover new shores.

Columbus had been seeking a new route to India that would replace the land route controlled by the Ottoman conquerors of Byzantium and would also avoid the North African Islamic pirates whose conquest of Spain had been thwarted, but who continued to prey on Spanish shipping, and who posed a hazard on the Portuguese sea route to India around the African coast.

The origins of the United States of America lay in resistance to Islamic Jihad. As Thomas Jefferson and John Adams rediscovered when dealing with the question of Islamic piracy.

When trying to persuade the Islamic emissary to stop attacking American ships and enslaving Americans, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams were told that Islamic piracy and slavery were, “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.”

America provided something better than a route to the Indies, although it ultimately allowed westerners to reach India, China and Japan while bypassing the raiding empires of Islam, because it also contained lands and resources that enabled European nations and colonies to build up their own civilizations without recourse to the slave nations under the Islamic boot.

Muslim pirates preyed on New World cargoes, leading to multiple conflicts, including the First and Second Barbary Wars, America’s first true international wars, but the tide had turned. The Ottoman Empire had lost its bid for Europe and would never be able to reach America. Where it had once threatened to swallow the West, it began to decline and was never able to recover.

The brief European colonization of the Middle East and North Africa was a good deal gentler than any of the horrors that Islamic conquerors had inflicted on the region. There was no genocide, mass slavery or the total repression of peoples because of their religion. The greatest Muslim complaints against colonialism are that the British and French provided civil rights to non-Muslims, especially Christians and Jews, and allowed them to form their own countries.

British colonialism ended the Muslim trade in slaves that had traversed the route out of Africa and into Egypt, across Israel and to Arabia. With the end of European colonialism, slavery resumed. Islamic tyrannies like Qatar or Saudi Arabia are serviced by millions of non-Muslim slaves. (Qatar had formally abolished slavery under British pressure in 1952 and Saudi Arabia had only abolished slavery in 1962 under pressure from the Kennedy administration.)

The end of colonialism also marked the end of equal rights for Jews and Christians in the Muslim world. The Christian and Jewish exodus from the Middle East sped up. Over a million Jews from Egypt, Iraq, Yemen and other ‘decolonized’ nations fled to Israel. They along with Arab Christians also continued making their way to America, Canada, Australia and Europe.

Muslims however followed them to these havens. The Islamic settlers in the mediterranean region had never been at peace with the idea that these traditionally Jewish and Christian areas should once again break free and become independent of Islamic rule. Israel and Lebanon soon became known for having the worst terrorist problems in the region. This was no coincidence.

While Christians and Jews in the Middle East, and Hindus and Buddhists in Asia, were under siege by Muslim forces from Africa to Asia, a new wave of Muslim colonization washed ashore on the coasts of Western nations. The new arrivals adopted the protective coloration of identity politics and declared that they were part of a movement to “decolonize” Western nations.

But by decolonization, they mean colonization.

The Islamists are not here to liberate, but to enslave, not to decolonize, but to resume the colonization that had faltered at the Gates of Vienna, and had appeared hopeless when Europe unlocked the New World and no longer had to sail its ships or trade at the mercy of the bandits who had colonized, subjugated and destroyed all the learning and culture of the Middle East.

Their mission is to build armies capable of waging political or military conflicts, to divide and conquer their enemies in Western nations and to impose Islamic theocracy or Sharia law that will solidify their rule and end any hope of freedom, human rights or equality in the free world. It is in the name of this, along with their other colonizing enterprises, against India and Israel, the Yazidis in Iraq or the Buddhists in Bangladesh, that they launch their terrorist attacks against us.

It is not only America alone. Or Israel. Hindus are being butchered in India, and Christians in places as far apart as Nigeria and the Philippines as part of the new wave of Islamic conquests.

Islamic colonialism long predated British men with pith helmets strutting around the third world. Its death toll is in the tens of millions and the resumption of Islamic colonialism ought to be as great a concern as if Nazism had risen from the dead and tanks were speeding across Europe.

Unfortunately too many civilized peoples have forgotten their history and have been convinced that their former and future conquerors are the victims because they were briefly colonized for less than half a century, when Islamic colonialism lasted for over a thousand years, and would not be toppled by any number of peaceful protests or speeches the way that the British were.

Islamism is colonialism. The real decolonization is resistance to Islamic expansionism.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.

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