strained to find evidence in the Bible that a new prophet wouldrnarise after Jesus, seeing Muhammad in obvious prophecies ofrnthe Holy Spirit (that were fulfilled on Pentecost) or of the SecondrnComing of Christ. One could find no better refutation ofrnIslam’s efforts to appropriate Christian Scripture (here,rnMatthew 24:27) than that of the 14th-century Byzanfine saint,rnGregory Palamas, to his Turkish captors:rnIt is true that Muhammad started from the east and camernto the west, as the sun travels from east to west. Neverthelessrnhe came with war, knives, pillaging, forced enslavement,rnmurders, and acts that are not from the goodrnGod but instigated by the chief manslayer, the devil.rnSt. Gregory’s answer is no less devastating to Islam’s self-depictionrnas a pacific creed. Islam was born in violence, fromrnMuhammad’s sanction of raids of pillage and plunder (startingrnwith attacks against his own Quraysh tribe, which initially rejectedrnhis revelation) to his savage execution of hundreds ofrnmen of the Qurayzah clan (which professed Judaism) and thernenslavement and forced concubinage of their women and children.rnFrom its inception, first within Arabia and then againstrnall unbelievers, Islam has been unthinkable without its mandaternfor violence, war, terror—in a word, /zTzacf—itself codifiedrnin Muhammad’s Koran (notably Sura 9:29). Today, Islamicrnapologists in America have been quick to latch on to the vocabularyrnof grievance, denouncing the association of Islam with itsrnviolent past (and present) as “stereotyping,” “bigotry,” and “ignorance.”rnEven American elementary school texts have beenrnrewritten to suggest that once-Christian Eg)’pt, Syria, and Palesfinernbecame Muslim because their conquerors were “invited”rnin; Muslims are quick to remind Christians of the Crusaders’rnlater “aggression,” but they do not consider as aggression theirrnown unprovoked seizure of the Christian Middle East.rnIn the application oijihad, as documented by Bat Ye’or andrnothers, Islam divides the world into two domains, or “houses”:rnthe House of Islam (Dar al-hlam), where Islam rules andrnShan a, the law of Allah, has been realized; and the House ofrnWar {Dar al-Harb), where the rebellious unbelievers persist inrntheir (or rather, our) lawlessness. In Islamic terms, we unsubduedrnChristians are harbi, and as such we have no legitimaternright to our lands, our property, or even our lives, which by rightrnbelong not to us but to the Muslims; that which we now havernwe enjoy only until Islam becomes strong enough to imposernShari’a. As the highly respected and influential 14th-centuryrnauthority Ibn Taymiyya explained:rnThese possessions [i.e., the things taken away from thernnon-Muslims upon their conquest] received the name ofrnfay [war boot)’] since .Allah had taken them away fromrnthe infidels in order to restore them to the Muslims. Inrnprinciple, Allah has created the things of this world onlyrnin order that they may contribute to ser’ing Him, sincernHe created man only in order to be ministered to. Consequently,rnthe infidels forfeit their persons and their belongingsrnwhich they do not use in Allah’s sendee to thernfaithful believers who serve Allah and unto whom Allahrnrestitutes what is theirs; thus is restored to a man the inheritancernof which he was deprived, even if he had neverrnbefore gained possession.rnIt is worthy of note that Ibn Taymiyya is particularly reveredrnby the Wahabi sect, which is the ruling doctrine of Saudi Arabia;rnstudents at the Saudi-controlled Loudoun Islamic Academyrnwill no doubt receive benefit of his wisdom. But IbnrnTaymiyya’s sentiments are not unique to him. On the contiary.rnBat Ye’or quotes comparable passages from Islamic sages ofrnmany eras and locales, from the time of Muhammad to thernpresent day.rnSurveying the long history of the Islamic assault on thernChristian world, it is sobering to consider how close the latterrnhas come to annihilation on more than one occasion. In therninitial offensive during the first decade after Muhammad’srndemise, Christendom lost its birthplace in the Levant, with thernfront of the East Roman Empire only being stabilized at the approachesrnto Asia Minor. Meanwhile, the Arab armies sweptrnwest from conquered Egypt, subduing the whole north coast ofrnAfrica and crossing into Visigothic Spain in 711. They were finallyrnstopped by the Franks under Karl the Hammer at Poitiersrnin 732, the centenary of Muhammad’s death. The conversionrnof the Turkish tribes to Islam in the ninth century’ lent jihad renewedrnimpetus; the erosion and final collapse of East Romanrnpower opened the eastern door to Europe in the 14th century,rnand the Ottomans were turned back only at the gates of Viennarnin 1683. The site of the first high-water mark at Poitiers and thernlater one at Vienna are only some 700 miles apart—so narrowrnhas been Christendom’s brush with extinction!rnThe Turkish defeat at Vienna marked the beginning of tworncenturies of remission during which European technology,rnparticularly military technology, seemed to have resolved therncontest between the Cross and the Crescent decisively in favorrnof the former. During the 19th century, the Christian nationsrnof the Balkans—the only conquered Christian lands since thernSpanish reconquista in which the Muslims had not yet reducedrnthe indigenous population to a minority, as they had in Egyptrnand Syria, or eliminated them utterly, as in the Maghreb—castrnoff their Muslim masters, and by the end of World War I, mostrnof the Muslim world (with the exceptions of the Arabian heartlandrnitself and of a truncated Turkey which had adopted thernmodernizing, secular ideology of Kemalism) was subject to Europeanrnrule. But at the very time that Europe achieved its militaryrnand geopolitical advantage, the moral and religious declinernthat culminated in the autogenocides of 1914 and 1939rnhad become evident. Having found in their grasp places theirrnCrusader predecessors had only dreamed of reclaiming—rnJerusalem, Bethlehem, Antioch, Alexandria, Constantinople —rneffete and demoralized European governments made no eflFortrnto re-christianize them and, within a few decades, meekly abandonedrnthem.rnThe moral disarmamentof contemporary post-Christian Europernis now nearly universal. If, in the more remote past, BourbonrnFrance had made common cause with the Sublime Portern(the scandalous “union of the Lily and the Crescent”) againstrnHabsburg Austria, the arrangement at least had the virtue ofrncynical self-interest: Catholic France was hardly expected tornpraise the sultan’s benevolence as part of the bargain. But byrnthe 1870’s, Disraeli’s obsession with thwarting Russian ambitionsrnin the Balkans prompted the Tories’ unprecedented depictionrnof Turkey as tolerant and humane even in the face ofrnthe Bulgarian atrocities. Even so, Britain’s Christian conscience,rnprodded by Gladstone’s passionate words, was sufficientrnto bring down Lord Beaconsfield’s government in 1880.rnAfter World War I, with the installation of nominally “pro-rn16/CHRONICLESrnrnrn