In 2018, Robert Spencer published a remarkable book, called “The History of Jihad: From Muhammad to ISIS.” In one of the chapters (chapter 10), he discussed the matter of how the Western world caved into Islam’s demands. In this series, we look at some highlights from this chapter.
THE WEST LOSES THE
WILL TO LIVE
The Migrant Influx
After September 11, European nations began admitting tens of thousands of Muslim immigrants, such that by 2017, many European cities had majority-Muslim enclaves, and the Muslim population of Europe was in the millions and growing much more quickly than the non-Muslim population.
The influx picked up sharply in 2015. German chancellor Angela Merkel, keen to alleviate the humanitarian crisis in Syria and the surrounding regions, opened Germany’s doors to hundreds of thousands of Muslim migrants. Other Western European countries did as well. Yet while there was no doubt that some of the refugees were grateful for the hospitality they were being shown, others clearly weren’t. All of the Islamic jihadis who murdered 130 people in Paris in a series of jihad attacks in November 2015 were putative refugees who had recently been welcomed into Europe. Germany’s domestic intelligence agency admitted in July 2017 that hundreds of jihadis had entered the country among the refugees, and that twenty-four thousand jihadis were active in Germany.
Muslim migrants in Europe were also responsible for an appalling epidemic of rape, sexual assault, theft, petty crime, and looting. In the first half of 2016, migrants in Germany, who were overwhelmingly Muslim, committed 142,500 crimes, an average of 780 every day. This was a significant increase from 2015, during which migrants committed two hundred thousand crimes during the entire year.5
On New Year’s Eve, December 31, 2015, Muslim migrants committed as many as two thousand mass rapes and sexual assaults in Cologne, Stockholm, and other major European cities. Such assaults weren’t limited to that day alone; Sweden was called the “rape capital of the world” because of the notorious activities of Muslim migrants.
In Sweden, Muslim migrants from Afghanistan were found in 2017 to be seventy-nine times more likely to commit rape and other sexual crimes than native Swedes. Migrants and refugees committed ninety-two percent of rapes in Sweden. Rapists in Sweden have come from Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Eritrea, Syria, Gambia, Iran, Palestine, Chile, and Kosovo, in that order. All the nations on that list except Chile and Eritrea are majority Muslim.
In the British town of Rotherham, Muslim gangs brutalized, sexually assaulted, and raped over fourteen hundred young British girls, while authorities remained extremely reluctant to say or do anything in response, for fear of being labeled racist.
Yet hardly anything was being said about this. In the summer of 2016, Krystyna Pawłowicz, a member of the Polish parliament, charged German authorities with attempting to “cover up the crimes of their Arab guests, or even shift the blame upon themselves.” There was also evidence that migrant crimes were being covered up in the Netherlands and Sweden as well.
These cover-ups apparently proceeded from a fear that non-Muslims would begin to have negative views of Islam; yet the sexual assaults did have to do with Islam. The Qur’an dictates that a Muslim man may have sexual relations with the “captives of the right hand,” that is, captured non-Muslim women (4:3; 4:24; 23:1–6; 33:50; 70:30). The Qur’an also says that women should veil themselves so that they may not be molested (33:59), with the implication being that if they are not veiled, they may indeed be molested.
The Catholic Church
The Catholic Church, on the forefront of resistance to the jihad for centuries, likewise abdicated early in the twenty-first century. Of course, the Church had not called a Crusade for centuries, and by September 11 no one would have expected it to do so. Not only were the Crusades by then a dim historical memory, ill-remembered and even less understood, among most Catholics, but schools all over the West that had adopted the name Crusaders during the twentieth century began shedding the label. Historical pride quickly gave way to historical shame.
Early in the twenty-first century, the Catholic Church went even farther, not only not sounding the alarm about the advancing jihad, but demonstrating that it had no historical memory of why the Crusades had been fought, as well as no awareness that this jihad, which had historically targeted the Church, was continuing and had found renewed energy. There were to be no reminders from the Catholic Church about how Islam had been set against Europe for fourteen hundred years and that mass Muslim migration into Europe might not be such a good idea.
However, Pope Benedict XVI did touch off a worldwide controversy in 2006 by quoting the fourteenth-century Byzantine emperor Manuel II Paleologus’ words about Muhammad’s bringing nothing new but what was evil and inhumane. Benedict at least demonstrated that he was aware that Islam somehow posed a problem for Europe and the free world in general; after the Muslim riots and murders that followed his remarks, and fulmination from Egypt’s al-Azhar over his statements after a jihad mass murder attack in an Egyptian cathedral, Benedict fell silent.
His successor, Pope Francis, was anything but silent. In a November 2013 Apostolic Exhortation, he declared: “Faced with disconcerting episodes of violent fundamentalism, our respect for true followers of Islam should lead us to avoid hateful generalisations, for authentic Islam and the proper reading of the Koran are opposed to every form of violence.”
Pope Francis was not just a defender of Islam and the Qur’an but of the Sharia death penalty for blasphemy: after Islamic jihadists in January 2015 murdered cartoonists from the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, Francis obliquely justified the murders by saying that “it is true that you must not react violently, but although we are good friends if [an aide] says a curse word against my mother, he can expect a punch, it’s normal. You can’t make a toy out of the religions of others. These people provoke and then [something can happen]. In freedom of expression there are limits.”
For the pope, it can thus be assumed, murdering people for violating Sharia blasphemy laws was “normal,” and it wasn’t terrorism anyway, for “Christian terrorism does not exist, Jewish terrorism does not exist, and Muslim terrorism does not exist. They do not exist,” as he said in a speech in February 2017 “There are fundamentalist and violent individuals in all peoples and religions—and with intolerant generalizations they become stronger because they feed on hate and xenophobia.”
In July 2017, Ahmed al-Tayeb, the grand imam of Cairo’s al-Azhar, thanked Pope Francis for his “defense of Islam against the accusation of violence and terrorism.” Then, in September 2017, the pope met in the Vatican with Dr. Muhammad bin Abdul Karim Al-Issa, the secretary general of the Muslim World League (MWL), a group that has been linked to the financing of jihad terror.
During the meeting, Al-Issa thanked the pope for his “fair positions” on what he called the “false claims that link extremism and violence to Islam.” In other words, he thanked the Pope for dissembling about the motivating ideology of jihad terror, which his group had been accused of financing, and for defaming other religions in an effort to whitewash Islam.
In his message for the World Day of Peace on January 1, 2018, Pope Francis declared: “In a spirit of compassion, let us embrace all those fleeing from war and hunger, or forced by discrimination, persecution, poverty and environmental degradation to leave their homelands.” He warned: “Many destination countries have seen the spread of rhetoric decrying the risks posed to national security or the high cost of welcoming new arrivals, and thus demeaning the human dignity due to all as sons and daughters of God. Those who, for what may be political reasons, foment fear of migrants instead of building peace are sowing violence, racial discrimination and xenophobia, which are matters of great concern for all those concerned for the safety of every human being.”
Yet those security concerns were real. All of the jihadis who murdered 130 people in Paris in November 2015 had just entered Europe as refugees. This followed the Islamic State’s February 2015 boast that it would soon flood Europe with as many as five hundred thousand refugees. In September 2015, Elias Bou Saab, the Lebanese education minister, disclosed that there were twenty thousand jihadis among the refugees in camps in his country, waiting for the opportunity to go to Europe and North America. That same month, it was revealed that eighty percent of migrants who had come to Europe claiming to be fleeing the war in Syria were not really from Syria at all.
Why were they claiming to be Syrian and streaming into Europe, and the U.S. as well? An Islamic State operative gave the answer when he boasted in September 2015, shortly after the migrant influx began, that among the flood of refugees, four thousand Islamic State jihadis had already entered Europe. He explained their purpose: “It’s our dream that there should be a caliphate not only in Syria but in all the world, and we will have it soon, inshallah.”5 These Muslims were going to Europe in the service of that caliphate: “They are going like refugees,” he said, but they were going with the plan of sowing blood and mayhem on European streets. As he told this to journalists, he smiled and said, “Just wait.”
But for Pope Francis, concern for all of this was simply “xenophobia.” “It is hypocritical,” he thundered in October 2016, “to call yourself a Christian and to chase away a refugee, or anyone who needs your help. Jesus taught us what it means to be a good Christian in the parable of the Good Samaritan.” He cited Scripture: “You shall not wrong a stranger or oppress him, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.”
The Islamic State, meanwhile, had its own scripture in mind. With marked ingratitude, in November 2017 it threatened “Christmas blood” at the Vatican and released an image of Pope Francis beheaded.
A year before that, the same group had explained that, contrary to Pope Francis’ fond imaginings, their struggle was all about Islam. Addressing the free world, the Islamic State declared in an article in its glossy online magazine Dabiq:
“We hate you, first and foremost, because you are disbelievers; you reject the oneness of Allah—whether you realize it or not—by making partners for Him in worship, you blaspheme against Him, claiming that He has a son, you fabricate lies against His prophets and messengers, and you indulge in all manner of devilish practices.…
We hate you because your secular, liberal societies permit the very things that Allah has prohibited while banning many of the things He has permitted, a matter that doesn’t concern you because you [sic] Christian disbelief and paganism separate between religion and state, thereby granting supreme authority to your whims and desires via the legislators you vote into power.…
In the case of the atheist fringe, we hate you and wage war against you because you disbelieve in the existence of your Lord and Creator.
We hate you for your crimes against Islam and wage war against you to punish you for your transgressions against our religion.
We hate you for your crimes against the Muslims; your drones and fighter jets bomb, kill, and maim our people around the world, and your puppets in the usurped lands of the Muslims oppress, torture, and wage war against anyone who calls to the truth.
We hate you for invading our lands and fight you to repel you and drive you out. As long as there is an inch of territory left for us to reclaim, jihad will continue to be a personal obligation on every single Muslim.…
What’s important to understand here is that although some might argue that your foreign policies are the extent of what drives our hatred, this particular reason for hating you is secondary, hence the reason we addressed it at the end of the above list.
The fact is, even if you were to stop bombing us, imprisoning us, torturing us, vilifying us, and usurping our lands, we would continue to hate you because our primary reason for hating you will not cease to exist until you embrace Islam.”
Nonetheless, neither Pope Francis nor other Catholic leaders took any notice.
HEAVENLY REMNANT MINISTRIES 
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