"Islamized" Europe?

Or perhaps that should be re-Islamized. Since at one time Islam had gained an impressive foothold in Europe, within Spain and Portugal, and spreading tentacles further, toward Hungary, Italy, France. For over 700 years from early 8th C. to the 15th, Muslims governed Spain. And when Islam ruled those parts of Europe through conquest, it brought stability, both political and social to that geography. Islam brought a flowering of culture, of the arts and philosophy, mathematics and medicine, and tolerance among peoples.

When Spain was returned to Christianity under Ferdinand and Isabella in 1492, many things changed; expulsion of Islam for one thing, and the rise of the formidably dreadful Inquisition. In the year that Jews were expelled from Spain, the New World was discovered. Islam has never forgotten, never forgiven its loss of Andalusia. In the succeeding years the grand power that was Islam slowly degraded as the religion and the politics and the societal aspect stultified.

While Islamic scholars insist that Islam is a religion of peace, it is also true that Islam expounds jihad, both the struggle to surrender personally to Islam, and the violent struggle to spread the honour and the worship of Islam as far as possible across the Globe. That is its mission, so how do we reconcile the concept of a peaceful Islam with that of a violently missionizing Islam? That too is tradition.

When Islam was in the ascendancy it was a far-seeing, gregarious and generous society that evolved, an inclusive one, one that valued educational and technological and scientific advances. Islam in the doldrums is another matter entirely; it has solidified its religious credentials into a pillar of stone which must not be tampered with through any kind of enlightened 'adjustments' to reflect the modern world.

This disadvantage is celebrated by Islamists as an advantage, since it is the word of God that is pursued, not that of Mammon, but in fact, this is an absurd illusion, since trade advantage is vital to economic growth and fossil fuel economies are static and impressively finite. That economy represents a temporal lapse in the spiritual arena, but a temporary one. A more permanent issue remains jihad as the single greatest Islamist imperative.

And, through migration Islam has slowly spread through the populations of Europe and North America, joining the foothold it already has in India and China, through its origins in the Middle East. The Archbishop of Prague, lamenting the loss of traditional orthodox Christianity, claims that Europe has sacrificed itself through its secular spirit, to the inevitability of total Islamification.

Violent jihadists, intent on spreading the pathology of hatred for non-Muslims are too impatient to wait for the inevitable, however. They have become utterly intoxicated with hate and the headiness of self-sacrifice for Islam, embracing death for themselves and anxious to deliver it in as wide an arc as possible, world-wide - encompassing both Western democracies and unfortunate Muslims.

Nowhere have they been more successful in inveigling themselves than in England, where for generations imams have delighted in thundering from their mosque pulpits about the need to radicalize Muslim youth, and to introduce them to the fundamentals of violent jihad. Modern-day Britain has evolved as a bastion of Muslim sympathizers, enabling Islamists to integrate themselves into society, presenting as responsible, religious representatives.

While at the same time undermining the very traditions and heritage and customs of the British, intent on finally delivering the entirety to Islam, supreme. Islamists are so comfortable in Britain that the group Islam4UK arrogantly and with earned entitlement plan a march through southwest England at Wootton Basset where people gather to pay respects to the coffins of British soldiers.

There the group plans to launch their own march to commemorate Muslims killed in the Afghan conflict. A legitimate social sympathy, but an obvious political-religious statement demonstrating the contempt Islamists feel for Western democratic countries engaged in a far-off war in an attempt to defeat al-Qaeda and its Taliban cohorts. Their loyalty is not to Britain but to Islam.

The violence seen world-wide of Muslims enraged over the presumed insults to Islam by the world of the West, exemplified by the Danish cartoons and the riots and deaths and threats that accompanied those inflamed responses, demonstrates more than amply that rational debates or exploratory dialogue cannot take place between the two isolations; the largely Christian West and the Muslim East.

Emigration to other countries from largely Muslim countries by Muslim populations hoping to better their lives, also gains gradual opportunities to flood those countries with a demographic not easily assimilable, nor attuned to Western values. Islam is no longer in a position to offer valuable gains to those countries it enters, as it once did, for countries of the West are now in a position of cultural, social and political strength, as they once were not.

Except, alas, for the fact that those enlightened countries of the West have confused their generosity of spirit and acceptance of others with the reality of abandoning all that represents their cultural and social and religious inheritances through that very generosity of spirit. Militant, brutal jihad enthuses over this peculiar propensity toward appeasement. And a type of surrender quite unlike their own.

It is as though they've taken lessons from those little creatures, so amenable in their hundreds of thousands, to hurling themselves over the cliffs into oblivion.