Understanding the Islam/West Narrative
Any honest and objective appraisal of Islam’s historic jihad on the Christian world is eye-opening, to say the very least. In the first century of its existence (between 632-732) Islam permanently conquered, Arabized, and Islamized nearly three-quarters of the post-Roman Christian world, thereby permanently severing it. Europe came to be known as “the West” because it was literally the remaining and westernmost appendage of Christendom not to be swallowed up by Islam.
For roughly a millennium thereafter, Arabs, Berbers, Turks, and Tatars -- all of whom called and saw themselves as Muslims -- launched raid after raid, all justified and lauded as jihads, into virtually every corner of Europe. They reached as far as Iceland and provoked the U.S. into its first war as a nation. The devastation was indescribable; some regions in Europe, particularly in Spain and the Balkans, remain inhabitable due to the incessant raiding; some 15 million Europeans were enslaved during this perennial jihad and, according to contemporary records, treated horrifically.
In short, “if we… ask ourselves how and when the modern notion of Europe and the European identity was born,” writes historian Franco Cardini, “we realize the extent to which Islam was a factor (albeit a negative one) in its creation. Repeated Muslim aggression against Europe between the seventh to eighth centuries, then between the fourteenth and the eighteenth centuries… was a ‘violent midwife’ to Europe.”
Here the inevitable question arises: How could such a long, well-documented history of unmitigated Islamic aggression that had immense repercussions on the development of Western civilization now be presented as the antithesis of reality?
The answer revolves around a number of modern philosophies -- from the Enlightenment to moral/cultural relativism -- that have each contributed to an all-pervasive “Narrative” concerning the historic relationship between Islam and the West; a history that, in presenting the West as aggressor and Islam as victim -- hence the latter’s ongoing “grievance”-based animosity -- is the antithesis of reality.
To understand this, one must first understand that, despite its many manifestations, permutations, and emphases over the centuries, the Narrative’s unspoken driving force has largely been the same: to demonize and thus justify a break away from Europe’s traditional heritage, religion, identity, and mores. If this sounds farfetched, consider: whereas by any objective standard the West is responsible for practically every boon taken for granted today -- from scientific, technological, economic, and medicinal advances, to the abolition of slavery and anti-discrimination laws -- today no people of any race or civilization despise their heritage except Western people. Clearly something is amiss.
Or consider how leftists/liberals/progressives, who forever whine against any vestige of Western traditionalism, habitually make common cause with Islam -- despite the latter’s truly oppressive qualities. Thus feminists denounce the Western “patriarchy,” but say nothing against the Muslim treatment of women as chattel; homosexuals denounce Christian bakeries, but say nothing against the Muslim execution of homosexuals; multiculturalists denounce Christians who refuse to suppress their faith to accommodate the religious sensibilities of Muslim minorities, but say nothing against the entrenched and open Muslim persecution of Christians.
The reason for these discrepancies is simple: “The enemy [Islam] of my enemy [Christianity] is my friend.”
From here, how and why such a formally well-known history of Muslim aggression against Europe was not merely suppressed but reversed should start making sense: of all non-European, non-Christian peoples, only Muslims lived alongside and interacted with (that is, constantly encroached and warred on) Europe for over a millennium; this made Muslims the only people -- the only foil -- that could be used to support the Narrative’s argument against premodern Europe. But first an intellectually satisfying way of casting Muslims as victims not conquerors was needed.
Enter literary professor Edward Said’s 1978 book, Orientalism. Its central thesis is that the Orientalists -- the Europeans who began the academic study of the East centuries ago -- were not writing objectively about Muslims and their history, but rather intentionally slandering and stereotyping them in order to justify dominating them during the colonial era.
This made perfect sense -- but only because the postmodern Western mind had already been primed for it. For if, as Marxist Materialism teaches, ideas/religions have no influence on history (and thus, economic want, not “jihad,” caused Muslims to expand); if, as Relativism and its spawn Multiculturalism teach, there are no absolute truths, religious or otherwise (and thus no culture or civilization is “better” than another); if, as pop psychology teaches, violent and negative behavior is always a product of societal injustices (and thus the more Muslims behave violently, the more that only proves they are frustrated victims) -- then what does one make of the aforementioned centuries of European writings that uniformly depict Muslims as ideologically driven by violence and lust, and the teachings of Muhammad as diabolically inspired?
Simple: dismiss them all as bigoted and hypocritical lies by nefarious Christians and Europeans intent on demonizing a superior, more tolerant faith and civilization. Thus a whole new academic approach to Islam -- stripped of all historic writings not conforming to the Narrative -- was born. History would no longer shape ideas and attitudes; rather, preexisting ideas and attitudes -- wishful thinking -- would shape history.
Bernard Lewis, himself a target of Edward Said’s Orientalism, summarized this new approach -- or “pseudo history” -- well:
According to a currently fashionable epistemological view, absolute truth is either nonexistent or unattainable. Therefore, truth doesn’t matter; facts don’t matter. All discourse is a manifestation of a power relationship, and all knowledge is slanted. Therefore, accuracy doesn’t matter; evidence doesn’t matter. All that matters is the attitude -- the motives and purposes -- of the user of knowledge, and this may simply be claimed for oneself or imputed to another. In imputing motives, the irrelevance of truth, facts, evidence, and even plausibility is a great help. The mere assertion suffices” (Islam and the West, 115).
Orientalism’s success lay less in anything intrinsic to it -- American classicist Bruce Thornton characterizes it as an “incoherent amalgam of dubious postmodern theory, sentimental Third Worldism, glaring historical errors, and Western guilt” -- and more because it fit the West’s prevailing zeitgeist (which, of course, thrives on “dubious postmodern theory, sentimental Third Worldism, glaring historical errors, and Western guilt”).
Nor does the Narrative predominate today because people are well read or pay attention to academe; as French historian Marc Ferro demonstrated in his Cinema and History (1988), the overwhelming majority of Western people’s knowledge of history comes from movies. And most recent films dealing with premodern Europeans and Muslims -- Robin Hood (1991), Kingdom of Heaven (2005) -- contrasts hypocritical, intolerant, and fanatical Christians with sophisticated, advanced, and tolerant Muslims. Commenting on such films back in 1997, Lewis wrote, “The misrepresentation of the past in the cinema is probably the most fertile and effective source of such misinformation at the present time…”
Twenty years later the Narrative has only metastasized and infected all aspects of public life, including politics and so-called “mainstream news.” Meanwhile, social and other media giants -- YouTube, Google, Facebook, Twitter -- increasingly censor material that contradicts the Narrative.
Such is how previously well-known histories have been turned upside down and, in this case, used to weaken the West -- the greatest sin of which is ever again to think or behave like its “awful” ancestors did concerning Islam.
For more on the true history between Islam and the West, see the author’s recent Sword and Scimitar: Fourteen Centuries of War between Islam and the West -- a book that CAIR and its Islamist allies did everything they could to prevent the U.S. Army War College from learning about.
French courts sabotage probe of official financing of Islamic State terrorism
The Paris appeals court dropped charges of
complicity in crimes against humanity
targeting the Lafarge corporation just before
the fourth anniversary of the November 13,
2015 attacks in Paris and the conclusion of an
investigation by anti-terror magistrates. On
that date, deadly attacks by the Islamic State
(IS), which was receiving funding from
Lafarge with state complicity, claimed 130
lives and wounded 413 people.
Lafarge, an industrial company specializing in building materials, financed IS to the tune of at least $13 million while a wave of terrorist attacks devastated Europe from 2014 to 2016. This financing continued after the deadly attacks on Charlie Hebdo in Paris in January 2015.
The court ruling is line with Lafarge lawyers’ demands. In March 2019, charges were dropped against former LafargeHolcim director Eric Olsen—which, L’Express noted, “began the defense lawyers’ counterattack.” Charges were scaled back against a key defendant in the affair, Lafarge security chief Jean-Claude Veillard, and Frédéric Jolibois, the director of Lafarge’s Syrian plant starting in 2014, was released from preventive detention. Le Monde wrote that this scaling back of charges would “automatically knock major ‘holes’ in this complex legal case.”
The appeals court kept accusations of “financing terrorism,” “violating an embargo,” “endangering the lives” of former workers at Lafarge’s Jalabiya, Syria plant.
The charge of “complicity in crimes against humanity” was the most serious and had the broadest scope, however. The dropping of this charge limits the scope of investigations and effectively blocks a trial that would reveal the state’s actions between 2012 and 2016, and their repercussions with deadly attacks in France, Belgium, Germany, Britain and Spain.
Unlike the investigating magistrates, the appeals court demanded investigators prove not only that Lafarge financed crimes against humanity, but that Lafarge intended to commit such crimes.
Investigators had argued that Lafarge’s “intention” was proved by the fact that it was aware of IS crimes and contributed to them by financing IS. Courts “do not insist that someone guilty of complicity in crimes against humanity ‘share the same ideologically hegemonic policy as the main actors.’ Nor is it necessary for an accomplice to ‘know the precise crime being planned,’” they wrote in a note. The UN and the European Parliament reported IS war crimes and crimes against humanity in 2015 and 2016.
In October, prosecutors threw out four civil plaintiffs from the case, preventing any intervention by the public. Prosecutors settled on “throwing out all the legal briefs that non-governmental associations had filed,” wrote the Sherpa association, one of the plaintiffs, adding that without the civil plaintiffs “this case would not exist.”
Another civil plaintiff, the Chredo (Coordination of Christians in danger in the Orient), accused the state of “not respecting the obligation to mention Lafarge among the entities financing terrorism, though it was known to be doing so.”
This dropping of charges impedes the organization of a trial that would expose the imperialist policy of the French government and its NATO allies in Syria and the role of Western intelligence agencies during the deadly attacks of 2014-2016. In the war for regime change they launched against President Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria, the NATO imperialist powers used Islamist terrorist militias like IS as proxy forces.
A key aspect of the affair was the ties between Lafarge’s financing and terror attacks in Europe. The Life in Paris association, which represents victims of the November 13 attacks and their relatives, had been allowed to file charges in January 2018. Investigating judges ruled it was “established” that “the overall size and duration” of Lafarge financing allowed IS to “plan and carry out violent attacks in Syria and abroad, including in France.”
L’Express wrote in May 2018: “According to judicial sources, ‘bank notes found in the pockets of Abaawud [the suspected organizer of the November 13 attacks] or of others could have come from Lafarge.”
According to investigating magistrate Charlotte Bilger, “nothing allows us to rule out the hypothesis that funds that Lafarge could pay to terrorist groups would have helped to finance the terror attacks in Paris on November 13, 2015.” Nevertheless, the Paris prosecutor’s office opposed allowing the association to be listed as a plaintiff in the case, claiming the charges were outside the association’s legal competence.
In a May 7, 2018 article, “Lafarge, the shadows of November 13,” L’Express noted: “According to judicial customs officials investigating for the investigating magistrates, Lafarge paid funds until 2015 to various terrorist organizations, including IS. The date is critical: indeed, on January 9, 2015, Amédy Coulibaly committed crimes, targeting a municipal policewoman in Montrouge and a kosher market in Vincennes in the name of IS, formally establishing the link via a posthumous video.”
The magazine added, “Investigators set up a chart of payments made to intermediaries known to be close to terrorist elements, and it seems that these payments continued after IS first claimed responsibility for attacks waged in France. … Thus, a line in this chart titled ‘payments, supplies’ notes that seven suppliers of raw materials established in Raqqa … received from Lafarge the equivalent of $3 million between 2010 and February 2015—which executives like Frédéric Jolibois downplayed during their interrogations.”
One row in this “chart describes ‘payments made to intermediaries’ between December 4, 2013 and January 31, 2015 for a total of $240,000. … Clearly this was not enough to embarrass certain executives of Lafarge, who thus continued to pay their ‘alms,’ as one of them put it, to the organization,” continued L’Express.
It is now established in particular that Veillard was in contact with the Elysée presidential palace, in “October or November 2014” by his account, to “make clear that this factory could serve as a base in the context of a deployment of French military forces.” Lafarge also established permanent contacts with France’s General Directorate of Interior Security (DGSI) regarding its ties and payments to IS—contacts which, according to a declassified DGSI report, continued until 2016.
The questioning of former minister for Foreign Affairs Laurent Fabius, who denied all knowledge of any aspect of the case, reinforced suspicions that the Elysée and the foreign ministry were perfectly well informed.
Though it is also under investigation, the DGSI was allowed access to the case files. In October 2018, Lafarge lawyers accused it of “bias” and “conflict of interest.” The DGSI participated in searches of Lafarge facilities, participated in interrogations of suspects, and wrote up reports and summaries for the judges.
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