European Leaders Have Lost the Will to Defend Western Civilization
The
Western world would have succumbed over 1,000 years ago had its leaders
and citizens not made a brave stand in the face of foreign invasion.
Today, no less dangerous invaders than those from the past have
succeeded where their forebears could not, and without the force of
arms.
The
history of Western civilization has been interspersed with episodes of
military conflict on such a monumental scale that any defeat would have
reversed the course of history forever.
Consider
the Battle of Tours. Beginning in 711 AD, a Muslim army under the
Umayyad caliphate conquered a large swath of what is known today as
Spain and Portugal, or the Iberian Peninsula. The tide began to recede
only in 732 when the Germanic statesman and military leader, Charles
Martel, with a force of some 20,000 men, emerged victorious against
Muslim forces on a battlefield in southwestern France in what is known
as the Battle of Tours.
Military historian Victor Davis Hanson emphasized the importance of the conflict when he wrote that "most of the 18th and 19th
century historians, like [Edward] Gibbon, saw (Tours), as a landmark
battle that marked the high tide of the Muslim advance into Europe."
Martel’s victory represented the first chapter in a protracted effort – known as the Reconquista –
a 780-year campaign on the part of the Christian kingdoms to uproot the
Moors from the Iberian Peninsula. And it wasn’t until 1492, the year
Columbus set sail to discover the New World, that the peninsula was
fully controlled by Christian rulers.
