Millions of modern people of the white civilization - that is, the civilization of Europe and America - have forgotten all about Islam. They have never come in contact with it, they take for granted that it is decaying, and that, anyway, it is just a foreign religion which will not concern them. It is, as a fact, the most formidable and persistent enemy which our civilization has had, and may at any moment become as large a menace in the future as it has been in the past....
There was one critical moment when it looked as though the scheme would suceed. A huge Mohamedan armada fought at the mouth of the Gulf Of Corinth against the Christian fleet at Lepanto. The Christians won the naval action and the Western Mediterranean was saved. But it was a very close thing, and the name Lepanto should remain in the minds of all men with a sense of history as one of the half dozen great names in the history of the Christian world.
Today we are accustomed to think of the Mohammedan world as something backward and stagnant, in all material affairs at least. We cannot imagine a great Mohamedan fleet made up of modern ironclads and submarines, or a great modern Mohamedan army fully equipped with modern artillery, flying power and all the rest. But not so very long ago, less than a hundred years before the Declaration of Independence, the Mohamededan Government centered at Constantinople had beter artillery and army equipment of evy kind than we Christians had in the West. The last effort they made to destroy Christendom was contemporary with the end of the reign of Charles the II in England and of his brother James and of the usurper William III. It failed during the last years of the seventeenth century, only just over two hundred years ago. Vienna, as we saw, was almost taken and only saved by the Christian army under the comand of the King of Poland on a date that ought to be among the most famous in history -
SEPTEMBER 11, 1683
*We Christians may not have long memories but that can't be said for Islam and the followers of Mohammed.
The Belloc quotes were great. Belloc was *prescient* because at the time (1938) he wrote those comments, the Muslim countries were languishing in obscurity. The huge oil deposits hadn't yet been found or exploited. The thought of the USSR and the US supplying the Egyptians and Saudis with a modern air force would have made Belloc rotate in his grave.
Christopher Hitchens, who is a Middle East scholar, was the first (and one of the very few) that I saw to note the 911 date in 2001 as the anniversary of the Fall of Vienna.