A Brief History of the Transatlantic Counterjihad I

After Paul Weston published his brief account of our role in the Counterjihad Brussels 2007 conference, several people have asked me to write a history of the Counterjihad movement.

As it happens, such a history was already in preparation at the time Paul wrote his testimonial, and had been for several months. It was written by the Counterjihad Collective, a group of people (including myself) who have firsthand knowledge of the history of the transatlantic Counterjihad.

The paper has just been completed, but it’s too long for one blog post. I’ll post it here in eight parts, broken up into its numbered topics, which are of varying lengths.

Many thanks to all the people who contributed to this project.

by the Counterjihad Collective

I. Introduction

Over the past few years a transatlantic political and social movement that is now commonly known as the Counterjihad has gained increasing prominence. As it became more mainstream, it attract attention from the legacy media, especially in Europe, where the debate over Islamization has made it to the pages of major newspapers.

The resistance to Islamization and sharia started long before September 11, 2001. The roots of the movement can be traced back to antiquity, since the first violent razzia against Christian civilization in the 7th century, under Mohammed and the early Caliphs. Successive jihad attacks destroyed the Christian cultures of the Middle East, North Africa, and parts of southern Europe. With each wave of Islamic invasion, Europeans became aware of Islamic ideology through its deadly praxis. Popes, Patriarchs, and scholars wrote about the nature of the Mohammedan aggression, and the necessity for resistance to it. European Christians massed forces to launch Crusades in an attempt to reclaim Muslim-conquered territories in the Near East for Christendom.

Moorish Islam was expelled from Spain by the Reconquista in 1492, and the tide of the Ottoman expansion was turned back at the Gates of Vienna in 1683. For the next two centuries European civilization was ascendant, as Turkish power gradually receded and disappeared from the Balkans and Greece. Europeans were technologically superior to Islamic cultures, and became the colonial masters of Muslims in North Africa, Asia Minor, the Arabian Peninsula, the Indian subcontinent, and the archipelagoes of the Indian Ocean.

During those years the ideology of Islam ceased to matter to Europeans, and the violent and expansionist doctrines of the Koran, the hadith, and the Sunna no longer drew much attention among non-Muslims. Occasionally a European writer — most notably Winston Churchill, in The River War — would analyze the barbaric, inhumane, and imperialistic ideology of the Mohammedans. By and large, however, the menace of Islamic violence, which had been intimately familiar to millions of Europeans for a millennium, was forgotten.

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