The beginnings of this Crusade cane to us from the mouths of the right-wing-reactionary elements in society:
The original link has been deleted but the Wayback Machine still had a copy:
http://web.archive.org/web/20070703011333/http://www.catholic.net/RCC/Periodicals/Dossier/1998-11-12/introduction.htmlformercia (1000+ posts) Thu May-24-07 10:02 AM
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8. The Crusader rationale behind the covert action:
Edited on Thu May-24-07 10:03 AM by formercia
THE WORLD IN 2050
by Hon. Frank Shakespeare
Hon. Frank Shakespeare is the former U.S. ambassador to the Vatican. This address was delivered at the 1996 Wanderer Forum in Washington, D.C.
http://www.catholic.net/RCC/Periodicals/Dossier/1998-11...what is Islam? I had the privilege of living in Russia, in the Mediterranean, in Portugal, and in Italy for 5 years as your ambassador there. Those who have traveled know that Europeans think very, very differently at the visceral level about Islam than we do in America. To most Americans, Islam is vaguely a group of guys riding around on camels in the desert. That’s oversimplified , but we have no up close sense of Islam at all. For the Europeans, it is very, very different. Europeans know in their stomach, if they don’t know it in their immediate intellectual consciousness, that it was in historical terms just yesterday, just some centuries ago, that Islam was created in the wilderness of the Arabian peninsula, and went across the whole of northern Africa, that is to say, the southern Mediterranean, and then attempted in two prongs to take Christendom. One prong went up through the Balkans, and was stopped at the gates of Vienna by King John Sobieski of Poland in one of the pivotal battles of all history. And if that battle had been lost, it is probable that most of us in this room would be Muslim. And then at another point they went up through the other peninsula sticking down from Europe. The Balkan peninsula is on one side. On the other side is Iberia. And they went up through Iberia and they went into France and they were stopped only at Tours by Charles Martel, in another of the great, epical, momentous battles of history, and if that battle had been lost, it is probable that most of us in this room today would be Muslim. It took eight hundred years for them to be driven out of Iberia and down across the Mediterranean— 400 years to get them out of what is now Portugal and 800 years to get them out of Spain. And then there was the third critical battle, the naval Battle of LePonto, for which we have the Feast of the Rosary in the month of October. Europeans are very, very conscious in their viscera, that just across the Mediterranean from them is an enormous, forceful idea. Islam is not Russia, Islam is an idea. It is not a nation, it is an idea. And it came within a hair, on several occasions, of conquering Christendom, which would have changed the course of humanity.
--snip--
A thought about Islam: Something tragic is happening in Western Europe, which was traditionally Christendom. It is almost never spoken about, it’s only very rarely referred to, but it seems to me to be of staggering importance. And when I say it you will say, "Well, that’s too dramatic a phrase." It’s not meant to be dramatic. It’s meant to be an exact description of the truth. And it’s this. Europe is committing suicide. What do I mean by that? Europe has a birth rate which is simply suicidal. For example, it takes 2.1 babies per woman in a nation, in a society, to keep the population even, if you exclude immigration and emigration. The birthrate in Spain is the lowest in the entire world. It is 1.2. The birthrate in Italy is the second lowest in the entire world. It is 1.3. We tend to think of a big fat Italian mama with ten bambinos, because that’s the way it used to be 50 years ago. Well it isn’t. Italy is dying. Spain is dying. Two of the most Catholic countries in the world. Why? That’s for people much wiser than I am to grope with. France is 1.4. Germany is 1.3. If you take the 15 countries that constitute the European Union, that constitute Christendom in the historical sense, the birthrate is 1.5. Right across the Mediterranean, directly across the Mediterranean, in the Muslim countries and in black Africa and in India, the birth rate is 3.7 to over 4. That is a staggering situation. What does it mean? What it means is very clear. In the lives of our grandchildren, or maybe our great-grandchildren, but in just a moment in history, you’ll look at a map and see a big structure that looks like a boot and it will stick down into the Mediterranean and it will say on it "Italy." But it won’t have Italians in it! It will have people who come from Libya, be cause Italy has a special relationship with Libya in the past, and people who will come from Turkey because they need work. 28 years ago there wasn’t one single mosque in Rome. When I left there 4 years ago there were over 200. In Rome! Now many of those are storefronts. But one of them is one of the biggest, most modern mos ques in all the world. In Italy! And what are the Italians doing? They have the second lowest birthrate in all the world. I do not know Islam. I haven’t studied it. But Islam has been re-animated in our time. After its enormous vitality three to four centuries ago, when these great battles took place, it sort of went to sleep. And in our lifetime, in the last 40 to 50 years, it has been re-animated. In many ways it’s been re-animated as an idea. Islamic fundamentalism is the governing mode in such countries as Iraq, and in Syria, and in Sudan, and in Algeria, and Iran. It has just taken over Afghanistan. An Islamic leader has just been elected the Prime Minister of Turkey.
Who is to know where Islam is going? It would be a man wiser and more educated than myself. But it is an enormous question. Clearly there have been two elements which have played some role in it. There has been an insertion of two new things into that world in our lifetimes. One is oil, and the other is Israel. In any event, in all of that mix, you have a resurgent Islam, you have the huge money of oil, you have the fervor of belief, and of course you have something far more than just the Arab world. Islam runs down through Pakistan, and South east Asia and India. Muslims are 80% of the population in Indonesia, one of the largest countries in the world. And the struggle in our time for the soul of Africa is the struggle between Islam and Christianity. So in the year 2050, what is Islam?
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