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"Tradition?? The only good traditions are food traditions. The rest are repressive."

"There are two ways to think. The first is to trust to your ancestors, your religious leaders, or your charismatic professors. The second is to question, to challenge, to explore history for meanings, and to analyze issues. This latter is called Critical Thinking, and it is this that is the mission of my web site. "

Dr. Laina Farhat-Holzman  

February 2015

While Europe Slept: Denial of the Islamist Threat


Winston Churchill wrote a book in 1938 called While Europe Slept that impressed young John F. Kennedy so much that he made it his senior thesis in school in England while his father was US Ambassador there. His thesis was published as his own book in 1940. Both books were intended to rouse both countries to the threat of Nazi Germany that pacifists were determined to resist.

Europe lost an entire generation of young men in a meaningless fratricidal war between 1914 and 1918. It seemed impossible that a century of great modernization, technological progress, scientific advances, and nation states knit together by ruling families so intermarried that they all had one grandmother (Victoria), that war could happen. Yet a ridiculous little quarrel erupted into a war that no one of them could win until three empires collapsed (Austro-Hungarian, Russian, and Ottoman).

Europeans were bloodied and tired. They did not want to even want to hear that some new rats were climbing out of the sewers again, ready to put on uniforms and create new empires. The Russian Empire might have fallen, but the Communists wasted no time in reclaiming all the lost territory under a new Communist Russian Empire. The Austro-Hungarian Empire fell, but the Nazis marched into Austria and Czechoslovakia and reassembled the Austro-Hungarian Empire on their way to an even bigger Nazi German Empire. Italy imagined a new Rome, they took Albania and (would you believe) Ethiopia. Yet the British and French (and Americans) slept until it was almost too late. Events intervened and they had to wake up and go to war to save Europe, Asia, and the world. Western civilization was worth saving.

Despite repeated lessons from history, there are those among us, such as Libertarian Ron Paul, who think that if you leave others alone they will reciprocate. Hitler never intended to keep his peace pact with Chamberlain, nor with Stalin. Clearly nothing short of unconditional surrender, not another Armistice this time, would end World War II.


After World War II, Western Europe was once more tired and it pretty much slept. The US stepped in and provided an umbrella against Russian aggression. Had it not, all of Germany, France, and Britain would now be speaking Russian, eating Kasha, and sporting steel dentistry.

With a shortage of labor, Europeans welcomed cheap labor from Turkey, North Africa, Pakistan, Iraq, and Kurdistan, assuming they would be guests who would come and go home. They did not. They stayed, and brought their religion (Islam) and customs (oppressive) with them and were relegated to slums where no one demanded that they be integrated into the host cultures.

The "multicultural" model is wonderful for food. It is not wonderful for treatment of girls and women (wife beating, genital mutilation, child marriage, rape). Muslim immigrants resisted the values of the host countries and were pushing to make their own laws (Sharia) an alternate system. Sharia represents everything that Western law opposes. It cannot be an alternate system. There was pushback when young women began to die at the hands of their families. Now militant cells are erupting, theatening European core values.

It is not acceptable to murder cartoonists for making fun of one's sacred cows. One does not need to tiptoe around noting that Islam has a murderous side. This does not mean that it is a murderous religion, but it is not a religion of peace either. Muslims in the West are going to have to decide: assimilate or leave.

The point is that years ago, people such as Mark Steyn: America Alone: The End of the World As We Know It, (2006) warned that Europe was asleep to the danger of an internal menace. He was called an Islamophobe rather than a Paul Revere. The Multiculturists were wrong. Belgium is now awake, as are France, Canada, Australia, Britain, and the US. There is a global conflagration, and there is such a thing as an Islamic State. It calls itself just that, Islamic, and a State. It has delusion of grandeur. Delusions go before a fall.

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Dr. Laina Farhat-Holzman is a historian, lecturer, and author of God's Law or Man's Law. You may contact her at Lfarhat102@aol.com or www.globalthink.net.

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