Some Sense On The Westminster Attack

While running down my Twitter stream, I found a Tweet referring to an article in National Review by Andrew McCarthy, in which he opines on Islam, Muslims, and the recent attack on Westminster Bridge and near Parliament.  He opens with an interesting observation.

It was a careful choice of words, Bernard Lewis being nothing if not careful.  In 2004, the West audibly gasped when its preeminent scholar of Islam famously told the German newspaper Die Welt, “Europe will be Islamic by the end of the century,” if not sooner. 

Listen carefully.  He did not say that Muslims will be the majority population in what is still recognizably Europe. No, Professor Lewis said “Europe will be Islamic.”  [italics as in original]

The state of affairs Lewis predicted for Europe was true of the Middle East about 900 years ago when the Crusades were launched.  If my sense of history is correct, the areas invaded by the Crusaders had a Christian majority population at that time, even while being under Islamic rule.  In other words, such an arrangement in Europe is not only foreseeable, but has a historical precedent.  McCarthy also observes, with respect to "Western political and opinion elites":

They cannot help but project onto Islamic beliefs and practices their own progressive pieties - which take seriously neither religion nor the notion that there is any civilization but their own.

I have long held the opinion that in reality, Islam is similar to, but in some ways worse than, what the left accuses conservatism of being.  For example, Islam's attitudes toward women and gays are not only opposite to those of the Western left, but by any standard of proportionality, are also clearly harsher than those of the Western right.  But enough of my $0.02, read the full story.