Billedet: Konstantinopels fald 29. maj 1453

Det er ikke bare Angela Merkel som hårdnakket fastholder at islam hører til i Europa. Også EU’s vicepræsident og kommissær Frans Timmermans mener det.

Sidste onsdag holdt han et møde med imamer fra Belgien, Bulgarien, Frankrig, Tyskland, Italien og Holland. Timmermans havde et budskab til dem:

EU Official: Islam Is Part of Our History, Present, and Future

“The Commission is strongly committed to promoting diversity in Europe. Islam is part of our history, Islam is part of our present and Islam will be part of our future.”

For Timmermans og Merkel er islams plads i Europa et spørgsmål, som nærmer sig en trosartikel. De har mangfoldighed som første bud. Derfor skal islam være med.

 “The way we help our citizens — whatever their background may be — to embrace the diversity that is a reality in European societies is going to determine much of our collective future.”

Timmermans er af den troende slags. Hans hyldest til mangfoldigheden er ikke politisk, men religiøs.

In 2015, Timmermans noted: “[D]iversity is now in some parts of Europe seen as a threat. Diversity comes with challenges. But diversity is humanity’s destiny. There is not going to be, even in the remotest places of this planet, a nation that will not see diversity in its future.”

Det lyder vakkert. Men har Timmermans spurgt sig selv om, hvordan det står til med mangfoldigheden i de lande, indvandrerne kommer fra? Har det strejfet ham at mange af dem bringer holdninger med sig, som absolut ikke viser forståelse for mangfoldighed? Så dybt inde i EU-bygningerne kan ikke engang Timmermans sidde, at han ikke har forstået, at der er «problemer».

Eller er det bare de skrækkelige europæere som er problemet?

De troende multikulturalister er også apokalyptikere: Hvis ikke utopien bliver realiseret vil Europa gå under.

Timmermans added: “Europe will be diverse, like all other parts of the world will be diverse. The only question is, how do we deal with that diversity? And my answer to that is, by ensuring that our values determine how we deal with diversity and not giving up our values to refuse diversity. That will bring us down as a society.”

Timmermans concluded ominously: “If we don’t get this right, I truly believe Europe will not remain the Europe we built. Europe will not remain a place of peace and freedom, for very long.”

Eller er det omvendt? Er det denne utopi selv, der udgør en dødelig fare? Stadig flere synes at mene det. Hvilket får folk som Timmermans til at give den ekstra gas, til at understrege endnu stærkere at islam hører med.

EU udmærker sig ved at være blottet for historisk bevidsthed. EU er et tabula rasa: en tavle som er vasket ren. Uden spor.

Robert Spencer skriver, at han snart udkommer med en ny bog: The History of Jihad From Muhammad to ISIS (which you can preorder here)

Muslimske hære pressede Europa og kom igen, år efter år. De skulle erobre Europa. Den 29. maj 1453 løb de Konstantinopel over ende. Konstantinopel havde vært hovedstad i det byzantinske rige i 1.000 år. Nu blev det ødelagt.

To take just one notorious example: after over seven hundred years of trying, the warriors of jihad finally entered Constantinople on May 29, 1453. When they did, they made the streets run with rivers of blood. Muslims raided monasteries and convents, killing or enslaving their inhabitants, and plundered private houses. They entered the Hagia Sophia, which for nearly a thousand years had been the grandest church in Christendom.

The Muslims then killed the elderly and weak and led the rest off into slavery.

The Byzantine scholar Bessarion wrote to the Doge of Venice in July 1453, saying:

[Constantinople had been] sacked by the most inhuman barbarians and the most savage enemies of the Christian faith, by the fiercest of wild beasts. The public treasure has been consumed, private wealth has been destroyed, the temples have been stripped of gold, silver, jewels, the relics of the saints, and other most precious ornaments. Men have been butchered like cattle, women abducted, virgins ravished, and children snatched from the arms of their parents.

When the slaughter and pillage was finished, Mehmet II ordered an Islamic scholar to mount the high pulpit of the Hagia Sophia and declare that there was no God but Allah, and Muhammad was his prophet. The magnificent old church was turned into a mosque; hundreds of other churches in Constantinople and elsewhere suffered the same fate. Millions of Christians joined the ranks of the dhimmis; others were enslaved, and many were killed.

Robert Spencer har længe været optaget af Konstantinopels skæbne. Med årene er det blevet lettere at forstå hvorfor: Islam er igen på march vestover.

Den mere end tusind år gamle kristne kirke, Hagia Sophia, blev efter Atatürks revolution udråbt til at være et museum. Den skulle ikke bruges af nogen religion. Men Erdogan agter ikke at respektere denne neutralitet. Så sent som onsdag i sidste uge reciterede han fra Koranen inde i Hagia Sophia, og han gjorde det med en direkte henvisning til Mehmet II som erobrede byen.

Speaking for an art festival opening Saturday, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan recited the Quran’s first verse, dedicating the prayer to the “souls of all who left us this work as inheritance, especially Istanbul’s conqueror”.

The Hagia Sophia was built during the 6th century Christian Byzantine Empire and served as the seat of the Greek Orthodox Church. It was converted into an imperial mosque with the Ottoman conquest of Istanbul in 1453.

(…)

Thousands of Muslim Turks have prayed outside the Hagia Sophia over the years to demand that it be restored as a place of worship.

In 2015, a cleric recited from the Quran inside the building, a Unesco World Heritage site, for the first time in 85 years.

The following year, Turkey’s religious authority began hosting and broadcasting religious readings during the holy month of Ramadan and the call to prayer was recited to mark the first revelation of the Quran to Prophet Mohammed.

Tendensen er tydelig. Erdogan ønsker at samle islams banner op igen og ekspandere. Han kalder krigen mod kurderne for jihad.

Man pjatter ikke med disse begreber og disse steder. De betyder noget seriøst.

Mr. Erdogan said Saturday that it was “difficult and emotional” to be speaking at the Hagia Sophia, which he described as “magnificent and holy”.

Greece has protested the Turkish government’s religious use of the venue.

Selvfølgelig er en mægtig person som Timmermans klar over disse kræfter. Han vælger alligevel at åbne armene. Hvorfor? Spencer har ikke nogen brugbar forklaring på det.

Nøglen er troen som virker som en drug. Et narkotikum, som får de afhængige til at træffe irrationelle valg, som for eksempel at opgive sit eget kontinent og sin egen civilisation.

Mennesket har evnen til at forføre sig selv, eller lade sig forføre. Timmermans er åbenbart «under the influence». Man kan kun bekæmpe ham ved at udvise skarphed og viden og afsløre hans «afhængighed». Hvis man skal bygge et stærkere fundament må man have noget at tilbyde menneskene, som kan beskytte dem.

Men ikke overtro.