The Westminster Jihad Attack: 'Europe will be Islamic by the end of the century'

Andrew McCarthy sees the writing on the wall, and what the escalating plague of Islamic jihad attacks really means: the rise of Islam and the End of the West as we know it.


Islam and the Jihad in London
It’s not non-Western. It’s anti-Western.


By Andrew C. McCarthy, National Review Online via AINA, March 25, 2017:

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."

Khalid Masood acted "on unambiguous scriptural commands to war against non-Muslims."

We are not talking about Muslims here. We are talking about Islam. Lots of individual Muslims desire peaceful coexistence, even assimilation. But Islam's aim is to prevail. So, yet again this week, Lewis's foreboding has been brought to the fore by a jihadist mass-murder attack, this time in London.

As we go to press, five innocent people are dead after Khalid Masood, a terrorist acting on unambiguous scriptural commands to war against non-Muslims, rammed his rental Hyundai SUV into dozens of pedestrians on Westminster Bridge, many of them tourists taking in the iconic views of Parliament. About 50 people suffered injuries, some of them grave, so the death toll may yet rise.

Masood, a burly 52-year-old weightlifter with a long criminal record that included vicious stabbings, then crashed the car through the gate at Westminster Palace, home of the West's most venerable democratic legislature. He alighted brandishing two long knives, which he used to kill Keith Palmer, a police officer who, pursuant to British policy, was unarmed despite being assigned to provide security at one of the world's foremost terror targets. Masood was finally shot dead by a protection officer attached to England's defense minister.

There immediately began the ritual media pondering over Masood's motive. Yes, what could it possibly have been?

I'm going to stick with the patently obvious.

Can There Have Been Two Annunciations?

Islam claims the archangel Gabriel came to Muhammad commanding him to "Recite" and ushering in his prophetic calling. What are we to make of this "Second Annunciation? 

On March 25, the Orthodox Church commemorates the Annunciation of the Archangel Gabriel to the Virgin Mary.  As the hymn for the Feast says,

Today is the beginning of our salvation,
The revelation of the eternal mystery!
The Son of God becomes the Son of the Virgin
As Gabriel announces the coming of Grace...

Islam also begins with an annunciation of sorts, to Muhammad, (not) coincidentally by a spirit being also identified as the angel Jibril (Gabriel). However, the nature and outcome of that annunciation is quite different from the one to the Virgin Mary six centuries earlier. As St Gregory Palamas noted in the 14th century, Muhammad's actions were "instigated by the devil":

"[Muhammad] came with war, knives, pillaging, forced enslavement, murders, and acts that are not from the good God but instigated by the chief manslayer, the devil."  (Source)

This article contrasts the Annunciation to the Virgin Mary, with that 'second annunciation', to Muhammad. This is one of the most significant and revealing facts about Islam, one which forces us to confront at least two very serious questions:

1. If Muslims worship the Same God as Christians, how could that Same God possibly send two such radically opposed revelations and messages? 
2. And, could the sender of those two messages be the Same God if He chose to send His revelation to Muhammad through such a dark, threatening and blatantly evil "annunciation"?

Beyond the Cross

The Cross is God's final word on revealing Who He Is, through His Son Jesus Christ. The limitless, infinite humility and radical, self-emptying love through which Jesus restores us to the Father, is the most eloquent word ever spoken... uttered in silence as He lays down His life for us.

During this week at the mid-point of Great Lent, during which the Cross is brought out into the middle of the Church for the faithful to venerate, it seemed right to share this article I originally posted a couple of years ago.

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For the Veneration of the Cross, I'd like to share a selection from my book, Facing Islam. This is taken from the conclusion of the chapter on Muhammad, 'Prophet Motives - Was Muhammad a Man of God?'.

Beyond the Cross

By far the most compelling, overarching point to emphasize as we close this chapter is the Person and Mission of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the absolute, incontestable finality and divine pre-eminence of the Son of God, the Second Person of the Holy Trinity, through Whom God the Father has wrought salvation for mankind.

Fr. Thomas Hopko expresses the essence of the Christian message through the centrality of Christ and the Cross as follows:

Beyond the Cross there is nothing more God can do. Beyond the Cross there is nothing more God can say. Beyond the Cross there is nothing more to be revealed. (Fr. Thomas Hopko, The Word of the Cross, SVS Press, emphasis added.)

The working out of salvation in each of our lives through our cooperation (synergia) with the Holy Spirit is “just details” as Fr. Hopko succinctly puts it, but God’s Act of Salvation—the Incarnation, Crucifixion, Resurrection and Ascension of Christ (and of course, the outpouring of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost)—is without any doubt the central event in all of history.

Thus there is no need for a subsequent revelation after Christ, least of all one which seeks to enslave the world to a barbaric legalistic system of belief and practice (i.e. Islam and sharia law) after we have embraced and been embraced by the grace of God, “for [we] are not under law, but under grace” (Rom 6:14).

In short, after Christ, Islam has no place, no relevance, no raison d’etre. If we stand firm on the rock of our confession, on Jesus as “the Christ, the Son of the Living God” (cf. Mt 16:16-18), then we will never be shaken by the assaults against our Faith...

The spiritual forces behind Islam know this, that Islam has no reason for its existence because of Christ and the Cross. It is the centrality of Jesus Christ and His Cross against which Islam wages its desperate war.

Pop Quiz for Lent: What great Orthodox saint condemned Muhammad's actions as 'instigated by the devil'?

If you're a regular reader of this blog, or have my book, Facing Islam, you'll recall this was the bold statement of St Gregory Palamas, whom we commemorated last week on the Second Sunday of Great Lent.

Here is the full quote:

"It is true that Muhammad started from the east and came to the west, as the sun travels from east to west. Nevertheless he came with war, knives, pillaging, forced enslavement, murders, and acts that are not from the good God but instigated by the chief manslayer, the devil."  

(The Lives of the Pillars of Orthodoxy, Holy Apostles Convent & Dormition Skete, Buena Vista CO, 1990, p. 352.)

It is not really a secret, yet I would suppose that most Orthodox Christians have no idea that St Gregory, during his later years as Archbishop of Thessalonica, was abducted by the Muslim Turks and held for ransom (an income generating crime still used by Muslims to this day, which observers of the Middle East will have to admit).

Suffering cruel hardships, deprivations, and beatings, and so weakened by the ordeal that he died a short time after being ransomed by the Serbs, the holy Gregory nonetheless boldly proclaimed the Orthodox Christian Gospel to his Muslim captors, even though he was putting his life at risk.