stage between 1919 and 1979 only appears calm if we
ignore the attempts of Muslims to wipe out the Jews of
Israel in three different wars,^124 or if we ignore hundreds
of thousands murdered because of the demands of Muslims
in India to have their own Islamic State (Pakistan) instead of
being part of a secular, multi-faith India, as that sub-
continent gained independence from Britain after WWII.^125
So let us have no doubt that our twenty-first century
problems with Islamic terrorism and the slave-taking by
Islamic State do not just reach back to the Sudan of the
1880s described by Winston Churchill, but these problems
are a consistent pattern going back 1400 years to the Arabia
of Mohammed in the Dark Ages. Thus Churchillʼs view of
Islam at the dawn of the twentieth century was entirely
relevant to the events and policies of the twenty-first
century, and Mr. Weston was doing the responsible thing in
quoting the wise words of an elder statesman whose fame
comes from standing up to National Socialism.
We have heard it claimed that Churchill’s view of Islam
in 1899 was that of an uninformed young man who knew
nothing of Islam (after all, Churchill was in his early 20s
when he wrote The River War). However, in the nineteenth
century educated English people like Churchill knew far
more of the truth about Islam than do our contemporary
“experts”. Moreover, as Churchill got older and wiser over
the following fifty years and became one of our greatest
statesmen, his nineteenth-century view on Islam remained
unchanged. So Mr. Weston was quoting a view of Islam that
was held consistently by one of Britainʼs greatest statesmen
over a period of half a century. In his memoirs published in