The only alternative to the gentle courtesy of surrender is a reassertion of Christianity as the religion of the West, but such a revival is hardly likely in France or the U.S. and even less likely in Scandinavia, where Christianity came under attack before it had actually had time to bite deep into the Nordic soul. Liberalism, which is defined as a self-undermining philosophical posture, is only a transitional phase between Christianity and something else, and it is beginning to look as if that something else will be Islam. My advice to the Danes is to learn to live with it and make the best deal they can. Better to be Muslims than what they are. ~Thomas Fleming

Dr. Fleming is right that the only alternative that will, in the long view, halt the gradual Islamic transformation of Europe is a revival of Christianity. As we are discovering in the mixed, confused response of many Westerners to the controversy, liberal “values” and the right to mock are hardly the stuff of a substantial, living tradition, and he is right to remind us that these things are the weapons by which Christian civilisation has been sapped and undermined from the inside.

But surely one of the causes of great problems that the Europeans have brought on themselves is the attempt to make a deal with Muslim immigrants on the terms of the latter. Can we really say that it is better for Europeans, confused, decadent and deracinated as most of them assuredly are, to succumb and make their deals with the Muslims? We know that any such deal will be a bad one. Why would we in any way encourage the Danes to yield at the moment when some of them are just beginning to recover at least some desire to protect their nation and their way of life? Anders Fogh Rasmussen is a far cry from being a new Don John (and in his reflexive support for Mr. Bush he has shown himself to be capable of very bad judgement indeed), but he and his must be preferrable to Ali Pasha and his cohorts.

I don’t pretend that the liberal way of life is the way of life that they or we ideally ought to have, nor I do claim that liberal Europe will not ultimately fail if things continue to go as they have been going, but as long as the Crescent does not rule in Elsinore, so to speak, there will always remain a chance, however slight, for a revival of the old Faith. When the Crescent rules in Denmark, and in Europe generally, we know that this will mean the final death blow for Christianity there for centuries to come, perhaps forever, just as it did historically in North Africa and much of Anatolia and the Near East.

A story from the seventh century tells us that the monophysites rejoiced at the lifting of the Chalcedonian yoke when the Zoroastrian Persians invaded and successfully drove the Byzantines all the way back to Constantinople. For the monophysites, their vindication was obvious: God had struck down the arrogant and heretical Chalcedonians, and they, the real orthodox Christians, would be the privileged Christian confession. The monophysite patriarch of Antioch, Athanasios the Camel-driver, was reported to have said: “The entire world rejoices in peace and love, for the Chalcedonian night has passed away.” Athanasios was wrong about the peace and love.

The Persian occupation was reportedly brutal and devastating and intensely anti-Christian in character, including the sack of Jerusalem and the plundering of her relics, including the True Cross. The victory of the infidel was universally lamented throughout the Christian world. Athanasios’ rejoicing in the fall of his confessional enemies was extremely short-sighted.

Later, when the Muslims crashed in on the weakened Byzantine world, most monophysite Christians were horrified at the ruin of their empire, having been acquainted with the “liberation” of the infidel once already and finding the repeat experience no better. We do not know what Athanasios, who was still alive during the first invasions, would have made of the new “liberators,” but it is noteworthy that monophysite chronicles generally report the horror of the inhabitants at the arrival of Islam.

Once it became clear that there would be no successful Roman counterattacks, these Christians made their deals with the Muslims out of necessity, and would have undoubtedly preferred not to have to make those deals. Because of their deals, they gradually dwindled and disappeared from large parts of Syria and Egypt where they used to be the overwhelming majority. They were free of Chalcedon at last, and most of them and their descendants ended up praying towards Mecca.

The alternative to the admittedly crass, incoherent and often appalling liberal order is a future Islamic Europe. The future can be much worse than the present state of affairs, however much we may rightly object to how things are now. Historically, societies do not usually recover from being overtaken by Islam. Once they go under, unless something is done to resist the tide, they almost always remain under the green banners, and this is not a desirable end for any person. “Better to be Muslims than what they are”? Better to be dead than green, I should think.