“If Islam is terrorizing the West today, that is not because it can, but because the West allows it to. For no matter how diminished, a still swinging Scimitar will always overcome a strong but sheathed Sword.”

Those are the very last words of my 352-page book, Sword and Scimitar, which chronicles fourteen centuries of warfare between Islam and the West. They were meant to contrast how premodern Europeans — chief among them the Crusaders — took a manly stand and fought against a then-powerful and expansionary Islam, whereas their more decadent descendants in the modern West are eager to capitulate in any way possible to a significantly weaker but still aggressive Islam.

Although that last sentence about “swinging scimitars” and “sheathed swords” was clearly symbolic, the symbolism itself continues to be validated. Thus, according to a July 29 report, “Britian’s Royal Air Force Bans ‘Crusaders’ Nickname for Fear of Offending Muslims,”

Britain’s Royal Air Force’s 14 Squadron has dropped its historic “Crusaders” nickname following a complaint that it is offensive to Muslims. The name, which dates back to the squadron’s missions over Gaza and Palestine during World War I, is now apparently considered inappropriate by the RAF’s leadership. The decision came after a single RAF crew member lodged a complaint, claiming the term was insulting. Despite the nickname being a significant part of the squadron’s identity and history, crews have been ordered to remove any references to “Crusaders” from their hangar.

One aviator expressed frustration at this decision:

If they’d have asked members of the squadron, rather than dictating this change, almost everyone would have been in favor of retaining ‘Crusaders,’ because it is so much part of our history. There was never any prejudice or malice in the name.

Yes, but for the Leftist leadership of Britain’s Royal Air Force’s 14 Squadron, satisfying the unreasonable demands of one Muslim crewmember is far more important than maintaining the status quo expected by the other 90+ percent of native-born British crewmembers.

More Erasures

Though such craven capitulation is especially common within the UK, there is, to be sure, no shortage of it throughout the West.

In 2019, the owners of a famous sports team discarded their longtime logo — a sword-wielding Crusader — to show off their “woke” bona fides and appease Muslims:

One of New Zealand’s top rugby union teams, the Crusaders, has scrapped its knight and sword logo after a brand review in the wake of the Christchurch terror attack. The Christchurch-based side has opted for a Maori motif in place of the Crusades imagery following March’s attack in which a gunman opened fire at two mosques, killing 51 people. It did, however, decide to retain its name, despite criticism it was closely linked to the medieval religious wars between Muslims and Christians.

Yet, lest you think in retaining the name “Crusaders” the team was making some sort of stand, they stuck with (or rather were stuck with) the name Crusaders “due to commercial and licensing agreements that could not be altered.”

In 2014, Maranatha Baptist University, a Christian college in Wisconsin, canceled its 50-year-old “Crusaders” nickname because “our world has changed since 9/11 [when Muslims massacred 3,000 Americans] and we’ve become a more global society.” The terror-linked, US-based Muslim advocacy group, CAIR, applauded the capitulation.

Unprovoked Attacks

Meanwhile, Muslim nations, such as the home of Islam itself, Saudi Arabia (AKA “US friend and ally”™), proudly depict scimitars on their national flags, with the words, “There is no god but Allah, and Muhammad is his messenger” — words that countless people, past and present, have been slaughtered for not reciting.

No non-Muslim seems to be offended or concerned by that, but Westerners are falling over themselves to cancel the name and imagery of the time when their ancestors resisted Islam. That, in a nutshell, sums up how the West and Islam see themselves and respond to one another: While Islam venerates its violent, jihadist past, and, wherever possible, seeks to relive it, the West is constantly disavowing its Crusader heritage.

And what exactly were the Crusades from which the West is so keen on distancing itself? They were a militant, no-nonsense response to more than four centuries of jihadi aggression against and conquests of Christian and European territory. The particular Muslim invasions (between 1071 and 1094) that occasioned the First Crusade saw hundreds of thousands of Eastern Christians (mostly Armenians and Greeks) slaughtered or enslaved by Muslim Turks acting in the name of jihad.

As the Byzantine princess Anna Komnene (d.1153), who witnessed firsthand what the Turks had wrought, wrote, “cities were obliterated, lands were plundered, and the whole of Rhomaioi [Anatolia] was stained with Christian blood.” It was her father, Alexios the emperor, who implored the West for aid. In a letter to a friend, he summarized what Muslims invaders were doing to Christians:

Noble matrons and their daughters, robbed of everything, are violated one after another, like animals. Some [of their attackers] shamelessly place virgins in front of their own mothers and force them to sing wicked and obscene songs until they have finished having their ways with them . . . [M]en of every age and description, boys, youths, old men, nobles, peasants and what is worse still and yet more distressing, clerics and monks and woe of unprecedented woes, even bishops are defiled with the sin of Sodomy [that is, they are raped]…

An Appropriate Response

It was this concern for fellow Christians that prompted the First Crusade. At Clermont in 1095, Pope Urban recited a portion of what everyone was talking about:

They [Muslim Turks] have completely destroyed some of God’s churches and they have converted others to the uses of their own cult [mosques]. They ruin the altars with filth and defilement. They circumcise Christians and smear the blood from the circumcision over the altars or throw it into the baptismal fonts. They are pleased to kill others by cutting open their bellies, extracting the end of their intestines, and tying it to a stake. Then, with flogging, they drive their victims around the stake until, when their viscera have spilled out, they fall dead on the ground. They tie others, again, to stakes and shoot arrows at them; they seize others, stretch out their necks, and try to see whether they can cut off their heads with a single blow of a naked sword. And what shall I say about the shocking rape of women? . . . Who is to revenge all this, who is to repair this damage, if you do not do it?

The Christians present, mostly Franks, cried “God wills it!” and were soon off to provide succor to their eastern coreligionists.

This is what so many in the West are eager to disavow and distance themselves from — including symbolically, by erasing the image and word of the Crusade; and this is why “no matter how diminished, a still-swinging Scimitar will always overcome a strong but sheathed Sword.”

Raymond Ibrahim, author of Defenders of the West and Sword and Scimitar, is the Distinguished Senior Shillman Fellow at the Gatestone Institute and the Judith Rosen Friedman Fellow at the Middle East Forum.