Winds of War: Echoes From The Past

This from recent speeches by Winston Churchill III, Winston S. Churchill III on Islamic fundamentalism , Winston Churchill III: Radical Islam at war With the World.

Here are some excerpts.

· Intriguingly the dangers of extremist Islam were forseen by Winston Churchill all of 85 years ago, as I discovered to my amazement, while compiling my most recent book Never Give In! The best of Winston Churchill’s Speeches. Churchill is of course well known for his gift of prescience and, specifically, for being the first to warn of the menace of Hitler and Nazism as early as 1932, and of the Soviet threat in his famous Iron Curtain speech of 1946 in Fulton, Mo.

· But how many know that he also warned the world of the dangers of Islamic Fundamentalism? I certainly did not! On 14 June 1921, hard on the heels of the Cairo Conference, at which he presided over the re-shaping of the Middle East, including the creation of modern day Iraq. He warned the House of Commons:

• “A large number of( Saudi Arabia’s King) Bin Saud’s followers belong to the Wahabi sect, a form of Mohammedanism which bears, roughly speaking, the same relationship to orthodox Islam as the most militant form of Calvinism would have borne to Rome in the fiercest times of (Europe’s) religious wars. “The Wahabis profess a life of exceeding austerity, and what they practice themselves they rigorously enforce on others. They hold it as an article of duty, as well as of faith, to kill all who do not share their opinions and to make slaves of their wives and children. Women have been put to death in Wahabi villages for simply appearing in the streets. “It is a penal offence to wear a silk garment. Men have been killed for smoking a cigarette and, as for the crime of alcohol, the most energetic supporter of the temperance cause in this country falls far behind them. Austere, intolerant, well-armed, and blood- thirsty, in their own regions the Wahabis are a distinct factor which must be taken into account, and they have been and still are, very dangerous to the holy cities of Mecca and Medina ….”

· In Churchill’s day, of course, the viciousness and cruelty of the Wahabis was confined to the Saudi Arabia peninsula, and their atrocities were directed exclusively against their fellow Muslims, whom they held to be heretics for not adhering to the Wahabi creed - but not anymore. Today the combination of the oil wealth of Saudi Arabia and the supine weakness of the Saudi royal family which - as the price for not having their won behaviour subjected to scrutiny and public criticism by these austere extremist clerics - has bank-rolled the Wahabi fundamentalist movement, and given these fanatical zealots a global reach to their vicious creed of hatred and extremism. The consequence has been that the Wahabis have been able to export their exceptionally intolerant brand of Islamic fundamentalism from Mauritania and Morocco on Africa’s Atlantic shores, through more than two dozen countries including Bosnia, Chechnya, Afghanistan, Pakistan and the Middle East, to as far afield as the Philippines and East Timor in the Pacific.

· This is a stark challenge that today confronts the Western world and I fear it will be with us, not just for a matter of years, but perhaps even for generations. Whether the decision to invade Iraq was right or wrong, wise of foolish, is immaterial. The reality is that Iraq today is the epicenter of the Islamic militants’ assault on the West. They are determined that democracy shall not succeed in Iraq. For our part, we cannot allow it to fail.

Like father, like son.