Barbarians Inside Our Gates

          The horrific events in France have been called acts of violence, radical extremism, and, except in the White House, Islamic terrorism.  Some pundits have gone so far as to say that the killings signal the advent of World War III.  I think they signal far more than that.

          Our human species evolved very slowly after its first appearance around 40,000 years ago.  The first civilization didn’t actually appear in Mesopotamia and Egypt until around 3,500 B.C.  These were characterized by organized states, structured society, economic specialization, artistic expression, the earliest forms of writing and arithmetic, and in 1,700 B.C., the first codes of law.  Then this great advance came to a halt with the Fertile Crescent’s first invasion of barbarians: Dorians, Phrygians, and Indo-Europeans from the north, and Semites from the south.  This plunged civilization into a period of darkness that lasted a thousand years until the rise of Greek civilization.
          A similar collapse of the civilized world occurred in the first millennium A.D. when the Roman Empire fell to invasion by Huns, Goths, and other barbarians from the north, and Muslims from the Arabian Peninsula.  The Western world did not fully recover from the ensuing Dark Ages until the Renaissance.  Now civilization is under assault by a new wave of barbarians bent on conquering the West and imposing its Islamist ideology upon the Infidel.
          Critics of extremism are quick to point out that the vast majority of Muslims are peaceful.  But as our politically correct multi-culturalists wring their hands at the oppressive policies of the West, they ignore reality: Islamist extremists want to kill us all, and, except for Egypt’s General el-Sisi, few among those “peaceful” Muslims are saying or doing anything about it.  Like the children who danced in the streets when the Twin Towers came down, they would rejoice at the destruction of the West and the imposition of Sharia Law on the world.
          After Muslims conquered all of the Middle East and North Africa in the 7^th century, they swept into Spain and then France.  Had they not been stopped in Poitiers in 732 by Charles Martel, they might have converted all of Europe to Islam.
          The new Muslim invasion of Europe and the West has begun.  The barbarians are once again at our gates.  Indeed, they are already inside them.  How will they be stopped this time?  Who will be our Charles Martel?