Winston Churchill’s warning about Islam

For broadcast on 2CH Sydney, 2 June 2013.

Following the horrific hacking death of British soldier Lee Rigby by two alleged Islamic extremists, British Prime Minister David Cameron said, “There is nothing in Islam that justifies this truly dreadful act.”

But as US political commentator Cal Thomas pointed out in The Chicago Tribune this week, Cameron’s predecessor Winston Churchill thought otherwise.

In his 1899 book “The River War,” Churchill described what he witnessed in countries where Islam ruled: “Individual Moslems may show splendid qualities, but the influence of the religion paralyzes the social development of those who follow it. No stronger retrograde force exists in the world. Far from being moribund, Mohammedanism is a militant and proselytizing faith.”

Churchill said only Christianity had sheltered Europe and were it not for that faith, “the civilization of modern Europe might fall, as fell the civilization of ancient Rome.”

One wonders what Winston Churchill might say about the current state of Western civilization.

I’m Rod Benson for the NSW Council of Churches.