CORTEZ AND BAMBI

Contrary to what you have been told all your life, history is not written by the victors. If this were true, why, then, is there not a single statue of Hernando Cortez in Mexico City?

History is made by the victors, but it is the poets who write it. Spain – and Mexico’s – great tragedy is that there never was a Spanish Homer who immortalized the monumental heroism of Cortez. Instead, the Spanish got a smart-aleck novelist, Miguel Cervantes, who ridiculed Spanish heroic values in Don Quixote. It has been downhill for Spain ever since.

The epic crusade of Cortez to eliminate the indescribably evil religion of the Aztecs and to replace it with Christianity should be one of the most inspiring stories in all literature.

The Aztecs believed their sun-god, Huitzilipotztli, would not let the sun rise unless he was fed a constant supply of live beating human hearts. The sacrificial victim’s back would be broken on the stone altar to paralyze him and his heart cut out of his chest with an obsidian knife while he was still alive. Then his body would be tossed down the temple steps to be cut up and eaten. This would happen at the Great Temple in Tenotchitlan (the Aztec capital, now Mexico City) sixteen times a day. The Aztecs would then eat their victims. The favorite meal of Montezuma, the Aztec king, was fricasseed human babies.

That a tiny band of a few hundred Spanish soldiers was able to defeat the armies of the Aztec Empire seems nothing short of miraculous. At the Battle of Otumba, three hundred and forty soldiers and twenty-seven horsemen, almost all wounded and sick, were attacked by tens of thousands of Aztec warriors. The Spaniards had lost all their guns and all their cannons. They had nothing but swords and a few lances. After hours of desperate hand-to-hand fighting, all hope had vanished. Then Cortez led five other horsemen on a mad charge slashing through the Aztec ranks to their general and killed him. The Aztecs fled at the sight of such unimaginable courage.

The Spanish soldiers of Cortez’s day were among the toughest and bravest the world has ever known. One can only cringe at imagining what Cortez would think of his countrymen today.

When Cortez was born in 1485, there was still a Moslem Kingdom in Spain. Arab-Moslem conquerors had invaded Spain in 711 AD and within a few years had seized virtually the entire Iberian Peninsula. By 732, a Moslem army of over 200,000 led by Abd-er-Rahman crossed the Pyrenees and seized most of what is now southern France. On October 10, the heretofore invincible Arab cavalry charged down upon several thousand Frankish soldiers on foot at the Loire River near Tours. The Franks held. For the first time, the Arabs were beaten.

The leader of the Franks, Charles Martel, would be called The Hammer for his great victory. The Battle of Tours was one of history’s true turning points – for as Gibbon noted, had the Moslems won that day, all of Europe would have been Islamized and Western Civilization would have been extinguished.

Yet it took Charles’ grandson, Charlemagne, to finally kick the Arab-Moslem invaders (called Moors after the Latin maures – itself after the Greek mauros – for dark skin) out of France. Then it took another 800 years for Spanish Christians to kick them out of Spain. In the same year Ferdinand & Isabella sent Columbus across the ocean blue, 1492, they expelled the Moors from their last stronghold of Grenada.

Now the Jihadists are back, claiming Christians are the “Crusaders,” not them, that the Spanish and Europeans are the invaders, not them, that they have the right to reclaim their Kingdom of Andalusia and Islamize all of Europe. This time, the Spanish don’t have men like Cortez to protect them – they have “men” like Bambi.

Believe it or not, “Bambi” is the publicly-recognized nickname of Spain’s new Socialist leader, Josè Zapatero. He epitomizes that status of subservience Moslem rulers demand of their non-Moslem subjects known as dhimmitude.

Dhimmis are second-class citizens under Islamic Sharia law. Dhimmis are given a choice: convert to Islam, pay tribute called jizya and be willing to subject oneself to public humiliation, or be killed. These are the three choices now being given to Spain and all of Europe.

Europe is well on its way to becoming Eurabia. This apt description is that of historian Bat Yeor. The Moslem immigrant population of Western Europe is exploding, while Europeans refuse to have children — they want to go on state-paid vacations instead. The civilization of Europe is dissolving before our eyes. Thus the question arises:

Does America have to come to Europe’s rescue again? Twice before — World War One and World War Two — America has had to rescue Europe from itself. It couldn’t stop destroying itself on its own — twice. Then for another 45 years, America had to defend and protect a Europe incapable of preventing on its own being conquered by the Soviet Union.

For the fourth time now, if Europe is to be saved from extinction, it is America and America alone that must do it.

The first two times the price America paid was the highest possible — the lives of hundreds of thousands of American soldiers. The third time the cost was tens of billions of dollars spent on NATO. The price this time is different — and is the good news in this saga. The price that must be paid to save Europe again, to prevent Europe from becoming Eurabia, does not need to be paid in lives or money, but in moral and intellectual courage.

The War on Terrorism is a military war, being fought by American fighting men in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere. But it is not only a military war, and thus cannot be won only by military means. At its root, the War on Terrorism is a War of Ideas*.

And here is the key idea that must be driven into European brains with all the moral force America can muster:

For their culture and civilization to survive, Europeans must abandon the corrosive soul-poison of anti-Semitism. They must stop hating Jews and stop hating Israel.

Why is simple: The war on Islamist terrorism cannot be won if there is a distinction between terrorism committed in Israel and terrorism committed in Spain.

On March 19, President Bush delivered an address entitled “No Neutral Ground,” a speech so extraordinary it has made him, as one commentator put it, “The Churchill of our times.” His message is one that all Europeans must hear and repeatedly:
“The war on terror is not a figure of speech. It is an inescapable calling of our generation. The terrorists are offended not merely by our policies — they are offended by our existence as free nations. No concession will appease their hatred. No accommodation will satisfy their endless demands.”**

This is an exact description of Arafat, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, and other Palestinian terrorist groups. There is no difference in how they view Israel and how Al Qaeda views America.

If Europeans want to culturally survive, they must take the President’s words to heart: “There is no neutral ground in the fight between civilization and terror.” Either you have the courage to fight it, or you become Dhimmis, you become Bambis.
Thus in every forum available, private American citizens and public American officials, should relentlessly explain to Europeans:

The reason to support Israel is not because it is Jewish. The reason to support Israel is because it is part of Western Civilization. It is Western Civilization as a whole that is being attacked, that the Islamic terrorists want destroyed. Israel is part of that whole, which is why the terrorist assault on it is the same as the terrorist assault on America, on Spain, or any other Western nation.

In other words, Europeans must be made to change their perspective, to look upon Israelis not primarily as Jews, but as Westerners. That is the crux shift in viewpoint. “We’re all in this together, guys,” they need to be told. “The Arabs are playing you for suckers with their Palestinian gambit. ‘Divide and Conquer’ is the oldest trick for subduing an enemy in the book.”

For anyone you know in Europe, for any European blog or website on which you can post, one way to start is to send them “A Letter To My Friends” (Guest Authors, this week’s TTP Report), which illustrates how Israel is, warp and woof, part of us, part of the West.
It’s not that those who are not part of the West, be they Palestinians or Moslems or any non-Westerners, are inferior. Of course not. It’s that the terrorists wish to destroy Israel for being part of the West. All that the letter, written by Uri Dromi, a director of the Israel Democracy Institute in Jerusalem, describes is what the Palestinian terrorists hate.

Perhaps one day, another Cortez will emerge out of the Extremadura or some other obscure region of Europe to champion Christianity and Civilization, push aside the Dhimmis and the Bambis, and enable Europe defeat the evil of Islamization.

But for now, history again demands that America assume the burden of preserving freedom, of protecting Europe from itself, and achieving victory in the War of Ideas.

*The concept of the struggle against Islamic terrorism being a “War of Ideas” is today in common parlance, yet credit for originating the concept belongs to Dr. Ariel Cohen at the Heritage Foundation in Washington.

**The full text of the President’s speech can be read here: http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2004/03/20040319-3.html
. I encourage you to read it in its entirety.