Barack Obama’s ignorance of almost everything relevant to politics and history is a phenomenon that never gets called out by the knee-padded media in the US. So on he goes, this time attempting to excuse the barbarity of the “Islamic State” by saying that Christians have been just as bad. There have been wars between Islam and the Christian West, sometimes fought in Europe (Tours 732 A.D.; Vienna 1529/1683), sometimes in the Middle East (Crusades 11th-12th centuries) and sometimes on the Mediterranean (Lepanto 1571 A.D.). These were defensive wars if ever there have been. We wished to preserve our way of life against an invading enemy.

But if you are looking for a truly horrific story of invasion and cruelty, you need to look at the virtually unknown Mughal invasion of India. I knew nothing of it until I came across it reading through Will and Ariel Durant’s eleven volumes on the history of civilisation. They begin with these words, from which they go on to show in complete detail just how sound their judgment is:

The Mohammedan Conquest of India is probably the bloodiest story in history. It is a discouraging tale, for its evident moral is that civilization is a precarious thing, whose delicate complex of order and liberty, culture and peace may at any time be overthrown by barbarians invading from without or multiplying within.

It is a story that is being repeated today in the midst of our own Western civilisation. It is being exactly repeated everywhere the Islamic State manages to find its way to power. I am not interested in debating theological issues with Muslims. But I am very interested in protecting our way of life from marauders who undertake their invasions in the name of Islam. The sickening inanities of Obama are pathetic in their ignorance, but are vastly dangerous in lulling us into any kind of limits on the defences we build against an enemy that remains as terrifying and barbaric today as it was a thousand years ago.