What would the prescient, passionate, and eloquent Winston Churchill say to stir the public to a common defense of Islamofascism? In this unique column, Suzanne Fields reminds us of what he already said about it...."But how many know that [Churchill] also warned the world of the dangers of Islamic fundamentalism?" asked his namesake grandson Winston in a speech in Australia. The young Churchill confesses that he didn't know that, either, until he began compiling a book about his grandfather's speeches. He discovered that on June 14, 1921, after a Cairo conference in which Churchill presided over the meeting that re-shaped the Middle East -- including the creation of modern Iraq -- he warned the House of Commons that the violently radical Wahhabi Muslims, then confined to Saudi Arabia, were a dangerously lethal strain of what was then called Mohammedanism, and would require watching.
But who cared? "The consequence," says his grandson, "has been that the Wahhabis 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."
The young Winston worries that the West is dozing off again. He can't imagine anything more deadly for civilization than the message he hears on Capitol Hill, from congressmen who want to cut and run from Iraq. "Is [America] going soft?" he asks. "The reality is that Iraq today is the epicenter of the Islamic militants' assault on the West..."
Read the whole column right here.
