September 11

I don’t think bin Laden’s choice of September 11 is at all accidental.

From the British historian Hilaire Belloc’s “The Great Heresies” written in 1938:

“It has always seemed to me possible, and even probable, that there would be a resurrection of Islam and that our sons or our grandsons would see the renewal of that tremendous struggle between the Christian culture and what has been for more than a thousand years its greatest opponent.

The suggestion that Islam may re-arise sounds fantastic, but this is only because men are always powerfully affected by the immediate past. One might say that they are blinded by it.

But not so very long ago, less than a hundred years before the Declaration of Independence, Vienna was almost taken and only saved by the Christian army under the command of the King of Poland, on a date that ought to be among the most famous in history: September 11, 1683.”