During the Egyptian uprising, shortly before Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak was forced from office, I was a guest on CNN Newsroom with anchor Don Lemmon. As the Egyptian government was collapsing, I argued that the Western media were missing the real story. Western journalists were praising and celebrating the Arab world uprisings as a popular demand for democracy and freedom.
"That's not what is actually happening," I said. "The concept of democracy is really a Western concept. Here in America and in the Western democracies, we believe that power rises from the people, and We the People empower the government to rule. But this idea is unknown in the Egyptian experience."
If the chain-reaction of uprisings across the Middle East are not pro-democracy, pro-freedom revolutions, then what are they? I'm convinced they are the latest form of Islamic Jihad. They are yet another way by which radical Islam seeks to conquer secular pro-Western regimes.
Now, in saying this, I am neither prophesying nor conjecturing. I am simply looking at the history of Islam's relentless drive to conquer the Christian West, then projecting events of the past on into the future. The history of Islam is a history of invasions and conquests of the West, beginning with Umar ibn al-Khatt?b (the companion and successor of the Prophet Mohammad), who invaded and conquered Christian lands in the mid-600s.
Historian William J. Federer, in his book What Every American Needs to Know About the Quran, has chronicled the history of Jihad. He points out that one of the key symbols of Islamic conquest was the conversion of non-Muslim places of worship (including churches, synagogues, and pagan temples) into mosques. Here is a summary of his findings:
In 634, Caliph Umar conquered Christian Syria and converted the Church of Job in Ash Shaykh Sa'd into the Mosque of Job; three years later, Umar conquered Hebron, including the second holiest Jewish site, the Cave of the Patriarchs, the traditional burial place of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Today the Ibrahimi Mosque stands on that site. In 638, Umar conquered Jerusalem, where the Dome of the Rock and Al-Aqsa mosques were later built on the holiest Jewish site, the Temple Mount.
Around the same time, Muslim armies conquered Damascus and converted the Church of St. John the Baptist (built during the reign of Emperor Constantine I) into the Umayyad Mosque. Muslims also conquered Gaza and converted a fifth-century Byzantine church into the Great Omari Mosque of Gaza.