Historical Hypocrisy: Muslims Villainize Columbus While Celebrating Their Own Villains

In the days leading to Columbus Day, which was celebrated on October 13, President Trump issued a proclamation, an excerpt of which follows:

Today our Nation honors the legendary Christopher Columbus — the original American hero, a giant of Western civilization, and one of the most gallant and visionary men to ever walk the face of the earth.  This Columbus Day, … we pledge to reclaim his extraordinary legacy of faith, courage, perseverance, and virtue from the left-wing arsonists who have sought to destroy his name and dishonor his memory.

Born in Genoa, Italy in 1451, Columbus quickly emerged as a titan of the Age of Exploration.  On August 3, 1492, Columbus set out on a daring expedition that most believed to be impossible.  Commissioned by Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain, Columbus and his crew boarded three small ships … to set sail on a perilous voyage across the Atlantic.  He was guided by a noble mission:  to discover a new trade route to Asia, bring glory to Spain, and spread the Gospel of Jesus Christ to distant lands.

Just over 2 months later, on October 12, 1492, Columbus made landfall in the modern-day Bahamas.  Upon his arrival, he planted a majestic cross in a mighty act of devotion, dedicating the land to God and setting in motion America’s proud birthright of faith….

Outrageously, in recent years, Christopher Columbus has been a prime target of a vicious and merciless campaign to erase our history, slander our heroes, and attack our heritage.  Before our very eyes, left-wing radicals toppled his statues, vandalized his monuments, tarnished his character, and sought to exile him from our public spaces. 

Trump is referring to the fashionable, revisionist claim, championed by “the Left,” that Christopher Columbus was, in fact, the devil incarnate—that he was a mass slaver and genocidal maniac.

In reality, and judged by the standards of his time, nothing Columbus did was extraordinary.

Even so, and not least because Trump has come out in favor of Columbus, the Columbus-haters—that is, those who seek, in Trump’s words, to “erase our history, slander our heroes, and attack our heritage”—came out in full force.

The irony is that some of those hurling stones live in very fragile glass houses.

Take the Yaqeen Institute, a Texas-based, Muslim Brotherhood-linked, Islamic think tank which, according to its own description, works to combat “Islamophobia.”

Also in the days leading up to Columbus Day, it published a video titled “The Real Story of Christopher Columbus,” narrated by one “Imam Tom” (apparently an American convert to Islam).

As might be expected, the video engages in all the sorts of defamation and propaganda that Trump condemned in his proclamation. Not only does Imam Tom present Christopher Columbus as the devil incarnate, but he seems to imply that any American who likes Columbus is guilty by association.

Now why is Imam Tom, who, as a Muslim, lives in a very fragile glass house, hurling stones at anyone? Is he not aware that virtually all of the heroes of Islamic history are guilty of similar if not far worse behavior than Columbus?

Consider that one Muslim man who dominated the 15th century, a contemporary of Christopher Columbus’s: Ottoman sultan Muhammad (Mehmet) II, 1432-1481. During his more than 30 year reign, he conquered so many Christian lands that he is today better known—and honored by Muslims—as Muhammad the Conqueror. 

His crowning achievement came in 1453—when he, Muhammad, was 21, and Columbus was 2: the fall of Constantinople. His sole reason for conquering that ancient Christian kingdom was that it would not embrace Islam. Once he had taken it, he entered the Christian basilica, the Hagia Sophia (Holy Wisdom) and ritually desecrated it—including by destroying its altar, breaking its crosses, and burning its Bibles and icons—before calling the faithful to prayers and transforming it into a mosque.

Afterwards he and his Muslim conquerors engaged in countless atrocities—raping women, children, and even men in the streets, before slaughtering them.

A notorious pedophile, Muhammad II himself enslaved and sexually abused several Christian boys, stabbing one to death because the lad would not submit.

Three days after the Muslims had sated their barbaric appetites, Muhammad had the “wretched citizens of Constantinople”—to quote from an eyewitness source, Riccheriio—dragged before his men during evening festivities and “ordered many of them to be hacked to pieces, for the sake of entertainment.” The rest of the city’s population—about 50,000—was hauled off in chains to be sold as slaves.

To be sure, Constantinople was just one of many such conquests. In 1480, when Columbus was 29, Sultan Muhammad sent an army to invade Italy. On conquering Otranto, the Muslims massacred more than half of its 22,000 citizens and enslaved 5,000, mostly women and children.  The remaining 813 Christian prisoners, mostly ably bodied men, were given a choice: embrace Islam or die. They all chose Christianity and death and, on August 14, were ritually beheaded atop a lonely hilltop in Otranto. Their archbishop was sawn in half to cries of “Allahu Akbar.” (The skeletal remains of some of these defiant Christians can still be seen in the Cathedral of Otranto. )

One can go on and on about Columbus’s contemporary, Sultan Muhammad II, and I’m always coming across new outrages committed by him. For example, in my latest book, The Two Swords of Christ, I include yet another little known enormity.

After he conquered another Greek city, a reportedly very beautiful slave girl, by the name of Irene, was gifted to him. Muhammad became enamored and spent so much time with her that his men began to grumble that he was losing his fighting spirit. On hearing of this, he issued two orders: first, that Irene be bathed and essentially “dolled up” in a beautiful gown; and second, that his leading men and generals assemble in the palace courtyard. He then had the beautiful Irene escorted out to him. Holding her by the hand and parading the uncomfortable slave girl before his men, he asked if they had ever seen such beauty. Then, as they all stood gawking at young Irene, Muhammad yanked her by the hair, pulled out his sword, and sliced her head off, boasting that that is how easy it is for him to cut off anyone that gets in his way.

The point here is that Muslims, of all people, should not be hurling stones at Columbus, seeing how they live in glass houses. After all, this same Muhammad has statues in and is widely celebrated throughout Turkey, and is remembered and honored every May 29, which marks the aforementioned horrific sack on Constantinople—an otherwise glorious event that the Turks celebrate every year.

Incidentally, and lest it seem that Muhammad II was some sort of anomaly, virtually every Muslim leader throughout history behaved in a similar fashion—massacring and enslaving people simply because they would not embrace Islam—all the way back to Muhammad who, in a canonical hadith, boasted, “I have been made victorious through terror.”

One of the more infamous acts of terror was Muhammad’s order to ritually behead some 700 male Jews right in from of their now enslaved women and children—just like what happened to the 813 Christians at Otranto, Italy, in 1480.

Sultan Muhammad II is highlighted because he was a contemporary of Columbus—for an idea on how Muslims were behaving during Columbus’s era. If one truly wishes to talk about genocides, one can talk about how Muslims butchered as many as 80 million Hindus over the course of five centuries—all in the name of Islam, according to historian K. S. Lal.

In short, if Imam Tom is really concerned about and wants to prevent people from looking up to the “bad guys,” perhaps he should begin by looking inward and helping his fellow Muslims see the light, so they stop heroizing and seeking to emulate any number of Muslim leaders—from their prophet to the present—most of whom engaged in horrific atrocities.

Instead, Imam Tom he is shocked and upset because Americans dare celebrate Christopher Columbus, a man who, in Trump’s words, “paved the way for the ultimate triumph of Western civilization.” A civilization which, whether they like it or not, Muslims sure love relocating to and living in.

Half way through his presentation, Tom reveals his ultimate point about Columbus—that the explorer was an “Islamophobe,” who “hated Muslims,” who was even “fighting them in Spain,” and whose ultimate goal in traveling was to aid the crusade and recapture Jerusalem.

Anyone drowning in fake history—that is, the overwhelming majority of people watching his video—will take Imam Tom’s words and presentation as more proof that Columbus was an evil man who simply hated Muslims for no more a reason than that he was—as anyone who celebrates him is—a rabid Islamophobe.

Then there’s reality. I’ve already given you a small glimpse of the atrocities Sultan Muhammad II and his behemoth Ottoman army were committing during Columbus’s era.

In fact, it had been that way for nearly 800 years before Columbus was born, when Muslims, having conquered nearly three-quarters of Christendom’s original territory—including all of the Middle East and North Africa—first entered and conquered portions of Europe, namely Spain, in the year 711 AD.

From that year on, Europe and Islam were engaged in a death struggle, especially following the rise of the Turks, who began to invade and conquer Eastern Europe in the early 1300s. As seen, by the time Columbus was born, not only had much of the Balkans been conquered by the Ottoman Turks—and Russia by the Muslim Mongols—but sources speak of many millions of Europeans enslaved to the Turks, to the Tatars, and to the Muslims of Barbary, or North Africa.

As for the Reconquista, which Imam Tom dismisses as the “so-called Reconquista,” this too was a very real thing. It began soon after Muslims invaded, terrorized, and conquered the Iberian Peninsula in 711, and continued for many centuries—as countless Spanish and Portuguese Christians fought and died in their attempt to liberate their homelands from Islam.

It was in this context that Spain’s monarchs, Ferdinand and Isabella — themselves avowed Crusaders, who finished the centuries-long Reconquista of Spain by liberating Granada from Islam in 1492 — took Columbus into their service that same year. They funded his ambitious western voyage in an effort to launch, in the words of historian Louis Bertrand, “a final and definite Crusade against Islam by way of the Indies” (and this culminated in the incidental founding of the New World).

Many Europeans were convinced that if only they could reach the peoples east of Islam — who, if not Christian, were at least “not as yet infected by the Muhammadan plague,” to quote Pope Nicholas V— together they could crush Islam between them. But because traveling eastward, where the Ottomans and other Muslims held sway, was suicidal, a new route had to be found: hence the true reason why Christopher Columbus sailed west—to continue the crusade against Islam and recover Jerusalem. 

All this comes out in Columbus’s own letters: in one he refers to Ferdinand and Isabella as “enemies of the wretched sect of Muhammad” who are “resolve[d] to send me to the regions of the Indies, to see” how the people thereof can help.”

There is a final irony in Imam Tom’s depiction of Columbus as an “Islamophobe”: Yes, Columbus, and Ferdinand, and Isabella—and every European then—was an Islamophobe, but not in the way that word is used today. While the Greek word phobos has always meant “fear,” its usage today implies “irrational fear.”

However, considering that for nearly a thousand years before Columbus, Islam had repeatedly attacked Christendom to the point of swallowing up most of its original territory, including for centuries Spain; that Islam’s latest iteration, in the guise of the Ottoman Turks, was, during Columbus’s era, devastating the Balkans and Mediterranean, slaughtering and enslaving any European who dared travel east through their domains; and that, even centuries after Columbus, Islam was still terrorizing the West — marching onto Vienna with 200,000 jihadists in 1683 and provoking America into its first war as a nation in 1800 — the very suggestion that Western fears of Islam were, or are, “irrational” is itself the height of irrationalism.