On April 27, Donald Trump posted the following:
I’m bringing Columbus Day back from the ashes. The Democrats did everything possible to destroy Christopher Columbus, his reputation, and all of the Italians that love him so much. They tore down his Statues, and put up nothing but “WOKE,” or even worse, nothing at all! Well, you’ll be happy to know, Christopher is going to make a major comeback. I am hereby reinstating Columbus Day under the same rules, dates, and locations, as it has had for all of the many decades before!
Trump is referring to the fact that, for years now, Columbus Day — or as it has been increasingly known, “Indigenous Peoples Day” — has been condemned as a day when Americans celebrate the “genocidal” actions of an Italian madman against poor and peaceful the natives.
Trump’s point that “the Democrats did everything possible to destroy Christopher Columbus” is especially validated by former Vice President Kamala Harris. Not only is she on record affirming that she wanted to officially cancel Columbus Day and replace it with Indigenous People Day, but in 2021, she condemned America’s “shameful past” in the context of Columbus, saying:
Since 1934, every October, the United States has recognized the voyage of the European explorers who first landed on the shores of the Americas…. Those explorers ushered in a wave of devastation for Tribal nations — perpetrating violence, stealing land and spreading disease. We must not shy away from this shameful past, and we must shed light on it and do everything we can to address the impact of the past on Native communities today.
Good for Trump for caring about and wanting to reinstate Columbus. It’d be even better if we took this occasion to remember why Columbus sailed west in the first place. Although the Fake History we were all taught in school claims it was to “find spices,” the reality is that he did so to circumnavigate and fight Muslims.
Old Atrocities and Current Crimes
When Columbus was born, Europe’s Christian kingdoms had already been defending themselves from Islamic jihads for more than 800 years – and the fighting was at an all-time high. In 1453, when Columbus was two years old, the Turks finally sacked Constantinople, an atrocity-laden event that rocked Christendom to its core.
Over the following years, Muslims continued making inroads deep into the Balkans, leaving much death and destruction in their wake, with millions of Slavs enslaved. (Yes, the two words — Slavs and slaves — are etymologically connected for this very reason.)
In 1480, when Columbus was 29, the Turks even managed to invade his native Italy. In the city of Otranto, they ritually beheaded 800 Italians — and sawed the local archbishop in half — for refusing to recant Christianity and embrace Islam.
It was in this context that Spain’s monarchs, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella — themselves avowed Crusaders, especially the queen, who finished the centuries-long Reconquista of Spain by liberating Granada from Islam in 1492 — took Columbus into their service.
A Special Mission
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” (which 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 (d.1455) — together they could crush Islam between them. The plan was centuries old and connected to the legend of Prester John, a supposedly great Christian monarch reigning in the East who would one day march westward and avenge Christendom by destroying Islam.
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 in the war effort].” In another written to the monarchs after he reached the New World, Columbus offers to raise an army “for the war and conquest of Jerusalem.” (That his voyages centered on liberating Jerusalem from Islam is further evident in the title of one 2011 book, Columbus and the Quest for Jerusalem.)
Nor were Spain and Columbus the first to implement this strategy. Once Portugal was cleared of Islam in 1249, its military launched into Muslim Africa. “The great and overriding motivation behind [Prince] Henry the Navigator’s [b. 1394] explosive energy and expansive intellect,” writes historian George Grant, “was the simple desire to take the cross — to carry the crusading sword over to Africa and thus to open a new chapter in Christendom’s holy war against Islam.” He launched all those discovery voyages because “he sought to know if there were in those parts any Christian princes” who “would aid him against the enemies of the faith,” wrote a contemporary.
Islamophobes?
Does all this make Columbus, and by extension Ferdinand and Isabella — not to mention the whole of Christendom — “Islamophobes,” as those few modern critics who bother mentioning the true motivation of Columbus’s voyage allege? For example, in an LA Times op-ed, Yale historian Alan Mikhail wrote:
A primary force behind Columbus’ Atlantic crossings was a fear and hatred of Islam…. This shaped how white Europeans engaged with the “New World” and its native peoples for centuries, and how today’s Americans understand the world.… Columbus was born into Europe’s anti-Islamic mind-set in 1451…
While much of this is true, Mikhail does not bother explaining why there was such a “fear and hatred of Islam,” or why Europe had an “anti-Islamic mind-set” in the first place. Rather, “white Europeans” were just unenlightened bigots (“racists” in contemporary parlance).
But therein lay the irony: Yes, Columbus and Europeans were “Islamophobes” — 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 three-quarters 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 — the very suggestion that Western fears of Islam were, or are, “irrational” is itself the height of irrationalism.
In short, let’s not just start celebrating Columbus Day again later this year, but let’s also remember — and learn from — the events that gave rise to it in the first place.
Raymond Ibrahim, author of Defenders of the West and Sword and Scimitar, is the Distinguished Senior Shillman Fellow at the Gatestone Institute and the Judith Rosen Friedman Fellow at the Middle East Forum.