AN ANCIENT STRUGGLE CONTINUES
by George Jonas
National Post
September 10, 2005

9/11 happened only four years ago tomorrow, but my memories of it go
back centuries. Here's why.

Schoolboys in my native Hungary used to recite an old ditty. It conjured up
emotions ossified in the seams of time.

Stork, stork, ciconia,

What makes your foot bleed?

A Turkish lad is slashing it

A Magyar lad is mending it

With a fife, a drum, and a fiddle of reed.

The wounded stork's song was a fragment of tribal memory bobbing to the
surface from the collective unconscious of a great historic hurt. It was a
bitter lay, a denunciation of the Ottoman Empire, the Xanadu of imperial
Islam. The Turks had occupied Hungary for six generations. Although the
150 years of Turkish rule occurred during the 16th and 17th centuries, the
Magyars never quite got over it.

The national bird's lament was a manifestation of recollected trauma. We
meant to give no offence to anyone -- none of us had ever seen a Turkish
lad -- but we did associate the song with what we had been told about the
Turkish occupation of Hungary -- the Turkish hodoltsag or bondage, as we
invariably referred to it, just as Palestinians refer to the creation of
Israel as
nakba, or catastrophe.

Being in thrall to the Turk meant being in thrall to Islam. This was worse
than being in thrall to the German -- Hungary's other great historic trauma
-- for Germans were at least kin in Christ, while Turks were Muslims.

Christianity's roots in Hungary were not very deep. The Magyars, a
coalition of seven tribes of nomadic horsemen from Siberia, kept riding
west until they emerged from familiar Asia and found themselves in alien
Europe. This happened shortly before the end of the first millennium. The
Magyar chieftains concluded that they had no choice but to adopt
Christianity and settle in the fertile lands along both banks of the river
Danube, in a region the Romans had called Pannonia.

The chieftains didn't realize they had picked a natural conflict zone. They
pitched their tents in the borderlands between civilizations. The grey
Danube (it was never blue) was the last in a series of moats between East
and West. In due course, it became a moat between Islam and
Christendom.

Having made the mistake of settling in a bad geopolitical neigbourhood,
the Magyars would come to see themselves as defenders of the West, to
which they did not belong, against the East, to which they did. The
crescent moon became a symbol of menace, as the Muslim world made up
for the ground it lost in south-western Europe by its conquests in the
south-east. By victories such as Kosovo, the Prophet's armies gained in the
Balkans what they forfeited in Spain. The Magyars resisted Islam's advance
for nearly a century, but eventually they succumbed at Mohacs Field in
1526. After that debacle, Hungary's 150 years of bondage began.

Ottoman rule was not unmitigated evil -- for instance, horticulture and
architecture flourished under it -- but it was still a nightmare of caprice
and corruption. The Porta (Turkish court) combined dizzying hauteur with
abject servility. It also combined, along with its entire culture, Oriental
cruelty with Muslim self-righteousness.

I'm offering this potted history of the region because my reader is likely
to
be the product of what I've called "the 60-year gap." If born after 1918
(the year General Allenby rode through the gates of Damascus) but before
1979 (when the Ayatollah Khomeini deposed the Shah of Iran and the
mujahadeen began resisting the Soviet Union in Afghanistan) he or she
belongs to only about three generations in 1400 years during which the
struggle between the Islamic and non-Islamic world was on standby: The
only 60 years in which people could be blissfully unaware that their
civilization was at war with another.

Even this 60-year gap was a matter of perception rather than reality. The
struggle never abated. Pakistan and India conducted full-scale
engagements, as did Israel and the so-called rejectionist Arab states
surrounding it.

Still, in the Western perception -- and in the Arab perception as well to
some extent -- the struggle in those years was between the forces of Arab
"national liberation" and Western "imperialism" rather than between the
armies of the Prophet and those of the infidels.

The illusion of a gap in the ancient struggle had certain consequences. One
was that when the smoldering fire of Islam's jihad erupted again in 1979,
it caught many, if not most, Westerners by surprise. The 14-century-old
conflagration was burning brightly, with American hostages being paraded
in Tehran, but many people took another 22 years to notice the flames.

Millions did, finally, on a picture-perfect September morning in 2001.

Having grown up in the land of the bloodied stork, I saw 9/11 from a
different perspective. A "Turkish lad" slashing a bird's foot was not
totally
unfamiliar to me. Though I had no sympathy for wanton rage, coming from
the East I could understand how it might arise more easily than Westerners.
I could also entertain the politically incorrect notion that we might be at
war, not just with "terrorism" in general, but with the specific terrorism
of
Islam.

Perhaps Muslim resentment and rage shouldn't have come as a surprise to
anyone. Western ascendancy had been rubbing salt into the wounds of
Islamic decline for centuries. As the Princeton scholar Bernard Lewis
observed in 1990:

"For a long time now there has been a rising tide of rebellion against this
Western paramountcy, and a desire to reassert Muslim values and restore
Muslim greatness. The Muslim has suffered successive stages of defeat. The
first was his loss of domination in the world, to the advancing power of
Russia and the West. The second was the undermining of his authority in
his own country, through an invasion of foreign ideas and laws and ways
of life and sometimes even foreign rulers or settlers, and the
enfranchisement of native non-Muslim elements. The third -- the last straw
-- was the challenge to his mastery in his own house, from emancipated
women and rebellious children. It was too much to endure, and the
outbreak of rage against these alien, infidel, and incomprehensible forces
that had subverted his dominance, disrupted his society, and finally
violated the sanctuary of his home was inevitable."

For radical Islam, this millennial enemy was not only America or Israel,
but
the entire "House of War," the world of non-Islamic beliefs and values in
general, and Western beliefs and values in particular. The countries of
Europe could not exempt themselves from this jihadist view by conciliatory
gestures. Neither could Canada.

Stork, stork, ciconia,

What makes your foot bleed?

The answer had slammed into the Twin Towers on the morning of Sept. 11,
2001.

© National Post 2005

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