Another Columbus Day — or as it is increasingly known, “Indigenous Peoples Day” — has come and gone, with more and more institutions ignoring it or worse, repeating the hackneyed allegation that the Italian explorer committed a “genocide” against the natives.
One need look no further than to the current star of the “left,” Kamala Harris, for all the usual woke grandstanding and bromides against the Italian explorer. Not only is she on record affirming that she wants to officially cancel Columbus Day and replace it with Indigenous People Day, but in 2021, as vice president, she condemned America’s “shameful past” in the context of Columbus:
Since 1934, every October, the United States has recognized the voyage of the European explorers who first landed on the shores of the Americas. But that is not the whole story. That has never been the whole story. 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.
Earlier this week, a Trump campaign spokesperson slammed Harris for this position:
Kamala Harris is your stereotypical leftist. Not only does she want to raise taxes and defund the police — she also wants to cancel American traditions like Columbus Day. President Trump will make sure Christopher Columbus’ great legacy is honored and protect this holiday from radical leftists who want to erase our nation’s history like Kamala Harris.
Columbus’s “great legacy,” along with words like “radical” and “erasing history,” are a reminder of something else — something almost always forgotten in the debate about the explorer: why he sailed west in the first place. The answer isn’t “for spices,” as we were taught in school, but to circumnavigate and fight “radical” Muslims, in what is now an “erased history.”
A Lifetime of Jihad
When he was born, the then-more than 800-year-old war against Islam — or rather, defense against jihad — 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 he was 29, the Turks even managed to invade Columbus’s 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, Ferdinand and Isabella — themselves avowed Crusaders, especially the queen, who concluded the centuries-long Reconquista of Spain by liberating Granada from Islam in 1492 — took Columbus into their service.
They funded his ambitious 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).
The True Story
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 orders 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.
Actually Not Racists
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, if infinitely overdone, 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.
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.