Any Christian who dares stand against Islam — including by merely standing against Islamic aggression and terror — is a monster who must be shunned.
Sounds crazy, you say? Well, consider the following bit of news: The city council of Vienna refuses to honor John III Sobieski, the Polish king who saved the Austrian capital from the Turks in 1683, with a statue due to — in the words of one report — “concerns to do with Islamophobia.”
Here’s a brief summary of the Muslim siege of Vienna in 1683, by far one of the most important confrontations between Islam and the West (so much so that I allotted an entire chapter to it in my 2018 book, Sword and Scimitar): In the summer of 1683, some 200,000 Muslims from Turkey invaded Austria — slaughtering over 30,000 Christian captives — and laid siege to Vienna. For over two months, the holed-up and vastly outnumbered Viennese suffered plague, dysentery, starvation, and many casualties, especially of women and children.
Then, on September 12, when the city had reached its final extremity and the Muslims were about to burst through, an anonymous English eyewitness wrote the following:
After a siege of sixty days, accompanied with a thousand difficulties, sicknesses, want of provisions, and great effusion of blood, after a million of cannon and musquet shot, bombs, and all sorts of fireworks, which has changed the face of the fairest and most flourishing city in the world, disfigured and ruined [it] . . . heaven favorably heard the prayers and tears of a cast down and mournful people.
The formidable king of Poland, John Sobieski, had led 65,000 horsemen to avenge beleaguered Vienna. “It is not a city alone that we have to save, but the whole of Christianity, of which the city of Vienna is the bulwark,” Sobieski had told his men from atop a hill overlooking the city before leading a thunderous, downhill cavalry charge — history’s largest — against the Muslims and annihilating them.
Many Poles and Austrians, then and now, appreciated Sobieski’s heroic relief of Vienna—to the point that, since at least 2013, they have been clamoring for a monument to Sobieski on the hill where his army gathered. Although Vienna initially agreed to it12 years ago, plans for any monument to Sobieski were recently cancelled altogether.
Islamic Stronghold
Why? Because, and to quote city councilwoman Veronica Kaup-Hasler, “Vienna will not erect a stage which can be abused for xenophobic agitation and for fomenting Islamophobia and anti-Turkic sentiment.”
Interestingly, and despite her name, this Veronica looks much more Turkic than Austrian. This would make sense because, after the Poles saved the Viennese from Islam in 1683, the Viennese went on to welcome Islam in the name of tolerance, multiculturalism, diversity, and all that. As a result, Vienna is now a bastion of Islam inside Europe.
Yes, that’s right: although once a Catholic city and seat of the Holy Roman Empire (hence why the Turks were so eager to conquer it), today there are more Muslim than Catholic students in Vienna. Let that sink in for a while. And the mosques they and their parents attend tend towards “radicalization.” When two young Muslim boys were arrested before launching a terror attack on their school in 2023, they confessed that “We wanted to shoot all the Christians in the class!” Why? Because “Killing Christians takes us to paradise.”
Crime, as might be expected, is also rampant in Vienna, thanks precisely to this influx of Islam. According to a report titled “Austrians living in fear as violent migrant gangs carry out DAILY attacks in Vienna”:
Muggings and beatings are becoming commonplace in the historic capital city, with passersby being attacked on almost a daily basis….The Praterstern area, just outside central Vienna, is now controlled by North Africans and is considered the worst area in the city for crime. Despite police increasing their presence in the area it has become riddled with crime. On the other side of the city, the area surrounding the West Railway Station has been taken over by Afghans who have been making headlines for all the wrong reasons…. Crimes carried out by migrants in Austria have risen rapidly over the past year as more arrive in the country. .. Sex attacks carried out by asylum seekers has become a serious problem in Austria, with a 133 per cent increase in migrant sex attacks in just the past year since the migrant crisis erupted.
Indeed, as in other European nations, sex crimes — including against young boys — have skyrocketed in Austria. According to one report, “Hardly a day goes by without reports of sex attacks” at the hands of migrants. After Afghan migrants tried to rape and assaulted a blonde woman, police responded by advising her to dye her hair black.
Incidentally, all these reports and figures I’m relaying are from 2016 and 2017. Since then, the Muslim population of the city has continued to grow — as has the criminality.
‘Cancel Thyself’
Meanwhile, all that the Austrian government has done in the face of this demographic change and Muslim aggression is pretend that it’s not happening. School textbooks whitewash Islamic history — including the aforementioned siege of Vienna — while demonizing Austria’s own “intolerant” Christian heritage. Austrians are expected to cancel themselves as a way to appease Muslims.
Christmas festivities are “curtailed” in Vienna and other Muslim-heavy regions, even as Catholic children are forced to learn and recite Islamic verse come Ramadan. In one instance, after picking up her young son from school, one Catholic mother was shocked to hear him loudly and repeatedly chanting, “Allah, Allah!” until she learned that for two months the entire class had been compelled, on pain of punishment, to memorize and chant Islamic incantations. “It felt like a slap in my face!” said the mother in an interview.
Little wonder that a monument to Sobieski — the archenemy of they who now run Vienna — is not allowed in the Austrian capital he so famously saved.
On the one hand, the masochistic Viennese—at least their elected officials—do not want to offend the descendants of those Turks and Muslims who once terrorized, slaughtered, and enslaved the people of Vienna—and who are themselves currently criminalizing them; on the other hand, they have no problem spitting in the eyes of the descendants of those Poles who gave their lives to save Vienna from Islam.
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.