COMMITTED to train men and women
to have minds for the Lord Jesus,
hearts for the truth, and
hands that are skilled to the task.

THE BATTLE OF RESTORATION

Nehemiah 2:9-10
Acts 1:6-11
Acts 3:19-26
Revelation 21:1-8

“A Scimitar is a single-edged sword with a convex curved blade associated with Middle Eastern, South Asian, or North African cultures.” Wikipedia.org
“The scimitar has been a symbol since ancient times. To the Akkadians, the scimitar was represented in art as something held by kings and the goddess Ishtar. In the Old Babylonian period, art depicts gods such as Marduk, Ishtar, Ninurta, and Nergal holding scimitars as a symbol of royalty. A common scene depicted in this period is a king or a god trampling on an enemy.” Wikipedia.org
Raymond Ibrahim “Sword and Scimitar”
“The West and Islam – the sword and scimitar – have clashed since the mid-seventh century, when, according to Muslim tradition, the Roman emperor rejected Prophet Muhammed’s order to abandon Christianity and convert to Islam, unleashing a centuries-long jihad on Christendom.
Sword and Scimitar chronicles the decisive battles that arose from this age-old Islamic jihad, beginning with the first major Islamic attack on Christian land in 636, through the Muslim occupation of nearly three-quarters of Christendom which prompted the Crusades, followed by renewed Muslim conquests by Turks and Tatars, to the European colonization of the Muslim world in the 1800s, when Islam largely went on the retreat – until its reemergence in recent times.”
Raymond Ibrahim “Defenders of the West” (2022)
“Fourteen Centuries of War between Islam and the West documented the perennial conflict between the two civilizations; it showed how from its inception in the seventh century, Islam identified itself in contradistinction to Christianity – “God does not beget nor is he begotten!” the Koran thunders (112:3) – and became the chief adversary of the West, then known as Christendom. Between especially the seventh and the seventeenth centuries, an array of Muslim peoples (beginning with Arabs and Berbers, ending with Turks and Tatars), waged one devastating jihad after another on Christians. As a result, three-quarters of the original Christian world, including the older, richer, and more developed regions – namely, the Middle East, North Africa, and Asia Minor (now Turkey) – were permanently conquered and Islamized. Seen as the final bastion of Christianity – the final ‘infidel’ holdout – Muslims continuously bombarded Europe, or ‘the West’ (so named for literally being the westernmost appendage of what was once a much larger civilizational block that Islam permanently severed). In the words of Bernard Lewis,
‘For almost a thousand years, from the first Moorish landing in Spain to the second Turkish siege of Vienna, Europe was under constant threat of Islam. In the early centuries it was a double threat – not only of invasion and conquest, but also of conversion – All but the easternmost provinces of the Islamic realm had been taken from Christians….North Africa, Egypt, Syria, even Persian-ruled Iraq, had been Christian countries, in which Christianity was older and more deeply rooted than in most of Europe. Their loss was sorely felt and heightened the fear that a similar fate was in store for Europe….It was this fear, more than any other single factor, which led to the beginning of Arabic scholarship in Europe (in keeping with the dictum, “know your enemy”).’
“In between the millennium separating Islam’s invasions of Spain and Vienna, from 711 – 1683, virtually every corner of Europe – as far as distant Iceland – was pummeled and savaged in the name of jihad with untold millions of Europeans slaughtered or, often worse, enslaved. Few now can comprehend the traumatic impact this had on Europe’s development.”
Nor was the United States of America spared; it’s very first wars as a nation – the Barbary Wars (1801-1805; 1815) – were against Muslim slavers. Years earlier, when Thomas Jefferson and John Adams met with and asked one of Barbary’s ambassadors why his coreligionist were raiding US vessels and enslaving American sailors, the Muslim relied on the millennium had always relied on: ‘The ambassador answered us’ the Framers of the Constitution wrote to Congress in a letter dated March 28, 1786, ‘that it was founded on the laws of their Prophet, that it was written in their Koran, that…it was their right and duty to make war upon them (all non-Muslims) wherever they could be found, and to make slaves of all they could take as prisoners ’.

100 years ago, the European historian Hilaire Belloc published the book
“The Great Heresies”
Millions of modern people of the white civilization – that is, the civilization of Europe and America – have forgotten all about Islam. They have never come in contact with it. They take for granted that it is decaying, and that, anyway, it is just a foreign religion which will not concern them. It is, as a fact, the most formidable and persistent enemy which our civilization has had and may at any moment become as large a menace in the future as it has been in the past.
In Islam there has been no dissolution to the universal doctrine – or, at any rate, nothing corresponding to the universal break-up of religion in Europe. The whole spiritual strength of Islam is still present in the masses of Syria and Anatolia, of the East Asian mountains, of Arabia, Egypt and North Africa. The final fruit of this tenacity, the second period of Islamic power, may be delayed – but I doubt whether it can be permanently postponed.” Hilaire Belloc (1870-1953)
Raymond Ibrahim “Defenders of the West”
“Not only does Islam continue to exhibit its historic hostility; it continues reasserting itself all around the world – including if not especially against the West; the Taliban, an Islamic extremist group, which the U.S. spent much by way of blood and treasure to declare victory against twenty years ago, is back in power in Afghanistan (with billions of dollars’ worth of U.S. weapons to boot); Iran, which is driven by apocalyptic visions and eschatological dreams of the jihadist kind, is close to becoming a nuclear power; millions of Muslims ‘refugees’ are flooding the West, especially Europe, where they overtly and especially covertly continue the work of their jihadist ancestors, either be engaging in bouts of thuggery, violence, and outright terrorism or, more commonly, by subverting the continent’s identity; and Christian minorities throughout the Islamic world are being oppressed and killed in ways reminiscent of the great era of Christian persecution under Rome though the legacy media keeps all of these inconvenient facts suppressed. Everywhere the threat is real, even as a somnolent (sleepy) if not comatose West slumbers on.”
Winston Churchill “The River War”
“If you will not fight for the right when you can easily win without bloodshed; if you will not fight when your victory will be sure and not too costly; you may come to the moment when you will have to with all the odds against you and only a precarious chance of survival. There may even be a worse case. You may have to fight when there is no hope of victory, because it is better to perish than to live as slaves.”