Marred by dust and sweat and blood

This morning, after reading Brent Budowsky's opinion piece "Harry Reid in the Arena," I discovered that if Teddy Roosevelt were alive today, many would label him an "Islam-basher." You see, Budowsky quotes Teddy's stirring 1910 speech, emphasizing his injunction to give credit to the sweating, bleeding warrior who has left the spectator's bench and is actually fighting in the arena. Yet a few paragraphs after the quote, Budowsky tells us our 26th president would have severely disapproved of current U.S. leaders who are "critics...partisans..(and) Islam-bashers" and heartily liked Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's job-creation politics.

Does Budowsky know about Theodore Roosevelt's personal beliefs, or how he viewed Islam and Christianity?

The following passages are excerpted from Roosevelt's book, "Fear God and Take Your Own Part", (1916), reproduced in What Every American Needs to Know About the Qur'an by William Federer.

“Christianity is not the creed of Asia and Africa at this moment solely because the seventh century Christians of Asia and Africa had trained themselves not to fight, whereas the Moslems were trained to fight. Christianity was saved in Europe solely because the peoples of Europe fought.

If the peoples of Europe in the seventh and eighth centuries, an on up to and including the seventeenth century, had not possessed a military equality with, and gradually a growing superiority over the Mohammedans who invaded Europe, Europe would at this moment be Mohammedan and the Christian religion would be exterminated.

Wherever the Mohammedans have had complete sway, wherever the Christians have been unable to resist them by the sword, Christianity has ultimately disappeared. From the hammer of Charles Martel to the sword of Sobieski, Christianity owed its safety in Europe to the fact that it was able to show that it could and would fight as well as the Mohammedan aggressor.

The civilization of Europe, American and Australia exists today at all only because of the victories of civilized man over the enemies of civilization because of victories through the centuries from Charles Martel in the eighth century and those of John Sobieski in the seventeenth century. During the thousand years that included the careers of the Frankish soldier and the Polish king, the Christians of Asia and Africa proved unable to wage successful war with the Moslem conquerors; and in consequence Christianity practically vanished from the two continents; and today, nobody can find in them any "social values" whatever, in the sense in which we use the words, so far as the sphere of Mohammedan influences are concerned.

There are such “social values” today in Europe, America and Australia only because during those thousand years, the Christians of Europe possessed the warlike power to do what the Christians of Asia and Africa had failed to do -- that is, to beat back the Moslem invader.”

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Today, there are thousands of Christians beaten, murdered, and imprisoned in Eritrea, Pakistan, Iran, Saudi Arabia...and every other Muslim-majority country. They are the ones "in the arena," faces marred by blood and dirt. The conflict between Islam and Christianity (and any country where Christians are allowed to live unmolested) rages on. I wish both Reid and Budowsky would revist the battlefields of history and glance at the consequences. Is not critics who destroy values, nor partisans, but rather those who redefine black and white out of the spectrum and claim the only color is gray. I honestly don’t know how all this will play out in my lifetime here in America, but I do know the final outcome will be total victory for Christ and all those who call upon His name & love His Word.