Being Willing to Fight is the First Step

The anti-Islamization movement is full of fighters. Scrappers. People willing to confront scary facts. People willing to speak up, stand their ground, and do what's right. People who don't walk away from a fight because the odds are against them.

We are now in the process of collectively figuring out how to fight intelligently so we will prevail.

Enthusiasm is obviously not enough. And the fact that we're fighting on the side of truth and justice is not enough either. Plenty of times in history enthusiastic people fighting on the side of truth and justice were annihilated.

The first wave of the first Crusade has an instructive lesson for us all. The Pope had made the plea to the European Christian world to come to the aid of their besieged fellow Christians in Turkish Anatolia. A preacher called Peter the Hermit rode from town to town on his donkey speaking to crowds and exhorting them to defend Christianity from Islam. People joined in his cause and the group marched off to the Middle East. They had no real plan. They just knew something had to be done and by God, they were going to answer the call!

Most of those who followed Peter the Hermit were poor people with the crudest of weapons (I'm paraphrasing here from the excellent book, The New Concise History of the Crusades by Thomas F. Madden). Even women and children joined in the march across Europe to go fight the "enemies of Christ."

At the same time, another European group was forming to go fight. The two groups planned to meet at Constantinople and join forces before advancing to Anatolia. As separate groups, they marched across Hungary, Bulgaria and Greece.

Peter the Hermit's group arrived at Constantinople, but they didn't want to wait. They were ready to fight. The emperor of Constantinople tried to convince them to delay until the rest of the Crusaders arrived, but they were too eager, so without a plan and with very little experience and inadequate weapons, buoyed by their own belief in the rightness of their cause, they went off to war.

On the way to Anatolia, the French and German factions within Peter the Hermit's group started squabbling about what to do, and they split up. The German faction was overwhelmed by a professional Islamic army, and the entire German group was captured. Those who converted to Islam survived. The rest were executed.

The Muslims then sent a fake message to the French faction, leading them into an ambush and they were also annihilated.

We should not repeat this mistake. A fighting spirit is necessary, but insufficient to win. And the stakes are too high to be casual about this.

We are at war. Followers of Muhammad's example around the world are gaining recruits to make war on the non-Muslim world. Casualties in this war are mounting. Our own military branches have an important role to play, of course, but ordinary citizens have an important role too. And if we are going to win, we had better be smart. We're dealing with a very cleverly designed ideology that has effectively taken over a large part of the earth already and is now infiltrating every country in the world.

To fight this war successfully, we should use intelligent, extensively battle-tested strategies. For our purposes, these three are at the top of the list:

1. Gather allies
2. Coordinate efforts
3. Concentrate force at a decisive point

Read more about those here: The Good Must Associate.

We've been focusing here on Citizen Warrior on gathering allies — specifically, educating people about Islam in such a way that they join our side in this fight rather than turning against us and becoming unwitting allies of the enemy. At the very least, enough education should stop them from aiding the enemy. But hopefully we can bring them to our side.

This can be a very difficult task. We've been collecting tools that can help you here and common sense applies — you're not likely to be very successful, for example, by insulting people and telling them they're wrong. And you don't need to convert people to your side of the aisle to recruit them as an ally against the Islamization of the world.

We need allies so our coordinated efforts and concentration of force can have sufficient impact. That's where to focus our efforts in the immediate future (here's why). We need greater numbers.

We are already a group of scrappers, willing to fight. We can be glad for that. Now let's bring the fight to the enemy in the most intelligent way possible and win.