Jihad and the Suicide of the West

Paweł Lisicki (born 1966) is a Polish journalist, essayist and writer. From 2006 to 2011, he was the editor-in-chief of the Polish centre-right daily newspaper, Rzeczpospolita. In 2011, he founded the weekly Uważam Rze. Since 2013, he has been the editor-in-chief of the weekly Do Rzeczy, which under his leadership has become one of the most widely read conservative papers in Poland. He has written sixteen books (including collections of philosophical essays, as well as two plays and two political thrillers) and also a book-length interview with Cardinal Gerhard L. Müller, Christ is Always Modern (Chrystus jest zawsze nowoczesny, 2018).

Lisicki's work has previously been published in Czech in a collection of Polish conservative thought, The Return of the Man Without Qualities (CDK Brno 2010), and as a standalone book, Islam and the Self-Destruction of the West: A Selection of Texts (CDK Brno 2016). The latter also included an excerpt from the book Jihad and the Suicide of the West (in the Polish original: Dżihad i samozagłada Zachodu), the complete, updated version of which is now also available to Czech readers in translation.

November 2014. In six weeks' time, the Islamist attack in Paris will take place; another video clip has recently begun circulating on the internet showing a masked person with their fellow man kneeling before them, slitting his throat. On the last day of that month, however, the world's media was preoccupied with something else. (...) It focused on the visit of the head of the Catholic Church to Istanbul, where the Pope declared that the mufti had explained everything to him and that the Quran writes about Mary and John the Baptist. And that after those words, he felt a spontaneous need for prayer. What must the Christians who are dying for their faith have felt at that moment?

Did they feel betrayed, rejected, abandoned to their persecutors? Why must they die for steadfastly refusing to invoke and worship Allah in mosques,