**Previously recorded by Phyllis Schlafly // September 2011 **
Yesterday was September 11th, a day known to all Americans as 9/11, a day that will always live in infamy in U.S. history. That was the day that Muslims bent on murder and suicide flew airplanes into the World Trade Towers in New York City.
I wonder if there was some special significance to the date those criminals chose! Let’s look at some history of more than four centuries ago.
In the 1600s, the Muslim empire was expanding into Europe. The Muslim armies plundered cities, took slaves, turned Christian churches into mosques, and demanded that Christians convert to Islam at the point of a sword. In 1683, 100,000 Muslims surrounded Vienna, Austria, starved the Austrian people almost into submission, and sent this message to the Austrian King, Leopold I: “Await us in your residence … so we can decapitate you.”
However, on September 11th, 1683, that’s 9/11, 1683, the Polish King Jan Sobieski gathered Polish, Austrian and German troops, and led a surprise attack on the Muslims, causing them to flee in confusion. This tremendous military victory kept the Muslims from conquering Europe. European leaders hailed Jan Sobieski as the “Savior of Western Civilization.” The humiliated Muslim army then beheaded their general and sent his head back to the sultan in a velvet bag.
Here is how President Theodore Roosevelt later described this decisive historical event: “From the hammer of Charles Martel to the sword of Jan Sobieski, Christianity owed its safety in Europe to the fact it … could and would fight as well as the Mohammedan aggressor.”
And here is one sidelight of that battle of Vienna. After the Turks had fled and the Europeans entered the abandoned Turkish tents, they found bags of coffee beans, and thus learned the secret of how the Turks could stay awake and fight day and night. Shortly after that, a coffeehouse was opened in Vienna, and the use of coffee quickly spread across Europe.
