Christian Europe once met Islamic expansion with force. Burleigh argues that the West’s next counteroffensive must be fought with education, not swords. Image generated by Gemini.
“The moderates are jihadi-Islamists with patience,” said F.W. Burleigh, author of the book It’s All About Muhammad: A Biography of the World’s Most Notorious Prophet.
In an interview with The Gateway Pundit, Burleigh offered his assessment of Islam’s global advance, the West’s failure to respond, and what he believes must be done.
Burleigh argues that Muslims are drawn to Christianity because of its message of peace and love. “People are drawn by love, and that is what Jesus projects,” he said. Muslim defectors, having witnessed Islam’s cultivation of hatred toward non-Muslims, seek something different. Christ’s message of a loving Father, he argues, resonates where theology does not, and Jesus “comes to them in their dreams because of their need for love.”
The phenomenon of Muslims having the “Jesus dream” and then converting to Christianity has been well documented. It is not hard to believe that a message of love and sacrifice for others resonates more with some people than a message of destruction in the name of establishing an Islamic caliphate. In his book, Burleigh traces that hatred directly to Muhammad, arguing that Islam is not a conventional religion but a cult of violence whose survival depended from the beginning on terror imposed on those who refused to submit.
He views Western converts to Islam very differently. “Stupidity and brainwashing explain it,” he said flatly, adding that most eventually leave. For many, he argued, it is little more than cultural fashionability. He traces the deeper cause to what he calls Gramscian Marxists who have systematically taken over public education from universities down to grammar schools, working in parallel with “moderate” Muslims over decades.
He explained why he referred to moderates as “jihadists with patience.” “They wear nice smiles, blend in, and are willing to wait 20, 30, or 40 years for their stealth tactics to bear fruit.”
The election of a Muslim-Marxist mayor of New York, he added, is proof that those efforts are now bearing fruit, “unless the explanation comes from a rigged election, which can’t be ruled out.”
On whether Islam can coexist with other religions, Burleigh is unambiguous. He cites Koran 8:39 directly: “Fight with them until there is no more fitna and religion is all for Allah.” Islam will tolerate other faiths only so long as their adherents pay a subjugation tax, he argues, and even then the pressure to convert continues.
Christians and other religious minorities are paying jizya across multiple countries where jihadist groups operate as de facto governing authorities. In Mali, JNIM, an al-Qaeda affiliate, has imposed a monthly tax of roughly $40 on all Christians over 18 in the Mopti region, threatening to close churches for non-payment. Along the Niger-Burkina Faso border, jihadists have given Christian males aged 15 and older a choice: pay jizya or face the consequences, warning that those who pay will “live as slaves.”
In the Democratic Republic of Congo, ADF/ISCAP has presented Christians with three options: conversion to Islam, payment of jizya, or death, a framework ISIS’s Al-Naba newsletter described in August 2025 as fully sanctioned by Islamic law.
In Pakistan, TTP and Lashkar-e-Islam have imposed jizya across tribal border areas, including the Tirah Valley and Orakzai, where one Sikh community was forced to pay 20 million rupees and others abandoned their homes rather than comply. Afghanistan remains the only internationally recognized government still imposing jizya by name under Taliban rule. Open Doors analysts assess these cases as part of a coordinated wider strategy, with families who refuse or cannot pay being driven from their ancestral lands.
He points to the absence of Christian churches in Saudi Arabia, the destruction of Buddhist statues in Afghanistan, the shrinking space for Hindus in Pakistan and Bangladesh, and the burning of Catholic churches in Europe. “Who is torching all the Catholic churches and cathedrals in Europe?” he asked.
His book documents this pattern from Islam’s founding, cataloging what it says are Muhammad’s crimes against those who rejected him, including mass killings of Jewish tribes, assassination of critics, enslavement of men, women, and children, and systematic plunder.
On the political left’s alliance with Islam, Burleigh sees the same long-term strategy at work. “You can’t go anywhere now without seeing hijabs,” he observed.
He does not spare the left’s ideological inconsistency, noting that nearly everything liberals claim to oppose in Christianity, restrictions on women, opposition to homosexuality, rejection of abortion, is present in Islam as well, yet the left continues its support. He attributes this to decades of educational subversion that have left Western populations unable to identify either themselves or their adversary.
Burleigh warns that the stakes are civilizational. Islam has been pressing against Europe since the generation immediately after Muhammad’s death, when his followers conquered the Iberian Peninsula. He points to the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, with 57 member states, 48 of them Muslim-majority, as evidence of Islam’s organized global reach.
“Given enough time and sufficient inaction by Americans and Europeans, the loss of their nations could eventually happen,” he said.
That vulnerability, he argues, is compounded by widespread ignorance about Muhammad’s actual history, an ignorance that served Islam’s spread for centuries but is now eroding. More than 25,000 lethal terrorist attacks since September 11, 2001, have driven growing numbers of people to investigate the ideology’s origins. Meanwhile, recent English translations of Islam’s foundational texts, including the biography of Ibn Ishaq, the hadith collections of Bukhari and Muslim, the histories of Tabari and Waqidi, and the Koranic commentary of Ibn Kathir, have made those origins accessible to general audiences for the first time.
Critically, Burleigh argues that ignorance of Muhammad’s history extends to Muslims themselves. As he wrote, “most of the faithful do not know the truth about Muhammad either. They were raised, some would say brainwashed, with the mythologized version,” in which their prophet is so holy that he will assist God on the Day of Judgment. Most, he notes, have never read the Koran, and many are made to memorize it in Arabic without understanding a word. This makes the Muslim world itself a potential audience for the truth about its own founder.
His prescription is cultural rather than military. The real battlefield, he argues, “is the mind, and the real target is the myth that God talked to Muhammad.” Islam, in his analysis, rests entirely on that single foundational claim, forming what he calls an inverted pyramid balanced on one point. Destroy the myth, he argues, and the structure collapses.
He draws an analogy to ancient Greece and Rome: no one in Athens today believes Zeus lives on Mount Olympus, and no one in Rome still worships at the Temple of Jupiter. Those deity myths, however powerful in their time, did not survive contact with truth. Muhammad’s claims, he argues, are no different and no more durable.
The delivery system he proposes is cinema. Invoking the Polish king Jan Sobieski, who destroyed Ottoman forces threatening Vienna in 1683 through surprise and superior positioning, Burleigh argues that the modern equivalent is film produced on an industrial scale. “Let movie exposés of Muhammad be the cannons and cannon balls,” he said.
The munitions, he writes, “are plentiful,” because they are drawn directly from Islam’s own canonical literature, which Muslims cannot dispute, only attempt to conceal. He envisions everything from Hollywood-quality biopics to History Channel-style docudramas examining Muhammad’s epilepsy, his wars against the Jews, his multiple wives, and the origins of the Koran. He even proposes a courtroom format in which Muhammad stands trial for crimes against humanity, with his victims called as witnesses.
As he puts it, the goal is to “taunt Islam with its secrets and then move in over the horns for the kill; plunge the cinematic sword into the heart of the beast.”
“Fire your exposés from the high ground of movie theaters, televisions, and computer screens,” he said. “Spread them around the globe, and watch what happens to Islam, the enemy that is sworn to subjugate you. The civilization you will ultimately save will be your own.”
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